THE ADAM AND EVE STORY

 TREE OF LIFE

GENESIS is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped by a literal interpretation.  It´s "Tree of Life" is the human body.  The spinal cord is like a 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

The "serpent" represents the coiled-up spinal energy that stimulates the sex nerves. "ADAM is REASON" and "EVE is FEELING".  When the EMOTION of "Eve-consciousness" in any human being is overpowered by the sex impulse, ones REASON or "Adam-consciousness" 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 co-operative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal propensities.

THE HUMAN BODY

The human body was therefore not solely a result of evolution from beasts, but was produced though 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-petaled lotus" of the brain -- as well as acutely awakened occult centres in the spine.

God, or the Divine Consciousness present within the first created pair, counselled them to enjoy all human sensibilities, with one exception:  Sex sensations.  These were banned in order to avoid the 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.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

The knowledge of "good and evil", promised Eve by the "serpent", refers to the dualistic and oppositional experiences that mortals under MAYA (Illusion) 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.


(Excerpt from book Autobiography of a Yogi -- Teaching of the Master, Sri Yukteswar).