This point is tremendously important. Many of the images-which in our religion are dogmatically affirmed as having had historical reality-are very difficult today to interpret in historical terms. For example, the Assumption of the Virgin or the ascension of Jesus to heaven both lead us to a problem: where is heaven? Somewhere up in the sky? Our contemporary cosmology does not permit us to entertain that thought very seriously. We have a collision between these articles of faith and the historical and phys- ical sciences, which we have to admit are thing that we live by from day to ruling our lives, giving us every- day. This collision has destroyed people’s

belief in these symbolic forms; they are rejected as untrue. Now, since the primary truth is not the historical but the spiritual ref erence of these symbols, the fact that historical evidence refutes these myths on the level of objective reality should not relieve us of the symbolnd they symbols stem from the psyche, they speak from and to the spirit. And they are in fact the vehicle of communication between the deeper depth of our spiritual life and this relatively thin layer of consciousness by which we govern our daylight existences.

And when those symbols-those vehicles of communication between our greater and lesser selves-are taken away, we are left without an inter- com. This split leaves us schizoid; we live in a world up in the head, and the world down below is quite apart. We speak of schizophrenia when people, split in half like that, crack up: they plunge back into the night sea of the realities down there, which they had not been taught about. They’re terrified-by demons.

Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world.

Here is a basic theological formula: a deity is a personification of a spiritual power. And deities who are not recognized become demonic; they become dangerous. When you have not been in communication with them, when their messages have gone unheard or unheeded, and when they do, inevitably, break through, your conscious life is overthrown. There is, literally, hell to pay.

Carl Jung, in his analysis of the structure of the psyche, has distinguished four psychological functions that link us to the outer world. These are sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Sensation, he states, is the function that tells us that something exists; thinking, the function that tells us what it is; feeling, the function that evaluates its worth to us; and intuition, the function that enables us to estimate the possibilities inherent in the object or its situation.Feeling, thus, is the inward guide to value; but its judgments are related normally to outward, empirical circumstance.

The wonderful thing about symbology is that it includes all four functions.

When the symbols are interpreted spiritually rather than concretely,then they yield the revelation.

God is not an illusion, but a symbol pointing beyond itself to the realization of the mystery of at-one-ment.

People often dream that they have an exam and they have not reached the exam center even after a lot of hard work, or have not written anything in the exam.Such type Dream are symbolic image of threshold guardian which is not let you cross your own living horizon. Everyone has to cross the threshold.The threshold guardian is symbolic of a barrier holds you back.

Myths, like dreams, are products of the imagination. And there are two orders of dream, the simple personal dream, in which the dreamer becomes involved in adventures reflective only of his own personal problems, the conflicts in his life between desires and fears, driving wishes and moral prohibitions, and similar materials that are typically dealt with in a Freudian psychoanalysis. There is also another dream level that can be thought of as that of vision, where one has transcended the sphere of a merely personal horizon and come into confrontation with the same, great, universal problems that are symbolized in all great myths.

For example, when disaster strikes, when you meet with a great calamity, what is it that supports you and carries you through? Do you have anything that supports and carries you through? Or does that which you thought was your support now fail you? That building myth, of your life.

The Christ story involves a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on Holy Rood, the matty was he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the Father are one.

Getting back into that Garden is the aim of many a religion. When Yahweh threw man out of the Garden, he put two cher- ubim at the gate, with a flaming sword between. Now, when you approach a Buddhist shrine, with the Buddha seated under the tree of immortal life, you will find at the gate two guardians-those are the cherubim, and you’re going between them to the tree of immortal life. In the Christian tradition, Jesus on the cross is on a tree, the tree of immortal life, and he is the fruit of the tree. Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree-these are the same figures. And the cherubim at the gate-who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you’ll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed-fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you’re approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but see the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won’t be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through.

We are kept out of the garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what think to be the goods of our life.

God’s idea, in this story, was to get Adam and Eve out of that Garden. place of oneness, of unity, of no things. When you eat the Fruit of the What was it about the Garden? It was a division in the nature of people or Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, you know about pairs of opposites which include not only good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, but male and female, and God and Man as well.

Man has eaten the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Lest he eat the fruit of the second tree, which is that of immortal life, God throws Man out of the Garden and places two cherubim, with a flaming sword between them, to guard the gate.

Adam and Eve are separated from God and they are aware of this break in their sense of oneness. They seek to cover their nakedness. The question becomes, how do they get back into the Garden? To understand this mystery, we must forget all about judging and ethics and forget good and evil as well.

Jesus says, “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” That is the way back into the Garden. You must live on two levels: One, out of the recognition of life as it is without judging it, and the other, by living in terms of the ethical values of one’s culture, or one’s particular personal religion. These are not easy tasks.

I said that God exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden, but actually they exiled themselves. The fear is that of death and the desire is for more of this world:fear and desire are what kept you out of Garden.It is not god who keeps us in exile but ourselves.

This story yields its meaning only to a psychological interpretation. If you explain it as an historical event that occurred at some distant time back there, it seems ridiculous. There was no Garden of Eden as a concrete place. To believe so is to misunderstand and misconstrue the metaphoric language of religion.

You cannot even find a date for the idea of it. In the evolution of the species, did it arise with Homo erectus, when the human brain measured 1,000 cubic centimeters? Or did it come later with Neanderthal man, or just prehistoric with Cro-Magnon? When did this notion come?

This idyllic spot is not an historical fact. The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites man and woman, good and evil-are as holy as that of a god.

Let us look around this Garden now that we stand imaginatively within it.