“If one had to characterise the left hemisphere by reference to one governing principle it would be that of division.”

— Iain McGlichrist, The Master and His Emissary, p.137

“When you make a marble, or a soul, or a world… or a mammal… there is a ‘tail’ that remains for a while at the place where the organ was separated from its super-organ. In other words, where the orders of instancing were divided. Over time, it tends to fall off or be drawn into the new (instance).

When the Being-of-Unity communicated to the children of Earth in the Garden, it was warning them not about trees, or demons — it was warning them about this tail. Until it is hidden, when it is new, it is particularly dangerous because the [aspect being] who ‘made’ it is nearby. This being is -the dividing one-.

When it spoke of the ‘Tree in the midst’ of the Garden? It was speaking of the tail. In Hebrew, the word used for ‘midst’ comes from an unused root ‘to part’. Tavek. More literally ‘do not eat of the tree that divides the Garden -from heaven-‘. Effectively, the Being-of-Unity was saying ‘Play not with the local umbilicus, or you will acquire its power-identity’. And this is precisely what happened.

What happened at the Tree was this. We traded the dominance of the view of wholes and relationships (which was nonverbal) for the (nearly fascist) tyranny of the supervention of parts and the capacity to denote.

Essentially, we acquired the specific cognitive power of the Angel of the Tree (in the ways allowed by and peculiar to our own form and circumstance). This was the power of dividing and reference. It was the birth of representation and the beginning of representational thought, action, and language. But we lost the felt sense of wholes and relation. And this loss wasn’t merely a theft, it was a -leak-. As our development proceeded from that crisis-point, the leak would not only continue to drain away our nonverbal assets and senses, it would grow in size, so that our hemorrhaging would increase as our representational faculties developed. Forever.

We never recovered because we never understood the problem. This ‘fable’ in Genesis is the fable of the birth of a demon in our minds. A demon which, whether or not heaven is real, is absolutely real in human cultures and lives here on Earth, and this demon is little more than ways of seeing that demand static references (labels) and relative permanence (persistence over time). The demon is so fascinated with models that once it concocts one, it marries it, and adores it in absolute contradiction to better models, evidence, or even direct experience. It believes minds and living beings are little more than machines with functions and values, and it is more than happy to dispose of them in this fashion.

And it, not any beautiful Being-of-Unity fabled in strange books, is, has been, and will remain our God. It is the God of the faithful who have -the books it wrote- to worship. It is the God of identity, and tells us ‘what things are and do’. Although it conveys astonishing abstract powers of reference, psychologically, it is insane. This aspect of mind, when unjustly (self-) promoted beyond its obvious powers of greatly expanding the scope and potential of our cognitive and relational experience — becomes the God of Lies. It despises life because life is whole — something it, the hemisphere of our brains that actively opposes even the existence of its brother/sister (who knows and adores it), can never be. It is jealous, hateful, confused, habituated the the most hubristic of lies, and will happily destroy anything and everything that seems to oppose it, including itself, because it is not anchored in any body. It is a creature, at least in most human minds and cultures, of reactive domination.

In case this is not clear, the next fable, Cain and Abel, (Quannah and Hevel), clarifies it perfectly: Cain, concerned about the threat to his own supremacy, supposes that his functional powers are not only better than the -relational- powers of his brother, they are so amazing that even God must respect them, if such a being even exists. When this absurd idea is shown to be false, in a childish fit of reactive temper, Cain murders his brother -and then lies about it- to God.

Fascinating. This is happening in our heads, right now. When we were born? Our culture played Cain to our rising Abel. And killed him. And banished him to become ‘the first born of the underworld’ which is to say, dreaming. Which is where he lives, in us, to this day.

The early stories that took place in the Garden and beyond contain the antidote to the disasters they metaphy so expertly. But before we can acquire and employ it, we must first understand the structure of the problem… with the problem’s own result… our representational minds, who, indeed, may in most cases find the actual story to be a threat. After all, if we are to believe it, we must restore the balance, resurrect Abel, and re-unite the brothers who Cain’s murder ‘divided’… not only in fables of history… in the physical structure and relation of our own brain hemispheres. And in their outcomes: our human collectives and cultures”

— an anonymous informant