Is the Book of Genesis a Narrative form of Buddhism?

If you eat The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you'll start clinging to the aggregates and that feels bad, man.

I am beginning to wonder whether the book of genesis is encoding a bunch of concepts from Buddhism, but in a more widely accessible narrative form. Note that I don’t mean to say “all of Genesis is nothing more than Buddhism,” so much as, “it looks like Genesis includes within it a lot of things that mesh with the Dharma.”

For example, the first noble truth says that suffering comes from clinging, or attachment. Buddhism then offers more theories about how to escape suffering, combined with an 8 step process which starts to get pretty difficult to grasp unless you're really good with abstraction and have sat for long hours in meditation, watching your breath and noticing subtle changes and gradations in conscious experience.

Buddhism probably works well for certain classes of intelligent, conscientious people - hence the popularity of Buddhism among white collar American elites - but for most people, I think it's probably too abstract to work.

Is it possible that some clever social entrepreneurs converted the Buddha’s insights into a narrative form, to help them go viral, even if only in a weaker form? I’m wondering if this is what the book of Genesis is: Buddhist wisdom grafted on existing viral vehicles like the flood stories that were common in Mesopotamia, using M.C. Escher-style symmetric narrative structures to keep pointing in a direction that says, “love the truth, pursue it fearlessly, and your life will go as well as as it possibly can.”

Genesis as a Narrative Approximation

The story in Genesis says, "everything was good until Adam and Ave ate from the 'the tree of knowledge of good and evil'."

What would the effect of eating from such a tree be? If our brains are analog computers that use narratives to help us evaluate and navigate the world, and we didn't have any concept of good or evil, we might default into an 'everything is good' state, and, like animals, only respond to threats and dangers in the immediate moment.

Once we start using our brains to evaluate some things as good and other things as evil, you can imagine a feedback loop where we "incorrectly" see things as evil, which makes us feel bad, which makes a mess of our environments and makes things consistently worse.

I put "incorrectly" in quotes because there's no widely accepted empirical framework for evaluating whether or not assessments of things as 'evil' are correct.

What I've found is that mentally telling myself, "don't eat from that tree, I know it doesn't work out out for me" makes it easier for me to accept things as they are, which then makes it easier to actually fix problems, or just accept what I can't change, instead of getting angry or upset at things I can't control, which often has the effect of distorting my perception of those things in ways that make them seem bigger or more important than they really are. See: all of modern politics on the internet.

Personification as a Resonance-Increasing Hack

This approach works far better when I tell myself that Truth is a person that my ancestors called “God”, probably because I’m a meat-brained primate hardwired to seek out and emotionally respond to social cues. When I tell myself,

“relax, trust that God is in control,”

this seems to work for me far better than something more emotionally sterile, like,

“trying to control things you cannot control is a recipe for suffering, so it’s better to try and accept whatever i can’t control”

In the same way, imagining a 100-meter tall woman is picking me up and holding me to her breast is more effective at reducing my anxiety than piddling around with some mathematical formulas or predictions of risk. I don’t think this is remotely irrational, any more than telling my children about the Little Red Hen is an act of irrationality because everyone knows animals don’t form coalitions to manufacture baked goods.

This approach - of trying to see all things as intrinsically good - looks a lot, to me, like a simpler version of the approach advocated in the 8 step path.

In other words,

"Believe there's a God who loves you, who made everything and who is totally sovereign, so anything that seems bad is just something good that I don't yet understand"

seems like a simpler, cheaper narrative approximation of something like

"your emotional state comes largely from a belief-based evaluation of your circumstances relying on totally untestable beliefs about what 'good' is; all kinds of beliefs about 'good' could be used, but any belief system that doesn't assert, a priori, that everything is OK, interacts with your hardware in such a way that it produces an emotionally destructive positive feedback loop because it causes you to label some aspects of reality as 'bad' and then simultaneously fixate on exaggerated versions of them, and blind yourself to their more subtle realities, which will make you miserable."

According to wikipedia, the timelines for genesis and the Buddha roughly overlap.

I've had more thoughts on this, and suspect that the 'seven days of creation' might be narrative descriptions of psychological states called 'Jhanas', with the book of genesis reading almost like a backwards recipe for escaping suffering, with the terminus of the recipe being the garden of Eden.

The “Backwards Narrative form of Buddhism” Interpretation of Genesis

In order to attain peace, a person has to escape the social conditioning of the world they grew up in, put the tower of babel back together and understand the underlying reality that’s obfuscated by linguistic attempts to corral human beings into working together (which are inevitably flawed because they will mistake a map of social rewards for a map of the truth), deal with the inevitable suffering of being human by trusting God (i.e. Truth) to carry you through the emotional flood of knowing that your death and that of your loved ones is inevitable, keep going backwards through the story to overcome jealousy of seeing some people outperform you (i.e. God likes Abel’s sacrifice instead of Cain’s, contempt and anger are some one of the hardest negative emotions to overcome), then arrive at the Gates of Eden where the ‘angel with the flaming sword’ is your intuition that says surely there is such a thing as good and evil, but it turns out this angel is the same as the serpent, your intuition tells you good and evil exist, which, if you trust the Accuracy of your Intuition instead of the Goodness of Truth, then means you get overtaken by fear and spend your life trampling the part of your intuition that says the “world is good” underfoot, trusting your fear-guided intellect over the part of your heart that knows Eden is real and longs to be part of it.

Once you get back into Eden - by abstaining from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil long enough that you stop evaluating everything around you as good or bad and instead see yourself as part of one divine energy manifesting itself in myriad forms, you learn how to concentrate yourself by naming the animals that appear (desire, fear, greed, lust, desire, clinging, attachment etc) until the animals disappear (i.e. your brain calms down, you learn how to stop monkey mind) and you enter into the Jhanas, increasingly refined states of consciousness that become ever more subtle, with features like space and time dropping away until you end with nothing but pure awareness:

“In the beginning was Truth, The Level 4 Multiverse, The Word, And Truth was with God, and Truth Was God”