The choice at the foundation of consciousness
That effect, where engaging with the most outrageous aspects of scripture, one finds oneself implicated in them, always already accomplice.
Why would a God that is Love create the possibility of suffering?
How could Adam and Even have known that biting the apple was bad, if they didn't know good and evil?
Who put the snake in the garden?
Why did God harden the Pharao's heart?
Why did God allow the Devil to torture Job?
Why did Jesus kiss Judas?
At some point the choice comes up: "well, you could leave this plane and come back to the source right now, where everything is always already resolved". And I find myself holding on. More precisely, my holding on is revealed. The pre-conscious choice to suffer through this is that which makes me the one that I am. Its revelation doesn't alter it - the choice simply recapitulates itself in consciousness. It is "given". It is the choice to be a separate self (which is what consciousness is), with all of its implications.
One fundamental implication of separateness is narrative tension (God and the snake). Which sheds an interesting light on the role of scripture (outer and inner), as opposed to normal narrative. While normal narrative moves towards resolution, thus releasing the reader, the point of scripture is that its resolution is supposed to occur in the world. As the reader wrestles, ever more skillfully, with scripture, it moves further and further away from narrative resolution - and ties up the reader's loose ends instead (and by extension the reader's world's).
I put the snake in the garden. Before I was I. As I became I. At that point, falling to his first temptation was already forever inevitable. All of genesis had, basically, already happened.
And thus, by virtue of being me, I am bound to keep finding myself taking another bite of that sour apple, and, in the act, seeing more clearly and painfully what I did by plucking it from the tree. Learning that in the separateness that is I, I forsook the oneness that we once were. I forsook everyone. And yet I can't, I won't will the undoing of that.
Because, of course, the flip side is this: it is exactly as I became I, that We became We. And that's the gift that lies, despite everything, in the fateful fruit: that the more we undergo the difficult process of its digestion, the more we get to remember (and, hopefully, live by) the promise that we made to each other, when we were still together in the Great Womb, right before taking that first bite at the beginning of the world...