The Real Meaning of the Garden of Eden — it’s Not at All What You Think

There are some very interesting and useful things in the Garden of Eden myth. Note that just because I use the word “myth” doesn’t mean it’s unimportant nonsense. This was the perspective of Joseph Campbell, and I completely agree. There’s much the Garden of Eden can teach us, but not in the traditional way it’s viewed or taught. In fact, I throw out the church’s traditional interpretation entirely because I’ve come to see that this myth is part of a much larger picture than the church has ever conceived, connecting with general mythological themes, aspects of other spiritual traditions (especially eastern), psychology, and more.

Let’s start at the beginning. So, God just spent the last seven days creating all of existence. Sweet. So, when God creates Adam and Eve, we have the One into the two. This is found all over the place in creation stories (for good reason), but it holds a very special philosophical and spiritual significance: the idea that the Unity somehow manifested itself and broke into a duality (male and female, at least in this case). Notice the Yin-Yang symbol, for example, which ultimately doesn’t represent a balancing of opposites, but the unity of opposites that transcends them. “No,” you may say. “God is separate from existence. Sure, God created man in his own image, but humans are creations, separate…