What is 'the tree of life'? Does anyone believe that it exists, and if so, where?

Answer 1

It more of a 'scrub of life' and its currently in Hyde Park where a dog is cocking its leg up against it...

Answer 2

Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge and God banished them from the Garden of Eden because they disobeyed him, but there was also a tree of life there too and had they eaten of that they too like God would have lived forever.

So if you can find the Garden of Eden you might be on a winner, but who wants to live for ever?

what would be the point in doing anything if you've got all the time in the world to do it?

Answer 3

The tree of life is mentioned in alot of mythology, the two main ones being the Jewish esoteric branch called cabala and the Norse mythology of the ygdrassil or World Tree.

Speculation is of this being a symbolic representation of the axis of the world.

Answer 4

Rolf Edberg wrote an excellent book "At the foot of the tree - a wanderer's musing before the fall"

see http://www.kau.se/edbergstiftelsen/main/eng/edberg.html

The tree of life I would say is a taxonomic concept to show how ancestral form (root/base of tree) gives rise to descendents/ sub species which occur at tips of branches. the branches are the evolutionary pathways that led to the descendent species. The more forks in a branch and the more branchlets , the more suscessful that descendent group is at adapting to change .

This is just one way of looking at life on Earth over time, Caladistics (Hennig) , Quantum/Phyletic evolution (G G Simpson) , Vicariance (Gareth Nelson), are all different views

you may want to look at sites such as:

http://www.nhc.ed.ac.uk/index.php?page=236 (the symbol of the Natural History Museum in London is/was based on the tree of life

Then there are other sites such as:
http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

http://altreligion.about.com/library/weekly/aa102902a.htm


Bascially its an invisible "tree" we and the rest of life form its branches with its root and trunk lodged in the fossil record,

As a philosopher by starting with modern man you move from Archaeology to Anthropology to Philosophy of Evolution to Cosmology

Answer 5

The tree of life is supposed to be teh tree from which adem and eve stole the forbidden fruit.
i don't believe in it. most christians do though.
i suppose where it is could depend on each individual. so, if you lived in england and were very 'british', you would imagine the tree to be some where in england.

Answer 6

There is a tree of life in the park with the fountain of youth.

Answer 7

I have been to the Tree Of Life, it is in Bahrain.

Answer 8

There are two trees of life of which I am currently aware, and the one most consistent with your question is the biblical tree of life that appears in Genesis and later in Revelation.

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Genesis 2:
9 And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Genesis 3:
22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."
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Here the tree of life is set in the middle of the garden juxtaposed to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God forbids man to eat from the latter (though, interestingly, not from the former) and, as anyone familiar with the story knows, man disobeyed gaining the forbidden knowledge and being cast away both from paradise and from the immortality of the tree of life (so they would not "become like one of us" - like a god).

Jumping ahead, we are presented with the tree again (arguably, since the actual words in Greek are "wood of life" not "tree of life") here in Revelation, at the end of all things.

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Revelation 2:
7 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Revelation 22:
2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

19 And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

[Note - This verse is often falsely used to advocate biblical completeness in arguments of biblical inerrancy and biblical supremacy. Clearly, the intent is not that purpose. Rather, the verse is referring to the text in which it appears, what we have come to call the book of Revelation.]
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Here, the faithful reunite with the source of eternal life disobedience separated them from thus completing the Christian view of the spiritual cycle.

We must be cautious when proclaiming that any of these things "exist" in a literal spacio-temporal sense. The books of Genesis and Revelation are symbolically loaded and saying that man sinned first by physically consuming the knowledge of good and evil and then saying that, at the end of time, god need work through literal trees which will be physically consumed in order to grant eternal life to the faithful is a sort of spiritual childishness whereby one hides from the difficulty of actual interpretation and renders deep and profound images into flat paper cut-outs. These trees certainly do not exist anywhere in the physical world now and likely never actually did. They are symbols for much deeper ideas - the eternal perfect life granted in god and the sin, decay, and death granted by our willful separation from the things of god - and the truth of these symbols will stand or fall not on a physical search for them but on a deep understanding of what they represent. The images exist to transmit ideas; they are not the ideas themselves.

Answer 9

Miss Oxon is correct, its in Bahrain down by Riffa Golf Club and is covered in arabic graffiti. It features in all of Bahrain's tourist mags. Not worth the visit.

Answer 10

it depends upon you to believe if it exists. but its symbolic. you won't find it in a map, nor will a cab take you there. and a food for thought: you know that a thought is real, thousands of them run through your head all day. but have you seen one? do you have to see one to believe?