I've stated before that the texts of many of our religions are written in codes and in metaphor. All of these various religions express the same underlying principles and ideas wrapped  in the color and culture and poetic prose of the writer and the age from which it was born. These stories often use symbolism and metaphor to create physical pictures of trancendant ideas. Throughout history religious icons have been personified figureheads representing certain events or ideals and taking human forms. In this way it is we, the human, who have created our gods in our own image instead of the other way around. The Christian idea of man being created in god's image has become misconstrued to translate into god being some sort of incarnated creature that lives inside of creation, a human, but not human. This is humanity's egocentric mindset coloring the abstract universe in the shade of its own self, projecting itself onto its environment and holding onto the idea that we are the center of the workings of this great organism.

The Christian heirarchy can be broken down thusly: Jesus and Mary represent the duality in nature, the man and woman, the black and white, the polar opposites that create this physical world. In christianity god has taken the role of all loving father, being personified in the idealised self image of man, and conversely the devil has been personified to represent the inherent evil of the world, another representation of duality. The bible is filled with this kind of symbolism.

Take the story of Adam and Eve for example. This is a metaphorical story depicting the birth of human consciousness, or more generally all consciousness. In this context Adam and Eve can represent humanity and the Garden of Eden represents the 'kingdom of god' . It represents the unity of oneness and the balance and peace it presents. It is told in this story that the two had committed the original 'sin'. A sin, meaning a seperation from god. The temptation came from the desire to know and to reach out from the familiar and to touch the unkown. It was no coincidence that the tree that the fruit was plucked from was the Tree of Knowledge. This depicts man and woman becoming consumed of the desire of knowledge and seeking for itself the experience of knowing.

This is the birth of the imagined 'seperation', when we became autonomous entities and strayed from our spiritual roots. In all of our seeking we have all but lost our connection with that lost garden. The people we have become are but a fraction of the people we could be. The self we know is only one tiny part of the total self. We are like flowers, and this self we know, and this life even, are but one petal on the flower, and the flower is a part of a bush, and the bush rests firmly in the garden. By following our petals back to the root, we can all return to that metaphorical garden of Eden , the lush landscape of life. Before the birth of awareness, when 'we' rested in the garden we were at one with all and we contained the essence of every bush, every flower, and every petal, but we yearned to go beyond . So we reached out, loosing our ties to the root, knowing only our farthest reaches, the very tip of that last petal, and plucked the fruit from the tree. The fruit of consciousness from the tree of knowledge. And we continued on and became the tree and devoured the tree and now we again yearn, but for the returning to that place from whence we came.

We are all leaves on the tree of knowledge, connected at the root, sharing the same essence.

The essence at the root is the universal mind.