Has anyone got info on that particular tree? I was bantering with someones joke and I found it to be an extinct "plant" that existed on Mars. I ran this by a friend and he connected it to a description in Enoch of something like a Tamarind. The fruit was psychotropic, and this will open doors to understanding the past a little better for me. Another perspective on Eden as well.
As in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?
I've heard some interesting things about Pomegranates, but do not know the details...
I have always understood it to be completely symbolic in nature, however I suppose it wouldn't be unlike our Logos to contain a literal manifestation.
That was my original understanding. I could never get past "symbol" to find out what it symbolizes. Now i can. If it allows consciousness beyond the veil, and Ra states that if we had awareness of all beyond the veil we would be "godlike", it starts to click for me.
Symbolic fits just fine with "literally does not exist" and "not on this planet". Since it is gone all we have is a symbol of its existence.
I would perhaps look at Fruit as Catalyst?
Don't have anything to offer your quest to understand the symbolic meaning of the Tree of Knowledge, Pickle. I have little idea what it was originally intended to symbolize, or even what the popular conception is.
Just wanted to add that my favorite film, "The Fountain", depicts a version of the Tree that grants immortality through the death of the separate self and embrace of the all-self.
In the film the protagonist ingests what looks like Elmer's Glue issuing forth from the tree, and subsequently starts sprouting grass and flowers from his abdomen, much to his dismay. : )
Perhaps the film's creator drew on other traditions? Or perhaps what was depicted was intended to represent the Tree of Life rather than Knowledge, presuming those are two different things.
The book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn has an interesting take on the Tree of Knowledge as known in the myth from the Bible.
Essentially, he relates eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with the spread of agricultural society throughout the fertile crescent. The humans who started working against nature by cultivating land and growing society through agricultural means, eliminating the hunter-gatherer tribes which existed alongside nature rather than against it, felt they knew the best way to live, and felt they had the right to absorb the more "primitive" tribes into their own culture and use the land how they wished.
The idea being that these agricultural societies started thinking that there were things which were good and things which were evil in nature, instead of the fact that things just ARE without being inherently being good and evil. Good and evil being human definition applied to nature and giving us an excuse to control it, or applied to humans and giving us an excuse to control them.
Adam and Eve, the first humans who went from hunter-gatherer to agrarian, eating this fruit eventually created a society (which, since the myth was originally written, has spread world-wide) which is incongruent with nature, thus casting humans out of the Garden of Eden (a harmonious existence in-line with the natural order of the world).
Daniel Quinn believed that the myth was created to help tell the story of the destruction of tribal life.
Though I have no information on a physical manifestation of this symbol, my understanding of the Tree of Knowledge is slightly different. In order to have knowledge of good and evil, the veil must exist, for prior to the veiling, there was only good and there was no choice to engage in it. When the mind was veiled, it became as godlike because it was divested of the power of the Creator: the mind was given the opportunity to create its own reality by creating its own belief system. We all begin in confusion, which is a mixture of good and evil. Eventually, we choose either falsity or truth. Those who choose falsity explore evil; those who choose truth return to the good. The reason the Tree of Life cannot be eaten from once the Tree of Knowledge is eaten from is that the polarity of good and evil cannot be known without the illusion of separation from the divine.
Ignorance is innocence. The Tree of Life is natural evolution and process. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil obliterates that innocence.
In second density we simply existed; free of obligation.
Brought into higher consciousness by unnatural process, man was suddenly faced with the realization of self and a higher power. Suddenly man was like God, that is with the knowledge of self; with consciousness. Now he was faced with choice. To seek the higher power, the light, or to follow after the lusts of the flesh, the darkness.
And like the higher powers that brought them into this consciousness unnaturally, they chose to follow after the flesh and were led into the cycle of darkness; reincarnation.
The Tree of Life is our freedom from this cycle. It is the return to our natural design and process. This is what Christ tried to reveal to us. That symbol resounds throughout every religion. Many higher beings have brought truth to us in an effort to lead us into the Light and out of darkness.
The Tree of Knowledge of good and evil is the antithesis of the Tree of Life.