Tree of Knowledge, Tree of Life: Robert Moore

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The work of the International School of Spiritual Psychology is rooted in the teachings of the Danish Spiritual Healer Bob Moore. Here, we extract parts of the book Conversations with Bob Moore, to share his insights on the difference between natural and artificial duality, which is at the core of Nondual Therapy, Spiritual healing, and Spiritual Psychology.


Is this what the Bible is trying to show us with the story about the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge? 

Robert Moore


I THINK THERE are many things in the Bible which we can learn from, if we are prepared to look at them openly. Taking this symbolism with the Garden of Eden, we have two trees in the Garden of Eden: We have the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. It was the Tree of Knowledge that God said man should not touch*, and probably the reason was that he had no means of dealing with the knowledge he would get. And what happened? As soon as they ate of the apple, they went to find clothes for themselves, because they were naked. So obviously knowledge has got something to do with fear. I think this symbolism is saying to us that knowledge, which we are obtaining in a physical sense, is taking us in directions which we are not really able to deal with. And I think, this is becoming more and more apparent today. We always have this thing about knowledge, that if one person gets more knowledge than another person, it is producing fear, it is producing jealousy, it is producing something. Many people have taken knowledge as the ultimate, and in doing so we have a situation like the two firms in competition. It will always create competition. So until knowledge is not the ultimate goal, leaving space for life, and with life I include feelings, depth of awareness, I really cannot see that we are making progress.

But isn’t it interesting that the Bible talks not only about the Tree of Knowledge as such, it talks about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Is that perhaps what our life here on earth is about: to understand about good and evil? 


THESE ARE YOUR ideas. All I know is, that when knowledge in the physical meaning of the word is taken as the ultimate, it brings us into classifying, classifying between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’,  ‘good’ and ‘bad’. So through knowledge, we are classifying continuously, and we are so stuck with that. It is what I am trying to explain in courses with the symbol of the triangle: we are stuck at the bottom line of the triangle, where we look in one direction, calling this one good, and we look in the other, calling that one bad. Thus we are not reaching the neutral position at the upper point of the triangle, from which we do not look at things as good or bad, but we look at them as relative to growth.

But let us come back to the symbolism of the Garden of Eden and look at the two people who were there, a male and a female. What they represent within the symbolism we can only conjecture about, because we do not know. They may be two people being in a completely different dimension, within a completely other type of polarity. And, if I am looking at this symbolism in my way, the serpent may represent emotions. How emotions ever came to penetrate this other dimension I do not know, but maybe it says: In everything you have the parallel structure, and it can get out of control. But the subtlety of this symbolism is that God said that they should not touch the tree. Of course if you say to someone: You cannot do this! – He will immediately start looking at why he cannot do it, and he will start thinking about doing it. So we have subtleties in this whole symbolism which are worthwhile looking at, and where we should consider what we are talking about related to the earth, and what has been brought into being as related to mankind. Whatever the serpent may represent we have its interference, which was the inducement to go against God. The serpent was saying: You can have as much knowledge as God, if you just eat that apple. This in my opinion is what we can observe with many people today. Many scientists seem to believe that if they can invent this or understand that, then they have all the knowledge which is needed. And this is wrong, I think. The creation of life, which is being attempted by scientists nowadays, is taking things out of the natural polarity rhythm in which they belong, and this is producing another, a man-made manipulative polarity, which is reinforcing the already existing imbalance. So here again we have knowledge being used in a way which is not allowing man to appreciate what life is about, where people are rather putting their energy into the polarity structure in a way that is defeating the means to appreciate feeling and depth of awareness.


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