The Adam and Eve story:

[Guest guest]

The Adam and Eve story:

 

" Why did God punish not only the guilty pair, but also the innocent

unborn generations? "

 

Master was amused, more by my vehemence than by my ignorance. He started

explaining – " Genesis is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped

by literal interpretation; 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 centre, or `in the midst' of the bodily garden. The

serpent represents the coiled up spinal energy that stimulates the sex

nerves. "

 

`Adam' is the reason, and Eve is feeling. When the emotion or

Eve consciousness in any human being is over powered by the sex impulse,

his reason or Adam also succumbs.

 

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.

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.

 

To these, for advantageous upward evolution, he transferred the souls or

divine essence of two animals. 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; the original man

and woman were uniquely given a tremendous mental capacity – the

potentially omniscient `thousand petal lotuses' of the brain

– as well as acutely awakened occult 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. (Now the serpent (sex force) was more subtle than any beast

of the field (any other sense of the body) – genesis 3:1) These were

banned in order to avoid use of sex organs, which would enmesh humanity

in the inferior animal method of propagation. The admonition not to

revive subconsciously present bestial memories was not heeded.

 

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.

 

The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his

`parents' or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden "

 

As sri Yukteswar ended his discourse, I glanced with new respect at the

pages of Genesis

 

" Dear master " , I said, " for the first time I feel a proper

final obligation toward Adam and Eve! "

 

Paramahamsa Yogananda.