Shadows of Eden

Rated: PG-13 for nudity

Back in January when I was re-packing my backpack for the West Coast part of this monkabout, I fumbled through my socks looking for matching pairs. Then I realized that no one would really be able to see my socks under my samue pants and tennis shoes, and I laughed at my impulse to find matching pairs. And then I realized that I didn't have to care what other people thought about my socks at all. I'm still a long way from generalizing this liberating detachment to the rest of my appearance or to what others might think about my life in general, but it's a small step in the right direction. If I accomplish nothing else on this walkabout, I will at least have learned that my socks don't have to match.

But I've also gotten better at changing my pants in public. Before, I would find a bathroom or some surreptitious spot to add or subtract thermal layers as dictated by the changing temperatures throughout the day. Changing layers has become less necessary as the days have warmed up, but I got to the point where I could slip my pants off and on in public, mostly oblivious to the eyes of friends and strangers.

Again, I must tip my hat here to my hero Diogenes who happily flaunted many social mores. His habitual nudity often got him in trouble with the Greek authorities. And it seems appropriate to give a shout-out to UC Berkeley's modern-day Diogenes, the "Naked Guy", who often roamed about campus in the buff. (Unfortunately, his story ended tragically with his suicide two years ago after years struggling with mental illness. I'll knock on wood and hope that my form of "mental illness" leads to healthier pastures.)

I also went through a naked phase in college. Not as brave nor as brash as the Naked Guy, my nudity was constrained to drunken fits of streaking after parties with my radical student colleagues. Sometimes my friends would start chanting "Zum streak! Zum streak!". But I refused to bow to their peer pressure, choosing instead to sneak out later, shed my clothes, and dash off into the night. Once, at a progressive student conference (at UC Berkeley?), some friends found me passed out naked on a bike path. Another time I ran through the late night streets of Isla Vista (UC Santa Barbara's college town), trying my best to keep up with a pack of dogs who didn't quite know what to make of this strange naked human hounding their steps.

So what was it all about? Well, besides a penchant for exhibitionism, it was my strange way to express my rage against what I perceived were the limitations imposed on me by society.....as well as the limitations I imposed upon myself due to my fears. (It took me a long time---and some serious Buddhist introspection---to also realize that my hungers imposed a lot of limitations too. And that hunger and fear were flip sides of the same coin.) Stripping off my clothes was a symbolic way for me to tear away the constricting cultural codes that I felt were invalid because they were based on puritanism, commercialism, orthodoxy, elitism, repression, fear, greed, and/or ignorance. But more than just symbolic, it also felt so liberating to run naked through the night, not knowing where I was, not caring where I ended up. Amazingly, I was never arrested during these inebriated frenzies.

I have always been flabbergasted by the fact that---with the possible exception of turtles, most mollusks, and certain crabs---we humans are pretty much the only animals that are actually so ashamed of our bodies that we are afraid to show them in public. And yet we think that we are so superior to the rest of the animals! Sure, we tell ourselves that we need clothes because we don't have fur or feathers or scales to protect us from the sun, wind, rain, and cold, but this is just a rationalization, for there are plenty of times and locations when and where clothes are totally superfluous.

After all, nudity was apparently pretty hunky-dory until Adam and Eve took those fateful bites of the forbidden fruit. It wasn't until after they shared the fruit that they suddenly became ashamed of their nakedness. Which brings me to the progenitor of the fruit, that knotty Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. What a great symbol of our primary impulse to make dualistic judgments, to divide and separate reality into "good" and "bad".

Eastern traditions might interpret the Eden story this way: Adam and Eve fell from paradise when they began making dualistic judgments about paradise itself. This very act caused their schism with paradise when they began labeling things as "good" or "bad". In this way, they cast themselves out of Eden as they turned it into a world dominated by their dualistic opinions. (An Israeli friend recently told me that the original hebrew word that is translated in the Bible as "knowledge" can also be translated as "opinion". Perhaps it's really the Tree of Opinion of Good and Evil.) The key is that the Garden never changed-----it was only their perception of it that changed.

Remember, nudity was neither "good" nor "bad" until us humans labeled it so. So maybe there were other aspects of Eden that really weren't so "bad" to begin with too. After all, the snake was there in Eden too. Did its presence make the Garden any less a paradise before they tasted the fruit? Okay, so maybe I shouldn't try to argue the case for the snake---that could get pretty slippery---I'm just trying to say that if fangs and venom already existed in paradise, then what were they used for? And since God had already created "every beast of the field and every bird of the air" then there must have been a whole bunch of other critters with claws and other dangerous pointy bits too.

Okay, the real point is that maybe paradise can contain some pretty dark stuff too. Perhaps the Garden is big enough for some other nasty beasties lurking in the dark, or some other bitter fruit happily growing in the shadows of Eden, the Yin side of reality so essential to the balance and harmony of the way of the universe, the Tao.

Pain is a good example. I meet pain with resistance and fear, labeling it on a very fundamental level of my being as "bad". But if I stop to think about it, I will realize that I am actually designed to feel pain. In fact, pain is a very effective messenger of damage (or potential damage) to my body or psyche. It has helped me survive and my species evolve. Pain has been faithfully serving us all along in the most thankless job in history.

On the flip side, we tend to idealize "Nature", often equating it with a peaceful paradise where everything gets along in perfect harmony. But when I look closely at the plant and animal kingdoms I can see wars, murder, rape, pillaging, extinction-----injustices of the highest order. And yet they are harmonious and perfect. Chaotic, peaceful, bloody, friendly.....paradise. (By the way, just what is not "nature" anyways?)

Golleee, but I sure am sermonizing! It’s enough to make even Derrick blush…..especially since (from his point of view) I’m extolling the virtues of the dark side of the Force, those bad boys, the zen masters and Taoist sages, drunk on life. These last three blog entries were all supposed to be a single entry, but it got out of control. I’m sure I’ll look back on all this malarkey some day and be appalled. But for now I’ll give my ego free rein and thumb my nose at that future easily-appalled stick-in-the-mud Zum. Damn him and the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

Where was I? Oh yeah.....

So in a very literal sense, "original sin" is the belief in dualism. The radical corollary then is that dualistic thinking is what keeps us from seeing paradise all around us, right before us, within us.

So maybe it's a big BIG Garden-----plenty of room for sunshine and shadows too. Big enough for lions lying with lambs.....and eating them too. After all, that's what lions do. That's who they are. And if they let the lions in, then the Garden has got to be big enough to include us with our pain and neuroses. (Of course, the great ironic paradox is that our neuroses stem from thinking that we fell from Eden in the first place: the belief that the world, especially ourselves, somehow isn't "good enough".) And maybe the Garden is even big enough for war, disease, hunger, greed, poverty, ignorance (this rant?), schizophrenia, mismatched socks, and nude dudes.

But we take sides, we label "good" and "bad", and our fortunes become tied to the vagaries of chance as we are blinded to the perfection right before us. And so we wait for heaven....as well as peace and happiness and love and freedom and Denny's Tuesday Grand Slam Breakfast Special. And the delicious irony is that all this judging and fear and craving and waiting and blindness is within the garden too. So it's fine and beautiful to pick sides. Go ahead and root for the Lakers. Sometimes we can even taste the divine in the ecstatic joys and bittersweet pains we experience on the rollercoaster of duality.

And there's no need to sit back and passively watch the shadows do their dark work. There are powerful ways to engage and transform the shadows by honoring and embracing them. So yes, if you feel called, then work to end war, or buy your loud neighbors the latest Pearl Jam CD to add to their collection, or feed the hungry. (A good way to do this last one is to support micro-credit programs like the Hunger Project which seek to empower the poor to end the cycle of poverty). And see how effective you become when you embrace the shadows, undermining the power we give them over us and brightening them with the power of compassion. Feel free to bring light to the shadows. Or not.

Do I actually believe all this balderdash? Well, yes, though I have a hard time remembering it, especially when the shadow is in my empty belly, or shouts "Checkmate!" at me, or gets cast across a typhoon ravaged flood plain in Myanmar. Memory, that sweet capricious beast runs after his shadowy sister, Forgetfulness, both forever at play in the Garden of my mind. And what is it exactly that I’m trying to remember? Oh yeah...

...We never really left Eden.

So I will try to take off my dualistic glasses.....cast off some constricting notions clothed in opinion.....and go for a sprint in the Garden.

Come run with me?




"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."
---Rumi, Sufi poet

"Don't trust your mind, it will trick you. Don't trust your heart, it will lie to you. Trust your belly-----that's where God talks to you."
---Derrick, homeless Christian apologist

"The Perfect Way is only difficult
  for those who pick and choose.
  Do not like, do not dislike;
  all will then be clear.
  Make a hairbreadth difference,
  and Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart.
  If you want to get the plain truth,
  be not concerned with right and wrong.
  The conflict between right and wrong
  is the sickness of the mind."
---Seng-Ts'an (When I first encountered this quote ten years ago, it inspired me to get two small Japanese kanji tattoos: "Heaven" on my left shoulder and "Earth" on my right.)

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."
---anonymous

"We are all driven by our need for approval. And if you say that you aren't, then that's it too. The zen teacher's job is to go after that."
---Yoshin Sensei

"I charge my voices rent!"
"I told my voices I'm gonna listen to KLOS from now on!" (KLOS is a rock radio station)
---Sir Charles, one of my homeless chess buddies