The Genesis story explains the birth of your human ego. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had all their needs met and lived in paradise while being intimately connected to God.  There was only one rule:  Don’t eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words, “If you want to remain in blissful ignorance, don’t do it.”

You know the rest of the story. They took the infamous bite ingesting the knowledge of good and evil, also called duality.  Immediately, they fell from Grace feeling separate and alienated from God.  They felt ashamed, so what did they do? They covered themselves with fig leaves. Symbolically, the fig leaves represent the ego, whose job is to cover and hide our shame of feeling  “less than how God and others want us to be.”

This is the birth of the human ego, from one spiritual perspective. The rest of the Bible, in one way or another, is the human quest to find our way back to God and the Promised Land.  We all seek to reunite with our Source of origin while battling the forces of the ego, or as it is known in spiritual terms, Satan or sin.

Christianity refers to the Genesis story as the fall from Grace. It views the Garden of Eden as an actual physical place and the beginning of all of man’s troubles. Adam and Eve are believed to be actual people who made a seriously bad decision that changes the course of history for all mankind.

Other interpretations, including mine, view the fall as rich spiritual symbolism. It was a necessary and expected part of humanity’s evolution. One such school of religious thought that  holds this view and has been around longer than Christianity is called Jewish Kabala.

Eden is the realm of the spirit and must be left in order to become an individual soul.  The time spent on Earth as a human is the beginning of a process of returning to God. In this spiritual or symbolic version of the fall, disobeying God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents a human being first exercising free will and the birth of the ego. In psychological terms, we might call this the terrible two’s of humanity. In spiritual terms, it is moment when humans evolved from being animals to possessing a soul capable of choosing right from wrong and good from evil.  The ego then becomes a spiritual necessity to having a relationship with God.

The two drives of the separate “I” are survival and wholeness. The drive to survive through protecting and getting behaviors, unfortunately, keep us separate from the experience of being connected to the sacred. An acronym for an ego rooted in fear is Edging God Out.
At a certain point in our individual development, we begin to realize that our strategies for success are not working to bring us the feeling of happiness and wholeness that we imagined.  What do we do?  Try harder to either slowly and gradually or immediately and boldly, find a way to surrender. If you have to choose, choose wholeness over outward success.  When you begin to let go of your control strategies, what often happens is a flood of un-integrated feelings rise to the surface. This doesn’t feel good. You feel out of control. This is an important choice point. Your ego will have you feel like retreating back to the familiar control strategies that seemed to work at one time. In your heart, you know these strategies will also close you off from the spiritual connection that the deepest part of you seeks. What do you do? What will you do?

I recommend that you find a group or teacher that will support you in staying in the fire of transformation. It’s uncomfortably hot, yet if you remain, what you gain is a transformation of your ego being rooted in fear and survival to a sense of  “I” grounded in Spirit, Essence or God. At this point the ego’s acronym becomes Expressing God/Grace/Gifts Outrageously.

So, are you … Edging God Out, or, Expressing God Outrageously?

In Wholeness,

Michael