The Tree of Hierarchy
Somehow, I ended up contemplating the Bible again as I was hiking through the forest at sunrise. It was so beautiful that I started thinking about the whole Garden of Eden story and wondering if we had really been kicked out of it after all.
God tells Adam never to eat from the tree of the knowledge of “good and evil.” It is the one tree in the garden he must avoid. He can eat from every other tree, but if he eats from this one, it’s not going to end well.
Almost immediately after he is told this, the serpent comes to Eve and suggests that if she wants to be “more like God, and know good and evil,” she should ignore God’s directive and eat the fruit.
When I began wondering what Satan might represent, my first thought was that it was the temptation to become. That feels like the movement away from simply being. It’s the drive to achieve, to succeed, to create. But the more I sat with that, the more natural becoming felt. That is part of the joy of human life, to become, to create. We are continually in a process of becoming.
But the serpent was adding something to the act of becoming. He suggested to Eve that she needed to become something better. That who she was was not enough. There was a ladder to climb. There was hierarchy here.
This is what has felt so different for me in the forest. Because when I stand in it and look through its lens, I see no hierarchy.
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The forest is full of distinctions. There are bears and birds, tall trees and fallen logs, sunshine and storms. Everything is in the process of becoming. A seed is becoming a tree. A caterpillar is becoming a butterfly. But there is no ladder here. I don’t find the forest insisting that anything become better in order to belong, or that anything needs to be “more like God.” That was the serpent talking.
Once Adam and Eve eat the fruit, there is an immediate shift in their perception. They have entered a new reality, and in this one “they knew that they were naked.” They felt shame for the first time.
If “the knowledge of good and evil” is the beginning of hierarchy, then shame makes perfect sense. The moment they begin ranking themselves, they believe that something is missing. Now they are naked. Now they must hide from God.
God had not wanted that for them. He warned them not to eat from it “lest you die.”
After they ate from it, they didn’t die physically. But what seemed to die was their ability to see the world outside the lens of “good and evil.” Hierarchy had entered their reality, and they could no longer see through the lens of belonging.
A lens where “better” doesn’t exist.
But the lens of belonging has never left the world.
It’s still here for us to look through.
