The Biblical story about Adam and Eve is true, although this is one story I don't expect you'll believe. I think it's an interesting story at least - with as many questions as there are answers.
I'm not religious, so it is an important point to make as many Christians would view this story in black and white and, simply believe it's from the Old testament, Genesis, a story written by God with a moral lesson. Generally the first seven days of Creation, when God created the Heavens and the Earth would be what they know most about. The story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden would be nothing more than a notation about Original Sin and the Exile out of Paradise.
There may be many people who have little or no knowledge of this story. Or may I suggest the full story.
In June of 1979 I moved to Arizona. I was exiled there... which is a long story I don't plan to go into. I was 24 years old.
It was a difficult time for me, too anxious, too concerned and confused about too much. My parents had exiled me as my mother was a devout Christian with a "one road in life mentality" who found my young again life to be too shameful to the family, and too extreme - what with my "disgraceful job at a community college as a custodian" and my sexcapades!
Essentially I was run out of town... to take "my sinful lifestyle" elsewhere. Back then, the mantra was to "move west young man, and women..." So I left everything dear to me and moved to Flagstaff Arizona. A platonic women friend, Michelle, agreed to let me stay with her for awhile and I had a job lined up, hopefully at the University of Arizona. I had a couple of other friends living nearby in Phoenix; the friend of an ex-girlfriend, and the ex-girlfriend herself - whom I was still fairly good friends with. Heather and Sue.
It was during a visit, while staying a few days with Heather that we had all gone out for dinner and drinks, Heather, Sue and myself. The place was called the Tombstone Trader's Bar and Grill, as it was an old trading post for Tombstone Arizona, father to the south along the border of Mexico.
We had dinner, although by 6 o'clock the outside that afternoon was still 98 degrees, the difference was there was zero humanity, which meant there was no physical discomfort, just a soothing hot, warmth. They have cicadas there, and they make a noise that makes me thing the air is filled with electricity, steadily humming.
After dinner we went to the bar to have drinks. There was a swimming pool outside where one need only come through a sliding class door to enter the bar. There was also a section of the bar the had an outside bar. This couple entered from the pool, a very handsome couple. He was about six foot, well toned and covered with dark hair on his chest and head. Both of them had exquisite faces, not only attractive, but hard to see or look at as if they were surrounded by a powerful aura. The man wore only his bathing trunks, the woman wore a black bikini with a brown towel wrapped around her waist. Both were dripping water as they entered, the man wiping himself with a towel, then lending it to the woman. I realized it was difficult to tell how old they were, at times looking maybe 18, at others mid to late twenties. Ageless faces full of understanding.
As the couple entered the restaurant/bar, they glance around, whispered to themselves briefly. To my surprise they came over to uur table which was round and had two empty chairs. The bar was quite full, and glancing I could see there was only one barstool left, and glancing quickly around I realized most of the tables were full.
"Of course, you're welcome to sit her", I said in answer to the man's request. They sat down and we introduced ourselves. The woman offered her left hand first, and as I took it it, cool and firm and shook, I felt a rush up my arm and the air move in on me, the electric hum, all merged into that hand-shake. Brief as it was I felt great. The man's hand-shake surprised me also. Firm and comforting and I felt a similar rush. "Thank-you for the seats", he said. " My name is Adam, this is Eve".
"The Adam and Eve", I laughed and joked, questioning him?
The man laughed. "As a mater of fact", he said, "we are". And he looked at me with these eyes that I really wanted to dive into and get lost. And then the woman, Eve spoke; "you are all friends?"
"Yes", we all responded. "I see you have quite a history together", she said softly.
We all looked at one another, and I replied, "yes we do". "How do you know that or you're guessing, right?"
She looked at me and she had blue eyes, very vivid. "Not a guess," she said. We both know these things.
"How?", I asked.
Eve looked at Adam for a moment, he gently nodded, and Eve continued. "Take is a simply a story, you don't have to believe me, but I could use a drink first, what about all of you?" Heather said she was ready, Sue and I still had 3/4 of a drink, but we both said almost at the same time, "sure".
She decided not to wait for a waitress, and stood up. She had taken her towel off and laid it on the chair. Looking at her stand and walk towards the bar was mesmerizing. I couldn't help but follow her up there, and stand waiting for the bar-tender. Sue broke the trance by asking Adam a question.
"Are you from around here, Adam?"
He looked at her and I realized he'd been looking at me, and he said, "actually yes, but to you it'd seem pretty far away. We're from Southern Europe; we have a Summer place here where we sometimes stay."
Sue said, "a Summer place in Arizona?."
Eve arrived bad with the drinks, held like a real waitress, tray and all. "Yours, yours, and yours," she said, as she looked me in my eyes and smiled briefly. Then she sat down. We all did a cheer with our glasses. We spoke among each other for awhile, when Eve said, "Bob, you asked us about ourselves?"
"Yes", I answered, not expecting her to offer, but with the question still lingering at the back of my mind. "Sorry,", I began, " I was just joking about you being the real Adam and Eve, Just a joke.".
"But we are Bob." Eve said, looking straight at me. She laughed. "Don't be surprised. The world is both a big and a small place. Every once in awhile we like to share of story, Adam and I. Today seems as good as any, and also as all of you seem very open and interested."
"Would you like me to continue?" she asked.
We all murmured a "yes".
Eve looked again at Adam, lip-spoke briefly, then turned to us, and said, "we're immortals".
She paused to look at each of us to see how we were taking it. I was both skeptical, yet I could find no reasons to not listen and accept her story as true.
"Go on", I asked.
"We go way back. Not just 150,000 years, more like 350,000 years; sorry, I honestly have lost track of time. Myself, I can only theorize the same as you about the passing of time. There are many times I remember past events, can't help it - but it's quite overwhelming or can be. We pretty much try to live for the moment."
I decided to be blunt, so I asked, "so what's with the Garden of Eden and the Original Sin?" I don't know what I expected as an answer, and immediately felt stupid asking.
"Oh, the Garden", she said. "It was beautiful, idyllic, and it seemed we didn't have a care in the world." Eve looked at me. "You need to understand those were primitive times, we didn't look like we look now. We were at best 3 feet tall... hominids. And everyday was a day where survival was the only thing we did, without ever wondering why."
"Serious?", I asked.
"Yes, quite serious", she said.
"Sorry", I begged. "No problem," she replied.
"So what was the 'original sin' and all this about the curse?" I asked. "I trust you're saying you're the Adam and Eve from the Bible?"
"We are" she answered, then laughed. "The Original Sin; wow, how humanity twisted that one. It had nothing to do with sex, an apple or a snake. Well, there was a snake, but it began that three of us, Adam, Eve and another woman named Lilith were living in a cave in paradise. Adam had killed a swine and we had cut it up for dinner, while he went out to gather firewood, I went out also, to help. He was gone for a log time. The meat was cooking so I left and went to look for firewood too. Too much firewood never hurt. I saw a snake in the grass and as it happened I followed it, it's many little feet moving very quickly. Back then they had feet."
"It led me to a tall grove of sweet, aromatic and pungent plants, all growing 30 feet high or more. I cut down around 6, and hauled them back to camp. I put them on the wood pile to dry - naturally we saved the leaves and flowers of this plant as it gave off that pungent medicinal essence, but it also promised to be good for starting fires."
"I can't say it was the first time. but a few weeks later (though to us weeks didn't exist), we ended up burning the leaves and inch think stems. We were going to imbibe, so to speak. But what happened was extraordinary. What started as a gentle breeze and us basking in the sun and reefer essence, turned quickly into a storm and the leaves burned to make smoke that engulfed us. It was a very strong storm that blew in, destroying everything so like either "God was mad" or "Satan was angry". regardless, it lasted several days and devastated Eden."
Eve paused, looked around at us, and to Adam, who nodded.
"There were aliens here for a time.", she continued", and two things happened, two very significant things." She paused again. "I know aliens are on the minds of people, but they are long gone. They left around 100 BC. I never figured out exactly why they left, they just did.
"At first the three of us huddled in our cave inhaling quite a bit of smoke from the plant the snake had led me to. I can honestly say, where one second we were completely ignorant, the next we seemed to be in serendipity and we all looked at each other. Really looked. We recognized we were naked. We saw each others eyes. As dusk fell on the final day we all looked around at what used to be a beautiful forest - what you called the Garden of Eden."
"Our heads were filled with light, we were laughing like monkeys. We couldn't help ourselves. We starting touching each other. We had sex. Then we all fell together and fell asleep.
"The aliens showed up later. They injected all of us with something and marched u humanely to a saucer. It brought us to an oasis in the desert. The oasis was with the huge land of Eden. The land vanished as the aliens absorbed it's entirety. Eventually it was gone."
"What the aliens had give us was the elixir of eternal life, or at least life for many thousand's of years. It's repairs any injury, enables physical change to be more average within a population. Yes, it does exemplify physical perfection also."
I interrupted, "You've been alive 450,000 years? You expect us to believe that?"
Eve laughed. Adam is the one who spoke next. " what is the one thing scientists would like to solve?" He asked.
We all looked at each other, then Heather said, "how to extend life?"
"Precisely". Adam replied. "Yet no scientist has ever found a creature able to live forever. Everything seems to die no matter how old it is. The age varies dramatically among life-forms. The quality of life always declines with age."
"Yes, we had children and they populated the earth, however we we're alone and we just rather drifted off into obscurity. Other species of humans existed at the time, ignorant and violent - we could have been considered food and we competed for food. We amassed a family, between Adam, Lilith and myself... none of them inherited our immortality, though at first they lived hundreds of years eventually due to environmental conditions that stabilized to between 60 and 120 years."
"Changes overtook the environments we lived in and a great ice-age descended upon us. The three of us were frozen in time for one-thousand years, but even that didn't kill us. The aliens had vanished after what we now know was a stint in ancient Egypt, and who knows where else on the planet they practiced their inoculations. We assume other immortals exist but we can't be sure. We've never met them."
So I was trying to understand this story, so I asked, "So what exactly then was the original Sin? SEX?
Eve laughed, "no, sorry, sex wasn't the original sin, smoking what you call pot was the Original Sin. We were animals until then, living by instinct. Wild creatures. Animals living by meal to meal, caring for our young, constantly surviving and at war. And having sex. Sex was nothing strange, we did it all the time. What we hadn't done was dry out a cannabis plant, burned it in the cave campfire and by coincidence find ourselves in a hurricane that drove the smoke swirling around our heads. It's all we could breath and we got stoned. What can I say. Blasted. And we got wise, looked at each other, as if for the first time. Naked, yes, we noticed that. Vulnerable, that too. We got really paranoid, yeah really. But we dealt with it. And then we were taken from what was called 'Paradise', destroyed in a horrific storm."
"And so here we are today", she laughed, smiling.
Heather, Sue and I looked at each other, then at Adam and Eve. They were serious and we could all see it in their perfect faces. They were the closest thing to angels a human on this side of the planet could hope to ever see. And there they were; sitting with us in the Tombstone Trader's Bar and Grill, Phoenix Arizona in July of 1979.
