Dear friends and readers, the concluding selections to Just like Eve are now back. If you are new to this series, you can get an overview here, or start at the beginning, or start at the recent set of selections between Jasmine and her friends for her most recent discoveries.
Colorado Springs, CO, August 5, 2012
“The wise or knowing nature” of the “healthy woman” is to speak and act on one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible.”
(Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women who Run with
the Wolves, p. 10)
"To retain as much consciousness as possible. Jasmine records the final phrase a second time into her journal, after quoting Estés’ classic, recommended to her by Gabbie.
“To
retain consciousness or gain it back?” Jasmine writes into her journal. “Didn’t I have consciousness and then lost
it? When I was chided for ‘thinking at
odds’?” Jasmine lifts her pencil and
wonders whether “retaining consciousness” means triumphing over
conditioning.
Perhaps
a very few brave or lucky children never lose it. But Jasmine wasn’t among them. Over the years of her adolescence, chided for
thinking at odds, or seeing eyes roll over for her questions and insights, or
scolded for being just like Eve, little by little Jasmine permitted herself to
be conditioned into silence. At first, it wasn't silence but delayed speaking,
carefully considering her words and delaying her insights. She still saw heads shaking and shoulders
shrugging and eyes rolling, and she trained herself into silence. In time the
silence of her mouth also grew into silence of her mind. She coached herself to
quit thinking at odds.
In
college, away from her family, Jasmine began to think at odds again, and sometimes,
she made the error of speaking her thinking. Remarkably, among some of her college friends,
that was okay. She could speak her mind.
But perhaps their encouragement gave her too much confidence and she forgot,
and spoke her mind again at home or at church, and this time, the chiding
turned to scolding. She's a young adult. Shouldn't she know better by now what
she can and cannot say?
So
Jasmine rebuked herself, vowing to think at evens, yet unsure how she could
learn such a trick. Then she met Tim,
the archer, who was very good at thinking at evens, and he liked her too, and
his body felt delicious as he stood right behind her, touching his whole body to
hers, teaching her to position every limb and every part of her body for
perfect aim. With him, she could shoot
that arrow straight into the bullseye. With
him, perhaps she could also think at evens.
And
now the very quality that drew her in is sending her away. Tim may have
succeeded for a time to help Jasmine think at evens, but such an target, that
he didn't even know he’d been given, and nor did she for that matter, carried
with it a deadly side effect: the loss of Jasmine's own wise and compassionate
consciousness.
Then
Davie came along -- after Jasmine had already married Tim, and after Davie had
already married Pam. But Davie helped
Jasmine recover her own consciousness, her thinking at odds that he loved. As Davie’s celebrated her thinking, Jasmine
could see the loss of her consciousness began with her inquisitive and
compassionate spirit. She had wished to
know why Noah let God drown the world: a question of compassion, for which she
had been scorned, called “just like Eve.”
She
and the church, Jasmine has come to realize, have differed on their fundamental
value system. The church values
obedience at all costs to the authority it believes in, while Jasmine has valued
compassion and has questioned the value of obedience without it. Of the church, however, she remains
perplexed. If the churches truly believe
in “obedience,” would they not wish to obey their master? Jesus?
“Wasn’t it Jesus who said, ‘Ask, seek, and
knock’? And didn’t the writer of Hebrews call for us to discern between
good and evil?
“Isn’t
Elohim, who forbids such knowledge, inconsistent with them?” Jasmine has already learned the character
called ‘God’ is Elohim in Hebrew, with its feminine root, “power” and
its masculine plural to translate, essentially, to feminine and masculine
“powers.” Once again thinking at odds,
Jasmine makes a radical break from her tradition and reads this figure as a
simple character in a simple story whose name is Elohim.
Their
own church, terrified by the attraction between Jasmine and Davie (Pastor David),
sent Jasmine out of church and ordered Davie to quit attending their Mixed
Doubles group. Now that Jasmine is out
of church, she figures they think however they do; they can think Elohim
is “God” and stay blind to the inconsistency of this character with the one
Jesus calls “Father,” who encourages questions and compassion.
For
Davie Jasmine longs every day. Her
divorce with Tim is almost final. She prays Davie returns to their tennis group. But even if he does not, and even if he stays
with Pam, Davie has given Jasmine a priceless gift: he has given her the key
that opens the door to redeem her consciousness. And now Clarissa Pinkola Estes is walking
with Jasmine through that door, confirming to her that she has found the right
place, and that many have gone before her.
Through
myths and legends, Estés relays the stories of the feminine version of the
hero’s journey, and Jasmine decides to read Eve’s story the way Estés reads the
stories she relates. The myth most like
Eve’s is called “Bluebeard,” after the groom who woos the youngest of three
sisters. Soon after they wed, he departs
for a trip, hands her a set of keys, and tells her she can use all but one, which,
of course, is the one she most wishes to use.
When her sisters come to visit, they make that their mission: find the
door that uses this key. When they finally succeed, they find a room full of
corpses: Bluebeard’s ex-wives. With the
help of her two sisters and their three brothers, the young bride’s next task
is to escape before he kills her too, and she succeeds.
“’Bluebeard
forbids the young woman to use the one key that would bring her to consciousness’
(Estés, p. 47). Isn’t that what Elohim
did?” Jasmine asks into her journal.
“Forbid Adam and Eve not only from knowledge, but also from something
Eve perceived would come that is far more valuable? Wisdom?
When I read the story of Eve in its plain text, its message is clear, but
disturbing. But only if we think the
figure who forbids is ‘God.’”
Jasmine
smiles at Estés’ analysis of Bluebeard, who looks very much like Elohim,
both of whom forbid consciousness: “If she attempts to obey Bluebeard’s
command not to use the key, she chooses death for her spirit. By choosing to open the door to the ghastly
secret room, she chooses life (p. 47).”
“She chooses
life.” Another final phrase gets written
twice into Jasmine’s journal, first from the quote and second from herself. “Is life also not what Eve chose? Elohim said eating of knowledge would
bring death, but wouldn’t both choices bring death? Either extermination or non-life in blindness,
lacking in wisdom?”
Jasmine
sets down her pencil, reflecting that not only compassion, but also wisdom, are
values far higher for her than mere obedience.
She beats to a deeper drum. She,
too, wants wisdom. So she asks
questions. Starting to feel vindicated,
Jasmine adds into her journal what Estés says about questions: “Asking the
proper question is the central act of transformation—in fairy tales, in
analysis, and in individuation. The key
question causes germination of consciousness. . . . Questions are the keys that
cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open” (48).
“For
Eve, the question was prompted by the serpent, who told Eve she would not die for eating
the fruit,” Jasmine writes into her journal.
“He suggests Eve does can choose life. It will come at a cost: her ‘eyes will be opened’ to her
vulnerable nakedness and to evil and to suffering. But she will also gain a real, authentic life
with wisdom.”
Who
is this serpent in Hebrew? Jasmine wonders.
She’s already learned the Hebrew word translated as “God” is Elohim,
and the word translated as “helper” in Gen 2:18 is ezer, better
translated as “life saver,” and the word for Eve is Havah, or “life-giver,”
making Eve’s name and title a play on words that has been lost in translation.
To understand
the serpent in Hebrew, Jasmine knows she must turn to Jewish resources, and
from the Jewish mystics, she makes an astonishing discovery: the serpent, nachash
in Hebrew, shares an energetic affinity with messiah, mashiach in
Hebrew, in their system of gematria. In Hebrew, every letter is also a
number. Scholars add up the letters of a
word to form a number, and words of the same number share an energetic
affinity. Nachash (Nun, 50 +
Chet, 8 + Shin 300 = 358) and mashiach (Mem 40 + Shin 300 + Yod 10 +
Chet 8 = 358) add up to the sa energy of 358.
“The
serpent carries the energy of the messiah?” writes Jasmine, stunned. If any biblical figure is more demonized than
any other, it would be this serpent. But
Jewish mystics connect this figure with messiah. Thinking very at odds, Jasmine continues
journaling: “Like a liberator? I suppose so. He liberated her from the non-life
of blindness into an authentic life, one with both pleasure and pain, with joy
and suffering. For better or for worse, the serpent-messiah offered Eve a full,
authentic life.”
Jasmine
wonders why this remarkable clue into the serpent as a messiah figure is not
well known. Then again, she remembers
even the second two curses to Eve, written clearly in English, without errors of translation, are also
not well known.
Perhaps
later Jasmine will also connect this nechash to the saving force
Moses calls upon for the Israelites in exile from Egypt,
or to the
one Jesus tells Nicodemus must be lifted up to enter the kingdom,
or even to modern medicine’s familiar image of the caduceus with two snakes
wrapped around a pole, representing the kundalini energy that heals the body
and opens the mind. But today, Jasmine is
early in her discoveries.
It
will also be time before she learns that her quest, like that of Eve, is that
of the sages of all time, like the Norse god Odin, who sacrificed his eye for
all-seeing wisdom. Nor does she know
that many who have gone before her have been persecuted. Those in power, perhaps not consciously
realizing it, are threatened when people start thinking for themselves. They might lose their positions of privilege
and authority. Hence, many of the texts
that liberate into consciousness have been lost, buried and burned, most
infamously in 48 BCE from the fire of the library in Alexandria. Meanwhile, many of those retained, either
written or oral, have been carefully repackaged to undermine liberation and
embolden the authorities of the world.
But the mysteries can be unburied, as Jasmine has done. Many scholars have interpreted the story of
Adam and Eve in many ways, almost all of which are far more rational than
Augustine’s, villanizing Eve, that still permeates Jasmine’s tradition.
But
Jasmine need not examine those, for her journey has been for those like her:
raised into the paradigm of her religious tradition and its reverence for the
Bible and methods of reading it: literally, but consistent, and with a study of
the words and meanings in the original text.
Hers is a simple quest: to see the ways this story interpreted as she's
been taught is not only internally inconsistent and harmful to wisdom, but even
relies on the mistranslations of its principle characters and concepts from its
original Hebrew text. In essence, the
evangelical interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve violates the very rules
the same tradition teaches to read the Bible.
Into
her journal entry, Jasmine concludes, “The church leaders might have intended
an insult when they called me ‘just like Eve,’ but now I see a woman who
bravely risks her life for something more valuable: wisdom. Her ‘eyes were opened,’ and, therefore, she
suffered. Truth is painful, and so is wisdom. We don't see without a cost, but it is worth the cost to suffer and live. Perhaps Eve still should have done as
Abraham: challenge Elohim for a better deal.
But if her only two choices were existence in blindness or wisdom with
open eyes and suffering, Eve made the better choice, and I find her vindicated.”
Jasmine
closes her journal, deeming herself also vindicated. No longer insulted by centuries of
misunderstanding, Jasmine is grateful to be just like Eve, to think at odds, to
be a ball rolling down a hill, and to beat to a deeper drum. Tim, her family, and her church can join a
marching band together and drum in obedient conformity, while she strums to her
own rhythm. A sly smile comes across her
face, one that can be seen only by others who also beat to their own drum.
Continue to Davie's Return, Part 1
Start at Jasmine's newest discoveries
