Adam’s World

Isaac spoke about Adam:

The first Adam was both male and female.
Adam’s heels were brighter than the sun. That is to say, even the lowest part of him was filled with light. Special light, higher and brighter than the sun. Adam stood so tall, from heaven to earth, and stretched from one end of the universe to the other. This means he contained the whole universe within himself.

He lived in perfection. He wanted for nothing. His reason for living was simply to exist for God. He had no other purpose.

Then along came the snake and the tree of good and evil.

We might think of that tree as being filled not with apples but with videos. Movies. Illusions. It is the tree of stories and illusions.

In Adam’s world, one didn’t consider good and evil, because it didn’t apply. His was not the dualistic world. It was a world of union, unity.

But in that world of unity, one does consider the real and the unreal. If it’s real you can rely on it. If it’s an illusion, you don’t bother with it.

So there was Adam, looking at this tree of illusions.

The snake enticed Adam by suggesting he would honor God even more if he went into this world of illusion and then dispelled illusion. He suggested Adam would fight his way out for the glory of God. The snake snagged a bite of Adam’s ego here. All created beings have some ego, in all worlds.

Adam took the bait and bit into the illusion.

The trouble is, once you’re in this world, you’re in, and you can’t see your way out of illusion.

In Adam’s first world of perfection, there was no cause and effect. If something, say a bottle cap, were thrown into the air it might stay there or it might suddenly rain a hundred caps. Whatever was divinely determined would just happen.

But once we hook into the chain of cause and effect, then time and space arise. Then we think we know what will happen next. Then we are thoroughly inside the illusion.

Without cause and effect, everything is only what it is. In such a place there is no need to do anything. The only thing is to simply know that God keeps coming through.
Honor all of it as it is. All of it is God, in the world of Union.

Life is not easy for us in the world of illusion. This is the horizontal world, where we buy and sell, join and disperse, struggle as we do, horizontally across the face of the earth.

We forget to go vertical and connect with God.

This is why, in our tradition, once a week, we stop our horizontal life and “do nothing.” Shabbos is our day to reconnect with the Garden, with God. We do our best to stay in the vertical plane.

This is an excerpt from  from Chapter 33 of  vol 1, Walking the Bridge – With a Fearless Heart.
See also Perpetuate the Past or Plug in to the Vertical
(Thanks to Wikipedia for this image from the Sistine Chapel.)