Bridger of Worlds
The Bridger of Worlds podcast is an in-depth walkthrough between the world of matter and world of spirit. I struggled with porn addiction for close to fifteen years, and all of this led me to discovering some very crucial and beautiful things about not only the physicality of my existence, but the spirituality of it as well. Since then, I‘ve been building bridges that have served me in feeling more whole and well-integrated. I’ve now made it my mission to share with you whatever it is I’ve learned.
Themes, topics and healing modalities such as spiritual embodiment, psychosomatic practices, Shadow Work, Masculine/Feminine energetics, conscious sexuality and archetypal meanings are brought to the forefront in order to raise awareness around what is out of sight because it is only from there that new life can ever emerge.
The greatest paradox of the human condition is to live amongst duality as we seek unity. This is a podcast honoring both and in doing so, creating the loving connections and honest-to-raw conversations we so desire in our lifetimes.
Bridger of Worlds
Sacred Sexuality in the Bible II: Adam, Eve, the Serpent & the Garden of Eden
In this episode of The Bridger of Worlds Podcast, Ioannis Kokkinos explores the hidden dimensions of sacred sexuality within Judeo-Christian mysticism, revealing how the story of Adam and Eve, the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge mirror the inner alchemy of the human soul.
Key themes explored in this episode:
- Sacred Sexuality & the Bible: Reinterpreting Adam and Eve as an archetypal story of union, temptation, and awakening rather than sin and shame.
- Tree of Life & Tree of Knowledge: Exploring their symbolic connection to sexual energy, duality, and the path of divine integration.
- The Serpent’s Wisdom: Understanding the serpent in Eden as a symbol of kundalini, creative life force, and the transformative power of desire.
- East Meets West: Bridging Christian mysticism with Taoist and Tantric teachings on the sacred union of masculine and feminine energies.
- From Shame to Power: Challenging dogma that represses sexuality and reclaiming eros as a pathway to spiritual wholeness and creation.
Ioannis invites listeners to reimagine sexuality not as a fall from grace, but as a divine gateway to embodiment and union with Source.
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bridger of Worlds podcast. I'm your host, Ioannis Kokkinos. Thank you so much for joining me. If you're on YouTube watching, thank you for tuning in and if you're on one of the podcast platforms, thank you for tuning in as well.
Sacred Sexuality in Judeo-Christian Teachings
So today I am gonna continue riding this train that I started as far as sacred sexuality is concerned, and the Christian teachings.
Today we're gonna go a bit more Judeo Christian. So last week I talked about the Eucharist, the blood, the wine, the bread, the seed, right? There was like a small parentheses in connection to the episode two weeks ago. So I did talk about some Judeo-Christian citations and symbols there. So please touch base with that episode with last week's episode even three weeks ago.
Because that's basically when I started talking about esoteric Christianity in connection to the spiritual, energetic union of the masculine and feminine. Now, of course, this does parallel the Eastern philosophies, the Eastern teachings As far as Taoism is concerned and Hindu Tantrism.
Adam and Eve: Symbols and Archetypes
So in the East it's obviously a lot more emphasized and more mainstream accepted to say that the spiritual foundation of the universal teachings is divine union between the masculine and the feminine, and I wholeheartedly believe the same doctrine is present in Christianity, which includes the Old and New Testament, as well as Judaic teachings, because today I'm gonna really get into the creation story of Adam and Eve, which is present in the Old Testament.
So the Old Testament is of course, a part of the Bible, and it speaks to how the world was created. So I wanna talk about Adam and Eve as symbols.
The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge
So I'll obviously be talking about them from the archetypal perspective, and I'm also gonna talk about the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge and how all this connects to sexual energy. We're gonna take a look at original sin from a very different vantage point. So I have mentioned in quite a few episodes how obviously when organized institutions started to come into power, the. Overall message and translation of sex and sexuality was shameful, disgusting, the reason the fall of humankind began.
Original Sin and Sexuality
But that is not exactly the case because if we dissect the symbolism and meaning of both the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, and of course Adam and Eve, we will see that sexuality is actually very much a part of creation, spirituality and even godliness. The sacred, the source, right?
So this is not new information. I've been talking about this for many, many episodes, but today we will be diving deep into the story of Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. So, of course there's a lot of references, there's a lot of citations. I'm going to summarize what happened in Eden and why the fall of humankind began.
So the most important thing here that I wanna state off the bat before I get into it is that God actually did instruct Adam and Eve to have sex, and this was before the temptation with the apple by the serpent, right? So, um, God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful. Adam and Eve were actually created on the sixth day.
So God created the world in seven days according to the Bible. And on the sixth day is when Adam and Eve were created. And prior to Adam and Eve being created, God created nature, right? He created the plants, the trees, the flowers. He created light and dark. The flora, the fauna, right?
So Adam and Eve were basically instructed by God to be fruitful, which symbolically speaking means to have sex to continue creating, right, creating nature. So Adam and Eve are obviously in union, right? The feminine and the masculine are in union in order to create life. This we already know, but one instruction that God told Adam and Eve, that was also very important, to not eat from the tree of knowledge. So the tree of knowledge is the tree of duality. The tree of life is the tree of oneness. Both trees were present in the Garden of Eden. The tree of life represents Adam and Eve in union, and the tree of knowledge represents Adam and Eve as split.
So symbolically speaking, this creation story basically explains and depicts how oneness, which is the source, which is God consciousness, it was split into duality, into the duality of spirit and matter.
It is very significant that Eve was, uh, the one that was tempted because eve represents the feminine, right? And the feminine is the symbol for matter. Matter is the material manifestation of the world, right? So everything we can see, smell, hear, taste, and touch is under the domain of matter. So when the universe was no longer just energy and matter started to form, this is basically what represents the split between masculine and feminine, the split between Adam and Eve. Now, it is very.
The Serpent and Gnosis
Significant that a serpent was the one that presented with this knowledge, right? So the tree of knowledge, knowledge here is code. Knowledge in Greek means gnosis, and in esoteric terms, in the traditional, esoteric teachings, gnosis comes by way of inner seeking, right?
So we have knowledge that We gain when we read text, when we read a book, you know, when we read something online, we gather knowledge, we gain knowledge, but that's not what knowledge here means. Knowledge here means gnosis, and gnosis comes from inner seeking, inner contemplation, inner meditation, and also metaphor.
So the Tree of Knowledge gave the message of that duality exists. So there's a huge misunderstanding here that the reason for the split was sexual union. This is not exactly the case. Original sin does not equate to Adam and Eve having sex. They were already having sex, they were already being fruitful in order to continue this process of creation that God had already started in Eden.
What happened was is that by having sex by eating the apple from the tree of knowledge, they gained the knowledge that sexuality is not only a force for unity and creation, but is also a force for destruction. So touch base with the episode, 'cause I go into a full episode about this, that sexual energy is a force for creation as well as destruction.
And this is significant because our homework in this lifetime is basically to raise our sexual energy. So the serpent under Western symbolism is Lucifer or the Devil, so it's an evil symbol as far as Christian symbolism is concerned. And it is the serpent, which is the sexual energy that told Eve to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge in order to gain knowledge that sex is not just a force for creation, but also separation, destruction, which represents the fall, right?
So. Eve ate the apple. They were both aware that they were naked, right? They felt a lot of shame, and then they got kicked out of Eden. So this is centuries and generations worth of shame and guilting as far as like our private parts and our genitals and our sexuality's concerned. So thank you very much organized institution for that.
But as I said, they were already in sexual union. It's just prior to the tree of Knowledge. It was the tree of life, and the tree of life is the tree that symbolizes oneness.
The Tree of Life Across Cultures
It is the tree that is present across many cultures and tribes and religions across the ages.
We see the Tree of life apart as part of Kabbalah. We see it in Norse mythology. We see it in Aztec, Mayan mythology. We see it in shamanic lore, right? The Tree of Life is a universal symbol that represents the unconscious, which is the root systems of the tree. Then we have the bark of the tree, which represents the mundane day-to-day reality that we are very much aware of, and then the branches, the leaves, right? Everything stretching up towards the sky and heavens represents the super conscious or. God consciousness, right? So the Tree of Life is actually the harmonizing and the bridging of spirit and matter. It is unity. It is union, but it doesn't mean that it's better than the Tree of knowledge.
The Duality of Sexual Energy
The tree of knowledge gives us the knowledge that because we are human and because we are here on the Earth plane, this means that Spirit and matter split into duality, but we need this duality to realize oneness, we need basically the fruit from the tree of knowledge to realize duality separation, which is not necessarily evil, right?
'cause here in the Christian teachings, we have Lucifer disguised as a serpent. We have Eve the feminine who did something very bad and terrible because, you know, as humans we realize there is duality. But that is the game. That's the game we're here to play as part of our human condition is within duality, among duality is to realize the singularity, which is the tree of life, the tree of oneness.
So, of course sexual union represents bringing two single entities together. It's it, it represents divine union. But what have I been saying in previous episodes is that the sexual energy can also be a source of detriment.
It can be a source of destruction if we don't face the shadow expression of our sexuality.
The Kundalini and Ancient Symbols
So in two episodes ago, I did talk about the Temple of Solomon, right, as the two pillars and the Holy of Holies. So Boaz is one pillar, jachin is the second pillar and the Holy of Holies is the center, central channel. Now symbolically, this actually represents the masculine and the feminine and the central channel, right?
Pingala and Ida from the Kundalini teachings and Sushumna, which is the central channel. Archetypally speaking, we can also say the same thing for Adam and Eve and the tree of life, right? We can say that Adam is the masculine channel. Pingala. Eve is the feminine channel, Ida and the tree of life is Sushumna, right?
So the spine, the tree of life is basically where the energy must rise in order to realize. Oneness where the Kundalini energy rises from the base in order to realize oneness at the crown. And this we also see on the caduceus of Hermes, right?
So the caduceus is two serpents, coiling the staff. Those two serpents represent again, masculine and feminine. Pingala and Ida and the staff represents Sushumna, the central channel. We also see the same staff in ancient Egypt. The staff of Osiris two serpents coiling, a staff reaching a pine cone. The pine cone here represents the pineal gland pine.
Pineal. The pineal gland is one of our spiritual centers. It's one of our glands in our head that is one of our spiritual centers. When we raise the energy, when we use breath, when we use awareness, the two serpents being the masculine and the feminine, the energies raised up to the pine cone, up to the pineal gland, and we realize oneness.
So. It's not just in the east through Hindu Tantrism, where we see two serpents and the central channel. We also see this in Egypt. We see this in ancient Greece. We see this in ancient Rome. We also see this in Aztec and Mayan mythology. Quetzacoatl, Kukulkan was the feathered serpent.
The feathered serpent here represents the kundalini that has been raised and is flying, right? So it's that serpent energy that we are all meant to raise and liberate in order to experience oneness and God consciousness. So it is the serpent in Eden. That tells Eve to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge because it is the serpent that is the sexual energy here.
That is actually, in a very paradoxical way, the liberator, because we need the duality. We need to have the free choice to decide and choose where we are to go in our lifetime. That is the point of being here to have free will and to have the free choice to go left or right, to go up or down, to go in or out, right?
Life is a constant balancing act of choice of yes or no. That is the tree of knowledge. But of course here, this speaks to cultivating our spiritual natures, and it is the base, the foundational energy, the base energy is our sexual energy is the serpent that we need to utilize and work with in order to see in which direction we are to go.
Are we going to further destroy ourselves? Are we going to further separate and sever ourselves from God, from spirituality, from the source, or are we gonna use the serpent, the sexual energy to further create ourselves, to move through rebirth? The snake, the serpent, archetypally speaking is one of the ultimate symbols of transmutation and transcendence.
It's an animal that sheds its skin throughout its lifetime more than once, right? So the shedding of the skin represents the death of old life and the new skin growing represents the birth of new life. So I talked about in the two episodes ago how Jesus said that we must raise the serpent. Jesus obviously moved through resurrection. Jesus Christ moved through rebirth, and this is what he meant when he said, so just how Moses raised the serpent. So the Son of Man, which speaking about himself, the son of man, the son of God must be raised because we have to work with the sexual energy, with the serpent in order to move through rebirth. So the tree of knowledge is not the tree of evil. And let's say we paint, you know, we painted the serpent as Lucifer Lucifer is our shadow, right? So Lucifer is just our shadow self, right?
So if we look at it from the Jungian perspective. Our shadow can be Lucifer. Our shadow can be the devil because our shadow is constantly in a state of peril and pain because of its perceived notion of separation. But here's the kicker. Jesus Christ also moved through his own shadow self, right? Like his ego crucifixion or shadow crucifixion, right? Which led to his rebirth. It's not that Jesus experienced rainbows and butterflies. Jesus very much was basically at war with his shadow, which represented Lucifer and Lucifer as a symbol represents the separation of spirituality and matter, but not the reunion. Right? Jesus Christ represents the reunion of spirit and matter. That is the Christ energy. So that is why the Christ as holy fire moving through our body, moving through our chakras, moving through our churches is the representation of the reunion of Spirit and matter.
Jesus Christ was also named the last adam, this symbolically means that when Jesus Christ resurrected and entered the kingdom of heaven, it was Adam and Eve that reentered Eden. Jesus Christ. Resurrecting represents the reunion of Adam and Eve as symbols. And I'm not talking about people here, right?
I'm talking about the energy of the masculine and the energy of the feminine.
The Role of the Nervous System
And if we look at this physiologically speaking, right? Our nervous system is split into two. We have the sympathetic nervous system, which is the masculine, and we have the parasympathetic nervous system that is the feminine.
This is always and forever speaking to the relationship between the active, penetrative force of our energy and the energy of the cosmos and the passive receptive force of within ourselves and the energy of the cosmos. I've been talking about union of masculine and feminine, union of masculine and feminine, but this is happening on a very practical level because we are, when we are in an active, stimulated, highly charged, um, willful state. That is our masculine, that is our sympathetic nervous system. When we are in a relaxed, open, flowing, nurturing, receptive, calm, fluid state. We are in our feminine, which is our parasympathetic nervous system, and we need both because when we are not in our sympathetic nervous system, our body is in a parasympathetic, relaxed state, which improves and vitalizes all of our bodily slash health functions, which influences our breathing. Right. When we are in an active state, when we are in our masculine, when we are in our sympathetic nervous system, our breath is much more fast paced and charged. When we are in a very relaxed state. Our breathing pace is much slower and more calm, which signifies that we are in our parasympathetic nervous state, which is the feminine, and it is in the parasympathetic nervous system where most of the healing happens. When we are in downtime, when we are resting, when we are relaxed, when we are meditating, when we're slowing our breath down, when we are calm, when we are open and receptive. That is where most of the healing happens for our body, for our organs, for our bodily functions. So, yes, Adam and Eve, right?
Shiva. Shakti. Masculine, feminine archetypes, archetypes, archetypes. But on a practical level. We're basically talking about our masculine energy as a sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the feminine, and that is Ida and Pingala in the Hindu tantric teachings. That is the two serpents on the caduceus of Hermes, the messenger God in ancient Greece, or Mercury in ancient Rome, the staff of Osiris in ancient Egypt, right?
These two serpents are basically two energetic channels within our body. So this was a bit of a tangent actually.
The Symbolism of Adam and Eve
I didn't, I wasn't gonna talk about this, but because I'm talking about Adam and Eve, right? And I keep talking about masculine and feminine and the serpent, right? We're so culturally and generationally conditioned to like fear and hate and distrust the serpent, I guess mostly in the West because of the story, the tree of knowledge,
just to recap here a little bit, the Tree of Knowledge gave us the knowledge that duality exists, but we need that knowledge of duality to realize oneness, and that's the whole journey of the Christ. That's the whole journey of Jesus Christ, and that's why, as I said, he was named the last Adam because what Jesus did as far as moving through his crucifixion and going through what he went through in order to resurrect, signify that he reentered Eden. He reentered the kingdom of heaven as the last adam and there's no Adam without Eve, right? So symbolically speaking, Adam is the spiritual principle, and Eve is the material principle, right?
That's why the serpent tempted eve. The serpent didn't tempt Adam because eve is the feminine and the feminine is the material experience. But we are here to be material. We are here to experience the material. That is what it means to be human and to live on this earth. Plane is to move through matter, but it is through matter.
It is through the physical. We realize the spiritual and that is the game. We are all here to play no matter what our religious background or no matter what our culture, no matter what our age, no matter anything, every single human being is here to play this game of realizing oneness or realizing the singularity within the duality, the dual nature of things.
So I repeat Sex was happening in Eden. They were told to be fruitful. The fruit here represents sexual union because, uh, an apple is a fruit, right? So we know that Eve ate the apple, which signified sexual union between her and Adam, but here was from the Tree of Knowledge. It wasn't from the Tree of Life.
So we can say basically that Adam and Eve were eating from the Tree of life, right? They were told to be fruitful. So they were eating all kinds of apples from the Tree of life, but the fall didn't happen. They were moving through sexual union to continue this process of creation, to continue the process of nature, which is what God had created prior to creating Adam and Eve.
And the apple, the fruit from the tree of Knowledge gave them the knowledge duality. So sexual energy is a force solely for creation from the tree of life. But then sexual energy from the tree of knowledge as a force for creation and destruction, separation.
The fall, right? The fall meant they were no longer spiritual. They left Eden. They became human beings filled with misery, shame, and guilt. But, that's just sprinkles and garnish from organized institution. It's not to say that we are not here to feel those things, right.
To face our shadow and to move through shadow work and to, you know, meet the Lucifer in all of us, which is, I repeat our shadow is to move through these feelings, is to transform these feelings, is to transmute these feelings. And because that is exactly what Jesus Christ did. Jesus Christ felt shame. He felt guilt.
He felt fear. He felt terror, right? He felt grief. He moved through a lot of pain and suffering in order to experience his resurrection. So that was Jesus moving through his shadow. That was Jesus showing us what we are all here to do.
I also do wanna say about Adam and Eve, that Eve was created by the rib of Adam. And Adam was put under a deep sleep in order for Eve to be created. Sleep represents the unconscious. It represents the womb, gestation energy, right?
When we are sleeping, we're in the dark. It's the dark gestation phase of life and our process. So woman is actually womb. Man, right. So Eve was created from Adam because he was put under deep sleep, which represents the womb. That's how we get the word woman. Woman comes from womb-man So again, this is also highly symbolic because woman represents transformation, woman represents alchemy. Woman represents moving through the dark in order to transform the old into the new. That's why it was Eve that was tempted by Lucifer.
That's why it was Eve that had this conversation with the serpent, which was also a symbol of transformation and rebirth.
Conclusion and Next Episode Preview
So I am gonna leave it here because next week I want to get more into the difference between Jesus Christ and Lucifer from the aspect of the inner fire. So I talked a little bit about this today, but next week I wanna get deeper into it and really at last, paint the picture and depict this difference, this significant difference between let's say Christ Fire and Luciferian Fire because both are very sound and very, um, very potentially alive in within us. And of course, this does speak to sexual energy, sexual energy that is creative energy that is meant to become spiritual energy. So I'll leave it here.
And I'm also just letting you know that next week this is what I will be getting into. So please stay tuned for that. The difference between the Christ Fire and Luciferian Fire. It's important to know the distinctions because it has been incredibly, incredibly, incredibly confusing for the general collective, and generations upon generations of misinformation, miscommunication, um, lack of awareness. I don't know. I have no idea. But once we truly understand something, then we can really feel a sense of power and control over it.
Right? It won't rule over our psyches and won't rule over us as something to fear or to feel shame about. 'cause that's not what sexuality is meant to evoke within us. Right? Sexuality is not meant to evoke fear, shame, and guilt, uh, within us, not at all. So as far as the West is concerned, as far as you know, the Christian teachings are concerned, that is what I'm gonna get into next week with the Christ Fire and the Luciferian Fire and archetypally, how we can name both.
How we can move through these energies and what it is we need to do in order to distinguish one from the other. Okay? So stay tuned for that. I'll leave it here. That's enough food for thought. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know how much I enjoy talking about it. I love talking about these things as you very well know by now.
Uh, if you're on YouTube, please hit that like subscribe button. I so greatly appreciate it and motivates me, keeps me going. If you're on one of the podcast platforms, please share the content if you so feel called. Of course, if you're on YouTube as well, please share the episode. You can leave comments down below.
You can send me messages. I am on social media. I'm now on substack. I'm on Threads, TikTok, Facebook. Instagram, I'd love to see you over there as well. I will be back next week with the episode I told you about, as always here every Thursday, Bridger of Worlds. And in closing, please remember that you are the medicine and I am just the messenger.
Thank you very much.