The serpent that tempted Eve to convince Adam to bite the apple, that snake, represents sensuality, a fundamental part of ourselves.

To restrict and deny sensuality is the opposite of living a full life.

Bad for the Survival of Society

But why was sensuality depicted as bad? My guess is that early societies saw that sensuality led to the exhaustion of the young people who did the bulk of the work to feed the tribe. It also leads to the deaths of young women and the pain of loss of a child. Even when things went well, sensuality resulted in more mouths to feed. From that point of view, sensuality had a lot of negatives,

• Work capacity loss.
• Potential loss of young people.
• The pain of loss.
• More mouths to feed.

And, of course, the most effective way to fight such a powerful drive as sex is by having the gods declare them a bad thing. However, we are not an early society anymore, conditions have changed and the threat to life today is the lack of sensual and warm relationships. Denying aspects of ourselves has become so routine that we are actually scared of living a full life and have adapted to existing as limited lives.

Renouncing the Snake

Let’s assume that renouncing the sensuality-as-snake preserved and improved life. However, that cruft that built around it turned against us: we wanted to preserve human life, but the cruft wanted to preserve its existence.

The Shaman is the Owner of the Story

The whole thing was implemented by shamans who came up with amazing stories that held people’s attention. The spellbound stories worked and, let’s assume, kept their tribe alive!

Power to the shamans.

And, so, the storytellers declared themselves to be special, the only ones who could interpret the gods. Then one of them figured that the gods had an all-powerful boss. He became the boss shaman and was the only one who could understand the big boss god. And with that, the top shamans became very powerful for quite a while.

The Power of Life and Death

Eventually, organized religion became weaponized, with the power to decide who lives and who dies,

• Men shall live, women may die.
• Feudal lords shall live, vassals may die.
• Royalty shall live, common people may die.

Organized religion became dedicated to preserving its existence. It has gotten simpler: “powerful people shall live, everybody else may die.”

In spite of it all, we are still here (good). However, we are destroying the very system that has nourished us (not so good).

People

Today, people can take it from here. And they can do it with their sensuality and warm relationships. Adult people with their tools, science, and technology in hand. We can take it from here.

We still need stories to inspire us. Stories to live full lives. Not stories to scare into nothingness, but stories to take us forward, along with our sensuality and all our other feelings that are part of our full lives.

We don’t need to surrender our essence to a so-called leader. Leadership is fluid and we create leadership by following somebody now and somebody else later as it resonates with us, as we see fit and our needs change. We can keep our whole selves, our essence.

It will take a lot of work. And we will need new skills, particularly communication skills. We will also need to let our fears out and let others help us with them. And we need to learn to lead with trust.

On the other hand, we are well connected now with all corners of the world. This means that our ability to make or join communities is higher than ever.

We don’t need to submit our essence to an arbitrary say so. We can join with others anywhere in the world.

We can take it from here.