The secret of the Tree of Life
Guest post by Sabato Scala, translated and edited in English by Peter Foss
Blasphemous content alert, read further at your own peril.
Part 1: The mystery of the Tree of Life
The tree Adam eats the fruit of, is the tree of KNOWLEDGE. This is the reason why sins increased.
Had he eaten the fruit of the other tree, that is the fruit of the tree of LIFE, the one that produces men, then gods would worship men.
(Gnostic Gospel of Philip, Nag Hammadi Codes, third treaty of code two)
Now try asking yourselves:
1) Where and what is the tree?
2) And the Snake (the teacher), where is he hiding? Who is it? What did he reveal to Adam and Eve?
3) Why in so many ancient depictions, the Christ is associated with the Snake that wraps himself around the Cross? What does the cross represent?
Once again the Gnostic Gospel of Philip comes to our help:
TRUTH did not come naked in this world, but in symbols and images.
You can’t grasp it but in any other way.
All our life and all our experience have a symbolic value.
You don’t speak with metaphors or parables, if you could make the same concepts understand in simple words.
And then the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas adds on:
Jesus said: You know what is before you, and what is hidden from you, it will be revealed to you, for there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed at some point in time.
Whoever believes that all this is religion or philosophical speculation is totally mistaken.
These texts are a concrete and practical way to point mankind to the root cause of his ancient incapability of completely achieve its full potential, his inability to fully tap into his psycho-mental capabilities, to truly know himself and, finally, to come in real physical and tangible contact with his spiritual and divine part.
Hear my words: This is not a metaphor, it’s not a fantasy!
Anyone with the right personal evolutionary path, can have a non-mystical, not imaginary, not illusory but a tangible and true experience of what I speak of.
We could also look the other way, and waste our time and resources seeking out the guru of the moment, seeking truth in this or that religion, something that is out there.
But remember, the Divine exists already inside us, but it can only be found after removing the artificial obstacles of an upbringing which does not want us free.
Wandering and looking for the Divine experience out there is a rightful choice, but it’s a terribly short-sighted choice that will bring us back again and again here on this incarnated dimension, life after life, in accordance to both Eastern philosophies and Ancient Gnosis.
Like a fraudulent salesman, our trapper makes us believe that we don’t have time to think and that we can only take whatever he is selling to us now or never again the opportunity shall repeat, and that this is the only life and in the end either we chose him or we will be damned forever.
The fraudulent master fills us with fears, he shames us because of our caution, he makes us feel guilty if we don’t buy into his religion, degrades us, makes us feel stupid and small and shows himself as the only possible truth.
You can tell a tree by its fruits
Heresy is quite often the accusation made to those who want to free mankind from their bonds and chains.
He who tries to break himself or us free is humiliated, crucified, and finally put to death. But worse still is that his very own words and teachings are twisted and perverted, they are crafted into traps to assert and cloud the minds of the slackers who dare not to risk, like in the parable of the talents.
Wellbeing in this life must be addressed in a practical, factual and, above all, holistical way and it must be developed throughout the different levels of existence: Physical, mental, emotional, animal and spiritual.
If you neglect one and focus only on a few, you are building your house on shifting grounds.
Only one is The Master and He resides within us: When We feel that something isn’t adding up, that the road we’ve taken is misleading us, when it feels like it’s time to draw a line and make our stand, let’s do it without hesitation.
“He who rises, shall be lowered”. That’s the only way to recognize those with malicious intentions.
The solution of the Tree of Life
I invite you to watch closely and meditate upon the image above which combined two classic elements from Eastern and Western cultures: the Tree of Life and the Kundalini.
These symbols may seem disconnected at first glance, but in reality, they represent the same concept and are far from being mere myths.
Today, I shall present to you the solution and the secret that these myths reveal to mankind, both past and present.
The Solution lies in two texts that miraculously resurfaced after 2.000 years.
These texts emerged from the sands of the Egyptian desert in Nag Hammadi: On the Origin of the World and the Gospel of Philip.
Both documents come from a community that considered itself the guardian of the first, oldest, and most original teachings of an itinerant Jewish teacher—Joshua ben Joseph—better known as Jesus, known under the name of: The Christian Gnostics
The Gnostics used symbolic reasoning based on Hebrew lexicon and etymology.
For example, when discussing Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, they used the Hebrew word צֵלָע (Tzelá), not associating it with “rib” but with its more common meaning, “side” or rather “half.”
Eve, in fact, was not born from a rib—this interpretation was conveniently chosen to diminish the feminine, relegating it to a subordinate role to the male.
In reality, Eve was Adam’s perfect counterpart, equal to him in essence, differing only in the strength that drove her—which, paradoxically, was originally far superior to the male’s.
Gnosis asserts that the first Adam was created by a lesser and imperfect god, the harsh and volatile deity of the Old Testament.
This lesser god formed man from clay, inspired by an image reflected in a pool of water. This image originated as a reflection of Christ, the son of the true God—the Father of All—who, according to Gnostics, momentarily peered beyond the impenetrable veil separating this world from his Father’s Kingdom.
The Old Testament deity molded earth and water to recreate this image, believing it represented his own form reflected in the water. This newly created being was named Adam Kadmon, the “Primordial Adam.” Yet this clay figure, supposedly made in the deity’s “image and likeness,” remained lifeless and motionless on the ground.
According to Gnosis, without the Old Testament deity’s knowledge, Sophia—Christ’s divine counterpart—cast a spark of the Father’s and Christ’s light into the clay being. This spark was called Zoe—Life.
In that very moment, Adam Kadmon, an androgynous being like Christ, both male and female, came to life and rose in all his splendor.
He shone brighter than anything within the dark world created by the Old Testament deity—built from inferior elements lacking light, including passions and various forms of suffering.
The Archons, the angels of the Old Testament deity, envied this light, which did not belong even to their minor god. They sought to uncover the secret of such radiance and attacked Adam, splitting him into two parts to extract the spark within him.
In this way, two incomplete beings were created: Male and Female, Brother and Sister, Adam (the second) and Eve.
After this act of violence, the Spark transferred into Eve. Adam, deprived of the Life contained within the Spark, returned to being an inert clay form. Eve, his sister, kissed him on the mouth, becoming his companion and, through the kiss, transferring to him the breath (nefesh in Hebrew, meaning Soul) of Life from her Spark.
At that moment, Eve became not only Adam’s sister and companion but also his mother. Meanwhile, the Archons, seeing that Eve shone brighter than Adam, became infatuated with her and violated her.
From this union, Cain was born—the father of the lineage of half-men, the Hylics, beings who were half-human and half-angel, driven solely by material interests and destined to rule over the Earth, always protected by their fathers, the Archons.
However, before Eve was assaulted and Zoe contaminated, Sophia enclosed Zoe within the serpent, thus transforming nefesh into nahash (Hebrew for Serpent) by altering the central letter of the Hebrew word for Breath or Soul.
In this way the Serpent became the secret instructor, the one who possessed knowledge from the other world—the world of the Father. Thanks to this knowledge, the Serpent revealed to Adam and Eve the true divisive nature of the god of this world: The God of Justice, who is anything but just.
This deity enacts justice by categorizing everything into only two rigid categories: Good and Evil. This is his sole reason for existence and essence. Once humanity learned to divide and classify things, and even their own actions, without too much discernment or reflection, just into categorizing Good and Evil all around them, they began to separate from themselves.
Humans started perceiving all natural impulses that led them to act in ways classified as Evil as foreign to themselves. Thus, people fragmented internally: On one side, the Consciousness, believing itself to be good and just, and on the other side, the rejected part, the Unconscious, deemed bad and malevolent.
This is the bitter fruit of the tree of Good and Evil, of being aware of these categories at all times, surrounding us, caging our thoughts into dichotomies.
This tree resembles the Tree of Knowledge but it lacks the central branch, namely the ability to discern Context.
There is no absolute Good or Evil, everything depends on the perspective from which it is observed and the short / long term effects of actions.
Eve ate from the tree and became aware of her material and inferior nature.
She offered this knowledge to Adam, who did the same, leading to the realization of the original problem: A spark descended into a world foreign to humanity but hid itself within humans to avoid contamination. This spark gave life to two mirrored forces: The masculine force within the woman’s body and the feminine force within the man’s.
These opposing forces attract each other, driving men and women to seek union in order to recreate the original unity.
But when Adam and Eve reunited, driven by the earthly and material force of Passion, Adam released his seed into Eve.
This did not generate the original androgynous being but rather a Son of Man, a new human being, not a hybrid like Cain: This how Abel came into being.
Cain killed Abel, but Sophia once again sent Zoe into Adam and Eve’s last son, Seth, who became the father of the lineage of the Pneumatics (those who Breath!) those endowed with a divine spark, from whom Christ would be born.
Let’s return to our main question: If the Tree of Good and Evil is not an actual tree but rather the mechanism that drives humanity to perceive the world in a divisive way, then where is the true tree?
And what happened to the serpent?
The true tree is revealed when a person dies and is reduced to bones, losing his bodily flesh.
That dead tree is the trunk, the spinal column.
The branches are made of the rib cage.
And the fruit is the skull, which contains the brain, a structure that operates through classification, constantly dividing things into models and categories.
And what about the serpent?
In Eastern disciplines, the Kundalini (the instructor who unlocks true awareness) is coiled in three spirals at the base of the spine, enclosed within the sacred first chakra.
Thus, both the serpent and the tree are found.
The Kundalini can be released through specific meditations, but if liberated without preparation, it simply becomes the Tree of Good and Evil, offering a painful knowledge of life’s problem but nothing to lead us to its solution.
A New Tree was needed, a New Knowledge, a Complete Understanding.
This is how Gnosis explains the arrival of the new tree on Earth: Christ allowed himself to be crucified on a dead tree, an olive tree planted by his father, thus becoming the missing trunk of the Tree of Good and Evil.
He offered his blood as the fruit of the new Tree of Salvation.
The Tree of Life
Christ became the new Instructor, the new Serpent wrapped around the olive tree.
This is the meaning behind the classic image of the cross encircled by the serpent.
This is the new tree, the tree of Gnosis, the Knowledge that Christ brings into this world by incarnating as Jesus.
The learning of the Gnosis, the message of Christ, completes the journey of life on this plane and saves Adam, Eve, and their lineage, from the idle cycle of ignorance and reincarnations.
But what is this knowledge that saves men and women?
According to the ancient teachings, the human being living in this world is dead despite being alive.
Christ comes into this world not only to deliver the message that I have summarized but also to open a communication channel between the Father’s Kingdom and this world.
The Sacrament of the Bridal Chamber: The dry path
This channel activates only when unity between man and woman is restored, recreating the original androgynous Adam.
Christ established this channel through his relationship with his companion, Magdalene, the image of Sophia, just as Jesus is the image of Christ.
Their union tore, for the first time, the veil dividing the Father’s Kingdom from this world, creating an entirely new communication pathway.
It was the sacred sexual union between Christ and Magdalene, achieved without the emission of seed, that opened this channel for all.
But how can a sexual union occur without the emission of male seed, meaning without generating children of this world?
Taoist culture describes a specific form of yoga, sexual yoga, whose goal is to completely block the emission of male seed while maintaining sexual activity. This practice also involves an exchange of masculine and feminine energies during intercourse.
This seedless sexual union was cryptically described in medieval alchemy as the dry path, which uses Mercury (the kundalini) but not sperm emission associated to it.
This type of sexual union without the emission of seed is described in the Gospel of Philip.
Here it states that when Christ died, the veil of the Temple was torn, meaning that a pathway from above had been opened for some of us, the Gnostics, allowing us to return to the Father and connect with Him even in this life, through the Sacrament of the Bridal Chamber.
According to the Gospel of Philip, before reaching this sacrament, the Gnostics awakened the memory of the masculine force within the woman and the feminine force within the man, forces that had been separated when Adam Kadmon was split from Eve.
In certain rare branches of medieval alchemy, there is mention of the double Kundalini, namely two serpents coiling around the cross of Christ, much like the famous Caduceus symbol used by pharmacies.
This symbol hides in plain sight the meaning of the most powerful secret ritual in the world.
This ritual generates the elixir of long life (the elixir of Zoe) which opens the channel (the cross) formed when a man and a woman unite through a ritualistic, materially sterile bond within the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber.
Everyone is free to interpret this as they wish, to ignore it entirely, pretending not to have heard or seen it, or you might choose to truly see and hear, and above all, experience the transformation revealed by these ancient texts.
Note from the Foundation
In this post the emphasis is put on education and the inception of stressful emotions by the society and parents at young age.
We want to remind here that these emotions are ingrained in our brains genetically, and that subsequent rationalizations and their expression in “socially acceptable” behavioral expressions is a secondary process.
No emotional shade or flavor in ourselves are random. Emotions (the springs of ACTIONS) are there from long before our society and educational system, they were forged by chain of evolutionary events which selected the ones which ultimately yielded greater genetic success.
As an example about shameful emotions, they act as a software patch to limit our oversized hardware otherwise always ready to execute its biological duties.
At some point nature decided that the human species should focus on the quality of offsprings as opposed to its sheer quantity, hence the arise of shame within our genetic makeup and brains to achieve just that.
Unfortunately genes (still not 100% optimized) are a hot mess of conflicting emotions and directives, which in turn cause distress within the human life experience, and on top of that flawed education systems increase this state of affair.
So what do we do of Jesus teachings and the Bridal Chamber ritual?
Our interpretation is that Jesus was a super-man, a Man above the others who managed to deconstruct the emotions and behavioral gene pressure and re-construct himself, his actions and his emotions in accordance to rules and purposes that are over worldly compared to the standard human experience.
A Man capable of acting Truly Free, or rather saying a Man completely possessed by the Spirit of God and completely acting in compliance with its directive even within this heavy, thick plane of existence.
