Consciousness and the Fall

Shadowlands #8

In the Book of Genesis, human existence begins in a garden. There, man walks with God. He is naked, but feels no shame. All is in communion. All is in harmony. All is in balance.

In the middle of the Garden grows the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God forbids man from eating the fruit of this tree, warning him that to do so would kill him. However, a serpent tricks man into eating the fruit by saying, “When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Man gives into this temptation. He eats the fruit and begins to see. First, he sees that he is naked and covers himself up with leaves. Then upon hearing God approach man hides in the bushes. “Who told you that you were naked?” God asks. Realizing he has eaten from the tree, God exiles man from paradise and curses him so that he, his children, and all future generations will aimlessly wander the earth, toil in the dirt, suffer, and die.

This story is usually referred to as the Fall of Man. It is a mythological story, meaning it should not be understood as a retelling of historical events but as a metaphorical interpretation of the origins of humankind. In other words, the Fall of Man is a symbolic commentary on the emergence of consciousness, the impact it had on our species, and how that consciousness resulted in the world we live in now.

And that commentary is counterintuitive. Rather than ascending into paradise and living like gods, the myth tells us that consciousness had the opposite effect: we fell out of paradise into an existential wasteland, beginning a long, painful quest for meaning and a lonely search for home.

But why? Why would becoming more aware, more capable, and more intelligent result in a cataclysm for our species? A disaster? A Fall?

Our ape ancestors lived in a Garden, just like in the Genesis myth. Maybe not a literal paradise—where everything was hyper-pleasurable and all your problems were solved—but a kind of spiritual paradise, where our ancestors were one with the natural world and, more importantly, one with their own nature. They existed in a perpetual harmony with both the external environment around them and the internal one within them.

Put another way: our ape ancestors were living the way they evolved to live, in the world they evolved to live in. All they had to do was follow their basic instincts and their instincts would lead them exactly where they needed to go. There was nothing but the Torch and passing the Torch was simple: band together with your loved ones; seek out lush, beautiful environments; hunt for meat, find water, gather fruit; fall in love, have sex, and produce descendants; raise them up and show them how to live; fade away knowing they’ll carry the fire and keep it burning long after you die.

It should not be controversial that when people live this way, even now, they feel at home. Close to nature, grounded in their bodies, doing things that feel meaningful, surrounded by loved ones of many generations, in service of something transcendent and timeless. This feels good, feels right. No loneliness, no alienation, no nihilism, no depression, no angst. Yeah, you suffer, and shiver, and starve, and die. But you live. You bite into the heroic flesh of existence. You’re thrown into the fires of the real. To live any other way would never even occur to you. That is a spiritual paradise. The Garden of Eden. And it’s how our ape ancestors lived for millions of years.

But all of that changed when our evolutionary trajectory was tempted by a novel, ferocious innovation. Like a serpent whispering in the ear, the Darwinian potential of techne was too sweet to ignore; a fruit so revolutionary, so powerful, it could not be left on the tree. With the ability of techne—the ability to create and therefore manipulate objects—our ape ancestors were able to slice-and-dice reality into pieces, which could then be assorted and repurposed into machines, both psychological (like skills and methods and systems) and material (like tools and structures and cities).

The apes took a bite of that sweet, sweet fruit and awakened. Sure enough, as God had warned, the animal died and the human was born.

With techne, the apes’ psychology began to change much like a human infant’s changes during its first few years of life. Infants are not born conscious. When they come out of the womb they are completely uninhibited, completely at-one with the world, with their surroundings, with their own nature. That’s why they have no reservations about being naked and will poop themselves, publicly, without a second thought. They have no notion that others exist—no notion that anything exists—and therefore no separation between them and other, them and world. There is no Ego furiously chopping reality up into narrative objects and re-assorting them into a story of ‘Me’. There is no future with all of its potentials and worries. There is just pure experience, unconsciously guided by pure instinct. And this is how it was for our pre-conscious ape ancestors in the Garden. No techne. No objects. No-thing-ness.

But as infants grow and their psychology develops, they instinctually begin to objectify the world around them, to differentiate it into pieces: “mama”, “ball”, “doggie”. These are their first objects. This is techne hard at work, slicing-and-dicing so that we may become more capable of manipulating the world, more powerful to influence it, and better at adapting to it.

Objects are the first Fall, our first displacement from our spiritual home in the Garden. And the first Fall is a psychological one, a kind of alienation from oneself.

Because to create an object, we differentiate the world. The phenomenological one-ness with nature becomes two-ness. First, there was the All—pure experience—then we differentiate “mother” from the All, the first object. Perhaps the second object we differentiate is “father”. Then “ball”. Then “doggie”. Objects and language are basically synonymous, so you can essentially observe objectification developing in real-time in infants, signified by the words that begin to emerge from their mouths. New word, new object. This is a differentiation of the world: separating one thing from another, dividing reality up into discrete pieces so those pieces may adaptably be repurposed into tools, systems, and machines. In doing this, we convert the forest into trees—which is useful—but this leads to missing the forest for the trees.

To illustrate, imagine that when you listen to music, rather than simply experiencing the piece on an emotional felt level—dancing around like a crazed animal to the gorgeous vibrations, allowing yourself to ride the emotional and aesthetic rollercoaster—instead you rationalize the music: you take out the tweezers of techne and differentiate every single note, every single instrument, and every single lyric. In other words, you objectify the crap out of it, maybe so you can pedantically explain the significance of these fine details to someone at a party. “See what Chad is doing here is recording a dog barking underwater, and then using the XP20 compressor to time-stretch it, then blend it in with every snare hit. Yeah he basically invented the barkwave genre...”

Maybe you think this will impress people; maybe you pride yourself on your prowess with techne. But instead of letting the power and beauty of the music course through your body as you dance around to the rhythm, you stand there differentiating the song into little pieces. Sure, this might be useful: you can now take apart the music the same way you can take apart a car. You can systematize it, articulate its various components and discuss it with others, or repurpose the pieces into your own composition. That’s all to say: you can use the music for something productive. But in doing so, you’ve cut yourself off from its ancient, unconscious, and embodied beauty. What was once vibrant and full of life is now a box of inanimate things to be used for parts. You have missed the forest for the trees. You have missed the All for the objects; the one-ness for the many-ness.

That’s because the power of objectification does exactly what it sounds like—it turns the world from a living, breathing ocean of meaning into neutral, inanimate objects. Stuff. Things. That is powerful, obviously, because we can use those objects to build machines, develop technology, and engineer ourselves out of the Stone Age into a modern city that is plentiful in food, shelter, and safety. But in the process, we exile ourselves from the beauty and awe of a one-ness with nature—with our own nature. A song becomes a science. A poem becomes a product. And this is the direction things began to move once our ape ancestors became conscious: a cold mechanizing of the world, each other, and ourselves.

As children begin formulating objects, they also begin establishing connections between objects: “mama” has “food”; “ball” is at the “park”; “doggie” can “bark”. As they do this, they ingrain these objectification pathways into their psychology—kind of like ‘muscle memory’ or ‘second nature’—building systems of objects and their associations that eventually no longer require conscious thought, like how you learn to speak English or drive a car without needing to think about what you’re doing. This progresses and complexifies over time and once the nexus of associations between objects has become tight-knit and refined enough, a toddler will begin to grapple with the meta object of ‘Me’.

“I am.” This is the second Fall.

The child becomes self-conscious. They develop an instinct for the gaze of others. “I exist. And others exist too. And they can see me. Do I look stupid?” The child, like Adam, no longer wishes to be naked, to have his bare body exposed and gazed upon, and so he puts on clothing. Previously he pooped himself without a care; now he begins to question his actions. “Maybe I am making a mess. Maybe I am embarrassing myself.” The child becomes inhibited, and now endeavors to regulate himself, to maintain a presentable image, to ensure likability and appropriate behavior.

Animals don’t do this. They just exist. They follow their drives, intertwine themselves with the natural world, and do exactly what their instincts tell them. Animals are naked. Meanwhile, humans fuss about identity and image. They experience social anxiety and constantly inhibit their basic instincts in favor of behaving more ‘appropriately’ or ‘attractively.’ In this sense, they are separating themselves from their own body, their inner-animal, their inner-child. While toddlers joyously run around and scream and play at the park, groups of their parents solemnly sit and chat about meaningless, safe topics, for fear of what might happen were they to say the wrong thing, were they to come off as weird or troubled or weak, were they to deviate in any way from the realm of perceived acceptability.

This can get pretty bad in some cases, where people cut themselves off from their own feelings and desires and needs so aggressively that they develop a large Shadow: a kind of psychological blindspot where someone cannot see a large part of who they are. One’s Shadow can often act as a kind of spiritual dungeon where one locks away all their painful, undesirable, or ‘inappropriate’ feelings, ideas, or memories. Relationships can develop Shadows, with lovers hiding their true selves from each other; communities can develop Shadows with topics that cannot be discussed and feelings that cannot be expressed. It is a uniquely human fracturing of self into disconnected containers.

The formulation of oneself as an object also becomes perverted and inflated manifesting as narcissism, selfishness, or solipsism. “I am” can quickly warp into “I am all there is” or “I am all that matters.” The Torch can fade into obscurity in favor of maximum self-actualization, maximum self-promotion, maximum masturbation. The internet greatly exacerbates this by encouraging the Ego to construct a digital avatar out of its own projection of itself and then fondle that avatar in cyberspace alongside other virtual-reification-of-the-Ego fondlers. That’s essentially what an internet account is: a projection of who your Ego thinks you are, or aspires to be, freed from the shackles of having a body and existing in physical space. That is a uniquely human alienation from one’s body.

The third Fall is time.

Time is an artifact of consciousness. Animals and infants have no concept of time, no notion of yesterday or tomorrow. They do not ruminate on the past, they do not worry about the future. Time means dwelling on that bad experience you had as a child at the expense of being present with your own child. Time means fussing over your retirement plan at the expense of living right now. The capacity for entertaining the past and the future means an alienation from the present, a differentiation away from the one-ness of the Now, an exile from the spiritual paradise of living in the moment which we often try to return to, artificially, through drugs and alcohol and escapism.

With time comes work. Animals do not work. Work is the sacrifice of the present for the future. Once we understand this concept, we start experimenting with innovations in work, innovations in sacrificing the present. “Maybe if I stop having so much fun right now, I can make more money in the future. Maybe if I stop spending time with my less ambitious friends right now, I can become a successful businessman in the future. Maybe if I give up my weekends now, I can out-compete my colleagues and get promoted in the future.” Obviously, work allows you to accomplish some pretty remarkable things, for a monkey, but it also tends to stretch us, wear us down into functional machines at the expense of living souls. People often describe their jobs as ‘soul-crushing’. Animals and infants don’t engage in soul-crushing. We only subject ourselves to it because we know what it can accomplish, because we can simulate a potential future, because we are conscious. We alienate ourselves from being by working; we exile ourselves from the Garden of the Now for the potential treasure that awaits us in the Machine of Tomorrow.

The fourth Fall is ontological paradox: the contradiction between what we evolved to feel or believe and what we inevitably discover through the observations of consciousness.

Techne is the power to map objects onto an undifferentiated unconscious reality, but specifically in service of constructing useful machines—tools, skills, methods, systems. The whole point of techne is to convert the world into something useful, something that can be adapted to whatever we might need, in whatever environment we might find ourselves. It’s what allows humans to find forty different uses for a tree branch and spread to every ecosystem on the planet.

The only way to accomplish this conversion of reality into something usable is to constantly be scanning for useful patterns in the world—namely patterns with the highest predictive power. The more successfully a pattern predicts the future, the more we pursue it, the more real it becomes to us. That is what consciousness is doing, all the time: trying to get more and more in touch with ‘real’ patterns in the world, that will help it build bigger and better machines.

So techne becomes this powerful, new innovation in our evolutionary trajectory. “Oooooweee look how adaptive this is!” says evolution. “We better invest more and more resources into techne!” Brains get bigger. Tool-use gets more advanced. Fire. Language. Torchbearing gets supercharged: better hunting, better gathering, higher reproductive success, growing tribe. “Gimme more consciousness,” says evolution. “MORE!”

But something unexpected happens: these developments start to yield strange and difficult psychological byproducts. As we objectify the world more and more, as we discover more and more ‘real’ patterns, as we stare more deeply into the fabric of reality—differentiating and differentiating—the world paradoxically starts to withdraw from us. Questions begin to emerge about the nature of things, questions we never would have considered as primitive apes. “Why does the sun rise and set? Where does the rain come from? How big is the world and where does it end?” The more we see, the less we feel like we know, the more we have questions, the more the anxiety-inducing unknown appears in everything we look at. Objects become like black holes, dark phenomenological caves receding into the depths of reality. “What am I? What is my purpose? What is the point of it all?” We never wondered what was lurking down in the cave before, because we never knew the cave was there. Now we see it and we wonder: “What the hell is lurking in that darkness? And what does it mean? What might it do to me?”

‘Death’ is such a black hole, a kind of anti-object, meaning: a thing we objectify into our reality but have no idea how to contain within a neat, usable package. A ‘ball’ sitting in front of us is easy to objectify, easy to assert its properties and boundaries and function. Our own inevitable demise is not something whose properties, boundaries, and function are easy to assert. “What happens when I die? Do I cease to exist? Does everything cease to exist? Forever? What does it mean to not exist?”

These questions never arose before apes became conscious. Where they once lived mindlessly, as though all was infinite and endless—as if there were no tomorrow and every day would be like the previous day, again and again forever—now there is contradiction, a paradox: “I feel as though this life shall continue forever, but I see that it won’t. I feel as though the trees have spirits within them, now I see it’s just wood. I feel as though Earth is the center of the universe, now I see we’re just one of many specks in an infinite darkness.” This will continue throughout history. We’re still reeling from it now. This confrontation with the paradox produces anxiety, leaves us feeling confused, sometimes horrified. The more we gaze into the fabric of reality, the more we are confronted with the unknown. The once seemingly immaculate one-ness of existence begins to reveal its stains, cracks, and deformations. The shining light of consciousness paradoxically introduces darkness.

The fifth Fall is evil. With consciousness comes agency, which means the ability to make choices, which means being responsible for one’s actions. In other words, consciousness means the emergence of morality: the capacity for good and evil.

Animals are not capable of evil. When a bear kills another bear, we don’t interpret this as an ‘evil’ act—the animal was simply acting according to its nature. When a human kills a human, it’s murder. But what’s the difference? The difference is that the human is conscious, has agency, and therefore has a choice. He knows what he’s doing. He chose to kill someone—unlike the unconscious bear—and so he has committed an amoral act, an evil act. Consciousness means the potential for good and evil. Animals are capable of neither.

When Adam became conscious, saw he was naked, and put on clothes—he realized that he was vulnerable, unprotected. He understood all the many ways in which he could be hurt, suffer, and die. Because humans realize their own vulnerability, their own mortality, they also realize the vulnerability of others, what will hurt them, what will make them suffer. Sure, animals will eat each other, but there’s nothing like humans’ capacity for brutality, cruelty, and torture. You won’t see animals nail each other to crosses or burn each other alive.

Likewise, though animals can be sneaky and lay traps in their hunt for food, they are not capable of lying, deception, manipulation, or abuse in the way that humans are. And what’s so challenging, so compromising, so corrupting, is how tempting these acts can be for humans, how easily one can get ahead in the world if they’re willing to be amoral. Why labor tirelessly to grow your own food when you can steal from someone else? Why pay someone for their work when you can just enslave them? Why serve a king, when you can murder him and take his place? Consciousness means humans become extremely resourceful and innovative compared to their chimpanzee relatives, but history will show us that they don’t use this ingenuity to erect bastions of love, liberty, and peace. Instead they use it to repeatedly conquer the known world, tyrannize its inhabitants, and commit genocide. Is that an improvement upon living in the bush and eating ants? Hard to say.

The final Fall is environmental: consciousness leads to technological innovation, which leads to reproductive success, competition, arms races, and war, which rapidly change the world into something we never evolved to live in. The experience and surroundings and lifestyle of our ancestors began to feel more and more alien as the centuries progressed. Their basic instincts made less and less sense. They had to stretch themselves further and further to get by in the world.

The Garden was a state of existence that entailed creatively transmuting a natural wilderness into a habitable order, in tight-knit kin groups, in service of the Torch. That’s what we were born to do, what all of our drives are calibrated to, what all of our instincts are pointing to. When we’re in this context, we feel spiritually at-home. That was the prehistoric world of the Pleistocene. With techne came technology; with technology came tools, weapons, dwellings, villages; with these technological advancements came increased survival, increased reproductive success, more children living longer and producing more children; with increased reproductive success came higher populations, more crowding, less land to go around, less resources; with more crowding and less resources came competition within tribes and between tribes; and with competition came war and conquest, on scales we were never mentally or spiritually prepared for.

Humans are not built for high levels of crowding. Dunbar’s number is low, about 150 people, showing that our minds are designed to only sustain the amount of relationships that might have existed in a prehistoric tribal setting. Throw us into an environment with thousands of people around us and it cannot be stable, safe, or cohesive—operating in a positive-sum manner towards shared goals—without laws or rules being enforced through threat of punishment. That means that when things got crowded as a result of higher reproductive success due to the innovations of consciousness, our instincts stopped being a good guide on how to behave. High population density was an alien context to us, a kind of exile from the spiritual paradise of small kin-groups, where the only people in our life were our family and closest friends, the people we knew and loved and trusted.

Humans are not built for war. Men are certainly built for violence and conflict, but only on a small scale. The kind of all-out tribal warfare and, later, conquest, genocide, and slavery that gripped the world are not a state of existence that humans evolved to understand or process. Two men fighting over a woman, or two tribes skirmishing over a contested watering hole, at least make intuitive sense to us—we know what to do and how to interpret these situations; we can feel the proper instincts arise in us to either mediate the conflict, cheer on our team, or get out of the way. But full-scale, all-out war makes no sense to the tribal mind; it does not compute; and it is certainly not a lifestyle that any of us would willingly choose.

But this is what started to crop up around early humans in the aftermath of consciousness: novel, emergent patterns of competition and warfare of a scale that became terrifying, nightmarish, and beyond comprehension. We were exiled out of a coherent, relatively peaceful way of life into an ugly, brutal landscape of zero-sum hostility, despair, and displacement. And throughout history, even now, it has never stopped.

It can be hard to get an outside perspective on how utterly alien our lifestyles have become to the natural drives and feelings and interpretations that accompany us out of the womb. We are looking for an epic wilderness but instead find gray walls and asphalt. We are looking for the ever-present tribe of fifty but instead find two adults and one sibling if we’re lucky. We are looking to tame a wild landscape through the creative exploration of nature, deeply in tune with our bodies and souls, but are instead shoved behind a desk in a dark room and forced to memorize symbols on a page.

The moment we are born, we are lost, we are fallen. We have been exiled to some strange alien existence that makes no sense to any of our natural drives, desires, or needs. The Ego adjusts its narrative in order to get by, but our bodies are souls are like, “Where the fuck am I?”

All of this is to say:

The moment we became conscious, we entered a fallen world, and we have been living in it for millennia. The moment Adam became conscious he was exiled from paradise. His sudden and dramatic increase in awareness, adaptability, and intelligence did not result in him ascending to the heavens and becoming a god, but the opposite: he fell and fell and fell. He chopped a living, breathing reality into neutral inanimate objects, abandoning his one-ness with nature for power and productivity. He began to tell himself stories about who he was and what he should become and banished his blissful and innocent inner animal into the dungeons of his psyche. He began to sacrifice the current moment for the glittering promises of the future thereby inventing work. He discovered his own mortality, and killed the gods, and dispelled the spirit. He discovered lying, and manipulation, and torture and became tempted by grand ideas of power. He invented weapons and conquered tribes and built empires and burnt down the world and then rebuilt it again and again until nothing of the Garden remained. None of us have ever been to the Garden, but our flesh remembers. And it forever yearns to return to a place it will never see again.

Consciousness exiled us into the Shadowlands. It de-homed us, displaced us. And it’s still doing it, still chopping up the world, reassembling it into more and more complex, more productive, more powerful machines. Yes, most of us are safe, well-fed, and have access to the miracles of modern medicine, but we are wounded, and starving, and diseased in other ways. This is the story of humans. The crisis of consciousness. The trauma of technology.

A flaming sword now guards the entrance of the Garden. Even if we found our way back, we could not re-enter. We are conscious. The genie is out of the bottle. There is no unbuilding the machines we’ve built; no unknowing what we know; no disentangling the wires we’ve snaked into every corner of the globe. We are exiled. Forever condemned to search for a new home somewhere out there, east of Eden.