Adam, Eve and Eden (Rabel)

Adam, Eve and Eden

After the Lord God is brought into the text, that’s the fourth paragraph of the second chapter, then we come to one of the grand so-called contradictions of Genesis, where in verse 5 we read “And there was not a man to till the ground.” After all that talk about the man, male and female and all that, now we’re told, “And there was not a man.” Why is this not a contradiction, metaphysically speaking? Because we’re not yet talking about manifested human beings out there doing things. This is talking about the realm of ideas upon which or which are the predecessors of manifested things, which have to be ideas, principles, laws, etc. Then Jehovah God formed, and it sounds here as though we’re talking about a manifest human being, but we’re not. We’re getting closer to it, but we’re still in the realm of ideas.

The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. First we add Spirit, now we’ve got soul and what comes later? Nothing’s going on out here; it’s still in the realm of creative principle, creative mind. So we have, now, the soul, which will be a human being eventually. A soul was placed in a garden eastward in Eden; now the word East In The Bible Always Means Interior, within, not without, so we’re still within. There’s a garden there, in Eden, and in that garden are all kinds of trees and food and rivers, and all those rivers have meanings, by the way, but we won’t go into them. “And the Lord God commanded the soul of man,” not a person yet, but the soul of humanity saying, “of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.”

Now remember, folks, that this Garden Of Eden stands for the purely, totally interior realm of being. Now, in the purely interior realm of being, the soul of mankind is told, “of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat.” In the interior realm of you, how much do you have access to? All that’s there is for you. “Of every tree in the garden thou shalt freely eat.” Now, here we start getting to the nitty-gritty. “But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”—polarity, duality, number 2, “thou shalt not eat of it”—why? “For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Die a death? Manifestation will occur, immediately, and then you die to purely interior existence, not spiritual, interior. You can’t die to spirit, interior. You will die to interior, only, type of existence; and that isn’t even existence, because existence means to exit from interiorness. It means you will die to the interior realm called non-existence, but if you die to non-existence, you revert into existence. If this is as clear to you as it is to me, I’d be so thrilled, because this is pure metaphysical logic.

The soul of mankind in the Garden of Eden means that phase of your being which is purely interior, exclusively interior, nothing but pure potential, pure possibility, total innocence, ignorance, bliss, nothing, you see, totally potential, everything within. In that state of existence, the soul has all it needs; and I think this corresponds, and I’m just guessing, to a certain stage of embryonic existence, where the entity is totally interiorized, but is being cared for and provided for all that it needs. But there is a factor, still as a potential, which once that soul begins to partake of that, he will die or cease that kind of existence, and that is knowledge of good and evil.

The moment the soul of man becomes or evolves to the place where he can eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of duality or polarity or good and evil, which is pure symbolism, then it stops being a purely subjective being and begins to emerge into active self-conscious expression. We haven’t quite come to that yet, even though we know it’s going to happen. Before that happens, though, even in this embryonic state, even in this purely subjective state, the soul of man cannot remain just a thinking ability. You have to be more than just the ability to think; you have taken from that ability to think further a refinement and expansion, which is grotesquely described in the symbolism, as Adam, the thinking ability, falling asleep, and God taking one of the ribs out of Adam and forming it into a woman. And when he wakes up, he sees this gorgeous female, and he knows what it's all about. Instantly he know what it’s all about, what a woman’s body is for, and never having been told, unless he had dreamed it. How grotesque the literalism can be. Metaphysically it just means while the soul still is in the purely subjective state, the first quality of it, which becomes actual, is his thinking ability. But that doesn’t make him a whole person; out of his ability to think, the creative forces further expand him and make him also the ability to feel. They bring the female out of his original male nature, and this ability to think and feel is what constitutes that which we in Unity call consciousness. Now, that has happened, and the soul is ready for the next step. The serpent creeps into the garden. This has to happen.

Transcribed by Bill Nelson on 01-12-2015