Departure From The Way
Taken (with minor adaptations) from ‘Christ the Eternal Tao’ by Hieromonk Damascene
Pristine Simplicity
In the beginning, man was created in a state of pristine simplicity, pure awareness. His thoughts and memories were not diversified and fragmented as they are today, but were simple and one pointed.
He knew no mental distraction. While being wiser than any human being today, he was in a state of innocence, like a child, and in this state he lived in deep personal communion with God The Way and with the rest of creation, holding spiritual converse with them.
Being in such close communion with God, man participated directly in God’s Grace, which he experienced as a Divine and ineffable light which flooded his whole being. He was as it were clothed in this Light.
Man possessed self-awareness; that is, he was aware of an “I”, of being a unique creation, endowed with freedom of will.
“Made in the image of God,” he had an immortal spirit that could draw eternally closer to his creator. All of this gave him his special sense of personhood
Unlike the people of today, however, he did not have a sense of individuality. By this we mean that he did not live under the illusion that, as a unique person, he was sufficient unto himself.
While possessing freedom, he did not have the false sense that he existed free of anything else, that he was non-determined.
He was not conscious of being a seperate, isolated self, but cleaved unto God in a communion of love and united all creation in love unto himself.
Since he did not have diversified thoughts but only simple, pure awareness, he did not identify himself with such thoughts, as we do today.
And since he was not distracted by and enslaved to his senses, he did not identify himself with his physical body, as we do.
Thus, for all these reasons, we can say that, while being a person endowed with self-awareness, he was truly selfless.
When he was still in this state of pristine simplicity, man always acted in accordance with nature: both in accordance with his own human nature, and with the common nature of all creation.
This is the same as saying that he acted only in accordance with the ordering, directing Principle of all the nature- The Way.
His will, created pure by God, followed The Way in all things- not out of necessity, as did other creatures, but freely, out of love.
His freedom of will made him unique among all creatures, though not seperate from them.
This quality of freedom not only made for the possibility of his unique human personhood; it was also part of what made him “in the image of God.”
As God is free, so likewise man is free.
But between God and man there remained a fundamental difference. God is entirely sufficient unto Himself: self-existing, non- determined, unconditioned, standing in need of nothing.
He (God) is absolute Possibility. Man, on the other hand, is conditioned by the very fact that he was brought into being not by himself. His very minute-by-minute existence- not only his creation- is dependent on God.
The character of his existence is determined by his own God-given human nature, and by the common nature of the created order of which he is a part.
He has the ability to freely choose his actions within his determined, conditioned existence.
If he chooses to act according to nature, and thus according to The Way Who orders nature , all will go well.
But if he does not act naturally, he gets out of harmony with both The Way and with nature, and thus sets himself at odds with that which determined his very existence.
As long as man, in his self-awareness, remains humbly aware that he does not exist of himself, that of himself he is nothing at all, he will do what is natural to him.
He will do it freely and at the same time automatically- that is, spontaneously, because his “free will” will naturally fall in line with nature without his having to stop and consider anything.
When man begins to harbour the illusion of self-sufficiency, however, he becomes a “self” in the modern sense of the word: an individual desiring things for himself and pitting himself against other individuals.
If such was the possibly consequence of human freedom, why did God allow for it? It was in order to allow for love. Love must be freely given; it cannot exist without freedom. If God had not endowed the human essence with this quality, the world would be a cold, impersonal, entirely programmed environment.
the PRIMORDIAL departure
When man, in wrongly using his free will, first departed from The Way, he corrupted his primal simplicity and became fragmented.
Divested of the primal glory, of the garment of Uncreated Light that had enveloped him, he now found himself “naked” (Genesis 3:7). His spiritual corruption and death made him subject to physical corruption and death.
“After his transgression,” writes St. Macarius of Egypt “man’s thoughts became base and material, and the simplicity and goodness of his mind were intertwined with evil worldly concerns”
His will became divided. Now his “natural will,” which remained inclined to follow The Way in all things, was set against his “free will,” which had now taken on itself an inclination to depart from The Way.
Before his primordial departure from The Way, man had experienced only that which was natural to him. Now, however, he also experienced what was unnatural to him. Thus he self-willfully seized the “knowledge of good and evil,” destroying the primal simplicity and bringing duality into the world.
Before, man had been spontaneous, like a child. At every step, he freely chose, without thinking, to act according to nature, according to The Way.
Now, however, at every step he had to stop and think, to calculate: “Should I follow The Way or not?” Thus he became a complex being, inwardly divided, and always vacillating (hesitant , wavering).
Only God is self-existent. When man began to fall under the illusion of being a self-existent individual, he was essentially making himself into a little god.
This was the meaning of the primordial trap into which he fell: “Knowing good and evil, you will be as gods.”
Man had been created to rise, in his simple and uncompounded nature, in noetic (faculty of perception, particularly of spiritual perception, describing the proper grounding of the spiritual life) contemplation of the simple and uncompounded God.
To rise in love, and to unite all of creation with himself in love, raising it also to the Creator.
Instead of regarding The Way, however, he chose to regard what was easier and closer at hand: how own visible self. Instead of rising with God, he fell in love with himself.
Man had been meant to find pleasure in his limitless ascent to God and in loving communion with Him, the Source of all things.
But, in falling in love with himself, he began rather to seek pleasure from what was closer to him: his body and his senses.
All evil in the world can be traced to these two things: self-love and love of sensual pleasure.
Man had been created to desire God, the Uncreated source of his joy. But, in falling in love with himself, he had instead begun to desire created things.
Because of all this, God allowed suffering to enter the world.
He did this not out of vengeance, but out of love for man, so that through suffering arising from self- love, sensual pleasure, and the resulting desire for created things, man might see through the illusion of his self-sufficiency and return to his original designation: the state of pristine simplicity and communion with The Way.
the life of the ego
At the moment of man’s first act of disobedience to The Way, there suddenly appeared to him a sense that he had become wrong.
This fundamental sense of wrongness (“the knowledge of good and evil”) marked the birth of his ego and this of his self-consciousness.
As we saw in the previous Part, he lost the garment of Uncreated Light in which he had been clothed, and thus became aware that he was naked.
Since man’s ego was born through his trying to become a god unto himself, it is in the very nature of the ego to try to become autonomous.
Hence the ego shirks from admitting it is wrong; to admit this would be to admit that it is not god, and that there is a standard higher than itself.
This fear of admission was first seen in the ego’s attempt to “hide from the presence of God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8).
But the ego not only attempts to hide from God; as we have seen, it also attempts to hide from the spirit, for the spirit too convicts the ego of its wrongness.
Since the spirit, and not the ego, is supposed to be the master of the person, its very presence exposes the ego as a false commander and destroys the very basis from the ego’s existence.
How can the human ego, immersed in its own gratification, hide from the every-present reality of God and the spirit? How else than by a constant state of distraction into sensual pleasures, thoughts, memories and fantasies?
Thus, man’s fall into disobedience was at once a fall into distraction, and that was how his consciousness started to become as compounded and fragmented as it is today.
To distract himself from facing his wrongness, man seeks out he very things that made him wrong in the first place: self-love and sensual pleasure.
Gratifying himself in this way, he feels “right” again- but only temporarily.
Actually, he has only become more wrong, so that now he needs even greater distractions, and even greater shocks, to make him feel that he is right. In this way he progresses further along the path of self-destruction, truing to overcome his predicament by its very cause.
Our ego seeks any reassurance that, in fact, we are all right, that we did not make a mistake, and that we are God after all.
Our conscious selves may not admit that this is happening, but that is the actual underlying aim of our ego-life: to find anything that will enable us to forget our true selves and our hideous condition, and will make us feel, if only for a brief moment of ecstasy, that we are God, that we are in control, on top of things, and sufficient unto ourselves.
Such is the principle behind man’s constant desire to escape into the sensual pleasure of food, sex, drugs, alcohol, tobacco and entertainment etc; his desire for “love”, popularity, recognition, glory, power, group status, acceptance, and admiration for his physical appearance; and his desire to puff himself up through hatred, judgement, and the condemnation of others.