How Eden Is a Name for the Archetype of "The Garden" and Energizes Earth-size Living

Consider for a moment that the largest topography of consciousness that we humans can move into is named Spiritual Consciousness. In Spiritual Consciousness symbols and myths renew what we make conscious in daily life in this topography. The primal image of a verdant Garden that lives within all of us archetypally is especially important to our Call to keep Earth livable. The Garden is an evolved, healthy ecosphere, local and planetary, which we aspire to and which Earth appears bent on evolving. In the consciousness of MultiEarth civilization, the Garden lives mostly in the underworld because egos and civilization have judged it too utopian to be practical.

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Was Eden Ever an Ecologically Balanced Historical Place?

Eden is not a utopia lost. It is not a Garden of magical thinking or innocence. It is an evolved, healthy ecosphere that is alive in our conscious mind, and lives even more strongly in the regions of our unconscious. It exists mythologically to guide and shape OneEarth living. In various forms, it may exist biologically and ecologically. Earth appears intentionally bent on evolving it. We can inhabit it, but only if we have conversations with ourselves and others that frighten the bejesus out of our egos.

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Eden for the 21st Century

Eden has so many connotations, many in the past tense. Using the word may have more risks than promises. I decided to risk that it’s a useful, juicy symbol in this century for our efforts to keep Earth livable. That’s why I call the trilogy of books I’m writing, “Eden for the 21st Century.” The first book, Blinded by Progress, was indie published in 2013. The second book, From Egos to Eden, will be published later this year, 2016. I’m not interested in some “return to Eden” motiff, but I do believe that we all have an archetypal Garden in us that can guide us to keep Earth livable in the 21st century.

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From Egos to Eden

The Tree of Life by Hannah Cohoon, 1854How do you like the title of this blog as a title for a book? It’s what I’m planning to call my second book … unless I get a wave of comments telling me it just doesn’t work. The book isn’t likely to be published ‘til the end of the year, so you have time to weigh in.

Words for a subtitle haven’t settled in for me yet. But maybe: “Making the Heroic Journey to OneEarth Living.” The book spells out, chapter by chapter, the Great Work required of us to get beyond ego-thinking into those larger topographies of consciousness where we can act in harmony with Earth.

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Which Title Would You Choose?

If you read this blog regularly, you already know that for the past couple of years, Michael Johnson and I have been working on a joint project, the One Earth Project. We now have a book manuscript completed and a blogsite, as well as projected plans for film. The manuscript is even with a second publisher, awaiting their thoughts. But we are still settling on a title for the book — that despite that one title was previously announced on this blog. You can see that we’re still mulling it over. So we thought it would be both fun and enormously helpful if you would help us pick a title. 

Of the following three titles and subtitles, would you rank them in order of which appeal most, hook you most, make you most curious, or whatever criteria you wish to use? Please mix and match the titles and subtitles if that helps you vote. Please rank the 3 from first to last and leave your comment soon.

Know that your reply will help Michael and me proceed on self-publishing as well as in our conversations with conventional publishers. Thanks for your participation in the One Earth Project. And now, to the voting! Here are the titles/subtitles waiting for your action.

1. Blinded by Progress: Five Earth-Destroying Practices We Can Change
2. The Frogs Are Drinking Up Their Pond: Five Earth-Destroying Practices We Can Change
3. The Eden We Can Choose: Correcting Five Choices Keeping Us Out of Earth’s Renewable Garden

U.S. Decline Brings a New Moment for Faith in One Earth Mythology

The failing infrastructure in U.S. education, roads, mass transit, soil and biodiversity protection, drinking water quality, and waterways all indicate a superpower in decline. So do our lagging behind in green energy and rapid rail. As has happened throughout the Multi Earth story’s history, empires lose resiliency as their interior weakens.

The Jews in Babylon way back in 587 B.C.E. give us one such historical example. They knew that their own Multi Earth experiment in the monarchies of David, Solomon, and their successors, ended horribly. Plus, when they heard their conquerors’ stories, these conquered Jews knew beyond a doubt that they needed stories to help them understand how humans were being repeatedly tricked into believing the shining lie of Multi Earth living. Like them, I too want stories that expose Multi Earth ways and speak truthfully about the possibility of One Earth living. With the great U.S. superpower in decline, those stories have a new moment to be embraced.

My search for such stories and practices has been all the more challenging because of the many voices I’ve heard over my lifetime who’ve taught me to think of Eden more as history. As a story of the past, it tells how we humans fell into sin and that ever after we’ve been in a weakened state. In our fallen condition, human greed and Multi Earth ways become too mighty to be mastered. Capitalism is partly based on this idea. Since greed cannot be fully mastered, markets must be designed to make the best of greedy urges. But as myth, the choice of Eve and Adam in the Garden was for Multi Earth views, a terrible choice with sinful consequences, but not some psychological taint that has forever been passed along in historical succession. It’s just that too many humans have continued to choose Multi Earth views. Whenever we do so, we take our own bite from the forbidden fruit.

Over decades many teachers and authors have invited me to look through different lenses. As a result, I’ve been led to unbelief regarding Multi Earth stories and any reinterpretation of Eden or other One Earth myths that make them support the Multi Earth system. Instead, I’m putting faith in the One Earth paradigm and now seek the stories and interpretations that express it.

Eden as a Protest Story That Rejects Superpowers

The Jews living as captive refugees in foreign Babylon protested what they heard and saw there by compiling their own stories of how things had come to be as they were. Eden, Cain, and Abel are at their core protest stories, mythology rooted in dissent from Multi Earth ways.

But in addition to saying “No” to Babylon and empires, these stories also plotted a new direction for themselves. Living under Babylon’s Multi Earthers, the Jews saw anew the wisdom of the One Earth worldview. “How had they gotten so far away from it?” they wondered. Shunning the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation story in which humans and empires rise out of acts of violence among the gods, the Jews told stories that reconnected their own origins to an incredibly good Creation brought forth by powerful, nonviolent words of the Creator. They compiled Genesis as their anthology of their origins, including origins of what went wrong. 

Once I knew how and where the Eden, Cain, and Abel stories came to be, I recognized them as stories that know our situation today. The authors had lived in the bitterness of Multi Earth conquest more deeply than I have. They knew what it feels like to be living in the Multi Earth culture of a superpower and having to listen to its self-justifying stories. The stories they created in protest then, energize my turning from the Multi Earth story today and to make the story for One Earth living more fully my own. 

And now, I’d love to hear your comments on how retelling the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden in this way radically reorients their significance for you facing the macro-issues today.