The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil

Parallels between Genesis, David Bohm's philosophy and the brain hemispheres

Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia universalis, Basel, 1544

I found an interesting piece on Reddit which draws parallels I would broadly accept between the Genesis myth of the two Trees – that of Life, and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – and the hemisphere differences; and again with David Bohm’s philosophical understanding of physics. Bohm’s work Wholenesss and the Implicate Order struck me as intuitively right at a deep level when I first read it some 40 years ago, and I cite him repeatedly in my work.

Here is the post from Reddit, which I suspect was prepared using AI, but which I would mainly endorse. It puts the connexions between the three visions - that of Genesis, that of Bohm drawing on physics, and that of myself drawing on hemisphere science – more succinctly and directly than I have seen it done before.

I’d just add that I note in The Master and his Emissary that it is said that the meaning of the Hebrew words translated as ‘good and evil’ in the Genesis myth ‘mean precisely the useful and the useless, in other words, what is useful for survival and what is not’ (Alan Watts, The Two Hands of God). If this is true, the parallels are even more striking.

Anywhere here it is: I hope you enjoy it.

The Two Trees of Eden: Unity and Duality

in the Light of David Bohm and Iain McGilchrist

An Epistemological Reading of the Genesis Narrative from the Physics of the Implicate Order and the Neuroscience of Hemispheric Attention.

Abstract: This article proposes an interdisciplinary reading of the two trees described in the Genesis narrative — the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil — as symbols encoding two radically distinct modes of relating to reality. To this end, a dialogue is established between the exegetical tradition and two contemporary theoretical frameworks: the ontology of the implicate order developed by physicist David Bohm, and the model of hemispheric asymmetry advanced by psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. The central thesis holds that the Fall narrated in Genesis can be interpreted as an epistemological metaphor warning against the risks of mistaking a particular — and partial — form of knowledge for the totality of the real; a warning that finds a remarkably convergent formulation in the works of both thinkers.

Keywords: Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge, duality, David Bohm, Iain McGilchrist, cerebral hemispheres, implicate order, fragmentation, epistemology.

Introduction

In the second chapter of the book of Genesis, the narrative places at the centre of the Garden of Eden two trees whose presence has generated centuries of theological, philosophical, and symbolic reflection: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From one, eating is freely permitted; from the other, it is not. The prohibition falls not upon life, but upon a specific kind of knowledge. This distinction, far from being a minor narrative detail, constitutes perhaps the cornerstone of the entire story.

Throughout history, various traditions — from the Jewish Kabbalah to Christian mysticism, through Gnostic and Hermetic currents — have interpreted these two trees as representations of two fundamental principles: unity and duality. The Tree of Life would symbolise reality as an integrated, undivided, living totality; the Tree of Knowledge, by contrast, would introduce division: the separation between good and evil, subject and object, self and world. To eat of its fruit, on this reading, would not mean acquiring more reality, but inaugurating a mode of perception that fragments experience and confuses its own categories with the very fabric of the real.

What is remarkable is that this intuition, formulated in mythic language millennia ago, found in the twentieth century and in the early decades of the twenty-first a rigorous — and surprisingly convergent — articulation in the works of two thinkers from very different fields. Theoretical physicist David Bohm (1917–1992), in his exploration of the deep structure of matter and meaning, proposed that reality constitutes an undivided totality whose deeper order — the implicate order — is systematically obscured by the fragmentary operations of thought. For his part, psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (1953), drawing on an exhaustive analysis of cerebral hemispheric asymmetry, has argued that the two cerebral hemispheres offer two radically different ways of attending to the world: one holistic, relational, and open to the living; the other analytic, categorising, and oriented toward control. When this second mode usurps the place of the first, the result is an impoverished and devitalised understanding of reality.

The purpose of this article is to trace the lines of convergence between the biblical symbolism of the two trees and the theoretical frameworks of Bohm and McGilchrist, arguing that all three discourses — the mythic, the physico-philosophical, and the neuroscientific — point toward the same fundamental structure of the human problem: the confusion between a partial modality of knowledge and the totality to which it belongs.

1. The Two Trees of Eden: A Symbolic Cartography

1.1. The Tree of Life as a Symbol of Unity

The Tree of Life (Etz haChayim) appears in Genesis as a silent presence and, in a certain sense, an unproblematic one. Its fruit is available; no prohibition or conflict is associated with it. In the Kabbalistic tradition, this tree became the central diagram of Jewish mystical cosmology: the ten sefirot, connected by twenty-two paths, represent the dynamic structure through which the divine manifests in creation. What is significant about this diagram is that it constitutes a system of relations: no sefirah has meaning in isolation; each participates in the others and in the whole. Unity here is not uniformity, but organic interconnection.

At a broader level, the Tree of Life has been interpreted as a symbol of direct participation in the real: a knowledge that does not stand over against reality to analyse it, but recognises itself as a constitutive part of it. It is a form of knowing that is embodied, relational, and non-dual, and which has no need to divide the world into opposing categories in order to operate.

1.2. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as the Inauguration of Duality

The second tree bears duality inscribed in its very name: the knowledge of good and evil. Its semantic structure is binary. To eat of its fruit, according to the narrative, produces an immediate effect: “Their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen 3:7). This “opening of the eyes” does not denote a perceptual enrichment, but the emergence of a divided self-consciousness: the capacity to see oneself from the outside, as an object, and to judge one’s own condition according to opposing categories (naked/clothed, acceptable/shameful).

The narrative consequences of this act are revealing: separation from God, from the other, from nature, and from oneself. The human being no longer inhabits the garden as part of the whole, but perceives itself as an isolated entity in a world that now appears hostile. The expulsion from Eden, on this reading, would be less an external punishment than the inevitable consequence of a change in the mode of knowing: whoever fragments reality can no longer dwell in unity.

2. David Bohm: The Undivided Totality and the Trap of Thought

2.1. The Implicate Order and the Explicate Order

In his seminal work Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), David Bohm proposed an ontology that challenges the foundational assumptions of the mechanistic paradigm. According to Bohm, reality at its deepest level constitutes what he called an “undivided wholeness in flowing movement”. At this level — the implicate order — everything is enfolded in everything; there are no ultimately separate parts, but a single dynamic process that Bohm called the holomovement.

What we ordinarily perceive as discrete entities — objects, persons, events — belongs to the explicate order: the level at which reality appears unfolded in apparently independent forms. The explicate order is not illusory, but it is derivative and partial. Its error lies not in existing, but in being taken for the totality. Fragmentation, Bohm insisted, is not a feature of the nature of things, but of our way of thinking about them.

2.2. Thought as a System That Does Not Recognise Itself

In later works, especially in Thought as a System (1992) and in the celebrated Bohmian dialogues, Bohm deepened his analysis of thought as an active process that generates fragmentation without being aware of doing so. His diagnosis is precise and radical: thought divides reality into categories, and then treats those divisions as if they were intrinsic properties of the real. It does not recognise its own participation in the construction of what it perceives.

This dynamic has a circular and self-referential structure: thought creates a fragmented representation, projects it onto the world, finds it “out there”, and takes this as confirmation of its own validity. Bohm expressed this with a phrase that has become one of his most widely cited formulations: “Thought creates the world and then says: ‘I didn’t do it”.

2.3. The Resonance with the Tree of Knowledge

The correspondence with the Edenic symbolism is difficult to overlook. If the Tree of Life corresponds to the implicate order — reality as a living, undivided, participatory totality — the Tree of Knowledge corresponds to the operation by which thought unfolds that totality into dual categories (good/evil, subject/object) and, in doing so, loses sight of the unity from which those categories emerged. The Fall, in Bohmian terms, would be the moment at which abstraction is confused with the concrete; at which the map supplants the territory.

3. Iain McGilchrist: The Master, the Emissary, and the Usurpation

3.1. Two Modes of Attention, Two Worlds

Iain McGilchrist, in his work The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), and more extensively in The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021), has developed an argument that far transcends conventional neuroscience. His thesis does not merely describe functional differences between the cerebral hemispheres; it maintains that each hemisphere embodies a fundamentally distinct mode of attending to the world, and that those modes of attention are not neutral — they constitute different worlds.

The right hemisphere — which McGilchrist metaphorically calls the Master — attends to the world in a broad, open, contextual, and relational way. It grasps the whole before the parts, the implicit before the explicit, the living before the mechanical. It is sensitive to what is unique, to what is new, to what cannot be reduced to prior categories. Its mode of knowing is participatory: it does not stand before the world as an external observer, but recognises itself as part of what it contemplates.

The left hemisphere — the Emissary — operates in a radically different manner. Its attention is focal, narrow, analytic, and categorising. It breaks reality down into manipulable parts, classifies according to binary oppositions, and seeks certainty and control. It works with representations of reality, not with reality itself. Its natural function is to serve the right hemisphere: to take what the Master has grasped in global form, analyse it in detail, and return the results to the broader context from which they were extracted.

3.2. The Usurpation of the Emissary

McGilchrist’s central argument — and the one that gives his first work its title — is that the history of Western civilisation can be read as the account of a progressive usurpation: the Emissary, forgetting its subordinate function, has set itself up as the Master. The left hemisphere, with its preference for the fixed, the categorical, the controllable, and the abstract, has gradually colonised culture, science, education, and politics, imposing its partial vision as though it were the totality.

The result, according to McGilchrist, is a world that increasingly resembles the caricature that the left hemisphere makes of reality: mechanistic, disenchanted, fragmented, stripped of intrinsic meaning. A world of re-presentations that has lost contact with that which it purported to represent.

3.3. The Resonance with the Two Trees

The correspondence is established with notable precision:

• The Tree of Life embodies the mode of knowing of the right hemisphere: participatory, unitary, embodied, open to the living totality of the real. A knowledge that has no need to divide in order to understand, because it knows itself to be part of what it knows.

• The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil embodies the mode of the left hemisphere: a knowledge that operates through binary oppositions (good/evil being the most primordial), that categorises, that separates the knower from the known, and that substitutes the living reality with an abstract representation.

The Fall, within the McGilchristian framework, would be precisely the moment at which the Emissary usurps the Master: the analytic, categorising, and dual mode breaks free from the integrating vision that should contain and orient it, and declares itself self-sufficient. The human being “opens their eyes” to a world of categories, but in doing so closes themselves to the world as living presence.

4. Convergences: The Fall as an Epistemological Metaphor

4.1. A Common Structure

When the three discourses are superimposed — the Genesis narrative, the Bohmian, and the McGilchristian — a shared structure emerges whose coherence is difficult to attribute to chance:

4.2. The Paradox of Knowledge That Impoverishes

All three discourses converge on a paradox that deserves careful attention: not all knowledge enriches. There exists a form of knowing that, while conferring a certain operative power — the capacity to classify, manipulate, and predict — subtracts something essential from the relationship with the real.

Bohm formulated this as the difference between a thought that knows itself to be partial and provisional, and a thought that takes itself for a faithful mirror of reality. McGilchrist expressed it as the difference between a left hemisphere that serves the right and a left hemisphere that supplants the right. Genesis narrated it as the difference between a tree that gives life and a tree whose fruit, despite appearing “good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen 3:6), leads to expulsion from the garden.

The irony is profound: the Tree of Knowledge produces, in the end, a form of ignorance. Not the ignorance of one who does not know, but the more dangerous kind: that of one who, knowing partially, believes they know completely.

4.3. Fragmentary Self-Consciousness

Another significant point of convergence concerns the nature of the self-consciousness that emerges after the Fall. In the Genesis narrative, the first effect of eating the fruit is the perception of one’s own nakedness — that is, the appearance of oneself as an object of scrutiny. This is a self-consciousness that separates the subject from their own lived experience.

Bohm would have recognised in this movement the characteristic operation of thought turning back upon itself without understanding itself: the self that observes itself is fragmented into observer and observed, generating an infinite regression that never reaches the totality of being.

McGilchrist, for his part, identifies this divided self-consciousness as typically left-hemispheric: the left hemisphere can represent itself as an object, but in doing so it loses the lived, first-person experience that is the domain of the right hemisphere. Edenic shame would be, within this framework, the affect that accompanies self-objectification: the discomfort of one who sees themselves from the outside and finds what they see to be inadequate.

5. The Return to the Tree of Life: Toward Reintegration

5.1. Bohm: Dialogue as the Path Back

It is important to note that neither thinker proposes a simple regression to the state prior to differentiation. The aim is not to abolish analytic thought or to suppress the left hemisphere. The solution is not a return to an undifferentiated unity, but an integration at a higher level.

Bohm proposed as a concrete practice the dialogue — understood not as debate or discussion, but as a space in which thought can observe itself in action and, in doing so, discover its own tacit assumptions and its dynamics of fragmentation. The etymology that Bohm attributed to the word (dia-logos: a flow of meaning through) suggests a process in which meaning belongs to no individual participant, but emerges between them, thus restoring, at least partially, the experience of totality that fragmentary thought had interrupted.

5.2. McGilchrist: The Restoration of the Master

McGilchrist, for his part, proposes a restoration of the primacy of the right hemisphere, without thereby annulling the legitimate contributions of the left. The healthy sequence, according to his model, follows a tripartite movement: the right hemisphere grasps the totality of the experiential field; the left analyses, decomposes, and clarifies specific aspects; and the results of that analysis return to the right hemisphere to be reintegrated into the broader, living context from which they were extracted.

The problem with our civilisation, McGilchrist argues, is that the third step has been interrupted: the products of analysis do not return; they remain in the domain of the left hemisphere, multiply, become self-referential, and end up constituting a closed world of abstractions that has lost contact with embodied reality.

5.3. Convergence in Reintegration

Translated into the language of Genesis, the path that both thinkers propose would be equivalent to recovering access to the Tree of Life — not through the renunciation of differentiating knowledge (which would be both impossible and undesirable), but through the subordination of that knowledge to the greater context of life as totality. The knowledge of good and evil does not disappear; it is reabsorbed into a broader framework that contains it without being defined by it. The categories continue to exist, but they are no longer confused with ultimate reality.

Conclusion

The analysis developed in these pages suggests that the narrative of the two trees of Eden, far from being a naive story of disobedience and punishment, encodes an epistemological intuition of extraordinary depth: the warning that there exists a mode of knowing that, by fragmenting reality into opposing categories, alienates the knower from the living totality to which they belong.

This intuition, formulated in the symbolic language of myth, has found in the works of David Bohm and Iain McGilchrist a rigorous and convergent contemporary articulation. Bohm demonstrated, from the standpoint of physics and philosophy, that fragmentation is not a feature of reality, but an operation of thought that does not recognise itself as such. McGilchrist has shown, from the standpoint of neuroscience and phenomenology, that the human brain harbours two qualitatively distinct modes of attention, and that the cultural hypertrophy of the analytic-categorising mode at the expense of the holistic-relational mode produces a systematic impoverishment of experience.

That a narrative composed millennia ago, a twentieth-century physicist, and a twenty-first-century neuroscientist should converge in pointing to the same structure — the part that takes itself for the whole, the representation that supplants what is represented, the emissary who usurps the master — does not constitute proof in the conventional sense of the term, but it does constitute, at the very least, an invitation to take seriously the possibility that this pattern designates something real and deep in the human condition.

Perhaps the most relevant question arising from this analysis is not theoretical but practical: if the Fall consists in the confusion between a mode of knowing and the totality of the real, the return to the Tree of Life requires not a different knowledge, but a knowledge that knows itself to be partial — a knowledge that has finally learned to recognise its own limits and to subordinate itself to that which exceeds it.

Bibliographical References

• Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge.

• Bohm, D. (1992). Thought as a System. Routledge.

• Bohm, D. (1996). On Dialogue. Routledge.

• McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

• McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Publishing.

• Scholem, G. (1941). Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Schocken Books.