"The Adam and Eve story is incomprehensible to me!" I observed with
considerable heat one day in my early struggles with the allegory.
"Why did God punish not only the guilty pair, but also the innocent
unborn generations?"
Master was more amused by my vehemence than my ignorance. "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 bodily garden. {FN16-14}
"The 'serpent' represents the coiled-up spinal energy which 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. {FN16-15}
"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. {FN16-16} 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.
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