“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE “GARDEN OF EDEN.”
MAN “LOSES” HIS DREAM BODY
AND GAINS A “SOUL”

(9:15.) Chapter Five: “The ‘Garden of Eden.’ Man ‘Loses’ His Dream Body, and Gains a ‘Soul.’ ”

The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature. He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him. He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements—a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place. He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially almost shattering. Yet [man] is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective. He is to be the part of nature that will specialize, again, in the self-conscious use of concepts. (Louder:) He will grow the flower of the intellect—a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part.

But man looked out and felt himself suddenly separate and amazed at the aloneness. Now he must find food, where before his dream body did not need physical nourishment. Before, man had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality. Man has to physically procreate. Some lost ancient legends emphasized in a clearer fashion this sudden sexual division. By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and Eve version of events.

On the one hand, man did indeed feel that he had fallen from a high estate, because he remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality—a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree (underlined) immersed.³ Man’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that you now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity (softly), the full capacity for the development of language—a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman, say, as it is in any man on a modern street.

(9:35.) But if man felt suddenly alone and isolated, he was immediately struck by the grand variety of the world and its creatures. Each creature apart from himself was a new mystery. He was enchanted also by his own subjective reality, the body in which he found himself, and by the differences between himself and others like him, and the other creatures. He instantly began to explore (pause), to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his attention.

(Long pause in a steady, rather fast delivery.) Man’s dream body is still with him, of course, but the physical body now obscures it. The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can—as man quickly found out as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man feared nothing. The dream body does not die. It exists before and after physical death. In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

[Men] saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue. They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey,” seeing that each animal contributed so that the physical form of the earth could continue—but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men knew was its true form. When man “awakened” in his physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside. He retained memory of his earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he could now and then recapture that knowledge. He became more and more aware of his physical senses, however: Some things were definitely pleasant and some were not. Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.

Basically, what made him feel good was good. He was gifted with strong clear instincts that were meant to lead him toward his own greatest development, to his own greatest fulfillment, in such a way that he also helped to bring about the highest potentials of all of the other species of consciousness (intently). His natural impulses were meant to provide inner directives that would guide him in just such a direction, so that he sought what was the best for himself and for others.

3. At first, as I typed this session from my notes a couple of days later, I thought that Seth had contradicted himself here, for earlier in the session he’d stated that “the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.” Then I came to think that Seth actually meant that man has consciously separated himself from his dream body to a greater degree than other creatures have—that even though those other entities became “physically effective” before man did, they still retain a greater awareness of their dream bodies than man does. I’ll try to remember to ask Seth to elaborate upon this point, although I also think he alludes to it later in this session.