The Original Sin

“The question is how qualitative you want your life to be,” said Satan. 

“True,” replied Eve.  “In fact, this life is quite boring.”

“This is not the only life that’s open before you.  What you’re now doing is to live like animals.  You and Adam are just like the elephants or the goats or the fish or the birds.  You wake up in the morning, search for food, eat, rest, mate in the season and go to sleep.”

“What else is there to do?” wondered Eve.

“That’s precisely what I’m going to teach you,” Satan beamed with a kind of glee that could exist only in the hell.  “Imagine that you combine this animal life with the consciousness of the spirits.”

Satan paused.  Eve had begun to imagine.  But her imagination got stuck on the word ‘consciousness.’

“Mind, thinking, awareness...” Satan tried to explain.  Eve stared at him blinking in ignorance.

“See, the life of a pure spirit is boring too; more boring than that of the animals’.  The animals can at least eat and mate.  The spirits can’t do even that.  But the spirits possess a higher level of awareness, consciousness, by which they know much more than the animals do, they understand more, they can give meaning and purpose to their life...”

Eve began to understand. 

“For example,” Satan continued.  “Now you mate with Adam only when mating is a physical requirement you feel in a particular season and that is meant to produce offspring.  But with a higher level of consciousness you will understand the delights of sex, mating not for reproduction but for delight.  You rise above nature and its ways.  You acquire culture...”

Satan was bored of his existence as a spirit.  He wanted fun.  Adam and Eve were the best creatures of God who could be the subjects of his experiment.

God was bored of life in the heaven.  What was there to do except listen to the angels singing Alleluia all the time?  God did not prevent Satan from carrying out his experiment. 

God and Satan were relieved of their boredom when Eve accepted the apple offered by Satan.  An exhilarating feeling overpowered Eve when she bit into the apple.  It frothed in her brain. It became an intoxication.  Her brain was dancing.  Adam could perceive the change in his mate.  “Eat this and your brain will dance too,” said Eve. 

The intoxication aroused their spirits.  The aroused spirits understood their bodies differently.  Now the mating of the bodies had a new dimension.  They mated again and again.  Mated until it exhausted them.  And they glided into sleep.  When they woke up they looked at each other’s bodies in a different way.  They felt ashamed of their bodies.  Their spirits knew shame.  Their spirits knew sensual delights.  Their consciousness was evolving.

God watched them with amusement.  Satan watched them with inquisitiveness.  God’s amusement would eventually become grief.  Satan’s inquisitiveness would eventually be inherited by the offspring of Adam and Eve.  The inquisitiveness was the original sin.