The Possession of Eden
Once upon a time, all the people were gardeners. They tended a paradise that homed every kind of Being - plant, animal, mineral, ideas, gardeners, and spirits.
They moved about their garden with respect and sampled every possibility as fitted need and desire.
They knew the rhythms of the land and flowed with them, helping each to fulfill their own purpose and pass away. They tended and witnessed as each Being made its own choices, unfolding according to its essence.
They might prune back a ramble to let more light on an Idea. Or shift a perspective slightly to allow for more space. Or put 1 and 1 together to see what new emanation might propagate from their joining. They learned a bit each day about each relation and took those learnings into the future to encourage the freedoms of their paradise.
They did not know the meaning of Control. They had no frame of reference for judgement of “Good” and “Bad”. Each Being was its own self - here for some span of moments and then passing away, back into the soil, recycling itself, and finding newness in its next emanation. And each Being had a story to tell and its own knowledge to share.
This is how it was from time’s beginning.
Then, one day much like most others, someone new came forth. His name, he said, was Dichotomy. As usual, the gardeners prepared to hear his story. And as was not uncommon, he began in a new way.
Dichotomy’s story began with a warning.
He said, “If I tell you my story you will worship me, and cannot unhear me. While now you worship the Earth and all of its Beings in many forms of loving relationships, you will worship me instead as the Defining Relation. I will be your god, possessing first your mind and then your body, and together we will reshape the world in my own image.”
The gardeners heard these new words and did not know to be afraid. They encouraged he carry on.
So Dichotomy drew himself out on the sand as a long line with two rounded nodes on each end. He said: “Here’s what I look like - I am the relationship of before and after, as beginning to end. I am between this and the other. I am tension, comparison, and the root of conflict. I name the good and the bad. I tell you what is right and what is wrong, and ...well...I am what I am.”
The gardeners listened to his story as he told it, grappling with the new ideas he presented. They knew they didn’t fully comprehend his rulings, but slowly became transfixed - his power evident in the pull on their minds.
He, in his own unfolding, exists to sort the world. And so true to his word and role, he showed them, thing by thing, ways to sort: “That is sorter, that is sorted. That is male and that is female. That is clean and that is dirty. That is good and that is bad. That is strong and that is weak. That fits in and that is different.”
His ideas always came in pairs. Relating and evaluating and creating structure where before each thing was just wholly just itself, in its own best form. It felt like a game at first - to hear a pairing and then rearrange the world into simple groupings.
Entranced, they believed they were still learning new things, just all from this singular voice. They forgot to move on to the next story and so forgot how to tend the multitudes of paradise.
And so despite his warning, they fell for his beguiling manner, and instead of listening to all and building relationships as befits each, they did just as Dichotomy said.
Sure enough the gardeners came to call him a god, then The God.
Sort by sort, their world was transformed from a diverse and pluralistic paradise to a new world of judgement and singular kind of knowledge. The gardeners gardened no more, and only sifted things along the random spectrums identified by Dichotomy.
To this day, the paradise grows wild and untended, just beyond our terraforming. Distracted, we’ve been led to almost our annihilation, the final dichotomy of Life itself.
So wake up! Wake up, Gardeners, as though from a dream!
Your work is to love the Earth, your mother. Not only her child, Dichotomy, who is but one of the multitude.