Deep sleep as consequence, not cause. The textual ground for reading the tardema as what Adam could no longer avoid rather than as something done to him.
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THE GNOSTIC WITNESS
The Gnostic texts present Adam in a state of spiritual sleep before the fall proper. The Apocryphon of John has him requiring awakening: I entered into the midst of the prison which is the prison of the body, and I said, he who hears, let him arise from the deep sleep.
Adam's pre-fall state in that text is one of ignorance and imprisonment rather than glory, which is the opposite of what the tradition assumes and is the same finding Böhme reaches by a different route.
[See THE DEEP SLEEP · THE FAIR IMAGE · ADAM]
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BÖHME ON WHY THERE COULD BE NO SLEEP
Böhme states the exclusion directly in the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, chapter twelve: a reasonable person will easily perceive that there could be no sleep in Adam as long as he was in the image of God, and that we shall then not need the elements, neither the sun nor the moon, and shall also require no sleep.
And he names what the sleep was. Adam forthwith sank down into a swoon, into sleep, into an unability, which signifies the death, for the image of God, which is immutable, does not sleep. Whatsoever is eternal has no time in it; but by the sleep the time was manifest in man, for he slept in the angelical world and awaked to the outward world.
The exclusion is the whole argument. If the image of God does not sleep, then the sleep is evidence of what Adam had already become.
[See BÖHME · THE SIGNATURA RERUM · TINCTURE]
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THE ORDERING
The tardema that falls upon Adam is not arbitrary divine action. It is the culmination of what he had been doing.
Waking consciousness cannot be maintained when the organizing orientation has collapsed. The deep sleep is what happens when the tether to life releases. His refusal to take freely of the tree of life, his standing apart, his installation of measurement distance, had disconnected him from what sustained unified awareness.
He sleeps because he is already unconscious in the ways that matter.
[See THE TURN · THE MEASUREMENT CUT · AKOL TOKEL]
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The sleep does not cause his separation from Eve.
It manifests the separation already underway in his cooled tincture and his contracted field-participation.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
