How did we come to be? The mystery of human creation, addressed dramatically in Chapter 16 of Yogananda’s “Autobiography,” is quite simply the paradox that we evolved from the animal kingdom and at the same time we were granted a divine spark of life from God. The two aspects of our creation, natural selection through evolution and direct divine intervention, are not mutually exclusive or opposing theories. Instead, they are equal and mutually dependent causes of our mysterious origin. We are both animal and divine. Ours is a divine spark that burns brighter than the divinely created spirits that enliven the animals.
“Man is a soul and has a body,” says Sri Yukteswar to his disciple, Yogananda. This is the formula that best explains the relationship between our divine and animal natures. “So long as (man) remains confused in his ordinary state of spiritual amnesia,” Yukteswar continues, “he will know the subtle fetters of environmental law” (that is, the dualities of maya)
But how did man come to his “ordinary state of spiritual amnesia?” Ah. The key to this puzzle lies in the even more puzzling story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. No seeker can travel far along the spiritual path without at some point pausing to confront the mind-bending conundrum of our Fall from Grace. “Why did God punish not only the guilty pair, but also the innocent unborn generations?” asks Yogananda of his master, Sri Yukteswar. Yukteswar’s explanation of the story of Adam and Eve displays his great insight, led by his assertion that “Genesis is deeply symbolic and cannot be grasped by a literal interpretation.”
The gist of his response to Yogananda’s question is that our genesis was divine and that Adam and Eve were created as immortals inseparable from God, their Creator. God “endowed this new species with the power to create children in a similar ‘immaculate’ or divine manner.” This last assertion explains the power of the story of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, not to mention the Catholic injunction of celibacy for priests.
Needless to say, the one type of knowledge that God forbade Adam and Eve was sex, “lest humanity enmesh itself in the inferior animal method of propagation.” Thus, when they ate the apple, “Adam and Eve fell from the state of heavenly joy natural to the original perfect man…they had placed themselves under the physical law by which bodily birth must be followed by bodily death.” Yukteswar then concludes, “The knowledge of ‘good and evil,’ promised Eve by the ‘serpent,’ refers to the dualistic and oppositional experiences that mortals under maya must undergo.”
What is clear from this Eastern interpretation of the ultimate Western myth (or truth) is that the Fall represents a descent into ignorance more fundamentally than a descent into sin. Of course, sin is caused by ignorance, so perhaps it means the same thing in the end. But ignorance is overcome by the ignorant one choosing actively to seek the Truth (enlightenment,) while sin is overcome by a direct intervention from God in the person of Christ (salvation.) Yukteswar concludes his analysis by stating that “The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his ‘parents’ or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden.” In other words, it is up to each person to strive actively for enlightenment—that is, to break reincarnation’s cycle of birth and rebirth in seeking to re-unite with God. To restore the human race to the Garden of Eden,
it is not enough for any of us to remain willfully and complacently ignorant, while merely hoping or praying for an act of divine Grace in Salvation.
Bird of Spirit 