Where Were You Before the Tree of Life? – The Experiment: The True History of the Darkness & the Light - Chapter 1: The Tree of Life: Archetypes, Metaphors, & Illusion
The Tree of Life is a common metaphorical image in the mythology of just about every country and race on Earth in one form or another.
It is an archetype or prototype, something that was in the beginning an original image.
Although its meaning seems to vary from place to place, its central role in such cultural traditions as the maypole and many similar religious practices seems to be everywhere we look.
How widespread most of these archetypes are, is startling in and of itself.
Renowned writer and culturist Joseph Campbell tried to explain the existence and origins of such archetypal images in the body of his work.
His major explanation for the commonality in various cultures of these archetypes seems to be ‘independent invention’ rather than what he liked to term ‘diffusion.’
What Campbell referred to as archetypes included such images as death, rebirth, a child who becomes a savior, virgin birth, a sacred world mountain, the great goddess, time as a cyclical thing, the axis mundi or world axis, the primeval waters, the serpent, certain kinds of sacrifice, an awakening, and even things as seemingly simple as the lotus blossom.
These are images that can be found, more than just coincidentally, in so many myths and legends, cultural and religious histories, as well as on the personal or individual level all around the world.
Robert Segal boils down Campbell’s work to the all-engrossing question lying at its very heart, one that is also very vital to our own forthcoming research into the very nature of archetypes in our history.
The questions is,
Are these mythical images that we see all around us, the archetypes themselves, or are they simply symbols that seek to represent the original archetype themselves?
Are they the real thing itself, or are they meant to represent something else.
Campbell’s idea that these archetypal images arose through independent invention suggests that each culture came up with an archetype such as the Tree of Life on its own.
This means they were not in any way, shape, or form, borrowed from another culture or influence.
There could be two possible explanations for this coincidence, he argues—the first is heredity, to Campbell the most likely explanation.
Heredity being that a certain image once formulated within a cultural or religious group of some kind is then handed down from elder to younger and thus multiplies and divides its influence within that group itself.
The second explanation is experience.
If it were experience from which these archetypal images spread then that would mean that each race or culture that has the Tree of Life in its mythology has actually, somewhere in its dim distant past, had an actual experience of something that anyone would commonly recognize or logically symbolize as a Tree of Life.
This could have been while in a physically wakened state, or in an archetypal dream shared by many in the culture—dreams being a central storage depot for many of the religious visions and images.
Campbell placed a lot of importance on dreams.
Devoid of what he called an ‘effective general mythology in our immediate society’, each one of us, he said, will resort to his own
“Private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams”
to create for ourselves our own system of mythological ideas and metaphors.
As one of his critics put it, this means that as we walk down the street, we are
“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, standing this very afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”
Psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, who founded the analytical school of psychology, was one of Campbell’s mentors.
For Jung, however, it was only inherited causes of imagery that could be archetypal.
Campbell, however, uses the term far more loosely in his interpretations by suggesting that even acquired causes can also be archetypal.
By archetypes, both Campbell and Jung, imply not just recurring mythological subjects but ones that also both stir emotion and propel behavior.
Political emblems and symbols of national pride such as the Bear for Russia or the Bald Eagle for the Unites States are the most common examples of these.
Each city, state and region within the United States goes out of its way to have a state flower, a city motto, something that stirs the emotions with regard to that particular region or geographical location.
These are the New World Order’s greatest weapons against Mankind because they of the emotional significances they stir deep, deep with our Souls.
Jewish Soul VS. Gentile Soul – Library of Rickandria
Later in life, Campbell went on to formulate the idea that all myths and epics of legend and fable are linked by the fact that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need of the human psyche to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities; that we have indeed created these things to explain our very existence.
But what if, instead of all these legends being the wild flights of fancy of a lonely people squatting besides their campfires at night, what if they were indeed true?
Every legend and fable have somewhere in it, that grain of truth which we will herein seek to glean in putting together the bigger puzzle of history.
Archetypes, Campbell proposes, are the releasers of whatever it is that directly prompt emotions and actions in animals:
they are innate releasing mechanisms.
An example of this might be ‘the golden arches of McDonald’s’ that now serve to open some innate doorway to our feeling of being hungry, whether, in truth, we are actually hungry at all.
Archetypes then are triggers that activate emotions and actions.
Like keys to locks that open doors, archetypes are keys that trigger responses that can then unlock deep-seated needs and desires within each of us.
Archetypes themselves, however, need to be activated in the person’s psyche and it has to be some form of concrete symbol that is the ultimate trigger to activate them.
The most famous example of this is Pavlov’s dog salivating at the ringing of a bell.
With humans, a certain piece of music, a smell, a touch, or especially a certain symbol within our sight, can all be triggers that open inner doorways which then allow our emotions and thoughts to be manipulated, once the inner defenses are down.
The advertising and marketing industries that now seek to control all our consumer spending habits knows how to target us with just such trigger-releasing mechanisms—
- logos
- jingles
- slogans
all are triggers meant to stimulate our complex emotional needs and push us toward spending our acquired energies, in the form of money, on something the advertiser or marketer want to sell.
Archetypes are central to this book and the concrete symbols which invoke them are a key element to understanding the:
- power religions
- political parties
- secret societies
and other such control groups exert over each and every one of us, particularly that monolith we shall come to know as the New World Order.
In The Mythic Image, as in others of his books, Campbell compares myths to dreams, saying that both come from the deep unconscious side of our beings.
His argument is, briefly, that through dreams a door is opened to mythology.
Since myths are of the nature of a dream, dreams arising from an inward world unknown to our waking consciousness, so then do myths arise from that very same inward world of the unknown.
Whether the unconscious is full of acquired ideas or inherited ones, Campbell does not like to definitely say, though he contends that myths, like dreams, are,
a) composed less of plots than of images
b) have a logic of their own
c) can only be experienced, but never truly analyzed
This is not to say that this author fully agrees with everything Campbell is saying.
This is only to give the reader some semblance of groundwork for what is to come.
In explaining away the similarities among myths of various countries and cultures, Campbell downplays the importance of independent invention, focusing himself instead on the idea of diffusion, that each spread somehow from a single source or incident Strangely enough, Campbell suggests that the psychological and metaphysical functions of myth prevent them from having a social function as well—
“If myth serves to reconnect humans with their severed selves it operates devoid of any connection to the workings of life.”
In one of his works (Magic) he agrees though that myths do at least have some dealings with society.
Social problems, he admits, stem from psychological ones, from the failure to tend to the unconscious:
“. . . every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness.
Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance . . .”
How the rediscovery of a severed part of either humans or the cosmos would assist one socially, Campbell does not say, yet this severed part of humanity is exactly that which these series of volumes shall attempt to return to their rightful owners.
Campbell argues that the individualism espoused by creative mythology renders impossible the fulfillment of any social function myth might have since, having a logic of their own, they are never truly able to be analyzed.
He finds it impossible to believe, he says, that the ways of any one society are divinely sanctioned by mythology.
Hence, he doesn’t in his own way, trying to use purely mental techniques of interpretation, understand the inherent spiritual nature of dream symbology and its purpose in helping maintain the balance between all the inner the multidimensional worlds of the human being and their outer world in which they must function daily.
As one of society’s proclaimed experts on mythology and archetypes, Campbell’s ideas reflect the tendency, as do most or all of our experts in the scientific, left-brained world that we live in, to espouse a philosophy that some things can never, and almost should never, be known.
This is one of the greatest foundation stones of complicity with which the New World Order has paved its way to total domination of this and many other planets.
Often it seems as if it is almost a criminal act for us to try, let alone to say that we do know or perceive answers that come from unscientific personal experience or from beyond the physical plane of existence rather than from verifiable ‘scientific’ evidence.
Where and when then could the common experience, group image or mass-vision of the Tree of Life have occurred in history that would have allowed each and every race to have it as one of their inherited images?
That is a question we will seek to answer by tracking our original ancestry, one from which both hereditary and diffusion explanations of archetypes could stem.
Take a look at this creation story from the Wapangwa people of Tanzania which uses of the theme of what is called excretory creation, centered as are so many are, around a Tree of Life, much as we have in the Christian idea of the trees in the Garden of Eden.
“Before there was a sun, a moon, or stars, there was only the wind and a tree on which there lived some ants.
There was also the Word, which controlled everything, but the Word could not be seen; it was a catalyst for creation.
“Once the wind became angry at the tree for standing in its way, so it blew particularly hard, tearing off a branch on which there were white ants.
When they landed, the ants were hungry, so they ate all of the leaves on the branch, sparing only one, on which they defecate a huge pile.
“They then had no choice but to eat their own excrement, and over time, as they ate and redeposited their excrement, the pile became a mountain that finally spread to the original tree.
By then the ants preferred excrement to leaves, and they continued the process of adding to the pile until it had become the earth.
“The wind still blew on the world so strongly that parts of the excrement pile began to harden into stone.
The world gradually formed, until the Word sent snow and then warm wind, which melted the snow and brought a huge flood.
The waters killed the ants; there was water covering everything.
“Later the earth and the world tree joined, and the trees, grasses, rivers, and oceans took form.
The air gave birth to beings that flew about singing.
These beings came to earth and became animals, birds, and humans, each with its own song or language.
“The new beings were hungry.
The animals wanted to eat the Tree of Life, but the humans defended it.
This led to a huge war between humans and animals and to the tradition of humans and animals eating each other.
The war was so ferocious that the earth shook, and bits and pieces of it flew off, gained heat, and became the sun, moon, and stars.
“After the war there was the creation of gods, rain, thunder, and lightning.
A long-tailed sheep with a single horn was so happy at the end of the great war that she leapt into the air, caught fire, and became the source of thunder and lightning.
“The new gods who sprang up were harsh with humans.
One of them told the people that the sheep that had sprung into the air had killed the Word, the ultimate creator, and that the people would be reduced in size and in the end would be consumed by fire.” (Source: Beier, 42-46.)
While almost being prophetic of the dilemma facing Humankind in its present situation, this creation story from East Africa shares many common elements with those of places as far away as ancient Sumeria and Babylonia, many thousands of miles to the north of its point of origin.
Taking a look at any good collection of these creation myths from around the world shows the reader just how many of them are filled with archetypes and share such elements in common.
The most common of all, however, is still the Tree of Life, sometimes as the fruit of the Tree of Life, a fruit which almost inevitably, those who are the first beings created must never be allowed to eat.
A common element in Tree of Life mythology is that this fruit of the tree has the power, either alone or in concert with other ingredients, to give eternal life.
In his book, Stairway to Heaven, Zecharia Sitchin, the Sumerian scholar famous for his archaeological ideas about transcultural gods, relates a description of The Tree of Life by the Biblical patriarch Enoch in which the tree gives forth streams of:
- honey
- milk
- oil
and wine.
In his work with Sumerian mythology, Sitchin suggests this tree was in fact the palm tree brought by alien ancestors who spread it out to the various corners of the Earth, to those areas where it would grow.
His interpretation makes sense since there is the coconut palm from which we obtain milk and oil, and the date palm from which we get a honey-like date syrup, as well as date wine.
Indeed, what better plant to take along with you on a long trip through space in order to supply all your needs?
“And the angel who was with him confirmed that it indeed it was the very tree from which Adam and Eve had eaten before they were driven out of Eden . . .
It was as high as a fir, its leaves were as of the carob, and its fruit like the clusters of the vine.”
“As to the tree, no mortal is to touch it until the great judgment.
Its food is for the elect.
Its fragrance shall be in their bones, and they shall live a long life on earth.”
Barbara Clow confirms Sitchin’s explanation of the alien origin of the palm tree in her book, Heart of the Christos:
“This was a time of primeval bliss. . .
They bought a Tree of Life—the date palm—and the seeds of corn, bananas, and grains. . .
The Tree of Life became the central altar of Adamah (her name for the original humans).
Adamah noticed that the Tree lived thousands of years, just like the Nibiruans.
The Tree’s solar seed year is 3600 years because its DNA is Nibiruan.”
Much of the mythology surrounding the Tree of Life on one level revolves around Man’s own quest for eternal life.
And more than anything, this quest seems to be triggered by an association with ancient gods of one type or another, most of whom lived to incredible ages, setting up a feeling of envy in Mankind “to be like the gods” and live forever.
“In the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” (Genesis 3:5)
Basically, it became a case of ‘if they can do it, why can’t we?’ And in surrendering to this feeling of envy, Mankind also found himself trapped in a “race against time” in his life, measuring everything against the average span of his lifetime.
This is a race that is still a key to his imprisonment today.
This desire to be like the gods will come up a lot in the course of this book, but for now we will just mention it in passing.
In The Gold of the Gods, famous ‘space-gods’ researcher and author Erich von Däniken tells of the legends in China surrounding just one such god of seemingly eternal nature.
Be careful to note the number of common archetypes in this legend, they will crop up again and again throughout the length and breadth of our tale.
“According to legend, every ruler and “Son of Heaven” is supposed to have lived for 18,000 terrestrial years and if we take this estimate at its face value, P’an Ku brought order into the heavens 2,229,000 years ago!
Perhaps these astronomical calculations may be a few years out here and there, but what does it matter with such a family tree?”
This god, P’an Ku, whose legend is said to have spread throughout China, was depicted differently in different regions, not surprising in view of the vast size of the country.
Sometimes he is a being with two horns on his head and a hammer in his right hand, sometimes he appears as a dragon mastering the four elements, sometimes he holds the sun in one hand and the moon in the other, and sometimes he is chipping away at a rock-face, watched by a snake.”
In ancient Egypt, The Pyramid Texts detail the efforts of the Pharaohs to attain this very same elusive goal of eternal life.
In these texts, the Tree of Life seems to again symbolize some form of nourishment, which along with the Water of Life, imparts eternal life to the incoming Pharaoh.
The Pharaoh was made to recite magic formulas to make the Boat of Heaven sail back, its destination the “Imperishable Star” whose symbol was the winged disc, and to approach “the Double Gates of Heaven” (from which we likely get the myth of St. Peter at the gates of heaven).
As Sitchin describes it, there was one final detail to attaining an everlasting afterlife for the Pharaoh:
the king must then find and partake of the “Nourishment of Everlasting,” an elixir which keeps rejuvenating the gods in their celestial abode . . .
“Give sustenance to the king from your eternal sustenance.”
The Pharaoh must then make his way to the Field of Life/the Great Lake of the Gods where he was to obtain both a beverage that is the Water of Life, and a food that is the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
In the texts it is the Great Green Divine Falcon who leads the king to the Field of Life and to find the Tree of Life that grows there.
There, the goddess who is the Lady of Life meets the king.
She has in her hands four jars with whose contents she
“Refreshes the heart of the Great God on the day when he awakens.”
She offers the divine elixir to the king, “therewith giving him Life.”
This ‘legend’ has direct correlations to that of two of the New World Order’s most significant ancestors, King Arthur and Jesus of Nazareth.
Another instance of the Tree of Life in Sitchin’s work can be found in Divine Encounters in which the Tree is again depicted along with the Winged Disc, the celestial symbol of the aliens from Nibiru, and the depiction of what we are told is the whole solar system (a central deity surrounded by a family of eleven planets) flanking a Tree of Life.
This would seem to symbolize the Tree of evolution of something more than just the solar system, however, and in fact does relate, as many Trees do, to the origin of life on this planet from all twelve signs of the Zodiac, as we shall find out later in the book is exactly what happened.
If this all seems difficult to accept at first, consider the Milky Way's center as the busy core of a metropolis, crowded with huge populations of stars frantically dancing to the rhythm of gravitation.
New results already show some 100,000 stars never seen before.
The Milky Way is, in fact, a large spiral galaxy 130,000 light-years across which began to form about 10,000 or 15,000 million years ago.
Structured in a thin disk with spiral arms and a great bulge in the center, our Solar System is in the edge of one of the arms about 25 000 light-years from the center: a very quiet area compared to the inner central bulge.
100,000 red giants have been newly identified in a region of the galactic center that as seen from Earth is only about four times the angular size of the full moon.
Most of these are the so-called AGB (Asymptotic Giant Branch) stars, very evolved stars that provide key clues to unveiling the star-formation history of the Milky Way because their masses vary according to their age; it is therefore easy to determine how long ago a certain population of AGB stars was born.
AGB stars expel huge amounts of dust to the environment during a brief stage of their lives - dust in which many chemical elements including those essential for life - are present.
These instances of the Tree of Life do not sound like the proverbial apple tree that most people would associate with Adam and Eve in the Biblical Garden of Eden.
The apple was supposedly the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which Adam and Eve were tempted to eat by the serpent.
The Tree of Life was the tree from which Adam and his Eve were also barred from eating
“Lest they become like one of us . . . and live forever.”
Being thrown out of the Garden of Eden meant that they never got the chance to eat of this Tree of Life. In Gilgamesh, one of the earliest surviving works of ancient Sumeria, circa 2900 BC, the hero Gilgamesh goes on a quest to join the gods in an Afterlife.
On his journey, Gilgamesh sees “an enclosure of the gods” wherein there was a garden; but the “garden” was made up entirely of artificially carved precious stones:
“All kinds of thorny Prickly Bushes were visible, blooming with gemstones; Carnelian bore fruit hanging in clusters, its vines too beautiful to behold.
The foliage was of lapis lazuli; and grapes, too lush to look at, of stones were made.”
The partly damaged verses go on to list other kinds of fruit bearing trees and the variety of precious stones—white, red and green—of which they were made.
Pure water also runs through the garden, and in its midst, he sees
“like a Tree of Life and a Tree of . . . that of An-gug stones were made.”
A Noah-like character named Utnapishtim shows up, not aged at all even though it is at least 6,000 years after the flood, and says,
“I will reveal to thee, Gilgamesh, a hidden matter, a secret of the gods I will tell thee . . .
Everlasting life is attained not by being immortal—it is attained by staying young forever! . . .
A plant there is, like a prickly berry bush is its root.
Its thorns are like a brier-vine’s; thine hands the thorns will prick (spikenard).
(But) if with thine own hands the plant you could obtain, rejuvenation you will find.”
Thus, once again, the Tree of Life seems to pertain to something dealing with the attainment of eternal life for the mortals.
In most versions of this story, the gods, jealous of what man might become if he attained such immortality,
“Lest he become as one of us,”
are not willing to let them have eternal life, not willing to let him taste of the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
The Book of Mormon’s version of the Tree of Life is somewhat different, although again, there are elements in common—archetypal images.
In the Mormon version, the fruit, once eaten, does wonderful things for the attitude and perspective of he or she who eats of it.
The story is of Lehi and the Tree of Life, in which Lehi sees the Tree in a vision,
“a Tree whose (white) fruit was desirable to make one happy” (1 Nephi 8: 10)
Unlike Adam and Eve, however, once Lehi eats of the fruit, instead of being punished, his soul is filled “with exceedingly great joy.”
He then desires that his family should do likewise
“For I knew that it was desirable above all other fruit.” (1 Nephi 8: 10)
He is worried, however, by two of his sons who will not partake of the fruit and fears
“Lest they be cast off from the presence of the Lord”
for not eating of the fruit.
In Lehi’s vision there are a number of other symbolic elements or archetypes, including a “river of water,” “a rod of iron,” and a “straight and narrow path,” among others.
One common interpretation of Lehi’s vision espoused in Mormonism is that the Tree of Life shows a vision for Jesus’ life work.
The river is the River of Life; the fruit of the tree represents God’s love; the iron rod represents God’s word; and of course, the straight and narrow path represents just that—the straight and narrow path on which the righteous must travel to achieve eternal life.
During an exhibition of various artistic interpretations of the Tree of Life at the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City a number of years ago, various representations of Lehi and his vision were exhibited from Mormon followers around the world.
Some, like the one from Peru, also incorporated in their imagery the many levels of heaven.
The depictions of the Tree itself varied depending on the climate and the flora in the country from which the artwork came.
Is it striking then that the palm tree (the Tree of Life associated with the alien gods of Sitchin and Von Daniken) figures as such a common decoration on some Mormon buildings, for example, the Mormon Relief Agency in Salt Lake City, when Utah and the areas from which the Mormon religion originated are cooler areas where palm trees do not grow?
In the Old Testament of the Bible, the Tree of Life is sometimes called the Tree of Jesse and has a genealogical symbology which relates to the patriarch of the long royal lineage which included King David and Jesus.
Exposing the Old Testament – Library of Rickandria
Abraham sees Sarah in a dream as a date-palm, a Tree of Life, meaningful for the twelve tribes which sprang from her son, Isaac.
In the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the texts makes reference to “the trees of the water,” which in this particular case has a derogatory meaning, and to “the trees of life” which have access to the water source, water having a very salvific meaning in the Qumran Scrolls.
Psalm 1:3 lauds the righteous who are like,
“A tree planted by streams of water.”
Here the Tree of Life again relates to the idea of eternal life, at least symbolically.
In Ezekial 31:14, however, there seems to be a confirmation of the idea that it is not proper for Mankind to have eternal life:
“All this is in order that no trees by the waters may grow to lofty height or set their tops among the clouds, and that no trees that drink water may reach up to them in height; for they are all given over to death, to the nether world among mortal men, with those who go down to the Pit.”
Another type of tree often associated with the Tree of Life in Biblical images is the cedar.
The use of the cedar in reference to such imagery is grounded in medicinal folklore for indeed there is a kind of tree which is known for its healing properties, and it is termed ‘the tree of life’ (arborvitae in Latin).
Arborvitae (“tree of life”) is the common name for certain related evergreen trees of the cypress family, so named early in the 17th century because of the medicinal value ascribed to their balsamic resin.
Extracts of this resin increase blood pressure and reduce fever.
The leaves have a fragrant, balsam-like odor, and the wood is reddish-brown, light, and durable.
Some of the larger species are valuable timber trees
The smaller species are cultivated in gardens and as wind screens for more tender plants.
The common, or American, arborvitae, often called white cedar, is found in the northeastern regions of North America as far south as Virginia.
The only other species native to North America is the giant arborvitae, found west of the Rocky Mountains from northern California to Alaska, sometimes called red cedar or canoe cedar.
The Oriental arborvitae of the Old World is smaller and less hardy than the American species.
It has denser foliage, more nearly vertical branches, and larger, rougher, and more nearly spherical cones.
So here we find a tree which fits the role in, not giving eternal life, but as Utnapishtim says in the Gilgamesh epic, the secret to everlasting life is attained not by being immortal—
“But by staying young (healthy) forever.”
As we later begin to delve deeper into the ancient mysteries which are so much a part of the formation of history, the Tree of Life arises as the central image of the Cabala, the Jewish mystical tradition, variously spelled as Kabbalah and Qua’bla as well.
Kabbalah, Hermeticism & the Occult – Library of Rickandria
And again we find reference made to the palm tree.
The medieval Spanish Cabala, the most important form of Jewish mysticism, has to do with esoteric knowledge about the nature of the divine world and its hidden connections with the world of creation.
The medieval Cabala is a theosophical system that draws on Neoplatonism and Gnosticism and expresses itself heavily in symbolic language.
In this symbolic language, there are:
Ten spheres connected together by twenty-two paths, corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and together they constitute the “tree of life,” the visual representation of the creation.
Through meditation and prayer, devotees seek to scale the tree of life and explore the relationship between humankind and the universe.
The Middle Pillar of this grand representation of the Tree of Life is
“a single pole, or shaft, joining Heaven and earth.
It is the path that permits direct communion with God.
It is the Tree of Life as a single palm tree.”
Once again, we find the Tree of Life involved with the exploration of spiritual enlightenment, the man walking with his feet on the Earth and his head in the clouds or heaven, leaving out no stage of human experience.
Attaining spiritual enlightenment through the use of the Cabala then becomes a living version of the child’s game Snakes and Ladders, or Chutes and Ladders as it is sometimes called, in which the devotee tries to raise his level of awareness up the central axis of consciousness of the Tree of Man to enlightenment.
Not coincidentally is the use, in the original version of this game, of the serpent or snake as the means by which those on the path fall back in awareness.
Trees are an appropriate symbol for this conscious effort to reach into the higher dimensions of existence since they themselves are a direct connection between the 2nd and the 3rd dimensions–bringing the energy of the one into the energies of the other to help create and support life as we know it on this planet.
The Hermetic Tee of Life has seven main branches and ten heads symbolizing the seven planets and the ten spheres of Kabbalistic tradition, along with the various aspects man sheds as he ascends the tree.
The serpent often pictured wound around its trunk is variously interpreted as the wisdom necessary for enlightenment and the primal energy of the soul.
In the Kabbalah the abode of God the Almighty is in the tenth Sefira, a “brilliance” or heavenly place, a Tenth Heaven.
The Sefirot were usually depicted as concentric circles, often superimposed, on the image of Kadmon (“The Ancient One”), the center of which is called Yesod (“Foundation”), the tenth Ketter (“Crown” or God the Most High).
Beyond it stretches the Ein Soff –infinity, infinite space.
These levels as we shall as see as we progress along our journey represent the various levels of consciousness or dimensions surrounding the planet Earth and the individual human being, much like the rings of a tree when it is cut.
As Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi explains in Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree, the Tree of Life was also used in the unkabbalistic practice of magic, using yet another set of archetypes placed on the Tree in place of those of the Jewish Kabalistic tradition.
Like the symbolism of the New World Order, the Knights Templar, and so many other religious and secret societies, The Tree of Life itself has various levels of interpretation.
As a metaphor for the title of this book, it refers to the intricate interwoven pattern of the genealogical tree of life from which all human evolution stems.
This a reverse tree if you will, with its roots in the stars, and its branches here on Earth.
The roots of this tree go back a long, long way, and have their beginnings in the universe, on planets as diversely different from that of Earth as Sirius and the Pleiades.
Yet the fact that each one of these planets supports a high level of sophisticated and intelligent life is consciously not accepted by a vast majority of people here on Earth.
Therefore, before getting too far into our journey it will be necessary to take a look at some of the mythology of Planet Earth in order to uncover the seeds from which this particular Tree of Life sprang, for this Tree of Life also relates to the spiritual purpose of this planet in the grander scheme of the Universe.
The truth of its purpose lies in its star-seeding and in its having been nurtured by so many different parent races scattered throughout the Universe.
This truth lies hidden amongst the convoluted reporting of history, a history written by Beings with their own agenda, and throughout the various religions which have evolved on the planet over the past 50,000 years and more.
To state this purpose plainly and simply, planet Earth was an experiment to connect up all twelve dimensions of spiritual existence on one planet, existent at the time, and give the souls who came here a chance to gain a greater range of experiences.
This would give them the opportunity to make quantum leaps in their spiritual growth, blending together the best of each of the various worlds and civilizations in this area of the galaxy.
The other planets from which we were star-seeded have more or less only one kind of lesson to teach, one dimension of existence – a higher level than this one, perhaps, but without the spiritual breadth and depth and potential we have here on Earth.
And it is because of our ancestry from the stars, the blending of many races, that we here on Earth have this awesome potential.
If America is the melting-pot of the planet, then planet Earth is the melting pot of not just the Galaxy, but in fact the entire Universe Itself.
Over the past 2,000 years in particular this information about the real Tree of Life has been exorcised, censored, or just completely edited out of most of our holy books and our history books as well, in what ultimately has become a successful attempt to cover up our true origins, to stop this experiment from working.
David Icke likes to talk about the fear and respect which many alien races have for human beings because of this great spiritual potential we possess.
Whereas they are fairly limited in their potential for making quantum leaps and bounds in their own existences, human beings are almost unlimited in terms of what they can accomplish during one simple lifetime here on Earth.
As I like to tell clients in my healing room, being Human means they have the potentiality of all 14 dimensions.
What then could this Tree of Life be which seems to be both good and evil for people if they eat or partake of it, depending on the attitude of those who offer or withhold it?
The Tree of Life is the knowledge of how to attain eternal life—perhaps not just the seeming eternal life of our alien forefathers who lived for vastly longer periods than we do here on Earth, but the true eternal life of a soul reaching into the highest levels of Heaven from which we all sprang in the Beginning, This fear David speaks of is not simply fear, for many of these alien lifeforms cannot feel emotions as we do here on Earth, but indeed it is a jealousy.
They, these beings we sometimes worship as gods, are jealous of what man might become if he attained such knowledge of how to reach true immortality,
“Lest he become as one of us.”
They are not willing then to let Us have eternal life, not willing to let Us taste of the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
And so, they have focused all their energies on squashing this knowledge, hiding it away from the sight of those who they deemed unworthy or from those most likely to use this knowledge for the benefit of all.
Instead, they have used this knowledge itself in the pursuit of power over other people, used it to create a slave race captive on a prison world –the most beautiful world in all of Creation.
Then they have completed their task by go systematically destroying all hope for Mankind to ever leave this perfectly implemented snare.
This is where the Dark side has its origin.
As stated in the introduction, there is a force here in this Universe that does not exist yet in the other Universes—for there are indeed many Universes, there never being just one verse to any song, and so Creation is—a beautiful song with many verses and an infinite number of ways of singing it.
This book, more than anything else, is a history that seeks to relate the birth, growth, and hopefully death of the Darkness in this corner of the Universe.
As the quote at the beginning of the book suggests, Mankind has come to think of Darkness, evil, the Devil, as being some nebulous thing in religious books of which we see its influence in the world, but do not really think or believe that there is such an entity in and of itself.
There is.
His name, for want of a more familiar term to call him, is Lucifer.
The Misunderstood Lucifer – Library of Rickandria
This is His story, and the story of how his influence and of that which created Him, has spread from the stars to this most beautiful of all planets, and the reasons, purposes, and methods by which he has managed to take over the planet in quest of His sworn mission to become God of His own Universe.
Along the way to achieving this sworn goal he has had many helpers, and it is they who have sought to manipulate and control the forces of Creation in order to imprison those other souls who are here simply to learn their lessons, going on about their business in this great adventure which is Creation.
These are the:
- secret societies
- religions
- military
- political
and scientific groups who think of themselves as the elite, the Illuminati or 'enlightened ones', here to meter out whatever they feel are the just rewards to the rest of us—those who are “the trees of the water,” those who are,
“All given over to death, to the nether world among mortal men, with those who go down to the Pit.”
As detailed so beautifully in Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 children’s fantasy, A Wrinkle in Time, many worlds have fallen to this Darkness before us.
Many of us still have memories of lives on other planets fighting against this tyranny that seeks to suck the Light out of all Creation.
And one more time we are here to do it all again, though like any war, there is one crucial turning point in the struggle that turns the tide in favor of one side or another.
For the seemingly eternal struggle against Darkness, Planet Earth is it.
Before the Tree of Life, however, was the original event known as the Creation.
Most of us have some vague notion of it, either from the Christian Bible, from one of the other holy books of various religions, or from the realms of evolutionary science such as it may be.
Exposing Spiritual Corruption: Spiritual Alchemy & the Bible – Library of Rickandria
In the Beginning we find Adam being made out of clay or the dust of the earth, multiplying his family seemingly incestuously out of just two beings, and then the world expanding as it does from there.
This Creation story as we know it, however, does not provide the necessary details needed to satisfy our rational minds as to how creation and the evolution of life truly began or how they work in this Universe.
Creation Myths of Civilizations – Library of Rickandria
If we do not like the Bible’s simplified version of the Creation, we are then left with the scientists’ fanciful notion that after a Big Bang somehow, life sprang out of a lifeless universe.
Big Bang – Library of Rickandria
From this cosmic explosion of matter Man somehow managed to pull Himself out of the muck and mire of a swamp somewhere as a single-celled creature that then became a fish, and then a monkey, and then a proto-human, and then the ultimate creature of the Universe—civilized man.
Both these Creation stories whitewash a much more extraordinary event than has ever been portrayed before now, one which has as its origin Original Cause—the beginning of all things in the Heart of the FATHER, HE who resides in the center of Creation itself.
That is where the real story of the Tree of Life must begin, long before the origins of this planet even came into the sentient thoughts of its Creators.
This book has been titled Where Were You Before the Tree of Life? because it is necessary for us to look at where we existed before our origins on this planet.
This will take us back to the origins of the universe—to the universal cosmic families from which we all once came.
Along the journey, it will also help to explain the affects that our origins have on our lives, both in the past and today, and give us some kind of insight into the lives and the choices we have to make in order to determine the kind of lives we will have in the not-too-distant future.
For many of the Beings on this planet Creation even involves going beyond this universe to other universes and into the very heart of creation itself—the Central Universe.
This book then also becomes a way of dispelling the myths from our lives, about cauterizing the insidious effects which these many thousands of years of propaganda have had on the group consciousness of this planet.
As a side benefit it also hopes to educate its reader on their own personal history so that none of those who wish to will ever be doomed to repeat over and over again the mistakes of the past, as the old saying goes.
Not by any purposeful intention but rather because of the way history has been written, it will also serve to restore the female energy to Creation which has for so long been suppressed or plainly just hidden from the eyes of the masses by the patriarchy of a ‘jealous male God’ over more than just the past 6,000 years.
One of the driving forces which inspired this book, and its title was a dream or vision, if you will, had by one of the original participants in the project.
In this vision, the woman saw a large tree similar to an oak, with many spreading branches and leaves, under which were two graves had been freshly dug.
From the one grave a man arose, floating off into an ethereal-like sky.
From the other grave, however, no one arose.
This was taken by both of us to symbolically mean that while the male essence has been allowed to rise in order to pursue his efforts of ascending the Tree of Life, the female remains buried, trapped beneath the mounds of earth shoveled upon her and her energies in order to keep her from rising to equality and taking her rightful place alongside man in Creation.
Although this is not solely the fault of the male, this has been a serious miscalculation on its part, and an insidious part of the patriarchy’s plan to subjugate women in order to control and manipulate the very processes of Creation itself.
It takes a combination of the male, the female, and of the neutral force or Holy Spirit, in order to truly create.
The female creates space for the male to fill, while the neutral force itself is the creative spark or catalyst that unites the two into one grander whole.
Where Were You Before the Tree of Life? – The Experiment: The True History of the Darkness & the Light - Chapter 1: The Tree of Life: Archetypes, Metaphors, & Illusion (basecamp.com)
Where Were You Before the Tree of Life? – The Experiment: The True History of the Darkness & the Light – Chapter 1: The Tree of Life: Archetypes, Metaphors, & Illusion – Library of Rickandria