Thousands of years later, when the same Adam soul incarnates for the last time in Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth will offer a more enlightened perspective on the power of like-mindedness in his teaching about the enormous good that results from two or more gathered together with the ideal of the Christ in mind.
Fig Leaves
According to the Genesis story line, immediately following their rebellious act Adam and Eve suddenly became aware of their physical bodies and sewed fig leaves together to hide their nakedness. Feeling exposed by their blatant disregard of divine law and burgeoning sense of an ego self—a “self” separate and apart from the whole—they make a feeble attempt to keep the naked truth under wraps by covering up their flesh. The two have accepted a universe comprised of good and evil and now perceive creation in a new light. Up to this moment the soul had experienced itself solely in relationship to the divine—as an integral thread bound up in the fabric of the whole. But once a sense of defiant self-consciousness emerges, these same souls begin to view themselves as isolated fragments with a separate existence laid bare for scrutiny by their detachment from the rest of creation. Estranged from their Creator, which literally had placed the universe at their feet, Adam and Eve are ashamed.
Before long the two hear the voice of God who is said to be walking in the garden during the cool of the day, seeking his companions. The deity wonders where Adam and Eve have gone only to find them secreted away. Adam admits that he and his helpmeet had hidden, fearful of coming forward, because they realized they were naked. God bluntly responds by asking Adam, “Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” (Gen. 3:11) Neither the man nor the woman has a ready answer and soon the jig is up. It is evident to the Creator his beloved progeny have ingested the fruit of the forbidden tree and now know the “two-ness” of separation—a transgression whose penalty is far-reaching and inescapable.
The gates of paradise will be forever closed to Adam and Eve and to every human being who believes in an existence apart from the divine totality—anyone who accepts the deception of duality instead of the truth of the Law of One. And the serpent or divine energy animating the created world will continue to crawl on its belly, eating the dust of the lower vibrations of matter until these heirs to heaven choose to raise it up again. Further, in navigating the fallen, intensely material, and dualistic circumstances to which the soul had descended, human beings are destined to experience enduring hardship where childbirth is painful and man must till the soil.
Unbridled Hope
Q. When did the knowledge come to Jesus that he was to be the Savior of the world?
A. When he fell in Eden.
2067-7
Adam and Eve’s impatience with the original divine plan of eternal attunement with their Creator results in a fall in consciousness from an effortless state of at-One-ment into the chaos of a mortal world subject to the laws of cause and effect. Once they had crossed the border into the wilderness of duality and self-centered thinking—believing this is good, this is bad; I want this, I don’t want that—the reality of divine perfection, though still ever-present, was largely forgotten. Yet all was not lost. Luckily the fateful decision by the two to defy the divine command to remain innocent also becomes the doorway for hope to enter the scene. Their disobedience is what places the children of God on a path to individuation.
The Cayce philosophy asserts that the soul’s fall from grace and subsequent ascent in consciousness toward realization of its true identity defines man’s purpose on earth. To “ … become aware of yourself being yourself yet one with Him,” (1992-1) is how the readings define it. And yet it was the heartbreaking loss of Eden that presented humanity with the opportunity to grow into that awareness. Banishment allowed the fallen children to move beyond the limited confines of the garden walls, which hemmed in paradise and restricted the soul to knowing its Creator solely through the eyes of a naïve child. Now during the steep climb upward through a material world, these same divine offspring will have the autonomy to act as mature, self-directed entities—beings with the ability to deliberately choose to return to that original, higher state of consciousness, that paradise, and dwell anew with their God.
In the end, humanity’s chastisement and expulsion from the childlike conditions of Eden gave the soul the chance to become fully itself—consciously. But the human race was going to pay a stiff price for the opportunity. Finding the way back in consciousness to God through a mind-created universe—overcoming the world—would prove to be a lengthy and difficult process. The demand to lift up the serpent or divine life force wallowing in the mud of the earth and elevate it to the heights of perfection once more was an undertaking that ultimately would require eons of time, space, and patience to achieve. In the meantime, during the countless days and years spent between the bookends of birth and death, human beings would be subject to the complex set of laws governing a material existence. In addition, an eternal injunction was put in place. The exiled souls could not scale the walls, sneak through the gates, or force their way back into paradise because mighty cherubim, members of an unseen army of Spirit, continuously guard the entryway back into the heavenly estate. And these divine messengers allow admittance only when a soul is ready—only when it has overcome the desire to misuse its celestial fire for self-gratification and no longer places material ways and means above the Law of One. “Do not gain knowledge only to thine undoing,” Edgar Cayce cautioned. “Remember Adam.” (5753-2)
The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden stands as a timeless allegory about a lost opportunity to choose at-One-ment over duality. And the Tree of Life reaching skyward at the center of the garden of paradise, crudely mirrored in the body’s own nervous system, represents the divine energy coursing through every man, woman, and child. Countless centuries after the fall in the garden, this same archetype will reappear at another critical moment in the human drama. In a powerful expression of synchronicity, the symbolic Tree of Life first depicted in Genesis will be transformed into the universal symbol for the soul’s sacred journey upward through time and space: when the cross is raised over Golgotha.
1Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999), 109.
2Encyclopedia Judaica, (16 volumes) (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972), II:241.
3Manly P. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic and Roscicrucian Symbolical Philosophy (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, Inc., 1957), CXXVI.
4Hugh Schonfield, ed., The Authentic New Testament (New York: New American Library, 1958), n. 59, 309.
Chapter 2
Enduring Soul
…The entity—as an entity—influenced either directly or indirectly all those forms of philosophy or religious thought that taught God was One.
364-9
After the fall in Eden, it would take many thousands of years for a soul to regain conscious awareness of its supernatural identity, rise out of its entombment in matter, and reach the pinnacle of God awareness or Christhood on this plane. Interestingly, the Cayce readings provide additional insight into
