All messages of divine inspiration are challenging to understand according to intellectual analysis, such as Moses' approach at the beginning of Genesis, on two apparently antagonistic but complementary factors: the breath of God and the hissing of the serpent; or, in intuitive language, the spirit of the Self and the intelligence of the ego, words that have been the subject of millennia of controversies, raising the possibility of the opposition of ideas or words of the Divinity itself.
Moses used the symbol of the “breath of God” to indicate the spirit and the expression “the hissing of the serpent” to designate man’s intelligence. At all times, the serpent has manifested itself as a symbol of intelligence, and even Jesus used this symbol when he said to his disciples: “Be intelligent as the serpent.”
The spirit and the intellect are the two faculties of human nature that govern all life events. The spirit, or reason, which Greek philosophy called Logos, and the intellect, which they called Nóos, are, as it were, the two poles of human nature. Intellect is the manifestation of man’s peripheral ego, while spirit, or reason, manifests his central Self.
The ancient wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita says that the ego is the Self’s worst enemy, but the Self is the ego’s best friend. It also says that the ego is a bad lord of life but a great servant.
Paul of Tarsus wrote to the Christians in Corinth: “The intellectual man does not comprehend the things of the spirit, which appear to him to be nonsense; neither he can comprehend them because the things of the spirit can only be comprehended spiritually”.
Since the man did not appear as a perfect man, but rather able of being perfect, amid an evolutionary process, two opposing forces needed to act in him, destined to reconcile in the synthesis of his plenitude.
In man, there are only the potential components to be an integral individual. It is up to him to dynamize an actual character's harmonious composition and functioning to establish his total harmony.
If, according to the Bhagavad Gita, man's intellectual ego is the enemy of his rational Self, there would be no hope of a harmonious synthesis. However, since the rational Self is a friend of the intellectual ego, there may be a peace treaty between the components of this apparently antagonistic but complementary human nature.
It is part of the cosmic plan that there is a struggle in human nature because without resistance there is no evolution. Man, being a creative entity, has the power to self-realize.
Teilhard de Chardin leads to man's evolution from the hylosphere (sphere of inanimate matter), through the biosphere (sphere of life), to the noosphere (sphere of thought) and further on to the logosphere (sphere of reason). This long ascending evolution is not possible without struggles, without the conflict between the forces of the Self and the ego, at first sight, adverse and irreconcilable, but whose purpose is a remarkable synthesis. The theologian, Origen of Alexandria, already observed in the third century in his doctrine that teaches that a time will come when all free creatures will share the grace of salvation and the reconciliation of Self and Ego.
Whoever contemplates the drama of humanity unilaterally and partially cannot but see in the intellectual ego the irreconcilable adversary of the spiritual Self, consequently, it is unwise to tell the spiritually primitive man that there is the possibility of a synthesis between these two antitheses.
To this day, most human beings are at the level of the noosphere, the mental ego, interested only in external objects and indifferent to the internal subject; only a tiny elite have reached the logosphere, which is keenly interested in the central Self.
Einstein wrote that the intellectual man discovers the facts of nature, while the rational man creates values within himself. The intellectual, the erudite man, finds what already exists. The one with higher evolution realizes in his consciousness values that did not exist, but which he makes to exist. This mystic scientist says that: “From the world of facts (which is science), it does not lead any path to the world of values (which is consciousness), because the values come from another region”.
Both the breath of God and the serpent's hissing represent a symbolism emanating from the Cosmic Powers, from the Infinite. It is up to man to carry out the grand synthesis between these complementary antitheses. It is precisely on this achievement that man's great task is based since his full self-realisation is the most outstanding work in the entire Universe.
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