Journey of Becoming – Exploring the Garden of Eden – Part 2 of 3

About the podcast:These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press.About this episode:This is Part 2 of a series of dialogues on the Garden of Eden. If you still haven’t listened to Part 1, we recommend you listen to it first by clicking here.In this second dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein deepen their exploration of the Garden of Eden, engaging with its complexities as a profound narrative about the evolution of desire, loneliness, and the process of becoming human. They examine the transition from the innocent unity of Adam and Eve to the birth of human complexity marked by desire, disobedience, and existential tension.If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference:Temple, David J.,Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, March 2026, Episode: “Journey of Becoming – Exploring the Garden of Eden – Part 2 of 3”Get the book:First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple:David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence.Chapters:0:00 — Introduction0:31 — Context Setting1:09 — Recapitulation: Garden of Eden, Chapter 22:31 — A Parenthesis on Genesis 2:24 - Leaving Father and Mother: The Condition of Desire5:39 — The Garden of Eden, Chapter 316:42 — About First Principles and First Values17:29 — The Garden of Eden Is a Text About Becoming Human26:05 — Invitation to The CrossingEnd — Mentioned SourcesEnd — Mentioned PeopleThe Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month.Episode Transcript:Context SettingZak: So again, David, he’s not here. But he asked us to record, continue speaking about the Garden. We were just getting into it.You might want to recapitulate maybe a little bit where we were.Marc: Yeah. On this one, if anyone is joining us for now, just listen to the immediate previous one, which is about 25 minutes on the Garden, where we opened up the Garden of Eden in Chapter 2 of Genesis. We’re going to go directly into Chapter 3.And what we decided to do is before we talk about the Garden in a meta frame, we’re just going to do this practice of actually just reading the text and raising issues as we raise it.Recapitulation: Garden of Eden, Chapter 2Marc: So we saw in Chapter 2 that they’re in the Garden, they’re naked, there’s no shame. That’s how we ended. That’s where we ended.So there is sexuality. There’s this loneliness. The three steps are:1) There’s the Garden.2) Then apropos of nothing, we go to this lonely being.In response to loneliness, there’s the bringing to the human being of all of the beasts of the field.The lineage reads that as sexual relations with all the beasts, but not in a bestiality sense, sorry to disappoint everyone, but just in an archetypal sense.It doesn’t work.That’s after the two verses of calling names, meaning, dominating, controlling. He doesn’t find a helpmate against him that liberates him from loneliness.3) And then there’s the sacrificial act.He falls asleep as it were. He’s split asunder.The woman emerges. And they’re then brought together.And when they’re brought together, there’s this great declaration, “The flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone. Therefore, he shall leave his father and mother. He shall cleave sexually, erotic union. They shall cleave together and they shall be one flesh. They’re naked and there’s no shame.”That’s the text.A Parenthesis on Genesis 2:24 - Leaving Father and Mother: The Condition of DesireMarc: And by the way, just a little parentheses, before David asked us to talk about the Garden, we were talking a little bit just in Zak and Marc’s space about that book that you referred me to, Sadly, Porn, by Edward Teach.He has this analysis that we were talking about briefly of the Fifty Shades of Grey story where he basically says, they’re exporting their desire to contract.They’re both controlled by contract, which he calls parental authority. So that’s parental authority. And of course, his point is that if they’re both brother and sister under parents, it’s actually not romance, it’s incest.That’s his dramatic point.But his point actually is this text in Genesis that we just finished reading, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife,” that is to say, step out of parental authority.* You have to each leave your parents.* You have to each not be under parental authority.* You have to actually have thrown mommy and daddy out of bed.You have to actually have a dimension of your own autonomy and your own script of desire in order to come together not as children of the great parent, but as autonomous free beings in which you can, with your own script of desire, create a new script of desire.What he’s describing is this kind of sexuality that takes place under the guise of parental authority.And the parental authority is not the inherent value structures of Cosmos, it’s the social construction of socially sanctioned visions of desire.He got a deep intuitive sense there of how sexing happens when you’re under parental authority.The penultimate text for that is Genesis 2:24, which is the text that we read last time, right before we’re about to start now, which is, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother.” And then w’davaq b’ish’to, “create erotic union with his partner, and they shall become one flesh.”It’s an incredible verse. You actually can’t create a Field of Desire without first leaving your father and mother.It’s a very tight structure verse, which is making a big demand. So that’s just a general thought. Before we go on, any thoughts on that one?Zak: It struck me as we read it last time, that particular bit, because of course Adam didn’t have a father and mother. So it’s just interesting.Like at that point, they’re like, “Leave your father and mother,” when in fact, “Who were those two?” Because right now we have one creator.And then of course there’s that sense of the giving away at the wedding. The kind of gestures of maturity that are thresholds, like leaving a Garden, like actually exiting. Leaving the nest.That stuff emerged. But the first thing was just that, “Well, I didn’t have a father and mother since...”Marc: Right. These texts, the silliness of superficial scholarship is to of course read them superficially. They’re not historical texts.They’re intentionally mythical archetypal texts, which are telling a story. And then the narrator says, and it’s like that.Zak: Yeah.The Garden of Eden, Chapter 3Marc: All right, Garden of Eden. 3.1.Let’s see if we can at least read through this chapter today. If we can get through the text today, then in part three, we’ll raise the issues, then we can really look at the Garden. Or maybe we’ll be able to do it as we read.So the snake.This is actually where the phrase comes from in the West, but there was a snake in the Garden.This is the snake in the Garden. They’re in the Garden. There’s a snake.The snake is in the Garden and the snake was more arum. The word arum means naked and wise, in Hebrew, both words. So it’s both meanings, arum.So the snake was more wise, or more cunning or more naked. Arum literally means naked. The snake was more naked than all the beasts of the field.And the snake says to the woman, lo tokh’lu mikol etz hagan, “God told you not to eat from any of the trees of the field.”And the woman says, Verse 2, “No, no, no, God didn’t say that.” That’s what the snake does. “And God said, no, eat from all the trees. Just from one tree, don’t eat. From the tree which is in the center of the Garden, don’t eat. And don’t touch it, lest you may die.”Of course, the good reader of the text notices that God didn’t say don’t touch it.So you just notice how people play just in terms of dialogue, the dialogue here in these first three verses.What both of them are doing is recalling a conversation and distorting the text intentionally in order to actually evoke a result.The snake says, “And God said don’t eat from any of the trees in the Garden, but of course God didn’t say that.” So he’s distorting the text.Then she goes, “No, no, no, no, no, God didn’t say that. God said he ate everything.” But then she goes on and then she misquotes.They’re both misquoting God.The misquoting of God is this process in the Garden of Eden. This is very structurally in the text.It’s the ambiguation of the God voice, the intentional misquoting, this early taking of God’s name in vain.And so she says, “And God told us don’t eat from those trees in the middle,” which God did say, but then she says, “And don’t touch them lest you die.”And the snake says, in the lineage supplementary text, the Midrash text, they say that the snake then pushes the woman into the tree, “And look, you didn’t die.”Because she’s overextended, she’s overreached.It’s the overreach of the misquote, which in terms of communication, we could go far on this, we won’t, but just to be aware as we’re reading it.So the snake says, “No, you won’t die,” Verse 4.And the snake goes on, Verse 5, “Because God knows that on the day that you eat from the tree, your eyes will be open and you will be like God having direct gnosis of good and evil.”So again, strange.So God doesn’t want you to have eternity. God wants you to die. Why would that be the case?And then God wants to keep your eyes closed? Meaning, if you would eat from the tree, your eyes would open. But isn’t that good?And indeed, the entire point of the Book of Genesis is who opens their eyes and who doesn’t, and the good people open their eyes and the bad people don’t.So clearly, this text is playing with you. It’s saying, “Okay, God doesn’t want you from the tree because your eyes will open.”Why?So then the woman sees, watere, the same word, she sees, meaning her eyes are open. She sees that the tree is good to eat, taawah-hu laeynayim, “But it’s a desire to the eyes.” W’nech’mad, is now added. In the earlier description, this didn’t exist.Now we’re in the Field of Desire. It’s a desire. The word taawah means lust. It’s a lust to the eyes. That’s a direct word, three letter root. W’nech’mad, nechmad is that same word we saw before, thou shalt not covet. So again, it’s a desire to contemplate the tree.And she takes from the tree, she eats and she gives also to her husband to eat.Now you notice that the snake is not the one… everyone thinks the snake takes from the tree and gives to the woman. This is not what happens. The snake plays with her mind.He just says, “No, you won’t die.” That’s it. So he gives his little talk and then she acts autonomously.And then watipaqach’nah eyney sh’neyhem, “Their eyes are opened, they know that they’re naked. They make clothes.”Then they hear God’s voice in the Garden, moving in the Garden.In other words, in this moment of vulnerability, of this violation in some way of the divine will, which we’re not sure why, how, this other strange thing happens, they hear God talking.It’s a revelation. Instead of God disappearing…God usually disappears.There’s a direct correlation throughout the canon between violation and I will surely hide my face. Deuteronomy, for example. Here’s the opposite.So you just get this text is f*****g with you intentionally. That’s very clear in the text.All of a sudden, God appears. They now hear God talking for the first time. And then they hide.They’re overwhelmed by the voice, they hide, mip’ney Adonai Elohim, from the face of God in the Garden. And then wayiq’ra Adonai Elohim, this is the first time that God calls to them.There’s no prior verse of God calling to them. Now God is calling to them.Now there’s an I-Thou. Now there’s a relationship. Something is happening.And God says, “Ayekah?” “Where are you?” “Where are you?” “Ayekah?” “Where are you?”And then Adam says, “I heard your voice in the Garden.” Et-qol’kha shama’tiy bagan. “I heard your voice,” waiyra, “and I was afraid, but also I was aware.” The word awareness and fear are the same word, in the same sense that your hair stands on its end when you’re afraid.There’s this direct continuum between, like, you go to a horror movie because you’re in fear, but it means you’re fully awake and aware. There’s this full continuum between fear and consciousness.So he says, “I heard your voice,” waiyra, “I was afraid, but I was also aware,” kiy-eyrom anokhiy, “that I am naked,” waechave, “and I hid.”So it’s this very human exchange between them.Wayomer, and then the Divine voice says, miy higiyd l’kha kiy eyrom atah, “Who told you, you were naked?” Hamin-haetz asher tziuiytiykha l’vil’tiy akhal-mimenu akhal’ta, “Did you eat from that tree?”So again, clearly an omniscient God should have this figured out in the biblical text.So there’s this wonderful exchange. In other words…There’s this dialogue.There’s this pedagogy…There’s this coming into consciousness…There’s this beauty of hiding…There’s this hearing of a voice that I wasn’t aware was there…There’s an awareness of self that wasn’t…This is all implicit in the text that all commentary kind of misses.So then what happens?Then it goes a little bad, Verse 12.Adam says, “Well, the woman that you gave me, she gave it to me and I ate.”And by the way, in the Hasidic tradition, they say that this was the sin. That he didn’t cover for her.There’s a major Hasidic tradition, which is, he didn’t cover for his wife. That’s the sin…The sin was this moment. This, he didn’t cover for her.It’s very beautiful.This notion, like, you cover for her. You cover for your woman. Your woman covers for you. That was the disharmony between them, that this is the actual sin in the Garden.Wayomer Adonai Elohim, “So God says”, “Ah, it was the woman.” [laughs]So, Mah-zot? “What is this?” “What have you done?”And the woman says, “Ah, the snake did it.”But the woman’s text is interesting.Hanachash hishiyaniy waokhel, so, hishiyaniy, if you read the English, “The serpent beguiled me.” But the word hishiyaniy also is the same word for married me. Nissu’in is to be married or hishiyaniy, raised me up. God is ram v’nisah, God is exalted.In other words, the English goes, “He beguiled me.” But actually, there’s this erotic moment between them, there’s this kind of coming to this Field of Desire, there’s also that, he raised me up. He made me insightful. He gifted me with something. He exalted me.So again, there’s this play. There’s not like, “What’s the violation? What’s happening here?”Then God turns to the snake. And God says to the snake, “Because you’ve done this, you shall be cursed from all of the beasts of the field and you shall go,” al-g’chon’kha telekh, “You shall go in your belly.” W’afar tokhal kal-y’mey chayeykha, “You shall eat from the dust all the days of your earth.”W’eyvah ashiyt beyn’kha uveyn haishah uveyn, “create tension between you and the woman and between your descendants.”And then God turns to the woman. He says, “You shall experience the pain of childbirth. With tension, you shall raise children. Your desire shall be to your man and he will be the one who speaks. He will be the one who will dominate.”And then to Adam he says, “Because you listened to your wife, in other words, you abandoned your own autonomy and you ate from the tree, which I told you not to, so then the land is cursed.”B’itzavon tokhalenah, “And with tension, angst, you shall eat bread.” “And thorn and thistle will emerge from the ground and you’ll eat the grass of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat bread until you return to the earth, because you’ve been taken from the earth for you are dust and to dust you will return.”And then wayiq’ra haadam shem ish’to chauah, And Adam calls his wife Chauah, because she is em kal-chay, the mother of all of existence.And then God makes them clothes, and clothes them. It’s a very, very strange text.And then they’re exiled from Eden. God says, Wayomer Adonai Elohim, “and God said,” hen haadam hayah k’achad mimenu, “Man has become one with us. Man has become one with us, to know good and evil.” So perhaps he will eat from the tree of life and live forever. Therefore, I’m going to exile him from the Garden. He’s exiled from the Garden, and he dwells East of Eden, and there is a flaming sword that revolves to not allow for entry to the Garden.And then finally, “and Adam knew his wife.”They’re actually intimate for the first time. And they birthed the first children.What a text.Zak: It’s very crazy.Marc: I mean, what a text.Zak: So complex.Get the book:First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination.The Garden of Eden Is a Text About Becoming HumanMarc: So maybe what we can do is, we can at least, let’s notice a couple things.The text begins with the naked man and woman in the Garden who are one flesh.There’s no sense of shame. V’lo yitbosh, there’s no shame.By the end of the Garden, clearly there’s a sense of shame. They hide.They hear the Divine voice. They’re exiled from the Garden.And there’s an entire series of punishments, which is the snake walks on the ground, eats dust.The woman has the pain of childbirth and the pain of raising children and all of the sexual tension with her husband.The man has, by the sweat of your brow, you’ll eat bread and the entire tension of subsisting, existing, surviving, making a living.And yet at the same time, there’s this emergence.So in a word, I think we can say a couple things about this text. We could spend many, many weeks and months in the text, but let’s just look at a couple of things.So from one very close reading of the text, you could actually read the text, I think, correctly, as a text about becoming human.Zak: Yep.Marc: Actually, all of these punishments…Zak: That’s what I was going to say. They’re the things we take for granted.Marc: Right.Zak: They’re the things that we take for granted about being human.Marc: Right.All of these punishments are actually those things that demarcate our humanity.Sexual tension.Would we want to go back to an era before there was sexual tension?In other words, that description of the idyllic Garden of Eden is almost this kind of primal, proto-human being who is kind of in the savannah. Maybe it has become Homo erectus, it’s kind of standing erect in this unconfronted bliss.It’s an unconfronted man and woman. Man and woman have been split. They’ve been brought to each other. There’s no existential tension.Zak: Yeah. There’s no plot. If they stayed in the Garden, there’d be no plot.Marc: There’s no journey.Zak: There’s no journey.And it seems like God wasn’t interested in that.And the idea that he comes down and is like, “Where are you? Did you eat that?” It seems like he would have to know, in which case he’s teaching them.Marc: That’s right.Zak: Like, he’s trying to find a way to communicate with them.He’s basically saying, “I know you ate it, but tell me, kid.”Marc: So this entire process is actually, in some sense, the birthing of humanity. This is the birthing of humanity.So the second thing we can say is that we’re birthed in the fall. And we’ll talk about that next time. We’ll talk about sin, originals…But the fall is not the sense of, oh, you’re damned or you’re impure or you’re not redeemable. It’s actually quite the opposite.It’s actually, we become human in the crisis.In other words, our crisis is a birth. Literally. That is the story of the Garden of Eden.The Garden of Eden is a crisis. It’s a shattering of vessels in the Lurianic understanding.And that shattering of vessels births this new possibility of going up from Eden, of actually emerging, of being born.And how am I born?Well, sexual tension. The tension of childbirth. The tension of raising children, this uniquely human process in which the calf doesn’t get up and walk 15 minutes later.So there’s this tension of childbirth. There’s this tension of child raising. There’s this tension of making a living.But it’s all of the things that demarcate the human journey, so the journey always begins with a fall.It’s not an event. It’s a journey, which is very beautiful.Zak: It is. I mean, one thing here that’s implicit would be that it’s a feature, not a bug.Marc: It’s a feature, not a bug.Zak: It’s a feature, not a bug that we leave the Garden.And this is some misunderstanding about even human development, if you will. Kind of tip the hat to Ken, who’s David’s good friend. David was very inspired by Up From Eden, which is a phrase you mentioned.This notion, in childhood, if you are lucky, very privileged, that doesn’t always mean a lot of money, it’s like the right niche, you’ll have a pretty sweet deal. It’ll feel a lot like the Garden, there won’t be any of those types of tensions.You don’t have to worry about getting food for yourself. You don’t have to worry about sexuality. You’re a kid. And all of these things. But of course, you have to leave that.If you don’t leave that, you don’t become a human. There’s no plot to your life. There’s no tension that’s driving you.There’s this misunderstanding in psychoanalytical, but also in a whole bunch of areas that, oh, childhood innocence should be returned to or somehow be preserved, or that children shouldn’t grow up, which is a lot of what you find in some of the more progressive educational niches.But in fact, this reading here is that, no, God laid this out in such a way that it would be threshold event, that it would be crisis emergent, and throw a story out in front of it, as what happens often when you leave the nest as a person, as a young person.There’s a story or an adventure, but there’s usually some event, some sense of what’s happening and also a sense that you can’t go back, which is very interesting, like the flaming sword.Marc: Right. And there’s a temptation to go back.Zak: Of course.Marc: I want to regress. I want to go back.And Kurt Vonnegut’s son, Mark Vonnegut, calls his memoir about his intense addiction, he calls it The Eden Express where he’s kind of understanding that when you try and go back to Eden—an addiction is a form of trying to go back to Eden—you actually get flamed by this sword that’s turning around and around and guarding the entrance to the Garden.So there’s a very, very strong allurement for the regressive developmental move. And you find it later on in the Exodus text when the slaves say, Erich Fromm’s beautiful phrase from the Frankfurt School, who leaves Germany at the end of the ’30s, “We want to escape from freedom.”There’s great desire to go back to the Garden.And the slaves say, “F**k this Exodus thing. Let’s go back to Egypt. We’re actually in an environment that…” Right?Zak: Yeah, totally.I would say that there’s something like, “Can I go back to the Garden?”But you have to go forward into that orchard of holy apples. Right?There’s some other place that’s like a garden, which is not that Garden, but the world to come.A holy place.Marc: No, beautiful. Let’s take two minutes and we’ll wrap, but we at least got it started.We’ll look at it more carefully next time. Next time will be our penultimate.We’ve gotten the text out. And I think David was right.He said to us, “Don’t just talk about this,” he said, “Force people to actually read the text with you.”Like, “Let’s read the text. It’s worth reading the text. And whoever’s listening, read the text, chapter two and three.”What we’ll do next time is, in a more formal way, we’ll list the 10 problems with the text, even more formally. And then we’ll offer resolutions.But just for now, as we close, I think what you said is exactly right.In other words, what the lineage calls chakal tapuchin kadishin, in this field of holy apples, which is the Field of Eros, which is the Field of ErosValue, which is the Field of Desire, is actually the Garden.Zak: Yeah.Marc: So in other words, on the one hand, you’re in the Garden.You leave the Garden and then you return to the Garden, but you don’t return to the Garden in a restorative way. It’s not a restorative redemption. It’s a utopian redemption.In other words, when I come back to the Garden, I’m more than I was when I was there originally. I come back and I’ve actually become a human being.In other words, everything is changed in some very dramatic and beautiful way.So that journey is the journey of—we want to return to Eden. We feel exiled from Eden, but we can’t go back. We actually have to go on this human developmental journey.That’s the beginning.Okay.Zak: Beautiful.Marc: All right. Love.Zak: Love.Mentioned Sources:* Teach, Edward, Sadly, Porn, Edward Teach, 2021* James, E.L., Fifty Shades of Grey, The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2011* Wilber, Ken, Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981* Vonnegut, Mark, The Eden Express, Praeger Publishers, 1975Mentioned People:* Ken Wilber (1949–)* Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007)* Mark Vonnegut (1947–)* Erich Fromm (1900–1980)Join Us In-Person or Online:This April 20–24, a small group of visionary humans willing to believe that their individual actions matter, are gathering at a castle in Holland, allowing their hearts to be ripped wide open and together, they’ll be co-authoring a new story of value for humanity.If you’ve been following the teachings, feeling the pulsating truth of CosmoErotic Humanism in your body and wondering what it would mean to fully step in...Then this is your invitation to The Crossing.If you’re feeling the pull to help humanity at a time where it most certainly needs YOU, then click the button below or send us an email to [email protected] us at The Crossing 2026, a five-day portal into the New Story of Eros, Power, Purpose and sexuality. 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