Life’s Lessons 101: The Knowledge of Good and Evil

Editor’s note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud’s statement on Spiritual Recovery.

By OxDrover

In the Bible the story of Adam and Eve living in the Garden of Eden, in perfect paradise, is a story familiar to most children who have gone to Bible school at one point or another in their lives. If you take that same story, though, and look at it through adult eyes, you can see that there is a great moral to this tale, whether you believe it as a “creation” story or not.

Before the “fall,” Adam and Eve had only dealt with a loving God/Creator who had given them a wonderful place to live in peace and plenty. They were naked and innocent in this paradise on earth. They were given an occupation of “dressing the garden” and only given one warning that they must not disobey, and that was to not eat from the tree of the “Knowledge of Good and Evil,” for if they did not heed this warning, they would die.

The original psychopath, Satan, in the disguise of a serpent, like all villains shows up on the scene. We know about psychopaths and we know that Satan personified this personality disorder, because he saw someone who was happy and prosperous, but naïve, and he wanted to bring about their downfall. Not for any gain or motive we can perceive on his own part, but simply to have someone else believe his lies and suffer for that belief. He wanted to enjoy the downfall of someone else. That was his “reward” for telling the lies to Eve, to get Eve to disregard the warning she had received from God ”¦ just as our psychopaths lie to us to get us to not heed the instinctive intuitive warnings we get when we catch them in a lie, or something doesn’t feel right.

How did Satan accomplish his task? The story tells us that Satan was “more subtle than any beast of the field.” ”¦ ”and he said unto the woman, ‘Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?'” Satan knew this was not true, but he was setting her up with a conversation starter he knew she would respond to.

The woman said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said ”˜Ye shall not eat of it’”¦or ye shall surely die.”

The serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and she shall be as gods, knowing Good and Evil.” Here the psychopath, as they all do, tells Eve that the warning from God is for God’s benefit, because God wants to “keep the best stuff” for himself and that if she will just not heed the warning not to eat of the forbidden fruit, she will be equal with God.

Here Satan is creating a need in this woman, and holding the hope of accomplishing that need in Eve. Before Satan’s lie to her, Eve wasn’t unhappy, and she had no desires that weren’t met. She didn’t even desire to be “as gods,” but now she has started to desire something that Satan appears to be offering her.

How many times have our psychopaths held out to us a “prize” that we start to desire? A desire that they have created a fantasy of, and lied to us that they know the way for us to achieve this desire, our heart’s desire. Is it a perfect soul mate? A perfect love? A perfect marriage? A perfect business arrangement? A perfect child? The perfect restoration of something we have lost? What was the desire in you that the psychopath created with their lies?

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat.”

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.”

Adam and Eve immediately knew that they had been had. They knew they were naked, and they did now know the difference between Good and Evil. They knew that they had been tricked, that Satan had done them in completely, and that there was no going back to naiveté. You can’t UN-ring a bell.

While Adam and Eve tried to find a way to hide themselves from God and the consequences of their disobedience and naiveté, Satan skipped off on his merry way, having accomplished what he desired, the destruction of human kind. The taking away of the innocence of humanity. The bringing of death to the world.

However, though Satan brought evil into the world of man, humanity also received the knowledge that will protect us in that fall from grace. We have the knowledge of Good and Evil. We can choose our path.

The psychopaths in our lives who have attacked us because we didn’t have a proper knowledge of their evil intentions when they started to destroy us for their own purposes, their own selfish games, have given us the same “fruit” that Eve in her naiveté ate, the wisdom of the knowledge of Good and Evil.

While Eve in the Bible story paid a stiff price for her knowledge by being cast from paradise into the world, we also have paid a stiff price for this knowledge, some of us in terms of money and property, all of us in terms of pain and emotional devastation. Just as Eve must have berated herself for being so naïve and stupid for doing something she had been told not to, we berate ourselves for being so naïve and stupid in ignoring the warnings we also generally had all along. Why did we not heed the warnings, just as Eve did not heed God’s warning not to eat the fruit?

Just as Eve, after the fall, had to learn to live in the real world, the world that is not paradise, that contains evil people, selfish people, even her own son, Cain, who killed her other son, Abel, we as former victims of the psychopath have to learn to live in the real world and to distinguish what is good from what is evil. We have to learn from our experience with our own personal version of Satan, and our own version of our fall from grace, to know what is truly important in life. To use this hard-won knowledge of Good and Evil to make us stronger and better people.

We are no longer naïve people who don’t know about red flags of warnings of psychopaths. We are no longer willing to trust others indiscriminately or lightly as Eve trusted the lying words of her own Satan. We are no longer willing to fail to listen to the instinctive cries of our own intuition about danger.

We have knowledge that we have gotten the hard way, and hard-won knowledge is a lesson that will stick to us forever. It is up to us to use this life’s lesson in Psychopath 101 for our own and others’ benefits.