GAN-^CĒḎEN IS Hebrew for ‘God’s delighting’ and for me it represents an inward experience with the Spirit that is indeed always ‘deLightful’. This Light is without limits and the great thing is that we can all ‘dwell in its purity’, as George Fox said in a 1652 epistle to Friends. So for me, Eden within is a sanctum which is immediately accessible, and where we can dwell and wait freely in what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the ‘wise silence’. What, then, is this inward Garden or Light? And what might it mean for today’s Friends?

The first Friends often longed for the innocence of the time before the ‘Fall’ and knew that to experience it they had to first ‘sink down to the Seed’ (Penington), to inwardly transcendent, so to speak, to that ‘place’ where they knew they were one with God. Early Friend Richard Hubberthorne, for instance, encouraged people to ‘come to the Everlasting Inheritance [the Light] which is within, which never fades away: out of time, into that which is Eternal.’ Isaac Penington spoke of the Light as ‘Pure Being Itself’ and pictured a ‘fountain of beings and natures, the inward substance [essence or Light] of all that appears.’ Anne Conway saw Light in ‘all creatures’, and in 1695 William Penn became the first Friend to publicly equate Light and Divine Consciousness.

Today, such Friends help us focus on Garden-Light-Consciousness as our inner fertile ground from which we can grow into spiritual and emotional maturity, particularly as we move deeper into the One-drous potential of who we actually are. That is, when we get to know ourselves better and better. Many a great sage has recommended knowing ourselves as best we can so that we can enjoy being one with Love which is what Consciousness is. Philosophers and scientists of the Materialist School understand Consciousness as our first-person experience generated in our brains. But I think it’s better to think of Consciousness as God, the Inward Light, who is immediately accessible to us, and who is one with all-Reality. So the Garden can be experienced on the individual, communal, universal and cosmological level. 

In Gan-^cēḏen we find the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. The latter can be seen as a metaphor for Love-Consciousness including its highest moral standards. To eat the fruits of the former is to distance ourselves from Love (‘sin’ in old-speak) and thus from our innocence, beauty, compassion, honesty, thoughtfulness, inner peace and many other life-giving attributes, all of which are necessary for a life lived as the Kingdom of God, what I usually call The Way. It is to distance from Eden-Love’s promise of eternal life and equality for all, to its Truth and simplicity. Such distancing means we are taken over, consumed, by ‘worldly knowledge’ and behaviour. Self-damage of this nature is born of ignorance and, usually, fear. If untreated, it will, in one form or another, lead to our dominating our fellow human beings and the natural world. We see plenty of evidence of this in the world at large, the sort of things Friends witness against.

It’s easy to distance from the Garden-Spirit, then, to expel oneself into a wasteland of ignorance, from that which underpins our individual life and that of the whole of humanity (hā‘ādāmah= Hebrew for land, ground, soil), the cosmos and Earth in all its variation. And yet distancing is reversable (metanoia- Greek for reorienting one’s mind, heart and behaviour) when we centre on Love, trust in Spirit without fear, and ‘return home to within’ (Howgill) to what poet Edwin Muir, in his work The Transfiguration, called the ‘green springing corner of young Eden.’ It is then we truly return to our inner, pre-Fall Adāmah-Eve, to be integrated with and in the Love who we really are, away from falsehood and ignorance.

We’re often afraid to be ‘who we really are’, even to the point of clinging onto material securities, attitudes and values that seem to serve us well but instead constrain us spiritually. In hiding from ourselves in this way, and therefore from Love, we fail to heed the warning of seers like Ṣūfī Nurūddīn Rishī: ‘without the elixir of death we will not be cured.’ In other words, like American Friend John Woolman, we need to die to values and practices that are spiritually harmful. Woolman showed determination in eradicating his own distancing by opening himself fully to Love so that he could be the Kingdom-Way in person. As a consequence, his quest to eradicate his homeland of slavery was strengthened enormously.  

What prevents us, then, from emulating people like Woolman, stops us from being that much-needed fount of creative spiritual energy and reconciliatory healing, from being an ever-replenishing well of loving-kindness towards our fellow human beings and all-Nature? The answer, I believe, lies in repeatedly discovering and ever-enriching this Blessed Community within, this inward Teacher of Light, by understanding more of who we are (Divine Consciousness), particularly during our times of silence. In doing so, we will secure The Way’s foundation on the outer level and be more confident, therefore, in prosecuting our Lamb’s War, what I prefer to call our ‘Lamb’s Peace’, with humility, and by living adventurously in faith while enjoying a non-exploitative relationship with Earth. In this Way, our inner Gan-^cēḏen will flourish.