“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.

The birth of imagination initiated the largest possibilities, and at the same time put great strain upon the biological creature whose entire corporeal structure would now react not only to present objective situations, but imaginative ones. At the same time members of the species had to cope with the natural environment as did any other animal. Imagination helped because an individual could anticipate the behavior of other creatures.

To some extent, such beliefs follow certain rhythms in both civilizations and in time.

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.