For Westerners, the biblical account of the Garden of Eden poses the problem of exile from the Kingdom of God. It is partly about sin, but it's mostly about death, which appears to be a permenent exile for the individual.
Comes now, the Saviour, a Christ who was the resurrected sun god who, through his leaving, plunges us into the darkness of death, and then, miraculously, by entering the underworld and emerging once again at dawn, comes back to life again and sheds the rays of mercy and goodness over those who follow Him and believe in His power to bring the light of our lives back for good.
Lo and behold, however, there is another garden. In Israel, in addition to the biblical garden, one can find a mountain known in Hebrew as the Garden of God, or Mount Carmel. It is not in Eden and it is not all lush and bountiful. It's in a desolate desert region, where the servants of God all make exclusive claims to the same sacred turf.
If the Garden of God had remained simply a mountain, it would not have given rise to yet another myth about the garden. Instead, through the tale of a lost daughter of Adam and Eve, the plot thickens.
It seems that a girlie girl was born into the world. Her genetic ancestors included folks who claimed to be offspring of the founder of the original nation of Israel, publishers and promoters of the Garden of Eden story. By the time g-g was born, through a number of historical twists and turns, her Jewish ancestors had long before been transformed into Christians who followed the Pope in Rome and called themselves Catholics (or Universals). The female child had Catholic parents who gave her two names at birth and let her grandmother give her a third name at baptism, which is a sacramental ritual regarded by believers as a sacred birth.
One of g-g's birth names was the one given to the mother of the famous and mythical Christ, a Spanish version of the Hebrew word for a dawn star, "Maria". The other birth name was for a saint portrayed with reverence in a smash Hollywood motion picture, the "Song of Bernadette", a chick flick about a French g-g who saw a vision of the ghost of Mary in a grotto near her peasant village.
So, her birth names were Maria Bernadette. The third given name was the baptismal one, and, surprise-surpirse, it was one of the many titles for the mother of the Christ, one that came from a dream related by a Saint Simon Stock of merry old England. He had a dream of Mary atop Mount Carmel in Israel, and the lady he saw in his dream was named by the Universals, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The Spanish version of this name is "Carmela", and no one in the baptized g-g's family was aware of the etymology of the root word of that name. Unwittingly, the Universals who name their babies after Our Lady of Mount Carmel are naming them "Garden of God".
Oopsie!.....
It follows that when the girlie girl was in her mid-twenties and a student at a national school of American law, (geographically represented by a quota of students from all across the land of the United States), she embarked upon an earnest quest for the etymology of her baptismal name, and discovered it's Hebrew roots.
She thought, "Wait a minute. Whether my religious predecessors were bumped from the Garden of Eden or not, I'm not in exile from any old sacred garden, because my sacred name is Garden of God. As an American citizen, I believe I am equal to all the other citizens of America, and as a baptized Universal, I believe I am equal to all the other Universals, universally. If I'm the Garden, then everyone is the Garden. If we ARE the frikken Garden, then we don't have to be concerned with being in or out of it."
We're IT, and it seemed to the g-g that this was probably a general principle based not on membership in a nation-state or a religious organization, but on the nature of being.
She felt deeply certain of her life and death intuitions, but she thought a more rational approach made these intuitions seem a bit balmy.
By and by, the girlie girl eventually came upon the writings of Joseph Campbell, where she recognized these ideas and realized that for people of the Orient, folks had figured this out a long time ago without baptisms or Bible stories. As time's winged chariot drew closer to the g-g and kinda pulled alongside of her, she would learn that through her mother's genes, she is a descendant of Asians who knew of the mystery of how we are all transcendent of ourselves.
She thought, "OMG!" ....
She also thought, "The Self is a bit of a problem, because it appears to be permanently trapped in a time and space of only three dimensions, but Transcendence is not much more clear for being infinite and without a frame of reference from which my feeble mind can begin anything vaguely resembling comprehension."
So, the story of the g-g is how one Westerner discovered the Garden Within, and how she concluded that it is only the beginning,
....and she lived happily ever after.....
~
Once in a while a door opens, and let's in the future. --- Graham Greene