3

The One Forbidden Thing

In the case of Adam and Eve the announced rule was of a type very popular in fairy tales, known to folklore students as the One Forbidden Thing.

—Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (1976)

Questioning is one of the most vital paths to understanding…The question we are always asking ourselves is “who am I,” or “who is this living spirit, this fire?”

—Hyemeyohsts Storm, Seuen Arrows (1972)

Nothing is sacred to the point where it should not be investigated or put under inquiry.

—Robert A. Monroe, Ultimate Journey (1994)

Prelude: Some of My Best Friends

While researching this book, I found a yellowed piece of paper tucked away inside an old shoebox. When I was four, evidently I had scribbled out a little rhyme, entitled (‘Trees.” The first and last verse went as follows:

Trees are so very tall,

They make us look so very small….

Some trees grow so very

wide

When I play there

I hide.

Now why, I wondered, had I written this paean to, of all things, trees? And why was I hiding? These questions got me to reminiscing about some old and dear friends. How strange, I thought; rd almost forgotten about them.

There was a tall majestic oak that presided over our tiny backyard. It carpeted the ground with acorns each fall, giving off a deliciously nutty aroma. I loved to play under its great sheltering branches. Then there was the delicate dogwood, on whose lower branch I used to swing like Tarzan. But my favorite was a group of spindly white birches that stood in the right-hand corner of our front yard. I would sit amidst the birches, where I played with my plastic soldiers and metal trucks. There was something about those trees that made me feel safe and secure. It was like being watched over by a wise old grandmother or a kindly aunt. I know I talked to those trees, and they talked back.

Our small house stood on the corner of a busy intersection. Cars were always running the stop sign. It would not be unusual to hear crunching fenders or see a car careening onto the neighbor's front lawn. Once a driver was killed. People had come rushing from their houses to help, and there was blood everywhere. Mom told me to go play in another part of the house, away from the front window and the gore.

Eventually, my mother became so concerned about my safety that I was forbidden to play among my favorite birches in the front yard. Given the traffic situation and its attendant dangers this was reasonable.

And yet…

Sometimes we tell ourselves that we have good and perfectly sound reasons for doing what we do. Only it turns out that those reasons may not be the actual causes of our actions. There are secret springs, hidden levers. This is the machinery of cultural conditioning. It grinds away, unnoticed, in the background. All too often it grinds us up in the process, leaving only a useless husk behind.

“Whatever you do, don't go near that tree!” Does this prohibition sound familiar? Can you hear in it the echo of an ancient ban?

Eve's Question, Our Answers

In Genesis, God Oehovah) tells Adam and Eve that they can eat of the fruit of any tree in the magical Garden save one: the Tee of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. “Touch it,” he tells them, “and you will die.” That's it. No second chances, no appeals, no three strikes.

Then the serpent comes along and gets Eve going. “Did God say not to eat any of the fruit?” he asks slyly.

“Oh, no,” Eve replies. “You've got it all wrong. God said that we can eat of any tree we like, except that tall one, over there, right in the middle of the garden.”

“Ah, well,” says the snake. “That's because if you eat of that tree your eyes will be opened. You will be like God, knowing good and evil. You will be wise. A philosopher.”

Eve wonders: What would it be like to have such wisdom?

So, against Jehovah's emphatic rule, Eve takes some of the fruit and eats. Then she gives some to her husband, Adam, and he eats. And the rest is history.

Well, not exactly. Many claim to believe that this story relates actual, (pre-) historic events. But even if we reject such simple-minded literalism, we might still ask if there's any history in the story. Notice this is a slightly different question. And the answer here is: almost certainly so. The tale of Adam and Eve is undoubtedly a juicy amalgam of fact and fiction, the literal and the metaphoric, the historic and the mystical. The trick is in figuring out which parts are which. We need some sort of key in order to break the code.

The best clue I know of is the one offered by Joseph Campbell.1 He points out that Eve's creation from the rib of Adam is, after all, a bit of a biological oddity. We all know that, male or female, no one comes into this world except by way of woman. Eve's birth is positively unnatural. Could it be that the subversion of nature is precisely the point?

Eve's name means “the mother of all living.” She is Mother Nature, Mother Earth—depicted here as a silly bimbo. The Mistress of the Animals is tricked by one of her own, a lowly serpent. She is ignorant of what her own Tree knows. Following her (womanish!) curiosity and intuition and asking hard questions (especially when it challenges masculine authority) is not the path to wisdom, but rather, the fast lane to hell.

Eden is topsy-turvy, upside down, backward. Just like Bizarro Superman, who says “Good-bye” in greeting and “Hello” as he exits. Or, like the Heyokas, the sacred clown-shamans of the Sioux, who walk backward and do all the ceremonies in reverse. The only way to read the Adam and Eve story is standing on one's head, gazing in a mirror.

Sadly, Christianity didn't get the joke and took all this seriously—grimly so. Eve's disobedience and Adam's passive complicity cause the so-called Fall. All of Nature is corrupted. Now the world is rubbish, humanity is rotten, natural processes are evil. Only when Christ returns and the world is destroyed, a new Heaven and Earth created, and the righteous believers saved, will goodness prevail. Nature will be vanquished at last!

Although Hindus and Buddhists don't have the Bible, they have their own versions of this Bizarro worldview.² To them, life is a hellish merry-go-round ride that never ends, a bottomless can of karmic worms, an unbroken chain of reincarnations or rebirths. Their hope is not to destroy the world, but merely to escape it. Break the circle of existence. Get out! Quit! Jump off the merry-go-round! That's what enlightenment is for.

As the great Groucho Marx said, “Hello, I must be going…”

Adam and Eve, of course, had to go; God told them to leave Eden (and then, just as an adamantly unmoved President Gerald Ford, interpreted by a famous headline in the New York Daily News, told the beleaguered city in the midst of its financial crisis in 1975: Drop Dead). But what if “God” was only a stiff cardboard stand-in for the wounded Adam? Was the young couple, in fact, forced to move out in shame because Eve had cuckolded her husband with one (or two) of the neighbors?

Silly, you say? Not to Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who viewed the saga of Adam and Eve as a cautionary fairy tale about the evils of adultery.3 “Jehovah,” you see, represents the anxious husband of a patriarchal society, where it is very important to ensure that the son who inherits your property is your biological progeny. The ultimate act of creation is, of course, procreation (which is why Genesis is only about genesis) . Hardworking husband must tend to his goats on a far-off mountain pasture. What will sexy young wife do while he's away?

This is a test.

Eve, of course, fails—and miserably so. She betrays Jehovah/ Adam by dallying with Mr. Snake and Mr. Tree! As a good Freudian, Dr. Bettelheim seems to want to treat these as obvious phallic symbols. But, as Joseph Campbell points out somewhere, the snake, considered as a swallowing machine, can also be read as the ultimate female enclosure: the womb. And, as Carl Jung notes, the archetypal tree in myth is just as frequently endowed with the specifically feminine, motherly qualities of nurturing and protection.⁴ Of course, as Dr. Freud himself once ruefully observed, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Alas, we must never let the complex facts get in the way of our simple theories!

Yet Dr. Bettelheim was right, of course; the old story is a patriarchal myth, meant to put woman and all she represents in her (subordinate) place. But, being the stalwart Freudian materialist he was, he could only see this in physical (and not metaphysical) terms. He could not see the paradoxical truth that sometimes a tree is just a tree, a snake is just a snake—and yet, at the same time, so much, much more.

Just how much more, you ask?

“Go Find Your Tree”

The ancient Gnostics were partially right: Eve was indeed a hero for snatching the forbidden fruit, but not exactly for the reasons they supposed. For the snake was not a mere (Hermetic) symbol of an inward illumination that would catapult the individual soul into exotic realms of the beyond. (Like the Buddhists, from whom they may well have learned, the Gnostics weren't so hot on this world.) Rather, the snake was a living conduit to an outward experience of kinship with all creation, including and especially the earthly. The snake was the cable and the tree was the port through which the infinite web of life was accessed.

Let me put it this way What got Eve into trouble was acting as if she could learn something directly from trees and snakes. Yet at one time—and down to this day in so-called primitive cultures—this is not prohibited but expected and encouraged.

Mark St. Pierre is an adjunct professor of sociology and anthropology at Regis University in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. His wife is a full-blooded Sioux (Oglala Lakota). He has lived and studied among the Sioux Indians for twenty years. He notes that there are certain “common threads in the fabric” of all animistic or shamanic tribal cultures. These similarities include “the belief that an ordered spirit world exists, that all in creation, including man, have a soul that lives after death, and that communication with these spirits—plant, animal, and human—provides important information to the living.”5

This information concerns humans as well as their responsibility to the larger web of life. The Dakota Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. says that when the Sioux people would gather an herb, such as sage, they would respectfully ask the oldest (“grandfather” or “grandmother”) plants which ones they should pick, so as not to deplete the stock by overharvesting the most productive plants. Also, it was an accepted belief among the Sioux that the herbs themselves originally revealed their medicinal uses for humans.6

Plants in general and trees in particular are key members of this interspecies communications web. Animist peoples have known this for millennia. Native peoples are well aware that trees function as activators of the spiritual and psychic life, or what I have been calling “sensitivity” (which may explain why their shamans often envision themselves climbing and descending the cosmic Tree in their trance ecstasies). The tribes of the Great Plains, such as the Sioux, Crow, and Cheyenne, held their Sun Dance, in which a felled tree (usually a cottonwood) stood at the center of the circle of dancers, providing the focus for a ritual of communal renewal and personal visionary experience.

Bear Heart, the elderly Muskogee Creek medicine man, singles out the formative role played by the tree in the education of the tribe's young boys and girls:

To teach our young people how to get in touch with nature and their own intuition, our elders used to take them way out in the woods, blindfolded, and have them sit by a particular tree. “You stay here blindfolded until we come after you. Be with this tree, touch it, hug it, lean against it, stand by it. Learn something from it.” After half a day or more, they would bring them back to camp, remove the blindfold, and say, “Go find your tree.” After touching a lot of trees, they could find the one they had spent time with. Sometimes they didn't have to touch a lot of trees—those with highly developed intuition could go right to their tree. They seemed to be drawn to it.

That's how we began to connect. It's amazing what you feel from a tree. It can give us energy. When we take long hikes in wooded areas, we often put our fingertips on the ends of the cedar or pine needles. Just standing there touching them, you're going to feel energy come to you. Trees are emitting energy all the time. Every needle of the tree, every leaf, is trying to make the atmosphere breathable for us. That's why my people have great respect for trees. The trees are our relatives—we call them “tall standing brothers.”7

You see, those old tree-hugging Indians knew something. They knew that the fruit of the tree is very nourishing after all. Only we have been taught that it is poisonous.

Bungle in the Jungle

Hug a tree?

For some, “Tree hugger!” is hurled as an epithet. After all, the Bible tells us so. Even our secular religion of material progress is happy to quote scripture on this one.

When I was seven, I begged my parents to take me to the 1964 World's Fair in New York. 1964 was probably the high-water mark of our naive faith in the secular god of Sci-Tech. In 1969, the Apollo astronauts would walk on the moon. But barely a year later, in 1970, the first Earth Day would be held. In 1964, I was still looking toward the future as a magical time of talking robots, space travel, and flying cars.

So we hopped an electric diesel rail car for the short ride to the fairgrounds in Flushing, Queens. The commuter car slowly snaked its way through grimy railroad yards, alongside factories with tall chimneys belching stinking plumes of white and yellow smoke. A half-hour or so later, we arrived at the enormous fairgrounds, packed with visitors.

It was a sweltering June day. We stood in line for over three hours at the General Motors pavilion. This was the famed Futurama. Here I would get a glimpse of the marvelous technological future awaiting humanity. I was tingling with anticipation.

As the ride began, our automobile bench seat glided smoothly past amazingly detailed miniature dioramas. Each model scene seemed at least as big as our entire house! There were fantastic cities with superhighways in the sky, moon bases, underwater communities, and, of course, scores of vehicles (General Motors brand, naturally) everywhere.

Soon, alas, our brief ride into The Future was over.

Something about that ride bothered me, however. There was one diorama scene in particular that stuck in my mind. It depicted a construction crew mowing down the rain forests in the jungles of South America with gargantuan trucks. The guidebook I'd saved as a souvenir of my visit breathlessly described it thus:

Visiting the jungle. Spectators see a machine that fells towering trees with searing laser light. A road builder, scaled to appear five stories high and longer than three football fields, follows the timber cutter. It levels and grades, leaving a divided, multilane superhighway in its path. The road serves a city that processes the products (lumber, chemicals, and farm commodities) drawn from the tamed jungle.

To most of us civilized exiles of Eden, trees are mere “things” that get in the way of progress. Mow ‘em down. Chop ‘em up.

Our civilized attitude toward animals is little better. In Genesis, even before Eve's faux pas, humans were put in charge of the animals. Adam gets to name all the animals, which implies a proprietary relationship. Animals are our servants, our slaves, our food. That's it, nothing more. To the seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes, the animal was a soulless machine, all body and no consciousness. Poke a cat with a knitting needle and what you get is a simulation of pain, not the real McCoy.

In many of the esoteric traditions of East and West alike, our “spiritual” nature or “higher” self is supposed to overcome our “animal” nature or “lower” self. Guess which one is supposed to be the master, and which the servant?

Our “civilized” idea is that the animal is a creature of pure bodily instinct, a mere automaton. It is the epitome of salacious evil, or at the very least, nihilistically amoral, an efficient killing machine. “The Beast” was the title given to the devil by the author of the New Testament book called Revelation. “Bestial” means bad.

Just recently, I came across a news report about an Israeli fighter jet that dropped a one-ton bomb on a Palestinian terrorist's house, killing him along with fourteen bystanders and demolishing the apartment building. A leading liberal commentator in an Israeli newspaper condemned the act as a descent “down the slippery slope of bestiality.”

Oh, really? I thought. How manifestly unfair to the beasts!

A friend of mine recently took a photo safari trip to Kenya. One day, at a watering hole, she observed a group of gazelles nonchalantly taking a drink while a lion strolled by. The gazelles didn't bat an eyelash. Knowing that the gazelle is one of the lion's favorite dishes, my astonished friend asked her guide how this could be.

“Oh, no, ma'am,” he said, laughing. “He just eat!”

It is, after all, the self-righteous civilized human, not the wild animal, who kills for justice, to save souls, for revenge, profit, greed, or “just clean fun.” Our idea of nature, in fact, has nothing to do with nature, just as our idea of the animal (or, for that matter, of the physical body) has nothing to do with the reality. We are trapped in a decadent set of myths that limit and distort our perception of reality and stifle our innate sensitivity.

Eve took the tree—and, by extension, nature as a whole—as her teacher. For the so-called higher civilizations of West and East alike, this is the One Forbidden Thing.

The Christmas Tree, the Buddhist (Bodhi) Tree of Enlightenment, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life of mystical Judaism—all are sanitized symbols, safely sublimated forms of a deeper, wilder, far less manageable truth. The truth is that the tree is no mere symbol. It is a real being, with its own consciousness, its own energy, and its own wisdom to share.

As you will recall, there were two special trees in the garden. After Eve and Adam ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Jehovah cast them out of Eden, lest they eat from the Tree of Eternal Life. We are all in exile, doomed!

However, using our interpretive key (upside down and backward, remember), we know this is a distortion. Eve would have known to eat from the Tree of Eternal Life first, and to view the knowledge she gained from the second tree in the light of what she learned from the first. What do good and evil look like when regarded from the standpoint of eternity?

The tree freely gives itself (its shade, its oxygen, and its subtle energies) to all, without exception. The secret of good and evil is that these are human creations, variable ideas to which nature in her constancy and indiscriminant generosity is sublimely indifferent. The tree reminds us of our unbroken link to nature in her physical and nonphysical aspects, and to the dynamic balance of cosmic forces that we, from our limited perspective, label “good” and “evil.” Like the tree, we are deeply rooted in the earth and yet spontaneously seek the light of the sun. Our sensitivity knows no bounds.

Yet there's no contradiction here. We belong to both realms. There is only one world after all. Our immortality, like our mortality, is a free gift of nature. We need not beg, borrow, or steal it from a jealous and vengeful god (or earn it from “selfless” gurus adept at exploiting our fears and insecurities). No one is in exile and all are welcome.

Distant echoes of the primordial wisdom of the tree are occasionally heard in and among us “civilized” folk. For example, in the Taoist I Ching (Book of Changes) one can read, “The Earth in its devotion carries all things, good and evil, without exception.” The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus declared along similar lines, “To God, all things are good, and just and right; but to man, some things are good, and others evil.” Even Jesus spoke of God sending rain on the just and unjust alike. (Then again, Jesus supposedly cursed the poor fig tree—a sure sign of patriarchal psychosis.)

This is Eve's tree talking.

But are we listening?

The Pathology of Mythology

One day I was pondering these questions when suddenly I realized something about my telepathic rabbit dream I'd so obviously missed before. I felt like a fool!

Surely the dream tree under which my prolific, intuitive rabbit friend had fallen asleep was no ordinary split maple in the backyard of my childhood home. It was a symbol of the cosmic Tree of Life—the tree of the knowledge of duality and of eternity (for they are really one and the same tree, just as they are one and the same life). Eve's question was thus my own question, her way my own way. Our fates were linked.

There was no turning back now.

How strange, I mused, that our private dreams could mirror the injuries we receive from our public myths. Joseph Campbell talked about what he called “the pathology of mythology,” or the ways in which our cultural myths damage our souls and impede our quests. When I first began thinking about how these same myths hinder the development of our sensitivity, I mostly kept my suspicions to myself.

Or so I thought.

One day I was reading a student's term paper. Debbie, as I'll call her, was one of the better students in the class. So I was somewhat taken aback to find her admitting in the conclusion to her paper that she would like to have an open, critical mind. I thought she already had one! However, she confessed, thanks to her eighteen years of religious training, she felt “brainwashed” and incapable of real change.

Brainwashed? I almost fell out of my chair—and not only because I thought more of Debbie than she did of herself. For I had just been going through a file stocked with depressing examples of religious pathology. The manila folder grew fatter by the day, chock-full of news clippings datelined from countries all across the globe (including, of course, our own). Here are a few choice excerpts:

Item: In Massachusetts, a “pro-life” zealot armed with a semiautomatic rifle bursts into two family planning clinics and shoots nurses and receptionists to death in cold blood.

Item: In Florida, another “pro-lifer” is convicted in the shooting murder of a physician who performed abortions at a Pensacola clinic.

Item: In Nevada, two men with ties to radical fundamentalist Christian groups are arrested by the FBI on suspicion of plotting to release anthrax, a lethal bacteria, a vial of which can wipe out a city the size of Las Vegas.

Item: In California, Christian fundamentalist Randall Terry tells an antiabortion rally dubbed “Love, Life, and Family” that America must become a “Christian Nation” under “Biblical Law.” Abortion and contraception will be forbidden, and fathers will be revered as the “Godly leaders” of the family, leaving “the woman in submission, raising kids for the glory of God.”

Item: In California, the self-castrated Marshall Herff Apple-white, the son of a Texas preacher and leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, joins his thirty-eight followers in a suicide pact. The Heaven's Gate theology was an eclectic fusion of Christian salvation, UFO lore, and love of computer technology. Applewhite and his Nike-sneaker-clad followers reportedly believed that their souls would be “rescued” from their “earthly vehicles” (physical bodies, that is) by a passing UFO concealed in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet.

Item: In New York, Islamic fundamentalists are convicted of bombing the World Trade Center and planning to blow up American jetliners full of passengers.

Item: In Iran, Muslim clerics up the bounty on the life of the “blaspheming” author Salman Rushdie to a cool $2.5 million. (The late Ayatollah Khomeini, the fundamentalist ruler of Iran, had originally delivered the death decree, or fatwa.) One cleric notes in his weekly sermon that it is the religious duty of Rushdie's closest friends and family to try to kill him first. “Rushdie must die!” he feverishly exclaims. His congregation responds by shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great.)

Item: In Algeria, Islamic zealots shoot high school girls in the face for not wearing their veils.

Item: In India, fundamentalist Hindus announce their plan to form a political party whose aim will be to make India a Hindu State. Radical Sikhs machine-gun guests at Hindu weddings in the Punjab as part of their plan to establish a Sikh state, called the Land of the Pure.

Item: In Israel, Muslim worshippers are machine-gunned to death by Jewish fanatics who hail from Brooklyn, New York. A maniacal Jewish fundamentalist assassinates Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for trying to make peace with the Palestinians (and for having the audacity to suggest that “The Bible is not a land deed”).

Item: In Switzerland and Canada, more than thirty wealthy followers of mystery man Luc Jouret (along with Jouret himself), founder of the Solar Temple cult, commit suicide in a staged pact. Jouret founded the group after breaking away from the Rosicrucians (an elite esoteric group devoted to the transmission of “mystical wisdom”).

Item: In Japan, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult are on trial for releasing sarin, a deadly poison gas, in a crowded Tokyo subway. Aum Shinrikyo is an eclectic fusion of Buddhist and Christian teachings. Its followers, who have been known to parade with masks bearing the image of their guru, Shoko Asahara, in front of their faces, believed that this act of terrorism would bring about the end of the world. Several commuters were killed and many others were injured in the attack. Asahara, who is accused of ordering the attack, is quoted as saying: “I will try to free humanity of its bondage, pain, and despair. Whatever suffering falls upon me I will bear, with holy love, for you all.”

Did I hear someone say “brainwashing”?

At first, Debbie's comment upset me. Then I tried to look on the brighter side. After all, I reasoned, if you know (or suspect) that you've been brainwashed, then it hasn't completely taken, has it? There was still hope that she (and those like her) could open to new possibilities, greater realities, and the power of her own natural sensitivity.

Yet how?

But Are You Religious?

One day after class, a student I'll call Monica approached me as I was erasing the blackboard.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, professor?” she asked shyly.

“Sure, go ahead, I'll answer if I can,” I replied, wondering what it could be.

“Professor, are you religious?”

There it was again, that dreaded question! Dropped like a fire bomb in the middle of a barn stacked with dry wood. I felt tongue-tied, mentally stammering.

“Well, uh…” I mumbled.

Religious? The very word now made me cringe. Yet I certainly was no philosophical materialist. “Atheist,” on the other hand, struck me as a homage to an anachronism. The biblical god was history. Why beat a dead horse? Spiritual? Too elitist and condescending. “Psychic” all too often conjured up images of gypsy fortune-tellers with neon signs advertising the mystical wonders of Madame So-and-So at fifty dollars a pop. And while I preferred “sensitive,” I knew that to many in our competitively crazed society this word means overemotional, weak-minded, sissified, or even hysterical.

So I just stood there, trying to think of a response.

“Look,” Monica said impatiently, “the reason I'm asking is that, well, I was raised Catholic. But I've had experiences lately. Strange experiences,” she added hesitantly.

“Well, I've had some pretty strange experiences myself,” I admitted with a smile.

“I was in the park the other day,” Monica continued in a confidential tone. “I love walking in the park by myself. Suddenly, I got this weird feeling. I glanced over at this bench, not far from where I was standing. There was this old man sitting on the bench. He looked Chinese or something. As I looked over at him, I think he smiled at me. Then he just vanished. I mean, he wasn't there!” she exclaimed.

Monica hesitated again, checking my response. I nodded reassuringly.

“I didn't turn my head or anything,” she continued, her voice quavering with emotion. “One second I was looking at him, and then he just disappeared, into thin air. The thing is,” she added, “I think I've seen this Chinese guy before. I may have seen him in my dreams. Or maybe it was in the park. I don't know. It's like, he's watching over me. Like we're connected, somehow.”

Monica's face relaxed. She seemed relieved. At last she had shared her secret.

“What do you think, professor?” she asked earnestly. “What was he? A ghost? My guardian angel? What?”

Before I could reply, Monica gushed out the rest:

“And there are other weird things. Sometimes stuff in our house will disappear and then just reappear. It's not that it's just missing, you know. We'll look everywhere, all over the house. It's nowhere, absolutely gone. And then, ‘poof,' like magic, it's back! Just the other day this happened to my little brother. He had been looking for a picture, a framed snapshot of him with our grandfather, who died recently. He swore he looked everywhere, even in his top dresser drawer. And it wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere. Then, later on, he looked again. And there it was, right in front in his top dresser drawer!

“Professor,” she pleaded, pausing to draw a breath. “Tell me, what's it all about?”

I did not want to play the Man of Authority. Not only because I didn't know what it all meant, but also because I felt it was important for Monica to search for her own answers. She knew something unusual was going on. She was paying attention, even though these experiences didn't fit in with anything from her religious background. I thought this was a good omen. Like me, she sensed—though neither of us could find the right words to express it—that it was possible to be religious without religion.

So I told Monica that she must figure out for herself what it all means. I offered to lend her some books and articles on the kinds of phenomena that she described. I reaffirmed my belief that such things do, in fact, happen. She wasn't crazy. Or lying.

Monica thanked me for listening. But as we said our goodbyes in the noisy hallway, I sensed her disappointment. I told myself that this was healthy, and that my approach would inspire her to find her own way.

Not long after our conversation, however, Monica dropped my course.

I ran into her later that semester. She apologized for her departure and reassured me that she had indeed enjoyed the course. She explained that her allergies had been acting up and had caused her to miss too many sessions. I didn't mention our previous conversation, and neither did she.

I felt as if l'd failed Monica. At first I convinced myself that I'd done the right thing, offering her reference materials and some bland words of encouragement. But now I agonized whether I could or should have said (or done) more.

Oddly, I had also failed to notice some obvious similarities between Monica and me—for example, her allergic sensitivities, the peace and contentment she found walking in the park, and her discomfort with conventional religion. None of this rang a bell. It was as if the universe were testing me by sending me another version of myself.

I had to admit that it looked as though I'd flunked.

Something in my basic analysis of the problem had to be lacking, I thought. I was on the right track, but maybe I hadn't traveled far enough along yet. Why would someone like Monica or Debbie get as far as they did, and then just throw in the towel?

“But What Would Be the Answer to the Answer Man?”8

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed as if Debbie's reference to “brainwashing” was more than a neat metaphor. This was a real clue.

Remember that old cold-war movie thriller, The Manchurian Candidate? In the original version, Angela Lansbury, playing a treacherous spy, casually uttered a code word triggering a posthypnotic suggestion that transformed her son (played by Laurence Harvey), a patriotic American soldier, into Robokiller, a preprogrammed political assassin hot-wired to kill for his Red Chinese controllers. He was operating on automatic pilot but didn't know it.

In the case of Debbie (and Monica), some cultural taboo was being violated and the posthypnotic suggestion was automatically kicking in. Instead of advancing to meet the challenge of new ideas and experiences, they were beating a hasty retreat into familiar dogmas and comfortable mental routines. Where there should have been the exhilaration of a newfound inner freedom, there was only a timid reserve, a closing off instead of an opening up of minds.

Why? What was the secret code word, the mental circuit breaker?

The more I reflected, the more obvious it became. The code word is: Question.

Most of us are addicted to answers and terrified of genuine questions. This is not our fault; this monkey was placed squarely on our backs. It is the single common thread in all of our cultural myths, whether religious, philosophical, or scientific. It's not merely that we're wedded to particular answers, mind you. We're stuck like flies on flypaper to the underlying belief that we can and should be able to obtain all the answers, once and for all. We're prisoners of the grand illusion of a total system of explanation, the vainglorious dream of a final theory of ever-thing, the dangerous delusion of the One True Religion. (Even postmodernists who gleefully “deconstruct” systems are all frustrated system-builders at heart. They maneuver their intellectual bulldozers over sandcastles of ideas with the cold ferocity of a suitor scorned.)

This is the viral DNA embedded in the cells of every ideology, the ultimate “ism.”

I now dubbed it “Answerism.”

Religious Answerism is often fairly explicit and up-front. For example, as Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels points out, one of the fathers of the early Christian Church, a bishop named Tertullian, insisted that people not be allowed to ask questions, for it is “questions that make people heretics.” The Greek word heretic means “one who makes a choice.” So choosing to question is definitely on the forbidden list.9

Sometimes, though, the prejudice against questions is a tad subtler. I once read a book by a well-known teacher who modeled himself on the Hindu gurus he had studied with in India. (In true guru style, his beatific picture adorned almost every page of the book.) He described how he had broken with several of his teachers when he discovered that they were not as purely “selfless” as they pretended to be (surprise, surprise!). In fact, he suggested, they were jealous of him and kept him from developing his abilities. It is very important, he cautioned, to question all such claims of having achieved perfect egolessness. Unless, of course, he added, one finds a truly selfless teacher who wouldn't dare dream of exploiting others—a teacher such as (hint, hint!) him. In which case it is very unwise to question what one is told!

I saw that Answerism stifles creativity and promotes violence.

Recalling now my own experience in graduate school, it made sense. I recognized the game that we were being taught to play in lieu of being encouraged to ask genuine questions. I knew why I found that game so distasteful.

That game was war.

The very words we used to describe what we were doing told the story. Like good soldiers fighting to take a strategically located hill, we were supposed to take and hold a fixed (intellectual) “position.” Philosophical positions, like their military counterparts, were said to be “defended,” “attacked,” “defeated,” “supported,” “abandoned,” and “maintained.” We were encouraged to find “useful weapons” to be deployed against “adversaries” or “opponents.” Assertions were “parried,” “hit their target,” “forced the issue,” or “knocked a massive hole” in an opponent's view, and so forth.

Granted, such verbal jousting paled in comparison with the bloody savagery of religious wars, persecutions, suicides, vendettas, and so on. It was insignificant next to the horrific despoiling of the planet undertaken by the greedy exploiters of Earth's resources (as lovingly documented, for example, at the 1964 Futurama). Yet beyond the obvious differences, there was a common psychological and ideological root to all this reflexive violence, whether physical or mental: the Answerist mind-set.

From reading the works of philosopher Thomas Kuhn (who coined the phrase “paradigm shift”) and quantum physicist David Bohm, I learned that Answerism holds sway even in science, which prides itself on its open methods of inquiry and the revisable nature of its beliefs. These courageous thinkers showed that while science periodically opens itself to new ideas and experiences that don't fit old paradigms, it quickly closes down again, reestablishing a kind of fundamentalism (what Kuhn called “normal science”) that does not permit deep questioning of the new perspective.10

So, for example, although Einstein and his relativity theory eventually triumphed over the classical Newtonian picture of the universe, Einstein himself could not, in turn, accept the even more revolutionary implications of the new quantum mechanics. He cut off all communication with Danish physicist Niels Bohr, even snubbing him at a party.¹¹

But what did Answerism have to do with Eve?

The Eve story marked the moment in our past when the authority of fixed rules (definitions, interpretations) usurped direct personal experience. There is no fixed formula, no strictly logical procedure, for generating questions. Asking the right question at the right time in the right way is an art, not a science. It takes feeling, imagination, and above all, intuitive sensitivity—the very qualities Eve was prevented from developing when her contact with the web of life was abruptly broken off. After that, we were told by holy texts what our experiences meant—period. (The ones we were permitted to have, that is.)

With the crippling of our ability to question, we fell under the sorcerer's spell. We saw ourselves inhabiting a dead universe-ashes to ashes and dust to dust. A dead world (either “God” was outside it or a nonexistent phantom) can safely be cut up into pieces with abstract ideas—cookie-cutter answers that pretend to be final and complete.

But what if, as the Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. says (from the perspective of that older, outlawed animist point of view), “the world is constantly creating itself because everything is alive and making choices that determine the future”?¹² Then creation (or evolution) is not something essentially over and done with; it's happening right now, all the time, in ways we can neither predict nor control, nor perhaps even comprehend. Everything, in other words, is conscious, alive, and free. Creation itself is “heretical”!

So we must keep an open mind and be ready, willing, and able to question—and fundamentally revise—all of what (and how) we think we know about our world. We'd better trust our own experiences, for they can always tell us something fundamentally new and different about ourselves, and about our mysterious (and surprising) world.

Answers are the dregs; questioning is the wine.13

Perhaps that is why native peoples did not write texts. Contrary to our prejudice that these were static cultures (the projection of our own rigidity?), they knew to keep their fingers on the pulse of change. This is the heart of questioning. The Indian activist Russell Means recalls that his Grandpa John never finished a teaching story. He always omitted the ending, leaving, say, the lost young hunter struggling to cross the raging creek. This frustrated Russell when he was a boy. But much later, he realized what his Grandpa was doing: “Grandpa John was teaching me the Indian way of thinking, teaching me to use my imagination, to figure things out for myself, to study, and to analyze. He caused my unformed mind to frame questions—and then search out the answers.”¹⁴

For Eve, then, religion is a truly open-ended inquiry. She is unwilling to settle down in any closed (or essentially closed) system of thought. Hers is a quest ignited by curiosity, fueled by intuition, and accelerated by respectful attention to her nonhuman friends in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms that she honors along the way.

I knew all this now, but only in an intellectual way. Answerism was definitely out. But what was in? What was the next step? What was I supposed to do?

Loitering at the Doorway of Change

Direction came in the form of three strange “dreams.” Only in retrospect, however, did I appreciate this. At the time, I was too close to the forest to see the trees.

Before we were married, Cynthia lived in a condominium that abutted a wilderness preserve, much of it consisting of marshy wetlands. It was a virtual wildlife paradise. We loved to stroll along the edge of the refuge, usually accompanied by Cynthia's dog, a well-behaved, good-natured golden retriever. We would catch glimpses of elegant, ethereal blue herons, highflying turkey vultures, swift hawks, roly-poly hedgehogs, honking Canadian geese, huge snapping turtles (once we stopped traffic on the access road to allow a mother turtle to get to her nest), and, of course, the ubiquitous deer.

Yet, for all its teeming activity, the place was suffused with a certain primordial quietude. Looking out as far as the eye could see, no human habitation intruded. In fact, the only evidence of human presence was a narrow dirt access road, used mostly by hunters. Perhaps I was just not used to the pure unadulterated wildness of the place, but I sensed that the area was imbued with a peculiar energy. Sometimes when I walked along the path alone in early morning or at dusk, it felt spooky. So I was not too surprised when I later read an item in the local newspaper that told of a reliable eyewitness (an amateur astronomer) who reported seeing strange, unexplained lights flying over the preserve. The paper even labeled it a UFO sighting.

Then there was what I called the Witch's Tree. It was a thick, massive old dead oak that looked like it had been transplanted from the ritual grounds of some ancient Druid cult. Standing out in the middle of an open field, it dominated the surrounding landscape, its bare gnarled branches stretching into the sky like the leathery upraised arms of a mystical priestess performing her supplications to the moon goddess. The only signs of life in the rotting old hulk were the green leaves of the serpentine vines of poison ivy that encircled the tree like a nest of boa constrictors. However, in the dead of winter the naked brown vines were invisible against the decaying brackish bark of the tree. That was the season when the tree looked its creepiest. I imagined (without the slightest bit of evidence to back up my supposition, mind you) that the UFO sighting had been made directly over the tree as the full moon glowed brightly through its spindly branches.

The UFO sighting in the wilderness preserve had not yet occurred, however, when I had three odd “dreams” in close succession. They took place on three separate occasions when I was visiting Cynthia at her condo, which was about a thirty-minute drive up and over rolling mountains from my house. To my way of thinking it was no mere coincidence that I had those dreams when and where I did. For I sensed that the wild energy of that place was somehow speaking to me, and to my concerns. Those dreams, in other words, were messages from Gaia.

The dream sequence unfolded over the course of several weeks in the fall of 1991, when I was hard at work finishing my dissertation. (In March 1992, I would fly back to Chicago to defend my thesis and secure my Ph.D.) By then I had been teaching philosophy for several years as a part-time adjunct instructor at various local colleges in the northern New Jersey area.

Yet despite all of my classroom experience and theoretical learning, I was unsure of the future direction of my work, beset by doubts concerning academia in general and philosophy in particular. Most of all, however, I lacked confidence in myself. How (and what) could I possibly teach, when I knew so little myself? How could I presume to guide others in their quests, when I felt so lost in mine? My students looked to me for answers. But I had no answers—only questions. What was wrong with me?

One night on the edge of sleep, I felt like a disembodied point of consciousness floating in a three-dimensional velvety black void. I slowly became aware of a series of brightly colored forms metamorphosing in front of me. The images were like holograms, fully three-dimensional. Their lucid hues (red, orange, yellow, green) were brilliant, almost psychedelic in intensity, yet semitransparent. Each shape would coalesce, then melt into its successor. Bedazzled by the sheer beauty of the display, the sense of what I was seeing escaped me. Suddenly, I recognized the forms.

They were the skulls of prehistoric humans, only in reverse chronological order: From Homo sapiens sapiens (or Cro-Magnon) to the distinctively beetle-browed Neanderthal to a gallery of humanoid ancestors more closely resembling apes. It was evolution in reverse I The strangest part of this hypnagogic vision is that all the while I felt like a student being given a lesson—though by whom, and for what purpose, I did not know. It was a mystery.

The second experience began as a more conventional dream. I dreamed that I was awake in the bedroom, standing by the rear window. Something caused me to open the window—perhaps I heard a noise, or I just knew that I was supposed to do this. I stuck my head out the window that looked onto the edge of the preserve and glanced to the left, down the side of the building. What happened next is indescribable. I didn't so much directly see, as sense, the presence of the brightest, whitest, most intensely brilliant source of light. At first, thinking it was the sun, I flinched, averting my eyes in order not to burn out my retinas. Yet even as I realized that it was not the physical sun, I pulled my head back into the room. I wasn't ready to see it, despite the deep feeling of awe it inspired.

The third experience would probably be classified as a lucid dream, which is defined as a dream in which one is consciously aware that one is dreaming.15 Yet to me it was no dream—lucid or otherwise.

I found myself standing in the backyard of the condo, on the manicured lawn that gently sloped down toward the reedy underbrush and woods of the preserve just beyond. Realizing that I was dreaming, I was taken aback by the un-dreamlike quality of my vision, which was crisp and dear. Looking about, I was astonished to realize that I could feel everything, including the ground beneath my shoes and my own body, as a physical presence, and yet it was also much more.

Testing my hypothesis, I bent down and gently touched my hand to the ground, finding the earth every bit as solid and real as one might expect. As I stood up, however, I became aware of each blade of grass glowing like a Fourth of July sparkler, radiating light from some hidden source within. The air was suffused with this same sparkling radiance. I also became aware of a strange, far-off sound. It was a gentle tinkling of bells, like wind chimes, only more delicate and ethereal. As I looked to my right, I saw that I was not alone. Sebago, Cynthia's golden retriever, stood nearby, his gaze fixed at the edge of the woods. There I spied the evident object of his canine attention: a rabbit hopping over the boundary line that divided the backyard from the wilds beyond. The dog and I exchanged knowing glances, as if entering into a tacit agreement.

“Let's get the bastard!” I shouted, as I took off after Sebago, who was already galloping off toward the woods in pursuit.

Were these dreams? Visions? Out-of-body visits to parallel worlds? I could not decide. Whatever they were, I sensed they were connected, of a piece.

The “reverse evolution” vision and the “invisible sun” dream seemed to be deliberately juxtaposed, their meanings intertwined. This could only mean there was some sort of guiding intelligence at work—a hidden teacher. Who, or what, was this mysterious guide? I did not know. Moreover, what was the lesson? Here I had more to go on. The parade of skulls took place inside a dark cave; yet the skulls were illumined from within by a brilliant radiance. This light in the darkness did not dim as the present yielded to the distant past. Consciousness, in other words, was always present. I felt a deep bond with those “primitive” humanoids. We were one. They had something to offer: a gift to give.

Also, their inner light was one and the same light whose presence I detected when, in the second dream, I stuck my head out the window of the building (civilization}. I glanced to the left, or what is sometimes regarded as the “sinister” direction, not to the “right” (the safe, conventional route}. By looking outside the established structures to the heretical, questioning side, I would find the true source—the same source that was present at the dawn of humanity. It was in nature, and in our nature, from the beginning. The left-hand path represented uncharted territory. Yet, like it or not (and it did make me uneasy), that was where I had to go.

The surprising appearance of my old friend, the rabbit, in the third dream told me that I had to be willing to trust my instincts (the dog) to guide me in these new realms. The wily rabbit was leading me from the manicured green lawn of civilization and rational control to the wild woods. This is the mysterious zone that Joseph Campbell termed “the dark forest of the mythological adventure,” where there is no way or path. Psychologically this zone referred to the unconscious; metaphysically to those nonphysical realms that out-of-body explorer Robert Monroe succinctly dubbed “There.”

But something told me that all would not be smooth sailing. Why had I called the rabbit a “bastard,” of all things?

A “bastard,” of course, is an illegitimate child, an offspring without an officially acknowledged father and, therefore, a somewhat disreputable issue. The meaning now seemed clear: I still doubted my intuitions and instincts. Secretly, my more conventional side ached to disown my own psychic sensitivity. At the very least, I was still afraid to embrace it, fully and openly. I was not ready to trust myself.

The former psychic spy and professional remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle says he knows many people who only loiter by the threshold of the doorways of change, unable to muster the courage to pass through. These people are good at intellectualizing their metaphysics but, according to Joe, manifestly unwilling, in the final analysis, to “give up or alter their extant perception of how or why things work.”16

In other words, like some forlorn fool straight out of a fairy tale, they are stuck, frozen solid in a kind of suspended animation.

That, alas, was me. I believed. On some level, I knew. Yet I held back. I hesitated. I couldn't bring myself to walk through that door.

No wonder that I was soon to have a visit from Snow White.