Sacred Journey. M.K. Welsch
and Eve made stands as a warning never to pervert the spiritual power to which our souls have access for selfish ends. If we do, it may be to our eternal detriment.
The female (Eve), representing the unconscious, veiled aspect of the human being, becomes aware of a frisson of energy inside her—the serpent. In close touch with this inner life force she soon becomes entranced with the possibility of wielding such a power and, unbeknownst to the outer male aspect (Adam), engages the notion with her mind. But the snake, which is both subtle and cunning, quickly tempts Eve to ignore her innermost guidance and stray outside the boundaries of divine law by seeking to aggrandize herself. It persuades her to ingest the knowledge of good and evil with the promise that she will become as a God. Eve has allowed her mind to grab hold of an idea and convince herself it is true: “I need something more than what I am right now in order to be divine.” With her decision to reach for the forbidden fruit and try to add “more” to what she already is, Eve has accepted the principle of duality. She perceives herself as separate and apart from the whole, from God. And the game begins.
Adam and Eve already existed in the midst of perfection as far as the eye could see, but after becoming cognizant of the kundalini energy within, living in attunement with divine order no longer was enough for them. Something mind-made, external to Eve’s inner recognition of an uninterrupted state of Oneness, becomes the apple of her eye. She then proceeds to involve Adam in the sorry drama. Thus will the more hidden aspect of ourselves (female) flirt with using the sacred life energy (the serpent) to convince the outer consciousness (male) that we must know more, have more, be more, in order to be whole. “ … For, it is knowledge misapplied that was the fall—or the confusion—in Eve” (281-63), states the Cayce reading. The irony is that Eve’s soul was constituted of divine stuff, and by its very nature encompassed everything she could possibly need or desire, including any knowledge that for the moment appeared to be lacking. Infinity resided within her. But with that singular act of disobedience to her highest sense of awareness, Eve gave in to the desire for separation from her divine source over attunement with that source. The yen for matter and material form had bewitched the soul again.
Worse, Eve’s companion, Adam, follows suit, then accuses his partner of leading him astray. Adam’s charge is the earliest known example of the all-too-human tendency to align one’s thinking with the thinking of others until together—through the sheer force of the collective mind and will—problems emerge. 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