Eden, Zion, Paradise

The road to Paradise is not a return to Eden. The covering cherub blocks the way because we cannot go backward--we must progress, individuate ourselves, and grow through metamorphosis. We must move from formless unity to organized harmony. The paradise to which we march, therefore, will be a celestial city and not a primeval garden of pleasant "nature". In Eden, we are innocent and unformed, amorphous--without form and void. When cast out of this state, we fall into divisions, boundaries--into the world of walls and clocks. We clamber through the thorns of nominalism, learning to recognize true and false, what is similar and different, what is between, and what is our own. To achieve Paradise, we must gather all that is ours, all that has broken apart from us. It is a Restoration; not a rejection of all that has come between the first paradise and the second. It is organized innocence, a return to original oneness strengthened by knowledge of self and other. Zion's walls are constructed from the red clay of Eden.