The Role of Satan [a.k.a.'Apara-Prakriti'] in God's Creation-Part 7

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The Role of Satan [a.k.a.'Apara-Prakriti'] in God's Creation - Part 7

 

The conflict in creation

between Christ Consciousness

and Satan

 

(p.143) In whatever way it has been rationalized, Satan's fall started an

enduring conflict between the God-tuned Holy Ghost with its immanent Christ

Intelligence, and the matter-bent lover of finite creation, Satan. Satan has

conjured an ugly counterpart for every beautiful creation of God in man's body

and mind, and in Nature. God created a wondrous human form to be charged by

cosmic energy, and to live in a free, unconditional divine state; but Satan

created hunger and the lure of sensory indulgence. For mental power, Satan

substituted mental temptation; for soul's wisdom, Satan contrived perplexing

ignorance; for the grandeur of Nature, Satan countered with the potentialities

of warfare, disease, pestilence, earthquakes, floods - a horde of disasters.

 

God made man immortal, to reign on earth as an immortal; Satan's evils bound man

with the consciousness of mortality. Man was to behold the drama of change with

a changeless immortal mind; and after seeing change dancing on the stage of

changelessness, he was to return to the bosom of Eternal Blessedness by

consciously dematerializing his physical form. (p.144) If Adam and Eve, the

symbolic first beings, had not succumbed to the temptations of Satan, and their

descendants had not allowed themselves to be influenced by hereditary ignorance,

modern man would not have to experience heartrending, painful deaths through

accident and disease. Man, being out of tune with God, has lost the power of

dematerialization given to the original human beings, so he lives with the

frightening prospect of the movie of life being prematurely cut off before he

has finished seeing the whole perfect picture of his changeful life.

 

How Satan ['Apara-Prakriti']

caused the fall of man from

divine consciousness

 

In the temptation of Adam and Eve we see that Satan's evil was at work from the

earliest period of creation. It was from my Hindu guru, Swami Sri Yukteswarji,

that I received my first clear insight into the esoteric essence of the

Christian Bible and its enigmatic story of Adam and Eve. I related his

explanation in 'Autobiography of a Yogi' and reproduce it in this present

context for the edification of the reader.

 

" Genesis is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped by a literal interpretation, "

he explained. " Its 'tree of life' is the human body. The spinal cord is like an

upturned tree, with man's hair as its roots, and afferent and efferent nerves as

branches. The tree of the nervous system bears many enjoyable fruits, or

sensations of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. In these, man may

rightfully indulge; but he was forbidden the experience of sex, the 'apple' at

the center of the body ('in the midst of the garden'). [1]

 

" The 'serpent' represents the coiled-up spinal energy [at the base of the spine]

that stimulates the sex nerves. 'Adam' is reason, and 'Eve' is feeling. When the

emotion or Eve-consciousness in any human being is overpowered by the sex

impulse, his reason or Adam also succumbs. [2]

 

" God created the human species by materializing the bodies of man and woman

through the force of His will; He endowed the new species with the power to

create children in a similar 'immaculate' or divine manner. [3] Because His

manifestation in the individualized soul had hitherto been limited to animals,

instinct-bound and lacking the potentialities of full reason, God made the first

human bodies, symbolically called Adam and Eve. (p.145) To these, for

advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two

animals. [4] In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was

ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality or polarity that underlies the

phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in a heaven of cooperative joy so

long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal

propensities.

 

" The human body was therefore not solely a result of evolution from beasts, but

was produced through an act of special creation by God. The animal forms were

too crude to express full divinity; man was uniquely given the potentially

omniscient 'thousand-petaled lotus' in the brain, as well as acutely awakened

occult [supernatural] centers in the spine.

 

" God, or the Divine Consciousness present within the first created pair,

counseled them to enjoy all human sensibilities, with one exception: sex

sensations. [5] These were banned, lest humanity enmesh itself in the inferior

animal method of propagation. The warning not to revive subconsciously present

bestial memories was unheeded. Resuming the way of brute procreation, Adam and

Eve fell from the state of heavenly joy natural to the original perfect man.

When 'they knew that they were naked,' their consciousness of immortality was

lost, even as God had warned them; they had placed themselves under the physical

law by which bodily birth must be followed by bodily death.

 

" The knowledge of 'good and evil,' promised Eve by the 'serpent,' refers to the

dualistic and oppositional experiences that mortals under 'maya' must undergo.

Falling into delusion through misuse of his feeling and reason, or Eve- and

Adam-consciousness, man relinquishes his right to enter the heavenly garden of

divine self-sufficiency. [6] The personal responsibility of every human being is

to restore his 'parents' or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden. " [7]

 

The Second Coming of Christ (The Resurrection of the Christ Within

You) Volume 1, Discourse 7, pg. 143-145

Paramahansa Yogananda

Printed in the United States of America 1434-J881

ISBN-13:978-0-87612-557-1

ISBN-10:0-87612-557-7

 

Notes:

 

[1] " We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the

tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, 'Ye shall not eat of

it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die' " (Genesis 3:2-3)

 

[2] " 'The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I

did eat.'...The woman said, 'The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat' " (Genesis

3:12-13).

 

[3] " So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him;

male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them,

'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' " (Genesis

1:27-28).

 

[4] " And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into

his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul " (Genesis 2:7).

 

[5] " Now the serpent (sex force) was more subtil than any beast of the field

(any other sense of the body) " (Genesis 3:1).

 

[6] " And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He put the

man whom He had formed " (Genesis 2:8). " Therefore the Lord God sent him forth

from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken " (Genesis

3:23). The divine man first made by God had his consciousness centered in the

omnipotent single eye in the forehead (eastward). The all-creative powers of his

will, focused at that spot, were lost to man when he began to " till the ground "

of his physical nature.

 

[7] The fall of man from his native state of divine consciousness under the

influence of Satan is understood in Yoga to be the descent of his life energy

and awareness from the centers of heavenly perception in the upper portion of

the cerebrospinal axis down to the base of the spine, whence the consciousness

flows outward to the senses and body identification (mentioned in Discourse 6).

The meaning of Satan " falling like lightning from heaven " in this microcosmic

sense is explained in Discourse 41.

 

The deeper spiritual meaning of the Bible has been woefully trivialized at the

hands of nonunderstanding literalists. I once talked to a very orthodox

Christian missionary, asking him how the serpent could influence Eve to take a

bite of the apple. " Well, " he confidently asserted, " in those days serpents

could talk! "