A is for Apple and B is for Birth Certificate

A is for apple and B is for birth certificate.  At least that is how it was when my daughter at age two sang the alphabet song.  She started out with a better vocabulary than me.

There is a long list of choices with “A” words to begin the A to Z Blogging Challenge with.  I thought of apple, android, angels, attitude, or April, being that it is the first day, and I can oh so feel like a fool most of the time.  Fool does not have to be confined to the first day of April for me.

I decided to go with something representing the beginning, the apple, something that dates back to Adam and Eve.  And yet, more and more “A” words are coming to mind as I write this, such as amen.  That can be a different post as you can slide most of these words into different categories.  For instance, angels will fall under guardian angels, unless a different “G” word comes up in the interim.  I did previously write about the “G” spot.

But back to apple.  They sit in the bowl on my table mostly turning brown, as I seem to avoid eating healthy.  I do give one to my husband every day for his at work mid-morning snack.  However, nothing is better than a crisp apple on a warm day while sitting outside on the swing.  They are said to keep the doctor away, as do almonds.  And there is another “A” word.  Perhaps almonds might fall under Edgar Cayce since he recommended three almonds a day.  There are also days when one apple, one carrot, and two sticks of celery go into my juicer for my first drink of the day.

It has been handed down that the apple was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.  Was the apple named specifically?  There are differing opinions as to what the forbidden fruit actually was, possibly the grape, fig, tomato, or quince.  But since the lump in the throat is referred to as the Adam’s apple, the apple getting stuck as it went down, the apple became the prime suspect.  And yet, it is know for knowledge, thus the symbol for Apple computers, and good health in that it is said to keep the doctor away.

Yogananda gives a completely different take in “Autobiography of a Yogi” on what the actual forbidden fruit was.  Below is an excerpt taken from Chapter 16, “Outwitting the Stars.”  The original version of “Autobiography of a Yogi” can be read in its entirety by following the link below:

http://www.crystalclarity.com/yogananda/chap16.html

“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.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.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.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. To these, for advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two animals. ¹⁷ In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality or polarity which underlies the phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in a heaven of cooperative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal propensities.”

I resolve to partake of apples more, and am thankful for both the fruit and the computer.