Profiles in a Dream Big Enough

Well Adam and Eve had never been dead before and didn’t know what that meant. After God left, they decided to test what God said. So Eve reached up and picked one of those red delicious apples and bit into it. The sweet juice oozed around the sides of her mouth and she said, “This apple is good. I don’t see anything wrong with it.” So she reached and picked another one and gave it to Adam. “Here, you taste it.”

So Adam took a big bite and said, “You are right. It’s good.”

The next day when they saw God, he walked right up to them and said, “I know about you. You have eaten the apples that I said you couldn’t have. So, you can’t stay here. Out. Leave. I can’t let you live here. You have to be punished for disobeying.”

So God kicked them out. Two of his angels came over and ushered Adam and Eve out of the garden, slammed the gate shut behind them, and stood there guarding it.

Adam and Eve looked at each other in dismay. Eve said, “God gave us freedom to have dominion over all the earth, and now this! Outside Eden! Guess we will just have to plant our own garden.”

“Fine with me,” Adam said, as they set off down the hill toward the creek, excited about their freedom to explore in a brave new world of possibilities.

And with that, they reset the paradigm from transcendence, to immanence, from up-there, to down-here, from servile surrender to authority, to freedom to explore their new world as a continuing option for building new tomorrows beyond old yesterdays.

At this point, Granddad turned the storytelling farmhouse porch into a classroom, or was it more like a worship service? By now it was almost like Granddad was speaking in his usual philosophical manner as an interpreter of stories, updated for our time.

He said, “It’s a story paradigm in which people have an ongoing opportunity to make choices that turn challenge into opportunity, and to turn old endings into new beginnings. It’s about how to plant new gardens with new tools in our successive times in the story.”

He continued his philosophical exposition. “Outside Eden. That’s where we are, always outside Eden. It means seeing the open gate before us, as more important than the closed gate behind us. It means seeing what we have, instead of what we have lost. It means living on the growing edge of the future, instead of the holding edge of the past.

Outside Eden means doing the best we can in far less than ideal circumstances. It means believing in ourselves beyond other people’s doubts. It means giving our best in spite of disappointment, injustice, setbacks, or loss, reaching beyond every failure for one more chance at success.

Outside Eden means that we will always work in less than ideal circumstances. We will face real hardships, adversity, injustice, and challenge. But it also means that we won’t give up just because the world is not perfect and the way is difficult. When we struggle from our cocoon stage, that is when we arrive at new beginnings, where part of any achievement is the reach itself.

Outside Eden means believing in ourselves and our own new tomorrows in spite of error, wrong decisions, or anything else that pits us against surprising new challenges. Our greatest fulfillment is always beyond some gateway of difficulty, and the promise of the future is to be found as we are testing new limits - as we are Eve and Adam.

I like retelling Granddad’s stories. He made old stories from yesterday like they are new insights for today. So, let me tell you about an experience I had recently when I was helping take care of Granddad’s farm.

I was out at the farm and needed something for one of the farm tools. So I drove four miles to Crossroads Hardware. As I left the store, I decided to go back to the farm by way of the curving back road and drive by the church that was so special to Granddad. As I approached the church I saw, as a modern marvel, one of Adam and Eve’s new gardens in our digital age. There was a cornfield of about one hundred acres, and two big pieces of modern day science, engineering, and technology tools, getting ready to spread fertilizer on the corn which was already two feet tall. That ‘tractor’ had big tires that made the machine high enough to drive through the corn without knocking all the plants down, just the ones where the tires ran, as it spread fertilizer in forty-foot wide swaths.

There was a tractor-trailer there, with three big bins of fertilizer which was being augured up into a big bin on the tractor unit. Then the tractor driver climbed up into the air conditioned cab, pushed a few buttons on the computer screen and began to drive out into the cornfield. Once he was in the field, he touched an app on the computer and GPS took over from there until it drove in a pattern so that, all on its own, it covered every acre of that field.

I stood there in amazement for a long time and just watched those modern day tools at work in one of Adam and Eve’s new gardens, guided with new tools of science and engineering.

Today’s Adam and Eve have created a vast array of leading edge tools. One of the tools is the Hubble Space Telescope which orbits the earth taking pictures of the starry heavens and its Milky Way Galaxy, which itself is but one of billions of other galaxies in what may be endless space, and where the earth is on the outer arm of that spiral galaxy. These pictures help us to know who we are as part of a larger oneness, where we are learning more about the earth, how it works, and how we can work with the way it works.

The Hubble Space Telescope tool is being extended to new successors. The Kepler Space Telescope has photographically explored some of the billions of galaxies of stars, and found one thousand, two hundred and eighty-four planets orbiting their stars. Five hundred of those may have a composition like our Earth. This exploration unit will be followed by the Tess Telescope which will explore two hundred thousand stars that are nearest to our earth.

As we expand the progression of knowledge in our time, we are learning more about where we are in a cosmic picture, macro and micro.

Another big tool that today’s Adam and Eve innovators have created to help us know about the earth, and the smallest particles of all molecular existence, is the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. It is a thirteen mile circle of magnets in a tunnel that guide and accelerate elementary particles at tremendous speed on a path until they are bombarded into a dead end and explode into component particles, and for a micro second, show the smallest units of all the one hundred eighteen elements of all existence.

As leading edge exploration goes forward, important new tools are also being created in medical science.

In the March-April, 2016 issue of MIT Technology Review, one story, under the title of “Immune Engineering,” is about 12-month-old Layla Richards, who after treatment for leukemia with genetically altered cells, was cured. Only in our time in history, with the just-in-time progression of medical science and research in gene editing, would such amazing results have been possible. It’s part of dreaming a dream big enough on the leading edge of the future.

All this is a progression of human knowledge up to our time, when the exploration of who we are in this wonder of all existence is being expanding exponentially. It’s a garden that is being created by those who dare to grow, not just a new garden, but a new and higher humanity by dreams big enough for our time in history and place in the story.

In our outside Eden world, we live in the most fantastic time in all the human story to dream and plant new gardens in a dream big enough.