How the Serpent Hacks into Eve’s mind
Scheme the serpentine world still uses to hack into our minds.
The most fateful dialogue in the history of humanity transpired that day the crafty serpent slithered down the apple tree and confronted our foremother in one of her ambling through the Garden of Eden. Two exchanges, of hardly two dozen words that sound like words out of a conversation of kindergarten school children in the play ground defined our fate forever: the Fall. However, hidden beneath these seemingly infantilish simplicity, there is a lesson of a grave significance to be learned about how the serpent pulls off the first and most consequential mind hack in human history; a lesson about human psychology, about the gaping loophole in our psychology that the first Hacker exploited to hack into Eve’s mind and succumb her to the sin that was to mean our Fall from grace; a lesson that has escaped the appreciation of over millennia of unenlightened readings of the common person. It is the loophole through which humanity has since been hacked by the serpentine world.
This is how the encounter is chronicled in Genesis (3:1 – 6):
3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
The fateful lines are contained in verses 4 – 5, specifically verse 5. The spell is embedded in the language, in the way experience is construed (there may well be other dimensions to his seduction than verbal elements such as use of pitch in his voice or even showering her with flattery in the way he greets her to get her to lower her guards, but this analysis limits itself to the information provided in Genesis 3:1 – 6).
The serpent comes unto the presence of the first woman with one objective in mind: to seduce her (and her husband Adam) into disobeying God by breaking the one law He ordains them by getting them to eat from the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. He is slink in the way he begins. Simplicity is the strategy he uses to ease into conversation. He asks her a simple Yes-No question and purposefully avoids mentioning the object of contention, the Tree. The purpose: to commit her into answering and get her to bring up the Tree into her mind on her own accord so that she would feel that she is not being manipulated. Note also the use of the simple, surface construal of experience; the verbs he uses are ‘say’ and ‘eat’, physical actions that one performs in one’s conscious state. Eve falls right into the trap with this answer: “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” The last verb she uses is striking: die. It is a unconscious action, action that one has no conscious control over, or one does in an unconscious state. Heretofore, the actions used both by the serpent and her have been surface conscious physical experiences, but with this last word, she tethers father out of conscious physical onto the unconscious physical. This must have been what the serpent has been hoping for. He leaps upon the opportunity. He assures her with this half truth: “You will not certainly die,”. (When God says in Genesis (2:17), “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat[a] of it you shall surely die.”, he is actually not referring to physical death, but spiritual death). What follows is the most fateful line ever uttered: “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The very construction of the sentence is intriguing. It is a complex-compound sentence. It consists of one main clause, “For God knows”, projecting a string of complex-compound clauses and a phrase. The following is the decomposition of the sentence into its component clauses and phrase:
1- For God knows that
2- when you eat from it
3- your eyes will be opened
4-you will be like God
5-knowing good and evil.
This is essentially stacking experiences/realities. It is where the scheme lies. It is different from the benign linguistic phenomenon called verb stacking or verb serialization, which is “a syntactic phenomenon in which two or more verbs or verb phrases are strung together in a single clause”. The fatal difference lies in the nature of the verbs strung together, i.e. the nature of the experiences, their layering in consciousness. Initially, in verse four, he begins with ‘die’, unconscious physical experience; he then moves to ‘know’, a conscious mental experience; he resurfaces back to conscious physical experience with ‘eat’. The next two lines carry the venom: “your eyes will be opened and you will be like God”. The serpent uses language abstraction, arguably for the first time in the Old Testament, in using ‘your eyes’ as subject. He is obviously not referring to their physical eyes. The reference is to the faculty of discernment of good and evil. The verb ‘be opened’ is, hence, an unconscious mental experience in the sense that it is an automatic reaction. He follows this up with another unconscious mental experience, but in stative form with ‘be like God’. Hence, he promises her that with the opening of their eyes, they will acquire an unconscious state of being like God. This is of course another half truth in that while they do acquire the discernment of good and evil, it is at the cost of losing Godlikeness in sinning. Humanity loses what they had possessed in their unconsciousness by their desire to have conscious possession of it. Eve by now, however, has lost her critical factor to realize this. The serpent in stacking the experiences thus played with the conscious mind of Eve.
The conscious is the guard of our mind. It examines, interprets, and filters incoming ideas. It filters-in ones that are consistent with what the person knows to be right and rejects the incongruous ones. This is the critical factor of the mind. The serpent’s intention is to bypass this critical factor and access the uncritical yet most powerful unconscious. The way he bypasses it is by exploiting one limitation of our conscious mind. Our conscious mind is incapable of processing experiences of various layering of consciousness coming at it subsequently. In its attempt at keeping track, it trances out. Once he accesses the unconscious mind, he instigates a strong emotional response in her that she cannot help but act upon.
This technique is not a revelation. It has long been known and used in neurolinguistic programming (NLP) as a way of implementing covert conversational hypnosis. It is part of the technique known as stacking/stacked realities. One source defines it as “Stacked realities, or the ability to create many different realities for your listener, are a great way to bypass the critical factor”. It bypasses the conscious mind, the guard, by getting it to run up and down the layers of consciousness to verify the truth of the ideas, and in doing so, on account of the ups and downs across the layers, it trances out. It may not come as a great surprise to learn that stacking realities is a technique most commonly used in the industry of the seduction of women. One of the so called seduction “gurus” known as Ross Jeffries, the founder of the world wide Speed Seduction Community and creator of the Speed Seduction, bases his seduction techniques on structuring language, which he calls patterns, to exploit what he refers to as ‘the Loophole In Female Psychology’. Stacking realities happens to be a common technique he employs in his ‘patterns’ to induce unconscious sexual desire in unsuspecting women during conversation. The following is an extract from one of what he calls ‘Connection Patterns’:
just standing here… talking with you… I have an intuition… that when you connect with someone… someone you really like… someone you’re really attracted to who makes you feel that click… right there… you know that sense of just feeling totally drawn… like you’ve known this person forever… like you were meant to know them…. a big part of it is that recognition that you can RELAX and laugh with this person… can you feel _that_ (touch her and achor the feeling)… is maybe how it works?
Realities, as you can see, are stacked, starting with surface experiences (stand, talk) and plunging in to deeper, mental experiences with intuition and a home run of a string of affective experiences (connect, like, attract, feel…).
This particular technique of course is also known in NLP as pacing and leading. The man paces the ‘target’ with what she can easily affirm as truth on the material world and then lead her to the state of uncontrollable sexual desire.
Hence, stacking realities is not new. I am merely stating that it is the Primordial Trick. It is ubiquitous too. It is in stealth advertisements, subliminal messages, and political propaganda, etc.
Genesis (3:1–6) is not just history, but allegory of our Fall everyday. We amble through the Garden of Eden our foremother took, encounter the serpentine world, and often are seduced several times a day. It is as though time had stopped at that fateful time in the Garden, and that humanity’s history since has been reliving Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 3 over and over again as though on a loop.
All vices and adversities have their entrance into our lives this way: lull the conscious into trance, lay the gait into the mind bare open, and lead our uncritical, giant unconscious astray. Consequently, we are flung back to little impulses everyday. Our vices and adversities are but the accumulations of the little impulsive actions and inaction we are induced into making and not making everyday.
Coming back to the consciousnesses of the cumulative destruction in our lives, we wrench our head, scream at, kick against, or push back, but being effectively cut off from our unconscious, we are too powerless, impotent, inarticulate to effect anything. Resigned, we either learn to live with the unpleasant reality, or worse embrace it as our culture, or our hobby, or worse still letting it grow into our identity. This is what Eugene O’Neill means when he says in his play, “Long Day’s Journey into Night”:
None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.
