“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There were other tales, some that have not come down to you, in which Adam and Eve were created together, and in a dream fell apart into the separate male and female. In your particular legend Adam appears first. The woman being created from his rib symbolized the necessary emergence, even from the new creature, of the intuitive forces that will always come forth — for without that development the race would not have attained self-consciousness in your terms.

(Pause.) Hence you have the majestic elements given to Satan, and the power. The earthly characteristics often appear as he is depicted in animal form, for he was also of course connected with the intuitive terrestrial attributes from which the new human consciousness would spring.

In terms of simple biological function, you now had a species no longer completely dependent upon instinct, yet still with all the natural built-in desires for survival, and the appearance within it of a mind able to make decisions and distinctions.

Now: This new kind of consciousness brought with it the open mirror of memory in which past joy and pain could be recalled, and so the realization of mortal death became more immediate than it was with the animals.

An association could trigger the clear memory of a past agony in the bewildered new mind. At first, there was a difficulty in separating the remembered image from the moment in the present. Man’s mind then struggled to contain many images — past, present, and future imagined ones — and was forced to correlate these in any given moment of time. A vast acceleration took place.

(10:41.) In another way, animals also possess an “unconscious” anticipation, but they do not have to come to terms with it on an aware basis as the new consciousness did. Again, good and evil and the freedom of choice came to the species’ aid. The evil animal was the natural predator, for example. It would help here if the reader remembers what has been said about natural guilt earlier in this book. It would aid in understanding the later myths and the variations that came from them. (See the 634th session in Chapter Eight, among others.)

As the mind developed, the species could hand down to its offspring the wisdom and law of the elders. This is still being done in modern society, of course, when each child inherits the beliefs of its parents about the nature of reality. Apart from all other considerations, this is also a characteristic of creaturehood. Only the means are different with the animals.

The early acquiescence to beliefs has a biological importance, therefore, but as the conscious mind attains its maturity it is also natural for it to question those beliefs, and to assess them in relation to its own environment. Many of my readers may have certain ideas about good and evil that are very hampering. These may be old beliefs in new clothing. You may think that you are quite free, only to discover that you hold old ideas but have simply put new terms to them, or concentrated upon other aspects.

This alone will cause adverse experience, making you reject the very basis of your own framework of experience. You will consider the body as a thing, a fine vehicle but not in itself the natural living expression of your being in material form. Many such Eastern schools also stress — as do numerous spiritualistic schools — the importance of the “unconscious levels of the self,” and teach you to mistrust the conscious mind.

The concept of nirvana (see the 637th session in Chapter Nine) and the idea of heaven are two versions of the same picture, the former being one in which individuality is lost in the bliss of undifferentiated consciousness, and the latter one in which still-conscious individuals perform mindless adoration. Neither theory contains an understanding of the functions of the conscious mind, or the evolution of consciousness — or, for that matter, certain aspects of greater physics. No energy is ever lost. The expanding universe theory¹ applies to the mind as well as to the universe.

(11:43.) However, these philosophies can lead you to a deep mistrust of both your body and mind. You are told that the spirit is perfect, and so you can try to live up to standards of perfection quite impossible to achieve. The failure adds to the sense of guilt.

The mind is a system of checks and balances even as the body, and so often a set of beliefs that can be seen as highly negative will often serve beneficial ends in countering other beliefs. For some time Western civilization stressed a distorted version of intellectual reasoning, for example, and so the current stress about other portions of the self serves a purpose.