=1 "Adam"

Adam

When Adam opened his eyes he found himself in a beautiful garden. The birds were singing in the trees — and the birds were he, himself, and his heart was singing the same songs. When he walked through the garden the flowers bloomed for him, and their beauty was his own beauty. And there was no limit, no difference between him and the flowers. And as he met all the animals of the garden one after the other and spoke to each one, and as each answered to the name he gave it, the delight of the garden was his own delight. Everything he met was himself in another form.

When he was hungry, fruits offered themselves, and he did not wonder why they tasted so good, but ate simply with delight in the fruits and their taste. Since everything was as it should be, there was no need or occasion to ask questions such as why there was a garden, or what was the meaning of things. Obviously everything was for his very own pleasure. He was living in the great oneness; all was one.

He was one and all at the same time. There was nothing to do or desire or aspire to. He simply was in his fullness, and enjoyed being. As one being, divided and multiplied among all, he had no feeling of 'I' or 'my' or 'you'. There was no need to make distinctions or to classify things. He was his body, and his body was the whole garden, and there was no end to the delight, no limit to the enjoyment of the whole. When he basked in the sun, its warmth was in him, and the sun was as much a part of himself as he of the sun. When he swam in the cool river, the coolness was he, himself, and there was no division between inside and outside, near and far.

All was one, and he was at the same time the one and the all. And so the aeons passed.

Then something happened. Some people think it was dreadful and accursed, but a few think it was good an necessary and a blessing in disguise. Some people think there was something evil in the garden which contaminated Adam, and others think the thing was already in himself. But whatever it was, nobody can explain how it came to be there. Had it always been a part of the garden and in its original planning, or was it introduced from outside? Whatever it was, it was irreversible. A veil descended on Adam, and stood between him and the oneness of things.

‘I’, he started to say, and ‘you’; ‘mine’, he said, and ‘yours’. ‘Yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’. ‘This is good, that is evil’.

Some people think he must have eaten a poisonous fruit to think in that way. But however it happened, with this kind of thinking time started, and evolution, and striving, but also aspiration. Hatred began, but love also, dissatisfaction, and satisfaction for work well done. Things were declared evil, but then research started, to find ways of doing better. Constant desire led to amelioration.

Then Adam started to build: new gardens, with villages, cities and towers, with bridges, civilizations, culture.

For an aeon the garden became a workshop full of smoking chimneys, slums, and ugly buildings. But then a beautiful garden appeared again, and this time it was built by Adam. And this time he did not build it for himself. That was why it was so beautiful: he built it for all the beings in the garden. He still continued to say ‘I’ and ‘You’, but he veil was gone between him and the oneness of things. Now he could look through the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, right into the oneness.

He still distinguished between good and evil, but now he know that evil was merely something momentarily out of place. He still liked some things better than others, but he recognized that all had their place in nature, and he respected their right to be.

Sometimes he was yet dissatisfied with this or that in himself or even in something outside himself, but he knew now that dissatisfaction was a sign of something asking to be transformed.

Time he still knew, but time had now become his friend and helper. He still chose to leave his body when it became burdensome, but he knew now that there was no death, only eternal change. He still felt a pain in his heart when he lost from sight a loved one, but he knew he would find him again and again in different forms, somewhere in the great oneness of things. He knew now that he knew and had attained life eternal, and yet he still lived in the garden, the garden of oneness.

The garden was no longer a little piece of land between two rivers, as in the beginning. It had opened into new dimensions, taken into itself new worlds, the worlds of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. The garden was now the whole universe, from the subatomic particles to the galaxies, from the chemistry of molecules to the magnetohydrodynamics of the stars. The garden had become really the garden of oneness, and Adam the image of God.