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God did not Cast Us from Eden
We Humans Shamed Ourselves Out
Chet Shupe
How Our Rational Minds Shamed Our Emotional Minds
into Submission Once Humans Acquired the Spoken Word
What, specifically, threatens to bring down the spaceship, Planet Earth? Mankind made a mistake. Like all mistakes, it was innocent. It was also an easy one to make—so easy, in fact, that it could be argued evolution made it, not us. But whoever made it, the chaos and suffering it unleashed have been immense.
The stage was set around two hundred thousand years ago, when evolution gifted humans with the spoken word. At first, language served us well. It extended body language, helped us share feelings, locate food and water, and make short-term plans—who would prepare breakfast in the morning, who would join the hunt in the afternoon.
Had evolution been watching, it might have congratulated itself on a job well done. After two hundred thousand years, nothing bad had happened. The spoken word had proved itself fail-safe. I, too, would offer my congratulations. But I’d add: “Don’t rest too easily, Mr. Evolution. Not yet.” Because after two hundred thousand years of unqualified success, your experiment took a wrong turn.
It happened only a few thousand years ago, when humans began wanting short-term arrangements to become long-term guarantees. It was no longer enough to know who would fix breakfast tomorrow. People wanted assurances—of shelter, of lifelong relationships, of lasting security.
They didn’t know that their desire to control the distant future was impossible. Nature’s laws render the future unknowable—and therefore uncontrollable. Emotional intelligence understands this. It governs our species by inspiring each individual to attend to real and present concerns—not imagined future ones. But our intellectual intelligence—the adaptive part of the brain, shaped by personal experience—had no such restraint. It took on the task of controlling the future with enthusiasm.
Having never tried it before, the rational mind didn’t realize that eliminating future uncertainty goes against the laws of Nature. Misinformed about what is and isn’t possible, it mistook the impossible for a challenge. And so, the fall began—not with malice, but with misplaced confidence.
Intellectual intelligence was eager to begin its grand project. It believed the answer was simple: To ensure lifetime access to essentials, all you need is a piece of paper specifying the agreement, a pen to sign it, and a safe to store the signed documents. But soon, it realized that granting ownership rights requires far more than it had anticipated.
First, you need a system of laws—like the Ten Commandments or the U.S. Constitution—to decide who is good and who is evil. In other words, who has infringed on someone else’s property, and who hasn’t. Then you need police to enforce the laws, judges to interpret them, lawmakers to revise them, prisons to punish the guilty, welfare systems to support the elderly and the poor, ivory towers to house administrators, and military machines to defend the flag that symbolizes the institutions it represents.
One might think that would be enough. But then, intellectual intelligence realized it also needed to sanctify this entire, artificially constructed scheme with a sense of moral strength. After all, granting the right to own things is no small matter. It elevates individuals to a God-like status over what Nature has created—whether it be a woman, a plot of land, an animal, or a slave.
In essence, by granting it, you are presuming to be a servant of God. But the question remains: Who gave you—or anyone else, or anything—King, God, dictator, government, legal system—the authority to bestow a God-like status over anything born of Nature?
The answer is: no one. That authority—to elevate humans to God-like status over Nature—can be granted only by one thing: a universally held belief system, religious or ideological. So, if you wish to play God’s right-hand man, you’d do well to build some temples or cathedrals in honor of the belief system that sanctifies your claim.
But when the wisdom of our souls must bow to a belief system just to secure material survival, we instinctively feel unmoored from life. As a consequence, we cling to magnificent, substantial-seeming things—as if our lives depend on them. And in our current state of spiritual distrust, they truly do. This is how temples solidify our faiths—and, consequently, our fates.
Across the world, people worship, trust, subjugate, and dedicate their lives to artificial systems of accountability—religious or secular beliefs that imbue these systems with moral virtue. We have no other choice.
As subjects of legal obligation, modern humans lack access to the wisdom of human nature—the wisdom that once moved us to care for one another through spiritual duty. That wisdom has been so thoroughly suppressed by sovereign law that we no longer realize we have spiritual obligations at all. How can anyone trust their own spirit—let alone another’s—when emotional intelligence must keep its head buried in the sand just to survive?
So here we are, with our spiritual senses trapped hundreds of feet underground. How can our spirits ever free themselves? I’m not sure there is an answer. In my investigation into how a species’ life works, I imagined myself trying to prevent the disaster I see approaching. But the deeper I delve, the more I feel I’m sifting through the debris of a disaster that has already happened. It happened the moment Eve took a bite of the apple—when her eyes, and Adam’s, opened to the knowledge of good and evil. In Eden, that knowledge did not exist. Rational choices were guided only by the desire to resolve innate feelings. Not because people were better then, but because there was nothing else to guide them.
But at the moment of our fall from grace, everything changed. Since then, most of our choices have been shaped by the need to survive—while honoring the constraints imposed by the knowledge of good and evil. Indeed, surviving in a reality ruled by “truth” has severed our access to the wisdom of our souls. We are trapped in a “reality” that exists only by virtue of the spoken word.
Many try to reconnect with the soul’s wisdom through spiritual practices like meditation and prayer. Bless them. But without access to our soul’s guidance, we remain stunned—wandering in a stupor of ignorance, trying to figure out which way is up. We are unable to consider the possibility that we have physically survived an inconceivable accident…from which we have not yet begun to emotionally recover.
I’ve come to suspect that God did not cast us from Eden, as the authors of Genesis claimed. The true culprit was the cold logic of our intellectual intelligence—combined with a touch of wishful thinking—convincing itself that it had gained dominion over the forces of Nature that created us. This put humanity in an untenable position: We now believe we must tame the very forces that gave us life, just to survive.
Our intellectual minds—unable to agree even on something as elemental as global warming—now see themselves as charged with determining the future course of evolution. They edit genes through CRISPR. They do so unaware that the wisdom required to govern a species must stem from the lived experience of countless generations before us.
Instead, the rational mind assumes that its capacity for reasoning is the beginning and end of all things. It sees itself as master of the natural forces that created us. And although it does not recognize this, if it intends to run things, the first force of Nature it must eliminate… is emotional intelligence.
This elimination did not occur by intent, but by happenstance—through the invention of social contracts. Intellectual intelligence gained a stranglehold on truth when it employed prescribed laws to authorize rights of ownership. Since we all need a place to live, sooner or later we must sign a contract. And once we do, what we are allowed to do—and not allowed to do—is no longer governed by emotional intelligence, but by the laws of the state.
This is how intellectual intelligence, albeit unknowingly, disqualified emotional intelligence as a viable participant in the game of life. How would we feel if we were disqualified from a game—especially one that determines the fate of our species? Well, our emotional intelligence feels the same. And because it needs to be there—for all our sakes—it isn’t taking it lying down.
When we are not free to resolve the feelings through which, given spiritual freedom, we would normally serve our species, emotional intelligence punishes us with suffering. And our species—whose needs are no longer being served—is in trouble. In this way, our suffering is the measure of how much trouble our species is in. As I see it, until we figure out how to let emotional intelligence back into the game, our unnatural state of suffering will only continue to increase.
When Adam and Eve studied the Ten Commandments—prescriptions for how to be good and avoid evil—they were shocked. They realized that God—i.e., intellectual intelligence—was looking not just for good behavior, but for perfect behavior. Even perfect mind control.
They wondered how they were supposed to manage. They knew nothing about perfection. As inhabitants of Eden, all they knew was the way things had always been. They did what they felt was right, and avoided what felt wrong. In Eden, being true to feeling was the issue—not perfect behavior.
But what constitutes perfect behavior is unknowable. Arguments about it are unresolvable, and thus can carry on forever. Had perfection—rather than species survival—been evolution’s goal, life would have come to a standstill long ago. Just as unresolvable arguments over good and evil have regularly brought civilizations to a standstill throughout history.
Unknowingly, and unfortunately, Adam and Eve bought into the promise of an ideal future—through the act of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil. In doing so, they pledged to uphold a standard of behavior they could not even imagine. Because the standard was perfection.
That’s when they realized: To meet this new standard, they would have to spend the rest of their lives pretending to be something they were not. Their first act of preparation was to dismiss—as pointless, unhinged, even evil—the guidance of their life-given, life-sustaining feelings.
The story of Adam and Eve is not about two individuals falling into legal subjugation. It is the story of how all human lives were affected when a few people’s eyes were opened to the knowledge of good and evil. At some point, one of the true believers said: “Let’s have a meeting. Let’s get everyone organized—in the name of righteousness.” And everyone agreed. Even though many were appalled that such a meeting could take place.
Those who opposed arriving at an indisputable agreement on good and evil were afraid to object—for fear of being suspected as agents of Satan. In fear of being seen as the one standing in the way of the promised land, virtually everyone, sooner or later, became spiritually dishonest. They locked away their true feelings in the closet of shame.
That meeting was the first formal gathering among human beings. Formal meetings exist to either modify truth, or reinforce it through preaching and indoctrination. When the human spirit was in control, there was no truth. Truth wasn’t needed. Emotional intelligence maintained a life-sustaining social order—as if by magic.
Life-sustaining order is not perfect or ideal. There is love and division, acceptance and rejection, sacrifice and killing, and hardship to overcome. But in the absence of good and evil, no one had cause to blame anyone—not even themselves. Everyone simply did what they felt was right, and had no reason to believe that others weren’t doing the same.
Territorial conflicts arose from time to time. Given that the surface of the Earth is limited, such conflicts are unavoidable. But emotional intelligence—our innate wisdom—did not treat conflict as a threat to be eradicated. It treated it as a reality to be transformed. So, it turned territorial conflict into the game of life. If conflict is inevitable, why not make it enjoyable?
This is why men love conflict. Not because they are violent by nature, but because, in our natural state, conflict was ritualized, dramatized, and even celebrated. It was a way to test strength, resolve disputes, and affirm identity—without destroying the social fabric. In this way, emotional intelligence metabolized scarcity into meaning. It turned survival into story. And it made the struggle for territory a dance, not a death sentence.
In a world where territorial claims are no longer personal but legal—defended not by instinct, but by the state—men channel their innate drive to defend territory into mock disputes on sports fields across the land.
In Eden, life-sustaining order was so omnipresent it was like water to a fish—unseen, unquestioned, yet essential. No one needed to maintain it consciously; life itself did the work. Emotional intelligence regulated behavior through felt experience—through anger, for instance—not through conscious deliberation. Anger, like hunger, happens to us. The conscious mind doesn’t choose it; it only chooses how to respond. It can express the feeling, resolve it, or repress it. But if we’re taught to suppress anger long enough—if enough people ignore what their bodies are trying to say—then the emotional order that sustains our species begins to unravel.
As that order dissipates, fear of disorder takes its place. And fear breeds more repression, more control, more distance from the wisdom of our emotions. The cycle tightens. The soul forgets how to breathe.
When the knowledge of good and evil began to catch on—like a computer virus spreading from device to device—groups of intelligent, educated people began convening to discuss how best to realize “God’s” plans. In the face of all the hoopla, our feelings seemed inadequate for guidance. So they turned over… and went to sleep.
That’s how we became ashamed of how we feel. To our feelings, the situation must have felt like: “After all, what do WE know, anyhow?” Convinced that the way Nature made us wasn’t good enough, we buried hundreds of millions of years of genetically accumulated wisdom—right then and there—under countless layers of shame.
The Book of Genesis implies that, to make themselves presentable for a meeting to do God’s work, people covered their genitals. Why that particular act? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s the universal body language of shame.
It’s during formal meetings, you see, that thoughtful and caring people agree on well-intended promises—none of which, in the end, can be kept, no matter how hard they try. This is how our intellectual intelligence—believing that social contracts could fix the future—innocently disgraced our emotional intelligence into submission. And so, we were shamed out of Eden.
We cannot live in Eden while simultaneously condemning, as evil, the inborn sensibilities we need to live there.
The authors of Genesis wrote that God placed an angel with a flaming sword to guard the path to the Tree of Life. It was their way of expressing their belief that we could never return to our spiritual homes. It would be something, wouldn’t it—if we proved them wrong? Even they would celebrate our return. To return to homes ordained by Nature would require that we trust our lives to families whose members find contentment by fulfilling their spiritual obligations—never legal ones.
