Let us take another look at the role food plays in our human dilemma. Have you noticed how the very act of eating makes you more aware of yourself as a sexual being? Do you realize that with every bite you are unconsciously and compulsively killing yourself?

Eating isn’t the only trauma that affects you this way. It is simply the most basic and apparently natural. But any trauma, whether it is getting caught in a lie, flying into a rage, playing hooky from responsibility— any trauma will awaken in you a troublesome sexual desire.

Now, if there is a sin/sex connection, and if the sin entered through the food, then it follows that the very act of eating to keep the body and soul alive could be doing double duty by sustaining the sin of pride and sexuality at the same time.

Of pride, let me say that it is a sentence of death; and of sex, it is the evidence of the descent of our ego into mortal flesh, where it now perpetuates itself genitally, whereas in a more glorious past, it perpetuated itself by regeneration of the soul.

How then can we separate pride and death from sinning through food? We have to eat. There’s no question about that. But how can we eat without sin?

How can we overcome pride and guilt without starving ourselves? Might we possibly eat our way back almost to paradise?

Before I answer that question, let’s explore the dynamics of the fall more deeply; perhaps the means of salvation will suggest itself to your innermost mind without words.

"Of pride, let me say that it is a sentence of death; and of sex, it is the evidence of the descent of our ego into mortal flesh..."

If I were the devil, wanting to control you by your addiction to sin, I would inject that sin into the manner of your carrying on some natural activity, and I would do it so subtly that you might not become aware that every time you engaged in that “natural” activity, you were being conditioned to sin again.

And even if you caught onto the fact that you were being “had” in some way, you still wouldn’t know what to do about it. There would appear to be no way out of the dilemma.

If, on the other hand, I were God, I would certainly provide for the possibility of your falling into the devil’s trap by devising a punishment for your defection, as well as salvation from punishment, that would appear to be terribly complicated, almost unfathomable, despite its basic simplicity.

I would require you to come home to simple reality and drop the heavy burden of pride. To the pure in heart, the way is always clear and uncomplicated.

But for the prideful ones, the way is always fraught with complications and questions, an exercise in balancing this consideration against that until each cancels the other out and progress seems impossible.

To carry our inquiry another step further, if we believe in a Creator at all, might we not suppose that He had in mind for us some natural and proper way to handle sexual desire?

And might we not also assume that it was in man’s handling of the first sin, the food sin, that he put the reins of his earthly being in Satan’s hands and lost his way back to the natural way of relating to anything, especially to his sexuality?

By eating the forbidden food, he elected to serve pride and death, and this service is the legacy that has come down to us from generation to generation.