“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now give us a moment… Dictation: The serpent is the symbol of the deepest knowledge within creaturehood; it also contains the impetus to rise above or beyond itself in certain respects. Eve, rather than Adam, for example, eats of the apple first because it was the intuitive elements of the race, portrayed in the story as female, that would bring about this initiation; only afterward could the ego, symbolized by Adam, attain its new birth and its necessary alienation. The tree of knowledge, then, did indeed offer its fruits — and “good and bad” — because this was the first time there were any kinds of choices available, and free will.

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.