旧約聖書 2The Old Testament, Part 2

In yesterday's article, we used the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament to gain insight into the undifferentiated world of illusion inhabited by primal humans. What exactly is this "human" born through alienation from all natural existence? When we approach this profound question left to humanity, we realize once again that we are beings who have lost ourselves, having lived only within the interior of a colossal fiction. Now, let us proceed immediately to the continuation.

First, let us address the true meaning of touching the wrath of God, as mentioned at the end of yesterday's piece. This signifies the absolute truth that the pair illusion is the only illusion capable of extinguishing or confronting the communal illusion. This truth appeared as the most radical rebellion, one that would destroy the maintenance of the community in a certain era. The reason people still harbor an intense aversion to things like anarchism is that it evokes this memory from the side of the old community where communal interests are at work. The wrath of God here can be called the wrath of a specific community, and what symbolizes this is the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil growing in the Garden of Eden.

In other words, this forbidden fruit is an initial prohibition from the side of the communal illusion. However, in the era of compilation, this phase was a new element organized retroactively as a narrative to suppress those attempting to live by the pair illusion against the communal illusion. The essential point is that at this stage, the Garden of Eden represents a heightening of communal consciousness to the dimension where community prohibitions are born. This suggests that the rulers were already aware that protecting communal interests with communal consciousness, and perpetuating what could be called their community, would be impossible unless the pair illusion was extinguished or suppressed. Therefore, even if the origin of the tale itself is based on old folklore, it does not narrate the events of primal humans but was re-edited for the people inside the community during a later era when civilization had risen. From this, we can see that a single myth of Genesis possesses a non-linear world where multiple eras are blended and deployed. Thus, myth does not speak of a specific era; rather, we grasp a figure where space-time is retroactively compressed into a certain era. This is why reading myth through linear thinking is meaningless.

The forbidden fruit symbolizes the primal gap where separation begins to bud in the individual mind, or to put it another way, alienation from God. In this case, God has been transferred to the essential state of the human mind, which is absolute good. As I have touched upon the thought of the Confucian scholar Wang Yangming several times, this state of absolute good is precisely the heart. However, the movement of that state of heart initiates separation, indicating that the discernment of good and evil became possible. To use the metaphor of the sea, the sea as good gives rise to wave crests as evil. Yet essentially, it remains the sea.

The important question is the origin of humans viewing God as absolute and worshipping Him. That is why it is written that God created man in His own image. This indicates that after the primal ancestors experienced the stage of alienation from nature, human consciousness created God to fill the abyss torn open by that alienation. However, this God could be anything. As mentioned earlier, since myth has the character of being organized retroactively, the God established here is a communal illusion. Yet at its origin, it represents the life cycle of nature, or the mysterious workings of nature, which human consciousness born of alienation came to realize as God ages later. At this time, it was realized that human time and nature's time were out of sync. The discovery of God in human consciousness necessarily requires this time gap.

Put simply, this is the moment humans knew in their consciousness that the life cycle of a single tree and the human life cycle were not in agreement, even though they were realized as identical in the natural state. This is particularly prominent among agrarian people who rely on grain cultivation rather than hunter-gatherers who premise their lives on movement, though there were countless beings standing on the boundary between the two in human history. This is because the discrepancy between grains that grow according to the four seasons and humans who cannot grow according to the seasons becomes a shocking realization for them. Since this realization requires a certain amount of observation, settled life becomes the catalyst for heightening this awareness. When human time and natural time were torn apart, humans created rituals to be executed at specific times to adjust the gap with the time of nature, the matrix of life.

The origin of these rituals unfolds in a form that compresses the gap in life's time, and almost without exception, they originate in sexual rituals. This was created to compensate for the time gap and is completely unrelated to the modern sense of sexual issues. Therefore, the stage of myth depicted in Genesis indicates phenomena occurring among settled agrarian people rather than ancient hunter-gatherers. This is distilled in the existence of Adam, who was entrusted with the management of the Garden of Eden. In other words, Adam is made to re-experience the movements of the heart that occurred in ancient settled life under a specific communal illusion in the Garden of Eden. The act of continuing to name the animals God created is also something born of deliberate observation. This is a memory of a mutation of the heart that was difficult to occur among people who based their lives on mobile living, where the management of the Garden of Eden became a confinement within the communal illusion.

At this time, they attempted to resolve the torn difference in time, even temporarily, through ritual, thereby retaining the part where nature and humans are assimilated. However, worshipping God within this fissure came to be realized as a crucial issue of life. Thus, Nature/God/Human began to deviate from their former mixture. What was important for ancient people was that the community transferred to the Garden of Eden only during the period of specific rituals. Whether this involved an altered state of consciousness or not, the vital point is that in ancient rituals, it appeared not as an individual problem but as a problem of the community. This is not an opposition between communal illusion and individual illusion. Rather, because they are undifferentiated, it means turning into the community itself in the altered state of the ritual.

In short, the abyss torn by alienation cannot be filled, and that abyss can never be recovered. Therefore, humans created language and all manner of decorations to conceal this painful abyss, which is the anxiety of the real itself. Yet no matter how much is concealed, the fissure never closes, and the abyss only continues to widen. Humans have no way to deal with this fated process where the distance between humans and nature heads toward rupture. This struggle becomes most serious as an internal problem, but for those of us living in the modern era and beyond, this problem is unmanageable to a level that can be called despair. This is because modernity is the most advanced in the technique of concealing this abyss, and because it is so highly advanced, humans themselves have forgotten the very fact that this abyss exists. Intellectuals are those granted status by the interests of the community to conceal this abyss.

That is to say, the real problem for us is to accept the fact that the abyss of alienation, which humanity had retained some degree of contact with while attempting to conceal until pre-modern times, has been erased since the modern era. However, accepting and admitting this means the arrival of a world unbearable for humans, where painful, raw reality itself emerges all at once with maximum intensity in human history. Therefore, no matter the collective dimension, there is never a movement toward this realization. In the sense that this alone is thoroughly enforced as a global taboo, the modern age we live in is actually nothing more than a tribal society. Moreover, because this taboo is hidden by modern violence that continues to mass-produce prohibitions such as ideals, laws, constitutions, and ideologies, the true nature of the Garden of Eden is usually never seen through, as its phase has shifted and is realized by these global prohibitions. Even if a figure appears who occasionally senses this concealment, they are mostly socially obliterated or excluded.

I consciously arranged the aforementioned structure of Nature/God/Human to demonstrate that God exists inseparably within the abyss of alienation between nature and humans. In other words, God is not an absolute being who exists separately and independently in some celestial world, unknowable to humans. Rather, for humans alienated from nature, God was the final mental rope to prevent complete separation from nature. This is the true meaning of "Musuhi [産巣日]” spoken of in Japanese mythology. Therefore, the invention of a vector from God to humans in separation is actually nothing more than a fiction created by modern humans. Caution is required, for if we bring this perspective retroactively to myth, understanding will inevitably be inverted. Summarizing this far, it is reasonable to suspect that perhaps we already exist in the Garden of Eden depicted as an ideal world.

Here, the serpent that instigated eating the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden becomes important. In the West, the serpent tends to be viewed as an evil or taboo symbolic animal, but on the Japanese side, that view is reversed. The serpent frequently appears in myths as a messenger of God and is still worshipped in various places today. In fact, when I see a snake in the precincts of a shrine, I have acquired the habit of bowing without anyone telling me to do so. This is the influence of the fact that the compilation of the Old Testament was carried out by hands of people who had already significantly developed concepts of good and evil. However, if we change the perspective, this serpent is an outsider appearing from outside the safety zone called the Garden of Eden. An outsider in this sense is not a barbaric existence as we might imagine, but a group possessing a different mode of illusion. This is the heterogeneous and grotesque god that Shinobu Orikuchi spoke of as "Marebito" in Japanese folklore. Such external gods are always spoken of as existences that bring new wisdom to a closed community. And the true identity of animals appearing in myths depends strongly on the political dynamics of the people who held hegemony at the time of myth compilation. The origin relates to the originary traditions of that clan lineage.

Therefore, mostly they are not really talking about animals, but are merely symbols representing the origins of old powers. Countless animals appear in Japanese mythology as well, but when viewed as actual entities, they almost without exception refer to tribes of the Jomon period. Viewed broadly, this means that an outsider symbolized by the serpent suddenly appeared and brought wisdom into the illusionary world of Adam and Eve, who possessed the illusion of a closed community of people heading from movement to settlement. Here, the fact that the serpent contacted the Eve side first, and then Eve contacted the Adam side, means that regarding the world where the pair illusion of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had become a communal dimension, the Eve side engaged in a sexual act with the outsider in the illusionary domain. This sexual act is not physical intercourse but is of paramount importance in the illusionary domain of myth.

In Japanese mythology, the work of creating the land and gods born from the pair illusion of Isanaki [伊耶那岐命] and Isanami [伊耶那美命], depicted as the ancestors of humanity, is narrated through the event where Isanami fell ill from burns due to the birth of the fire god Kagutsuchi [軻遇突智神] and returned to Yomi [黄泉国], a different world. The work stopped because of this, but this means the pair illusion of Isanaki and Isanami was severed by the outsider, Kagutsuchi. That is, because Isanami severed the pair illusion of Isanaki and Isanami through the instigation of the Kagutsuchi side, the communal act of the two that had been unfolding there was cut off. The same thing is narrated in the illusionary relationship of Adam, Eve, and the serpent. This means that while Adam and Eve's union had already acquired an illusion that maintained high intensity as a pair illusion, the intensity of the communal illusion was not yet realized, and the locus of this communal illusion side remained attributed to God. In other words, in the era of the Old Testament's compilation, it was already understood that the communal illusion was unknowable and beyond human comprehension. The fact that the communal illusion was perceived as an independent illusion beyond human intellect at this point blatantly conveys to us today the fact that the communal illusion cannot be transformed. In the relationship of the pair illusion of Isanaki and Isanami, this is reflected in the myth as the communal illusion dimension called Amatsukami [天つ神].

In a state where only pair illusion can be maintained, consciousness does not turn toward the formation of communal interests at all, rendering the formation of a community impossible. As I wrote in an article using Chikamatsu Monzaemon's "Love Suicides" as a motif, this is because the pair illusion can be completely unrelated to the interests of the communal illusion. Therefore, in order to shift the phase of the illusion, the pair illusion formed by Adam and Eve had to be extinguished once. This is synonymous with the fact that because the community formation in the pair illusion dimension of Isanaki and Isanami stopped going well at a certain stage, the pair illusion world of these two was dismantled by linking Isanami with the outsider side, Kagutsuchi. In short, Adam and Eve, who did not yet possess their own communal illusion in their consciousness, could not resist the external god or the serpent who possessed a communal illusion different from that of the God of the Garden of Eden.

At this moment, consciousness of the difference between human time and nature's time was bestowed upon Adam and Eve via the serpent, and this is the forbidden fruit. Conversely, the outsider that is the serpent knew this difference before Adam and Eve. What is important is that the communal illusion of the Garden of Eden, thought to be eternal, vanished all too easily due to merely this, which means the primal communal illusion lacked the power to stand alone. This might seem like an unthinkable state viewed from the current communal illusion which has become unknowable and completely autonomous, but human history might be better described as the evolution of communal illusion rather than the evolution of humans. What requires caution here is that Adam and Eve, who were bound by pair illusion at this time, were thrown out into the exterior. The story of knowing they were naked and hiding their loins with fig leaves out of shame, and the story of trying to hide from God in fear of His visit, mean that with the extinction of the communal illusion protected by God, the pair illusion of Adam and Eve also extinguished. They suddenly knew they were standing on the earth as individuals exposing only their individual illusion. Therefore, it is appropriate in religion to position this as the beginning of humanity. That is, the myth of Adam and Eve is not a record of the first human individuals born on earth.

The illusion before eating the forbidden fruit was a mixture where communal illusion and pair illusion were congruent, a state not clearly distinguishable. This mixed state was viewed from the side of the later Old Testament compilers, who called the communal illusion side God and distinguished the pair illusion side as Adam and Eve. However, after eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve as a pair illusion fell in the myth as human individuals on earth. Through this experience of the primal Adam and Eve, a long history began where humans moved from the undifferentiated mixture of individual illusion, pair illusion, and communal illusion toward gradual separation. That is why this was grasped as sin, but in other words, this is the activation of human history. Meaning, human history did not begin through the capabilities of the individual, but began as a problem of the illusion side. This characteristic is an undeniable truth, no matter how arrogantly we, living in the modern era and beyond, pride ourselves on having acquired a subject or ego.

Myth refuses a monolithic reading, but at least Genesis brilliantly depicts the process of humans internalizing consciousness into individual illusion through the conscious understanding of communal illusion. What is significant is that because the religious organizational attitude of the Old Testament, which aims for the absolutization of communal illusion, intervenes here, the troublesome bond of pair illusion is erased as an enemy or devil. This remains true today; the most troublesome evil for the prosperity of religious organizations is the pair illusion. For a cult that cannot acquire believers unless they internalize the huge fiction of the religious narrative, there is nothing more terrifying than this bond of pair illusion. Religious commandments and the like typically have their origins in prohibitions designed to prevent the binding of this pair illusion. Within such organizations, room is left for a historically rare leader to appear and bind a pair illusion with a disciple, but that remains constantly limited in influence, and as an illusion, development in the communal dimension is absolutized.

Therefore, after eating the forbidden fruit, the man and woman are expelled from the Garden of Eden, and the pain of labor and the pain of childbirth become the retribution for sin, establishing them as mortal beings. Naturally, labor, childbirth, and death were not bestowed upon humans at this point. These are things that sprout consciously only after consciousness is born; they are problems that do not exist prior to consciousness. Furthermore, the reason labor and childbirth are assigned to the man and woman respectively is also to prevent the binding of pair illusion in religious consciousness. In other words, problems occurred that could not happen to humans unless alienation from nature occurred, but among them, the consciousness of the time gap was critical. This is because they knew the discrepancy: unlike the animals and plants of nature that die, humans cannot simply die. Conversely, similar things had happened countless times in human history, but until then, it had never been consciously realized. It is easy to guess that the ascent of labor, childbirth, and death—which until then were not actually enacted in consciousness—onto the foundation of consciousness dealt a severe shock to humans. Because at this moment, they internalized into their consciousness the absolute limit for humans: that they are compelled to think about death. Death is the only thing that an individual can absolutely never know no matter what they do, cannot experience, cannot resolve by thinking, and about which speaking amounts to saying nothing.

Synthesizing these points, the old circumstances become visible: the sin established by human communal consciousness was understood, without needing to bring up Christian original sin, as living by the bond of pair illusion without possessing a communal illusion. To put it differently, the greatest enemy to the maintenance of this kind of communal interest, whether it be a religious organization, a state, or a society, is the thorough consciousness that it is always the pair illusion. This is still carried through today.

In fact, in the current world, the extinction of pair illusion has been realized with abnormal sophistication. Communal illusion is identified with the world and has become completely invisible, and the individual's individual illusion stands in opposition to and is congruent with the communal illusion, having already lost sight of existence through self-domestication into the system. When I look at the figures of Japanese people on a daily basis, I am almost dazed by that reality. Perhaps there is no civilization in human history other than Japan where the absolute world of communal illusion has been realized so extremely and sophisticatedly on a scale of one hundred million people. This is not in a good sense at all; it is the loss of the individual's existence, a world where pair relationships cannot be formed.

And this problem should not be thought of as a lukewarm issue like an identity crisis, but must be reconsidered as the most serious situation shaking existence itself. This absolutization of communal illusion squirms at the root of various problems dealing with the widely occurring motif of disconnection, but these were the communal ideals prepared to be reached since the era of the Old Testament's compilation. Occasionally, there are rulers with dictatorial thinking who praise the Japanese system, but this is praise for the absolute thing called the communal ideal. However, from the fact that this kind of taboo is spoken of, a counter-figure can also be extracted. That is the memory of a primal era that tells us: even when some civilization attempting to live by maintaining communal interests based on communal illusion was established, contact with small-scale groups living based on pair illusion was ceaseless, and people living based on such pair illusion existed even inside the community. This is self-evident to us who can know history across the widest range in human history, but once, this amounted to a life-or-death issue for community maintenance. And what we must truly pay attention to is the history of the people who held the world of the pair illusion side, yet this is where history ignores them.

Synthesizing the problems discussed so far, it becomes visible that the situation is quite serious and desperate for us today. This is because the sole question stands in our way: "Can we really recover the pair illusion?" Moreover, merely recovering the pair illusion inevitably leads to non-alignment with the interests of the communal illusion and results in radical action, thus carrying the inevitability of being obliterated or expelled from the community. Therefore, the troublesome problem we carry is that we must create some domain in actual life to recover the pair illusion, and elevate it not to extinguish the communal illusion with the pair illusion, but to a power that inhibits the absolutization of the communal illusion. This is not something to be completed by our generation alone, but our generation is important because everyone stands at the abyss of this turning point. This is the responsibility undertaken by all people living in the modern age. At this time, those who choose the path of continuing to transfer their individual illusion to the communal illusion side and those who transfer to the pair illusion side will appear; I believe this is precisely the next selection.

The key is to "look at only one person." There is no truth other than that. To look at only one person, there is no need to read piles of books, nor is there a need to watch the debates of intellectuals on YouTube for hundreds of hours. Regarding the truth of this pair illusion, it is something that need not be learned from anyone. Breakthroughs for the unending modern age are debated endlessly, but there should be no fundamental other than this. People capable of looking at only one person appear in each country, and they culturally create places to bind the pair illusion. This movement is the only, final power to oppose the communal illusion that has hypertrophied until it is no longer visible. In other words, if even a small minority of humanity cannot fulfill this movement, the individual as a human being will be wiped out by the encroachment of the illusion called the communal illusion. We have already ended the era of trying to change the group. Because the individual as a group has already been extinguished by the communal illusion.