“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The Garden of Eden story in its most basic sense refers to man’s sudden realization that now he must act within time. His experiences must be neurologically structured. This immediately brought about the importance of choosing between one action and another, and made acts of decision highly important.

This time reference is perhaps the most important within earth experience, and the one that most influences all creatures. In experience or existence outside of time (pause), there is no necessity to make certain kinds of judgments. In an out-of-time reference, theoretically speaking now, an infinite number of directions can be followed at once. Earth’s time reference, however, brought to experience a new brilliant focus—and in the press of time, again, certain activities would be relatively more necessary than others, relatively more pleasant or unpleasant than others. Among a larger variety of possible actions, man was suddenly faced with a need to make choices, that within that context had not been made “before.”

(9:02.) Speaking in terms of your time, early man still had a greater neurological leeway. There were alternate neurological pathways that, practically speaking, were more available then than now. They still exist now, but they have become like ghostly signals in the background of neurological activity.

(Jane paused, eyes closed, often seeming to grope for words while in trance.) This is, again, difficult to explain, but free will operates in all units of consciousness, regardless of their degree—but (whispering) it operates within the framework of that degree. Man possesses free will, but that free will operates only within man’s degree—that is, his free will is somewhat contained by the frameworks of time and space.

(Long pause.) You can only make so many conscious decisions, or you would be swamped and caught in a constant dilemma of decision making. Time organizes the available choices that are to be made. The awakening mentioned earlier, then, found man rousing from his initial “dreaming condition,” faced suddenly with the need for action in a world of space and time, a world in which choices became inevitable, a world in which he must choose among probable actions—and from an infinite variety of those choose which events he would physically actualize. This would be an almost impossible situation were the species—meaning each species—not given its own avenues of expression and activity, so that it is easier for certain species to behave in certain manners. And each species has its own overall characteristics and propensities that further help it define the sphere of influence in which it will exert its ability to make choices.

(9:17.) Each species is endowed also, by virtue of the units of consciousness that compose it, with an overall inner picture of the condition of each other species (pause), and further characterized by basic impulses so that it is guided toward choices that best fulfill its own potentials for development while adding to the overall good of the entire world consciousness. This does not curtail free will any more than man’s free will is curtailed because he must (underlined) grow from a fetus into an adult instead of the other way around.

“By the time” that the Garden of Eden tale reached your biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man’s development. The inner reincarnational structure of the human psyche is very important in man’s physical survival. Children—change that to “infants”—dream of their past lives, remembering, for example, how to walk and talk. They are born with the knowledge of how to think, with the propensity for language. They are guided by memories that they later forget.