The Revelation,” Cayce once said, “you can’t understand the Bible. And you can’t understand The Revelation until you understand Genesis.”
In The Beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)
Genesis begins with a simple premise. God is Spirit, and Life both in the heavens and of the earth, in all its phases and expressions, is a manifestation of that power.
God is. God was. He ever shall be. With God there is no beginning.
Then, to what does “The Beginning” refer?
The earth is just one aspect of God’s total creativity. Our planet is just a mote in our solar system, and our solar system is a speck in a larger system, which in turn is only a part of something even greater—a universe within universes!
“The Beginning” is not a description of God’s first creative act, nor even of His most important. “The Beginning” describes that creation in which Man—God’s child—finds himself.
According to Edgar Cayce, the purpose of Genesis was to keep in the mind of man a memory of “The Beginning.”
. . . for as is seen, that as is given [in Genesis] is the presentation of a teacher of a peoples that separated for that definite purpose of keeping alive in the minds, the hearts, the soul-minds of entities, that there may be seen their closer relationships to the divine influences of Creative Forces, that brought into being all that appertains to man’s indwelling as man in the form of flesh in this material world.
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Additional information in the Cayce readings states the substance of Genesis was drawn from extant, ancient manuscripts, and from information Moses obtained while in deep states of meditation. Other references indicate Joshua, Moses’ aide, possessed psychic powers and assisted in the interpretation of both the psychic and historical materials.
Moses, as the author of Genesis, was attempting to give an all-inclusive description of Creation and the place man had in it.
Genesis affirms Man was created in the Image of God, which the readings interpreted to be the soul, not the physical body. Man, according to Edgar Cayce, was first a celestial being in a spiritual world. Only through a Fall, a rebellion in heaven, did man become a material being. The spiritual estate was lost to the flesh.
Moses was recounting the evolution of God’s Spirit in the earth, telling the story in a highly condensed, symbolic language through which the finite mind of the Israelites could grasp an understanding of infinite happenings.
Just as Genesis preserves a past memory, The Revelation points to potential consciousness.
And then The Revelation . . . is a description of, a possibility of, thy own consciousness, and not as a historical fact, not as a fancy, but as that thy own soul has sought throughout its experiences, through the phases of thy abilities, the faculties of the mind and body, the emotions of all thy complex . . . system.
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The Revelation is the restoration of John’s consciousness of himself as a spiritual being. The first eleven chapters of The Revelation deal with experiences through dream and meditation regarding the purification of John’s body and subconscious mind. The remaining chapters show the affects. The flesh no longer binds him nor limits his consciousness. John obtained that state promised by The Christ—“a memory before the foundations of the world.” John was conscious of that estate he shared with God “In The Beginning” as a soul before the world was made, or Genesis was written.
Between Genesis and Revelation is the history of a nation, the first of which we have a record, who chose One God and experienced everything that is possible to be experienced in this earth. There were other groups who believed in one God, but only the chronicles of the Jews present a complete and continuous history, with the good and the evil, the beautiful and the immoral running together. It describes their beliefs, and what they did about them. From Genesis to Revelation there is presented a complete pattern of man’s experience in the earth. The pattern visible throughout the Bible is a viable one through which all men can obtain that condition realized by John.
When was “The Beginning?” It was when consciousness began, as seen from this answer from the question:
(Q) When did I first exist as a separate entity?
(A) . . . the first existence . . . was in the Mind of the Creator, as all souls became a part of the creation. As to time, this would be in the beginning. When was the beginning? First consciousness!
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Man’s first awareness was spiritual. Man’s first existence was as a celestial being in God’s Mind. God is Spirit, and Man, in His image, was a spiritual creation.
Many are the Cayce readings which strongly and beautifully affirm that the gift of Free Will is inherent in this creation, and is the birthright and heritage of each soul.
God desired companionship, and in His desire moved in spirit and brought co-creators, heirs to the Kingdom—the Sons of God—into existence.
All God’s creations follow fixed laws and will always be that which they were set to be in the beginning, except Man. A star will never be a moon, nor a moon a rose, nor a rose a man. Only Man can—and did—rebel against God, and thus altered his destiny.
The consciousness of the Light was followed by chaos. In Genesis 1:2, Darkness covers the face of the Deep. What is deeper than God? or darker than sin? This verse indicates the condition which resulted as souls began to misuse and abuse their birthright of Will, and first occurred in spirit, before the earth was made.
The loss of the First Consciousness, or Divine Awareness, was the result of rebellion. The spirit of selfishness is symbolized in Lucifer, Satan, the Devil, and the Serpent. They all are one—spiritual rebellion.
Separated from the source of Light and Love, many of the Sons of God became oblivious to the purpose for which they were created. The Father knew if they continued in their activities, ultimately they would deteriorate all their spiritual glory and power, and efface their own existence.
The truest utterance in all Scripture, which Cayce stressed, is “God does not will that any soul should perish.” (2 Peter 3:9)
The earth was first an expression of God and not intended as a place of habitation for souls, yet it became the place of opportunity through which these spirits could realize their separation. The pain, the adversity and suffering of material existence would eventually awaken within the soul the unquenchable desire to return to God. The parable of the Prodigal Son is a model of this experience.
Throughout its long stages of evolution, souls were fascinated with the material creation, and tempted by the possibilities in it for expression and experience. Unspeakable conditions began to manifest as a result of their interference with natural laws. Much of mythology, with its monsters, centaurs, harpies, gods, and heroes, consists of memories of this earliest, pre-Adamic history.
Because God is love, and wills no soul perish, a divine plan was instituted. In order to establish a standard, or means of comparison by which these souls, entrapped in their own distorted thought-creation, or ego-projections,
