The First Love Triangle Was Between...

The original love triangle was between Adam, Eve and the tempter Lucifer.


The corruption which took place in the first family, set the dynamics that wreak havoc in male and female relations to this day.

One of the most agonizing symptoms of the first love triangle is for one’s partner to be attracted to someone else and succumb to infidelity.

The premise of one being torn between two lovers fills many classic literature and films worldwide.

The story of the duchess Anna Karenina all the way to the film “Casablanca” as well as soap operas and many blues and love songs mimic the realities of being betrayed by a lover.

The original Godly family was destroyed by the first illicit sexual encounter.

In this relationship, you can see various attributes of abuse and betrayals.

Since Lucifer was very wise about God’s plan and was thousands if not millions of years older, this was the first sexual abuse by a trusted elder.

Since Adam and Eve were God’s children, they betrayed the parent’s trust and commandment.  Lucifer was a servant to King and rebelled against Him by seducing and taking away the King’s children.

Adam and Eve were the first dysfunctional family.

We may believe that dysfunction we see in today's society was brought into the family by the ‘free love’ movement of the 1960s, but humanity began in this unfortunate way.

Even though the Bible uses metaphors and hidden messages to convey the Fall of humanity, many great cultural narratives, suggest that more than just an illicit sexual relation happened between the first human couple.

Genesis shows that the woman fell under the sway of the Tempter.  She yields to his seduction and then she instigates this betrayal to her betrothed.

This pattern and other deceptive games that may occur in relationships was established from the beginning of humanity.

Christianity also alludes to a double treachery.  Not only do Adam and Eve betray each other, but they betray the Creator.

By disregarding God’s warning and concern, Adam and Eve, and Lucifer initiate sex and parenthood outside of God’s blessing and participation.

This is a heartbreaking scenario which still plays out in many families ever since.

In some depictions of the Fall, the Tempter is depicted as a servant and friend to God.

He has been trusted, but he refuses to respect his Lord’s children because he was jealous of God’s love for them.

He sought revenge by getting God’s children to follow him instead of God through tricking the children into a premature and illicit affair.

Thus, the first children were seduced by their elder and their Parent’s friend.

This is the origin of the tragedy of sexual abuse of children by their caregivers, relatives and even clergymen.

This is also the foundation for those who use sex as a weapon and a way to gain illicit power.


Another Kind of Adultery

If we take the story of our first ancestors tragedy, we can see the basis of many legendary tales.

We can compare God to a King and the woman as His bride or Queen.  Therefore, God was to be her central focus of love and loyalty.

 Thus, when the servant seduces the queen this becomes an adulterous act that betrays the King.

The European story Tristan and Isolde, the heroic Tristan, the beloved of the king, arrives to take Princess Isolde as his wife.

However, the young man and maiden take a love potion and cannot resist their passion for each other. Unfortunately, Tristan and Isolde run off together in betrayal of the king.

Similarly, the British legend of King Arthur revolved around the theme adultery between the King’s first knight, Lancelot, and his Queen.

This one act of treachery brings down the Utopian Camelot.

Folk religions around the world tell of a parallel conflict triad.

Greek myths are full of infidelities.

Oedipus Rex involves not only mortals, but a foretold incident of incest: the son kills his father to win the love of his mother.  Reverend Moon has suggested just this kind of dynamic behind the fatal dysfunction of the first family.

Adam, Eve, and Lucifer all chose to evade the moral challenge before them and misused love.

As the elder Lucifer was to attend to the immature children of God.

His position called to have unconditional love and obedience.  He knew that as Adam and Eve grew that they were destined to receive a special divine love and have authority beyond what he as a servant could ever possess.

He had the moral challenge to be content with his role.

Lucifer could look to have eternal praise and gratitude from his beloved King after he was a good caregiver to the prince and princess and they matured to assume their rightful position as God‘s heirs and Lucifer’s masters.

This duty asked for him to be humble to those who were presumably younger and less experienced than himself.

Also, the royal offspring themselves would have paid him unending respect and admiration as well as their countless descendants.

Instead, Lucifer was not able to trust and remain faithful to his lord or His children.

As he could only focus on his own situation and not see Adam and Eve from God’s point of view, it looked unfair in his eyes.  Therefore, he decided to turn away from God’s guidance and steal the affection of the young girl in order to soothe his own hurt feelings and feeling alone.

Eve, who was lonely as Adam learned about the creation, she was very flattered to have his attention and over time, lost interest in her fiance in favor of the elder more fascinating mentor.

Once Eve replaced Lucifer as her god, he believed that if he could seduce the girl he could possess all her love and beauty for himself.

At the same time he could act out revenge to his ‘unjust’ Creator by stealing the Heavenly Father’s most precious treasure, thus destroying His whole purpose for creating the universe.

As a final nail in the coffin he placed God in a deep grave and he humiliated his would-be master by degrading him through the Fall and become his rival.

Eve gave too much of her heart to the charming elder.

Once Eve succumb to his seduction, she was ridden with extreme guilt and realized that the act was wrong and that her lover had taken advantage of her.

To add to her painful feelings, she had deeply betrayed her loving Father and her mate and violated her own purpose.

Out of desperation and to ease her guilt and fear, she went to Adam for comfort, therefore re-enacting the same selfish act of seduction which Lucifer used to trap and destroy Eve.  Adam also abandoned His Father’s will for the allure of his fiancee’s premature love.


Disastrous Template

These corrupted relationships that happened at the beginning of humanity, explains why infidelity and promiscuous sex has such a hold to enslave humanity to this moment.

Because humanity inherited this fallen history, a relational template so deeply embedded
within the human psyche and soul, people are inclined towards it as second nature.

Reverend Moon teaches that this adulterous relationship in the beginnings of human ancestral family life has set a pattern for the profound and pervasive disorder of love that we have witnessed ever since.

Freud had a sense of this when he proposed that the family tensions which arise from the ‘Oedipus complex’ were based on some primordial event that caused the disorder of  family love.

Research shows that infidelity is indeed passed on from generation to generation: One study found that eight out of ten cheating spouses also had a parent that did the same.

The study may find more such cases because the parent may have kept their indiscretion secret.

Adam and Eve’s mistake implied more than just an act of infidelity.

This act was the remote source of all the destructive patterns of interactions between males and females which plague our society today.

For example, Lucifer and Eve both refused to use their resources of unselfish love and remain faithful to whom they were responsible and entertained their infatuations instead.

Instead, they sought to please their immediate gratification and comforting embrace of the opposite sex.

This plays out in sexual involvements in contemporary society today.

 

Males act like Peter Pan and flee responsibilities in favor of maternal acceptance from girlfriends and gain reassurance through sexual conquests, thus escaping paternal rules and requirements.

Women and girls do the same when they overly indulge in the intoxicant of sex and promise and romance and use the closest male audience.

They do this at the cost of fully maturing into daughters of God.

Because the first couple introduced the disorder of love, this led to another phenomenon - the allure of ‘forbidden love’.

There is an insidious attraction to people who are off-limits or out of reach: another woman’s husband, the sister’s boyfriend, the blossoming daughter, celibate priest, ‘bad boy’, the same-sex friend.

A syndrome that has men honoring the purity of a woman, but at the same time pursue the fallen, loose woman at the bar or have a provocative mistress on the side.


Distorted Gender Relations

Psychologist David Kasbow also sees as Reverend Moon has the negative male-female ‘war of the sexes’ played out in the Genesis story.

He describes the three characters, Lucifer, Adam and Eve, involved are the archetypes of masculine and feminine forms of irresponsibility, exploitative on one hand and the foolishly naive and yielding on the other hand.


Predatory type

Lucifer plays the Don Juan, Playboy role surrounded by the compliant Playboy Bunnies.  He is the immature man who uses and discards the opposite sex in order to prove his worth.

Another dynamic is the man who dominates other men through conquering and winning their women.

This is almost like a parasite, a rapist and the vampire who feeds off of what other people possess.  The Eveic figure is the seductress who uses her sex to dominate men for money, security.  She may be thought of as a man-eater.

Lilith is another myth, the first wife of Adam is portrayed as a demonic feminine.

He is under the influence of the foxy counterpart of the male ‘wolf’, the Siren, Samson’s Delilah.

She is the woman who keeps a list of boy toys for her amusement and delight to show off her power by stealing men from other women.  The incestuous father, the pedophile and the aging man who takes on a younger trophy wife.

Lucifer was the trusted teacher and parental figure who preys on the fresh, virginal individual of the opposite sex in order to compensate for his own failures, frustrations and inner deadness.

Christian writer Sarah Hinckley says the virgin is so attractive to the worldly one because of the “lightness of heart that is the companion of sexual innocence”.


Return for Tomorrow’s Post: The Impact of Sex Without Commitment 


This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook “Educating for True Love” written by a team of writers to explain the philosophy of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

Relationships Need True Love to Work

Without true love, men and woman cannot trust each other. They use each other to serve themselves.

—Sun Myung Moon

Sexual union is the crowning glory of marital love.

When a couple unites through sex, this symbolizes the mingling of the hearts, blood and lives of the two partners.

This is God’s delight as well.

Before the Fall, sex was not seen as dirty or something shameful.  God would be a part of the marriage couple’s pleasurable, sacred lovemaking.

But history has provided evidence of people having difficulty disciplining their sexuality and remain faithful to their partners.

Lovers who are not committed to one another can leave behind unwanted children, diseases, adults who prey on children who are not theirs in the relationship and so on.

It is all too easy for the body to subjugate the mind, for instinct to override conscience in the arena of sex.

Some attribute this to an individual’s childhood trauma and learning.

Others blame social conditioning based on the struggle of power in relationships.  Still others have sought to explain this behavior in light of early social patterns by tracing back to the earliest communities.

Some religious traditions and psychologies look to ancient myths, legends and stories that tell of the origins of human suffering through a human Fall.

These myths are respected and thought of as revealing of profound inner truths that are too deep and not easy to convey, thus are shown through powerful images and narratives.


“Myths are facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,” asserts anthropologist Joseph Campbell.


The tale of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis in the Bible quickly comes to mind.

The Qur’an also has a counterpart story.

Reverend Moon found the root of sexual immorality and the secret of all human suffering and self-destructiveness.

These traits are tied up with the reason why it is easy to misuse love and why societies are witnessing harmful relationship patterns between men and women throughout history.

What is this secret revealed in the story of Adam and Eve?

How does the abuse of sexuality between individuals and relationships impact society?


The Human Downfall

The Bible states that the first man and woman brought evil and suffering into the world.

At that time, they enjoyed everything in Heaven on Earth freely.  But God gave them one warning: do not eat a certain fruit.

The Bible states that a crafty serpent (the Qur’an is a vengeful angel) who tempted the women with the promise that if she delve into the fruit she would gain wisdom and divine likeness to God.  He made it seem that God was keeping this power from humanity and keeping it to Himself, hence bringing a word contrary to God.

After this, she saw that the fruit was good to eat for her and ate it.

Further in the story, Eve gave the fruit to Adam.  As the snake promised, they both gained wisdom.  But by eating the fruit which God warned them against eating, it brought shame and guilt upon the man and woman so they hid themselves from God.

They first covered their sexual parts.

In every drawing or account of the Fall of Adam and Eve, it has the man and woman covering their sexual organs.

When a person makes a mistake, they cover their transgressions.  The fact that the couple covered their sexual organs, shows that their mistake was in these lower parts.

This is similar to when two people are caught in fornication or adultery

When this story first circulated, this was probably transparent to the audiences then.  In the Middle East, they understand the euphemism of ‘eating of fruit’ to mean sexual relations.

Also, the expression, ‘to know’ someone as in having sexual relations with another.

Thus the Tree of Knowledge takes on sexual connotations as well. 

Many who speak of having sex outside of marriage or in immature relations promise that they will become mature and experienced.

People still expect this from sex.

When sex is violated in this way, they bear foretold consequences from their deeds: painful childbirth, distrust and tension between men and women, not able to grow and mature in love any further, and a profound separation from God who is the source of love and life.

The Hebrew tale of Paradise Lost, written by Milton brought in a sexual counterpart, and early writings of Jewish and Christian clergy did as well, In the historical perspective, according to scholars makes the Biblical account unmistakable: the tree, snake and the women’s name and other features alludes to the widespread practice of temple prostitution and the story was a deliberate parody to denounce it.

These writings place a sexual sin at the core of all human disorder and misery.

Other myths imply the same detail.  A Shinto myth has a god and his wife engage improperly in conjugal love.  They may call it incest.  Then they correctly give birth to the islands of Japan.  The goddess dies and a misfortune befalls their first son and daughter. Kojiki 4.1-6.1

Hindu and Buddhist text also tell their tale tying the origins of suffering to sexual indiscretions.

The Greek myth of Pandora tells of a woman who betrays her promise to her immortal fiance and opens a box which releases all kinds of suffering into the world.

This box can easily symbolize a woman’s sexual parts which are opened by another instead of her husband.


Ambivalence towards sexuality

Intuitively, there is a link between sexuality and the origins of human evil.  This forms the basis of the mixed messages within certain religions regarding sex.

The chosen people of Israel had a distinguished mark of circumcision.  This is a mutilation of the male organ which was involved in the Fall.

Christians and Buddhist favor celibacy as their path to sanctification and enlightenment.

Sex is a sacred gift which has become degraded and dangerous.

In the context of wider society, sexuality is honored.  For instance, poetry and songs celebrate its goodness and maligned on the other or the vulgar ways people refer to it when expressing hate and aggression.


Subtle Ramifications

The substance of these sacred narratives is the content of contemporary life.

People indulge in sex without being mature or involved in marriage.  This brings on more heartbreak and distortion about true love.

The most ironic consequence of thinking about casual sex is that people are blind to these very consequences.

Thus, the supreme and sacred power of sexual love with all of its intrinsic psychological and emotional, moral and spiritual, relational, social and lineal ramifications comes to be reduced to merely a pleasurable physical activity, like eating or sleeping. 

The real costs of premature sexual relations on the personal and social level and the impact on God are largely overlooked.  Technology can take care of the unwanted pregnancy and sexual infections, but the damage it causes to the spirit are irreversible.


Return for Tomorrow's Post: The First Love Triangle Was Between..

This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook, "Educating for True Love" written by a team of writers to explain Reverend Sun Myung Moon's philosophy on sex and marriage.

Effects Sex Before Marriage on a Person

We unfortunately live in a society where people no longer wait for the person they are to marry to have sex.  Those who do are ridiculed and thought of as abnormal.

God intended for the fruit of sex to be opened between two marriage partners.

God being of love, would also participate in this event and the children which are born from this activity.

Many young people do not know the devastation from becoming sexually involved too soon has on their mind, spirit and developmental growth.

Therefore, we have listed six effects having sex outside of a secure relationship has on a person.  We continue from our discussion yesterday: Sex Before Marriage Disrupts Growth of Heart and Character


3. Guilt, Regret and Diminished Sense of Worth

In Genesis, Adam and Eve experienced shame after they ate of the fruit which produced the Fall.

Since sexuality is linked to the conscience, it is no surprise that misdirected love commonly yields a harvest of guilt and loss of self-respect.

When people have used the most valuable part of their bodies to gain pleasure or love or security, they cannot but feel degraded, even if they are not conscious of the loss for some time. 

Many experienced teenagers say they regret losing their virginity the way they did.

Both old and young men say that they are haunted with guilt that what was just a pleasurable ride for them was a moving expression of love and commitment for their partner.

Females are more sensitive to how something sacred has been violated with premature sex.

They may feel shame for violating the more of their parent’s or their faith community.

Abortions add weight to the partner’s distress.  Infidelity within marriage creates its own guilt-ridden hell for the cheater.

Once the cheater wakes up to the devastation they have caused to the lives of their loved one, the self-reproach can be crushing.

One counselor compares this guilt to having killed someone while driving.

Self-forgiveness can be a formidable challenge.

When one looks at sexual attractiveness and prowess as the important reason to have a romantic connection with another, this makes one judge people based on looks and not on who they are.  This behavior creates anxiety in their relationships.

When one is concerned on how they can use another just for sex and not the whole person as a criteria for a relationship, this causes one to have fear that there are more attractive people or those who can perform better.

“Do I still look good enough, perform well enough, please you enough?”


This is tragic when adultery brings this insecurity to the one place that should be safe and secure, the marriage bed.

This undermines the ideal that your partner is unique and irreplaceable.

Jennifer, 30, explains her experience: “The acceptance, even encouragement of premarital sex makes it very difficult to sustain the fantasy that we are the sole
object of love.”

Victims of infidelity often feel they have been trashed.

With this lowered self-esteem, one may enter into other sexual involvements just to prove that they are still desirable.

This leads to even more self-disrespect.

Thus, a vicious cycle of reaching approval through sex, not able to attain this, and thereby compounding one’s desperate need.


4. Heartbreak and Destructive Behavior


All infatuations or romantic involvements of some duration are painful when they break up.

But the break up of emotional ties and expectations of where the relationship was going is intensified even more when sex is introduced.

Studies have highlighted the role of certain brain chemicals in sexual bonding.

Even in casual liaisons, sex acts like a powerful glue which has no easy way to release its grip.

Hearts that bond through sex are unlikely to disengage without being ripped apart in some way.

This trauma, for some, can resemble the pain of divorce.

Others are able to numb or deny the pain through alcohol or pills.

Many men have said that they are so afraid of being hurt like that again that they withhold their hearts even though they give their body to another for moments of pleasure.

This is why young people are indifferent to sexual activity which one commentator called, “oddly disengaged—emotionally cool while physically hot.”

The heartbreak that is incurred and the sense that one has given themselves completely and only received a little in return, not including the fallout of diseases and unwanted pregnancies, can cause young people who engage in sex prematurely to live in despair.

The rate of teen suicide has tripled in the past 30 years in the U.S.  This is ths same time period where teenage sexual activity rose sharply.

Statistics show that girls who lose their virginity are more prone to commit suicide than virgins.  Male peers are more likely to be involved in destructive behavior, such as running away from home, drug use and getting arrested.

The emotional explosion that comes when one is sexually betrayed can lead to extreme rage or lead to violence against former or new lovers.

Other emotions can be exhibited from the break-up of a sexual liaisons: stalking, assualt and homicide when jealous lovers become a daily even.  Countless people live in fear of retaliation by an ex-lover.


5. Spiritual Disorientation


Uncommitted sex encourages a distorted spiritual outlook.

Whether one belongs to a certain religion, one may still have a negative outlook.  First, premature sex gives one the belief in one’s own supremacy of his or her ego.

When one has multiple sex partners, it implies that the ego is the ultimate reality.  One may believe that others are just ‘accessories’ to use and do not deserve commitment just come and go.

When one gets involved in a sexual bond while at the same time remain aloof from any emotional ties reflects an attempt to split body and soul.  They choose to ‘have sex’ rather than to be with a whole-person union with another.

This buys into the fiction that one who lives in this way may believe that they are free to express oneself through the body and independent.

This kind of reality is unspiritual and denies the connectedness of spirit and flesh and also of oneself.

This view of reality causes one to be pessimistic about the possibility of being faithful.  It also gives the viewpoint of the unreliability of the universe.

Hebrew prophets pointed out that God was absolutely faithful through His covenant and commitment to His children.

Since, humans are made in God’s likeness, the we should and could be faithful to one another in a lasting relationship.

This is the reason adultery is tied to idolatry - betraying the covenant God and ‘having an affair’ with another god.  Jeremiah 3.6, Hosea 1.2

Moving from partner to partner displays a fickleness that is a far cry from the steadfast divine love and the dependability of the created world.

When one treats the mystery of sexuality as just a plaything is irreverent in the extreme.

Religious people use dishonesty to reconcile their own unprincipled sexual behavior with their religious doctrines and perceptions of God.

This only intensifies the disorientation and damage to the spirit.


6. Degradation of Love, Life and Lineage


If one cannot respect the power of sex which allows humans to take on a divine creativity, then they will view few things as sacred.

When sex is cheapened, it tends to lead to a tainted view of its extensions such as love, life and lineage.

These traditional components seem optional and are disregarded when inconvenient.

Love has been degraded so in the dating scene that love is hardly mentioned when discussing sex.

This represents an anemic definition of love where fickle feelings are the focus.

Even in today’s society, a child conceived outside of marriage is still viewed as a curse rather than a blessing.

This is evidence that life and lineage is cheapened through nonmarital sex.

Now unwanted pregnancies is seen as an inconvenience to be taken care of with an afternoon abortion appointment like it was a dentist appointment.

When love is trivialized then life and lineage is tied in with disrespect for the gravity of sexual relations further reinforcing a person’s disorientation of spiritually. Not taking sex seriously, removes one from the Heart of God.

Carson Daly stated that this lowers one’s self-esteem and the feeling that one has been used.  One feels self-contempt for being an user.

Then there is the embarrassment being sexually active outside of marriage can place one out of the circle of people who exhibit true integrity.

The uneasiness that comes from concealing one’s activities from family members and others.

Also, Daly speaks about the extreme difficulty of trying to break the vicious cycle of compulsive sexual behavior, and the self-hatred that comes after each sexual bond is broken.  Then the cycle begins all over again when one has to seduce another in order to revive one’s fading self-image.


Harvest of Selfishness

Though selfishness has an intuitive link to conflict and evil, it is the selfish abuse of sexuality that gives it its most virulent power.


Egoism and being absorbed into oneself is the very definition of immaturity.

When an individual grows up and builds character, then these selfish traits tend to fade.  The big question is why do so many people fail to fully grow up to the full human potential?

Why do some grow to such maturity while other have shallow hearts and small minds and are enslaved to bad habits showing immature behavior close to an animal.

Adam and Eve’s abuse of sexual love is the most critical cause of the original disruption of human growth in morals.

People throughout the ages believe that there is evil and self-destructiveness within every human heart.

This flaw pulls human godly nature down, making it impossible for one to grow fully into their God-like maturity impossible.

Anthropologist Richard Heinberg has observed: “People of every culture and age have insisted that . . . human nature is not natural at all because it has been distorted by some fundamental mistake or failure that has been perpetuated from generation to
generation.”


Reverend Moon defines this fundamental problem as descent from a poisoned lineage, a family tree rooted in self-centered love that bears only fruit of self-centered love.

The forbidden fruit was a metaphor for sexual love, which was ‘picked’ when it was immature and unripe.  This fruit was toxic in flesh and within the seed.

The first ancestors’ unprincipled liaison fundamentally disrupted the matrix of family life. 

“Humanity lost the standard of true parents, spouses, siblings and children,” explains Reverend Moon.

Opening the sexual fruit in its immature state which all humanity inherited hinders the capacity for us to give the truest love and blindness to the true reality of the heart and spirit.  Also, it gave rise to the extreme difficulty of the mind to lead the fallen body.

Catholics call this tendency original sin.  Buddhism attributes this enslavement to the senses.  Judaism calls it an evil inclination.

Freud deemed it the sexual instinct - the most unruly side of the root of the unconscious.

This inheritance, revolving around the heart and sexual desire, derailed moral and spiritual development.


Return for Tomorrow’s Post: Relationships Need True Love to Work

This post was rewritten and derived from the religious book, “Educating for True Love” written by a team of writers to explain Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s philosophy on love and marriage.