Myths of the Fall - the Garden of Eden and Kundabuffer

A Christian pastor trying to explain the notion of "original sin" to a rabbi summarized it thus: "It means that I'm an imperfect being living in an imperfect world." The rabbi, coming from a tradition that did not contain the idea of "original sin", could then understand exactly what it conveyed to his Christian colleague.

And as far it goes, this explanation is obviously true.

Many religions have attempted to explain the flaws in Man and in Creation. If there is a God, and if He is perfect, how can He have created such a clearly imperfect world? As Westerners, most of us were raised with the Bible as our background. The Garden of Eden is our primary myth of the Fall of Man. Most Christians and Jews interpret it as reflecting humankind's disobedience and the resulting expulsion from the original Paradise we were created to inhabit and tend. We lost that blissful state because we refused to accept God's condition for living in it - that we refrain from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Having disobeyed, we were then embarked willy-nilly on the journey of self-development.  Now we have to learn to make right choices, to work on ourselves until our centres become balanced and our orientation is towards the spiritual rather than the physical world. In the process we suffer pain and hardship, but there is no other way, no short cut back to Paradise.

 Having been raised among sleeping people, we are sleepwalkers in our own lives unless we have a method of awakening. Our psychology is profoundly unbalanced; we are at the mercy of negative emotions of all kinds, and of the huge illusion that we can "do", which results in so many social and psychological problems.

And our very DNA reflects the fallen nature of mankind. Flaws such as a tendency to alcoholism and other addictions now form part of our nature, even though this was never intended by the Creator. Various inherited conditions, including disabilities and fatal illnesses, are today part of the human gene pool, and although they can provide excellent material for working on ourselves, they are also a source of real suffering. The Bible points out that the disobedience of Adam and Eve infected the physical world, causing thistles and thorns to grow and life on Earth to bring pain and travail to everyone.

In Christian teaching, I think that, as a friend recently pointed out, these flaws in our DNA as well as those in our psychological world form what's traditionally termed "original sin". Each human child inherits the results of that first fall from grace. Baptism can give us the possibility of overcoming it, and takes away the original "stain" of that sin - our inherited tendency to concupiscence - by transmitting the grace of Christ to the child or adult entering the Christian life. But we all have to bear the consequences of that original fall, and to battle against the tendency to sleep and apathy which constantly threatens to overcome us.

In Gurdjieff's own mythology, the history of Kundabuffer, while not exactly the same as the Biblical account, does parallel the story of the Fall. The organ Kundabuffer is said to have been implanted in Man by higher beings, after a cosmic "mistake" was made, in order to prevent mankind's premature spiritual development. In this story, it was necessary for human beings to transmit a certain type of energy for a while, and Kundabuffer was placed in us so that we would see things the wrong way round, and not develop too fast. When the necessity for it was over, Kundabuffer was removed, but its consequences have unfortunately remained in our psychology and are responsible for our fallen, sleeping state.

Students of Gurdjieff have made strenuous efforts to analyze the exact nature and placement of Kundabuffer, but none of these attempts are wholly convincing. Gurdjieff was adamant that his mythology should not be too easily comprehended, because simply analysing facts with the intellectual centre would bypass the essential emotional work that is truly beneficial for our understanding. When a student read aloud to him some of "All and Everything", G thought he had made it too easy to understand, and said he had to "Bury the dog deeper"!

Of course, the student questioned G - did he mean "bury the bone"?

No, Gurdjieff insisted - he really meant "bury the dog"!

And subsequently all kinds of speculation have arisen about what "the dog" meant - was G alluding to Sirius, the so-called "dog star" around which our own solar system revolves? Certainly, he may have been. It's an intriguing possibility, but to become too bogged down in any detail of G's writings can mean missing the overall effect he wished to produce, that of awakening our deeper thoughts and feelings, which alone can help us become conscious.

For me, as for my own teacher and for Mrs Pogson, the overall message of both the Kundabuffer myth and the story of the Garden of Eden are very close. Both say that we come into this world in an already imperfect state, with flaws in our Essence, in the psychology of those who surround us, and in the nature of the physical world in which we must live.

Our struggle is against sleep, the sleep so easily produced by all these obstacles, and consequently against everything in us that tends to send us to sleep. 

Mrs Pogson taught that the Fall of Mankind is repeated every day as our personal fall into a lower state of being. When we wake each morning, we are in Essence. As soon as we begin to think in categories of "I", "me", "mine", then we fall into limitation. 

Kundabuffer caused mankind to take unreality for reality, to see everything upside down. The Work exists so that gradually, through intense effort and suffering, and with the help of Conscious Humanity, we will eventually be able to see reality - and to become real ourselves.