See also “The Fall of Man” or “Brain”.

Original sin or hereditary sin has hitherto been regarded as the inheriting of sin from the biblical Adam when he disobeyed the Creator and ate of the fruit of knowledge. From then on he was cursed to wander and struggle and as such the consequence of this sin, this disobedience was thereby passed along to all human beings, since we are descended from him.

Even though this picture is beautiful, it flies in the face of the Justice of the Creator. How is it possible for someone to inherit a sin that he has not committed? Sin is specific and is related and attached to the person who committed that particular sin. There cannot be something like the inheritance of sin as far as the Justice of God is concerned.

So if an Adam had committed a sin, then that sin is only related and attached to him so that sometime in future he personally would be held accountable for that sin. The problem here is that until now no one has been able to properly explain this picture story in the Bible. If we begin to think about the story in Genesis, it would be difficult to draw a cord through all the events in the creation and the subsequent fall of man.

True, Adam ate of the tree of knowledge but that story has nothing to do whatsoever with the fall of man, which only came later. All Genesis was describing was the actual advent of man, the creation of man and his development in the higher realms of this Creation.

The story was describing how Adam was created in Paradise and how his quest for knowledge led to his expulsion from this Paradise. We should remember that it was this curiosity and this quest which eventually led to his expulsion from his home. He ate from the tree of knowledge so that he could gain knowledge, so that he could experience. There is nothing wrong in wanting to gain knowledge. It was this urge to gain knowledge that led to his expulsion and nothing else. This was what was described in Genesis and nothing more. The fall of man was not described as such.

According to Abd-ru-shin in the book “In the Light of Truth: The Grail Message”, human spirits were created in Paradise in such a way that they were not self-conscious. They were created as spiritual seeds. These spirit seeds, however, in order to become self-conscious had to leave the comforts of their spiritual home.

As the urge to gain self-consciousness within these spirit seeds matured, that is, the urge to gain knowledge, to taste, matured, they had to be expelled from Paradise because in order to gain this knowledge that they were after, they had to descend to other parts of Creation.

The material world was created for this very purpose. To recapitulate: human spirits were created as spirit seeds in Paradise with no self-consciousness and no responsibility whatsoever. However, they cannot forever remain in this state as this would not be progress for them. They had an urge deeply buried with them also to progress and become self-conscious.

In Paradise itself it would not be possible for them to awaken to self-consciousness of their own accord because the pressure within this realm was too great to allow them to unfold. They therefore had to find a realm where the pressure was not so great and that is why material creation was allowed to develop as a training ground for the human spirits, so that here they would gradually be able to unfold and become self-conscious and one day return to Paradise as self-conscious human spirits.

So the urge became gradually stronger and stronger within these spirit seeds. This urge is equivalent to the couple (Adam and Eve) wanting to taste of the tree of knowledge. The actual tasting is the decision taken to gain this knowledge and the expulsion from Paradise is the automatic consequence of this. They were expelled into material creation which is where they would be able to fulfil their wishes of gaining knowledge through experiencing.

So the expulsion from Paradise is the natural ejection from there for those human spirits who want to progress to self-consciousness. Adam was nothing but a prototype, an example to show what happens to all human spirit seeds in Paradise on their road to wanting to gain knowledge though experiencing which will bring them the self-consciousness that is their goal.

The question of the serpent shows that a little of what happened with the fall has been fused with this naturally occurring event of the expulsion from Paradise. The serpent is only related to the fall of man which is an event that occurred thousands of years later in the spiritual evolution of the human spirit.

It occurred when we stopped listening to the voice of the spiritual intuition but instead started using only our intellects for all our decisions. This led to the overdevelopment of our intellects to the exclusion of all else. The physical counterpart of the spiritual intuition, the cerebellum became grossly underdeveloped thereby eliminating spiritual works for this humanity.

The physically grossly overdeveloped intellectual part of the brain became a stamp of this humanity resulting from the physical adaptation of the brain to this overuse. It is this physical adaptation that is the inherited sin. It became a brain characteristic of this humanity, and every human being already comes with this brain because this type of brain has worked itself into our genes having being dictated for thousands of years by the way we had used our brains.

This is the kind of brain we all inherit already at birth and this distortion is the sin we all bear against the ordinance of God since this physical distortion was deliberately introduced against this ordinance. At the same time we inherit a tendency to commit sin because the intellectual brain, being against the ordinance of God in its full activity is also bound to make us draw away from the Laws of God, continually suppressing the cerebellum and the spiritual intuition. This is therefore hereditary or original sin.