It came to pass, on this first day of the New Year, that Adam, as has been his custom since his Awakening, partook and ate another apple from the Tree of Knowledge. No longer did he call it the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for he to understand that the Nāgárāja had appended the adjective proposition, “of Good and Evil” so to create a riddle. A riddle efficaciously solved by consuming four apples and much intensive Work.

Over the millennia, Adam solved an uncountable number of the Serpent’s riddles and koans, much to the delight of both parties. When appropriate, Adam would provide quite complicated paradoxes for the Nāgárāja to contemplate and relate to his earlier riddles. Both, aware that riddles are the keys to understanding everything, ‘on earth as in heaven,’ so to speak.

I imagine you all are curious as to why Adam and the Nāgárāja are consumed with riddle-solving? This is an extremely confusing concept to adherents subscribing to the absolute veracity of the biblical tale of the Garden of Eden and God Almighty? Fortunately for myself, I solved this teaching riddle with the first apple.

The reason riddles, which are no more than artistic formulations of questions, are critical to linear progress along the Path of Study, is that deep truth resides within the question and not the actual answer. For answers presume an endpoint and questions are inherently open-ended (a subject I discussed earlier).

The seeds residing deep within today’s apple-flesh contain a living riddle. A riddle I have been deciphering for all of you without compensation of any kind. The preface for the riddle is based upon the Sumerian religious text which teaches that the gods made man out of a mixture of clay from the earth and the blood and body of a sacrificed god, i.e.,

You have slaughtered a god together,
With his personality.
I have removed your heavy work.
I have imposed your toil on man.
In the clay, god and man
Shall be bound,
To a unity brought together;
So that to the end of days
The Flesh and the Soul
Which in a god have ripened –
That soul in a blood-kinship be bound.

The riddle asking simply, “Does Man form his soul from what energies he possesses? Or, does God provide him with an immortal soul from beyond?”

The answer being given to you in this series of blogs from the Institute. Try and answer the question before I initiate you into the answer tomorrow.