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The Birth of the Mirror: Self-Consciousness as the First Sin

11 1
tuesday
Before the rupture, the first human did not know itself as an object. It knew the world the way flame knows the oxygen that feeds it: without distance, without reflection, without the ache of “I.” Awareness flowed outward. Thought was transparent. The inner and outer were a single continuous field. Being and knowing were one act. The Zohar describes the first human as “radiant as a lamp before the wind,” meaning a consciousness so pure it gave light without casting a shadow. This was not innocence. It was unity. There was no watcher behind the eyes. Only perception, open and unselfed. What the tradition calls “the eating of the fruit” was not hunger for taste or knowledge as we understand it. It was the first moment a human being looked back at itself and saw an object where before there had been only flow. Self-consciousness is the bite. The Ari hints at this through the language of contraction. In the Garden there was no separate, interior self. There was no psychic interiority at all. The soul lived directly through its limbs. Thought was not hidden. Desire did not need to be interpreted. The self was a window, not a room. But when the fruit was taken, something unprecedented entered the world: the internal observer. “וַתִּפָּקַחְנָה עֵינֵי שְׁנֵיהֶם” “And the eyes of both of them were opened.” (Bereshit 3:7) The Sages ask: opened to what? They already saw creation. They saw angels. They saw the Garden. What new seeing broke upon them? They saw themselves. This is the tragedy of that awakening: not knowledge, but self-knowledge. Not wisdom, but the splitting........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)