A Paradise! That is what I came searching for in India… And my work took me to remote villages of rural India where I discovered fascinating ecological traditions and wisdom. Everywhere I went I documented vernacular architecture, traditional agricultural practices, handloom traditions, forest management traditions… I went to tribal villages where natural resources were held in common and distributed, making sure there was enough for everybody. I met craftsmen who produced their goods, not for sale, not for profit, but for whoever needed them. I visited tribal communities where castes or classes were absent, where nobody was allowed to make himself more important than everybody else. These last few remote tribal villages where gentle cultures, life-sustaining, and nurturing ways of life had survived were the remnants of the Paradise I had been searching for since my childhood… (a Paradise that was fast receding to become the hell I had escaped from with the same crass materialism and individualism!)
And then in the course of my research, I discovered that peaceful egalitarian societies had also existed in Europe, in pre-patriarchal Europe. According to Marija Gimbutas, Old Europe was peaceful, egalitarian, matrifocal (woman-mother oriented) and worshipped many goddesses. The religion of “Old Europe” was dominated by an overwhelmingly feminine pantheon… Evidence shows that goddesses, women dominated societies were peaceful because concentrated on maintaining, rather than exploiting life.
“Tens of thousands of years of human culture were shaped and sustained by communities of creative, sexually and psychically active women— women who were inventors, producers, scientists, physicians, lawgivers, visionary shamans, artists. Women who were also the Mothers— receivers and transmitters of terrestrial and cosmic energy… It was from this first inner circle of women— the campsite, the fire-site, the cave, the first hearth, the first circle of birth— that human society evolved.” Sjoo, Monica, The Great Cosmic Mother
Old Europeans, like all indigenous people of the world lived in symbiosis with the land and revered nature. For example much of European mythology is based upon reverence of trees, especially the oak and superstitions such as touching wood reflected the belief that the guardian spirits present within the oak must be appeased.
And so it became clear to me that we had all once lived in Paradise. In his book Lifting the Veil of Duality, Andreas Moritz tells us that before the Great Separation was the First Creation, the Original Creation. It is the Primal Matrix from which we all began. In Chinese philosophy, it is the Absence, the generative void, the enduring source of it all: “mother of all beneath heaven”. The First Creation was female: the physical/ emotional/ spiritual body of the mother. It is also the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean from which all life emerged.
“This realm had no elements of duality in it, which made it impossible for us to perceive anything but oneness with everything and everyone. Since Oneness with the Supreme Source was our anchor, we had no fear and lived happily with our loved ones. In this simplicity of bliss, we could be the whole creation and all the beings participating in it, with no sense of separation.” Andreas Moritz
As there is very little awareness of a separate self in the fused dynamic between infant and mother, in the Primal Matrix early humans were merged with Nature the way an infant child is merged with its mother… “what philosophers and psychologists have called a pre-personal, undifferentiated consciousness, that sleepy realm of awareness that has not yet awakened to the possibilities of an individuated self…” Judith Anodea.
The First Creation also called the Age of Perfect Virtue is an actual historical period of time that covers the Paleolithic and Neolithic. That period is also referred to as humanity’s Golden Age, a time when there were no wars, no classes, no domination, no sexism. Yes, Rousseau’s theory of the Noble Savage holds. Anthropologists have been documenting again and again how primal people (present and past hunter-gatherer societies) lived in small egalitarian, nonhierarchical, nomadic bands on a wide-open planet where the chances in a life time of meeting another band of Sapiens were rare. Think of it, why would have there been wars? Peace was the only option as survival wouldn’t have been possible had everyone not been involved in protecting and nurturing activities.
But as Andreas Moritz writes, when we lived in the First Creation, in the Primal Matrix, we lacked one thing… We didn’t know who we are.
“In the Age of Perfect Virtue they were upright and correct, without knowing that to be so was righteous; they loved one another, without knowing that to do so was benevolence… They didn’t rebel against want, didn’t grow proud in plenty. Being like this, he could commit an error and not regret it, could meet with success and not make it a show.” Chuang Tzu, 4th century BCE
To evolve and know who we are, we needed to create the illusion of separation from our infinite self and enter the experience of duality. Maturation is a gradual separation from the mother, from the undifferentiated whole.
“We needed to go through every kind of dualistic expression there could possibly be, such as love and hate, joy and sadness, fear and trust, right and wrong, good and bad, life and death, in order to learn about and undo the trauma (of separation) that has enabled us to know, through experience, who we are.” Andreas Moritz
And that is how our world of Oneness gradually became a world of Duality, where opposites rule. This transition from oneness to duality brought our Fall from Paradise, an experience that traumatized us and caused the worst kind of suffering.
The myth of the Fall from Paradise, Fall from Oneness, Fall from Innocence is a version of actual history… in fact, a rather recent phenomenon…
According to Steve Taylor in his book The Fall, humanity’s Golden Age would have ended around 4000BC with waves of invasions following the Great Drying (when we literally fell from the lap of Mother Nature!). In a strip (called Saharasia) that contains today’s most deserts including Sahara, Thar, Gobi, Arabia, a climate that was wet and warm began to dry 6000 years ago to create today’s great deserts. This drought turned out to be a human tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions. The Great Drying with prolonged, repeated, widespread droughts occurred with increasing ferocity generation after generation. People experienced famine, displacement, war, destruction, exploitation, oppression and death with all the suffering that it implies.
It is this trauma that brought duality. Hostile environmental conditions would have encouraged a sense of separation between human beings and nature. With the Great Drying, we stopped seeing Mother Earth as a kind mother who bestows on us (her children) her bountifulness; we stopped revering her as a Mother… We lost our primordial trust into the Divine, into the Universe, into Mother Earth… Nature came to be seen as an enemy to be conquered!
Duality brought the Fall and with it dominator civilizations that are authoritarian, hierarchal, patriarchal (male dominated), with a high degree of fear, abuse and violence… The Great Mother Goddess came to be replaced by Warrior Gods…
The Fall is an ongoing evolutionary process, and that is why unstoppable. Like a highly contagious virulent virus, it has contaminated the entire planet, first through invasions, conquests, colonization (following the Great Discoveries) and now globalization. Today, with globalization, the last the last few peace loving and egalitarian indigenous societies are being swept away.
The noble goal behind the Fall has been progress, development, the ascent of civilization. And that is what has made the Fall inevitable! The Fall never really appeared as a Fall but as a Rise!
“Thus mastering nature with technology, and mastering human nature with culture, we distinguish ourselves from the rest of life, establishing a separate human realm. Believing this to be a good thing, we think of this separation as an ascent in which we have risen above our animal origins. That is why we naturally refer to the millennia-long accumulation of culture and technology as “progress”. Charles Eisenstein.
The Fall, designed as a trap in which we would all inevitably fall, has been necessary to awaken us… And as the last few indigenous people are falling, as on the other side, we see a rise in Unity Consciousness all over the world…
In our own lives too, we go through the myth of the Fall. We do the same journey that begins in Paradise, in Utopia, a safe, secure, peaceful, loving environment. And then Fall into a world of pain, suffering where we are judged, where unfair discriminations are made, and illusions are shattered.
It is the same journey for each of us, the Paradise followed by the Fall (loss of Paradise) and the desire to regain the Paradise.
“Whether gods or humankind, the rhythm of Paradise lost and Paradise regained speaks of our continual attempt to realize the ideal in the actual, the “fall” of inevitable failure, and the renewed effort to try again— an effort that does, most of the time, bring some improvement, if not actual Paradise, in our lives.” Carol S. Pearson
This is why the Paradise is both the beginning and the end of the journey; with in between, the Fall that equips us with more wisdom and knowing; with more awareness about who we are…