Men and women often see themselves as almost two different species. It’s like two different worlds that have a hard time understanding each other.

We assume no real bridge can be built between these worlds. Each thinks the other’s way of thinking and feeling is an enigma.

So the battle of the sexes continues, only coming together out of need for each other.

In truth, our differences are much smaller than we imagine.

In many ways, we mirror each other.

Men embody the active current and women the more passive. Where men are more passive, women tend to be more active—and vice versa.

We’re two sides of the same coin.

The outer active side will be passive inwardly, and vice versa. This pattern appears across many aspects of our nature.

Some qualities—like intelligence and intuition—could and should be equally developed in both men and women. But for a long time, there has been a collective belief that men are more intellectual and women more intuitive.

By now, we seem to have actually become this way.

This largely reflects how we’ve been encouraged to develop. It’s not fundamental to our nature.

Just looking at the physical anatomy of the two sexes, it’s clear that the male and female are counterparts to each other. This, of course, translates to understanding the emotional level more deeply, since the body is a symbol that reflects the spirit and psyche.

Active and passive forces within us

Let’s look at how this is conveyed in the myth of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. Here we have the masculine and feminine represented, which are the active and passive, respectively.

Yet in the story, we have Eve—which is the feminine and passive aspect—taking the first step toward the Fall of the Angels.

Why is this so?

The symbolism here is related to the presence of these two forces in each of the two sexes. Activity, as such, is not wrong for a woman any more than passivity is wrong for a man.

But if we suppress a healthy active current, it’s going to come out sideways. It will start going in the wrong direction and cause destruction.

The same thing happens when we repress a passive current and superimpose an unhealthy compulsion. Both men and women have been challenged by these longstanding disturbances.

For it is harmful to not allow people to develop freely based on who we are as people rather than on our sex.

What happened with Adam and Eve should not be taken as a historical fact. It is to be taken as a symbol.

Eve symbolizes the notion that activity turns destructive if it’s not allowed to function openly, in a healthy way. By the same token, Adam sat by the wayside and was too passive.

That was just as wrong and destructive in its own way.

If he hadn’t been passive where he should have been active, he could have stopped Eve.

In this sense, both were out of alignment.

But that doesn’t mean they should have been fixed in the opposite way. That would be a gross misunderstanding and wouldn’t even make much sense.

Adam and Eve are simply each symbolizing people with our original innate qualities prior to the Fall, where activity was present in the woman and activity in the man.

It’s just a question of how these forces work together and manifest.

If we had grasped this symbolism, we wouldn’t have gone on to suppress a valid part of the personality in each sex.

Instead, we looked at Eve’s activity as wrong and concluded that activity must be damaging for women.

The incident in question was showing that active and passive currents are present in both men and women. They only cause a problem when they become misdirected.

In the end, we are not so different.

Why Eve is linked to the Fall

Adam and Eve also represent more than the active and passive elements. They are a symbol of manhood and womanhood, in all their many aspects.

So there can also be other interpretations of this story, beyond this level.

For example, we can explore further why Eve seems to be one step closer to the Fall.

This was due to trends other than activity.

Historically, women have emphasized their intuitive capabilities and neglected their intellectual ones. As a result, being inquisitive and curious-minded have become considered to be masculine elements, as one would associate with a scientist.

Meanwhile, women have been more spiritually inclined. Society has built up these distinctions.

But both elements exist just fine in both sexes.

Why was Eve the one thought to be more responsible for the Fall?

This points, once again, to showing that intellectual curiosity exists in women too. It’s when we suppress it that it becomes mischanneled and therefore harmful.

But if curiosity is legitimately expressed and combined with intelligence, creative and constructive things can unfold.

For both men and women.

In this myth, it isn’t really shown clearly that activity and intellectual curiosity were suppressed in Eve. Yet these qualities were always present.

They had to be—they are part of her nature.

Everything functions well when these forces are properly channeled. Then we see how the concept of women’s intuition surfaces, related to Eve initiating the Fall.

If a woman is more intuitively inclined, she is more open to spiritual forces. So she can attain greater heights… and therefore also reach greater depths.

The two trees in Eden

In the Garden of Eden, there are two trees. One is the Tree of Knowledge, which is forbidden because we must come to awareness slowly. We must struggle to awaken our capacity to experience the beauty and joy of life.

It won’t come to us served on a silver platter.

The other is the Tree of Immortality, which also applies to us as incarnated spirits.

Neither of these trees could apply to a liberated spirit living in the Spirit World.

Understanding the Tree of Immortality

For us fallen angels, our evolutionary journey brings us here to Earth. We are not born with an inner certainty that we are immortal. If we knew this—without struggling through the labor of self-development—our survival instinct would be too weak for us to make it.

Having this uncertainty—which motivates us to solve our problems and clean up our confusions—is for our own protection.

Otherwise, we would be too lazy.

We would come here but not complete our mission. We would be satisfied with slightly improved conditions. But we would not have the incentive to go all the way—to fully free ourselves.

As a result, we would slow our return to unity.

The entire Plan of Salvation—a slow, gradual process to begin with—would come to fruition so much later.

Also, people wouldn’t work to preserve life, in the same way, if we knew for certain we are coming back. Not knowing about this moves things along.

Alternatively, we can come to an inner conviction about immortality through our hard-won successes in self-development.

Then it won’t impact our will to live.

On the contrary, we will come to welcome this earthly experience more than before, when we were holding on because we didn’t know for sure.

We will enjoy the beauty that surrounds us. Not because we think this is all there is—but precisely because we know it is not.

Once we’ve done the work, we will realize that we really are immortal.

Knowledge vs. inner knowing

To experience the joy of living this way, knowing that an even better state exists—which can only come about by way of spiritual development—is what we’d call living in a higher state of consciousness.

Before then, it is our errors and misconceptions that make life on Earth hard. It’s the sweat of our labor that releases the errors. This is what leads to the inner conviction we’re speaking of here.

It’s not a belief from outside us—it’s a knowing from within. It’s a certainty—a sense of the reality of immortality.

All religions teach that our spirit, or soul, is immortal. This knowledge can be given to anyone. It’s then up to the individual to decide whether they believe it or not.

That kind of knowledge is not the same as having certainty, or an inner knowing. Such certainty can only be gained by reaching a certain stage of development.

Of course, if we’re here on this planet, we’re not yet really immortal. Because we are still in the cycles of death and rebirth.

We’re also going to die a bit more every time darkness, disappointment and hurts cross our doorsteps. We need to become free of our errors—by dying into our pain—if we want to enjoy the kind of eternal life comprised of continuous happiness and joy.

The Tree of Immortality means we know that this exists.

This is what we are meant to wake up to.

Our current outlook is only gloomy because we’re still living under the illusion of sin and evil, due to our inner errors.

As long as this is the case, we won’t have certainty, so we will hold on to life.

Unless we are overly self-destructive, we want to stay—even if our time here is difficult.

And this is a very good thing.

Unraveling sin and sexuality

Certain religions teach that Adam and Eve committed the first sin. This connects with the way humanity views sexuality. But our idea that sex is sinful doesn’t come from this symbolism.

We need to reverse this thinking.

We have interpreted this symbolism this way because of our ingrained notion that pleasure is wrong.

This originates from the fact that we, as human beings, have negativity in us. To the extent that this exists, pleasure itself seems almost dangerous.

This explains our interpretation of this myth as saying sex is sinful.

To the extent someone is unhappy—experiencing pain within themselves—to that extent they will shrink away from all varieties of happiness. Tangible experiences of happiness, then, will seem like annihilation.

Why is this so?

In part, because we must be willingness to let go—to give ourselves over to the life stream. To do this, a person must be willing to trust the process of life.

But the contracted, separated ego holds on to itself.

The tighter we hold on, the less fully we live in a creative, meaningful way.

There is a supreme wisdom available to guide each of us—automatically and naturally. It helps us move into the channels we are bound to go on our evolutionary journey.

But the ego shuts itself off from this.

In doing so, we disconnect from life’s current of bliss.

When our outer ego self insists so strongly, it contracts the whole inner person.

Then our contact to the source is cut off.

And the connection dies.

In this state, it seems like the loosening of the contraction—which could lead to pleasure—would be dangerous.

Because the person now feels untethered.

Safety can then only be found in maintaining the contracted, separated, alienated ego state.

This inner conflict is part of the human condition.

We are crouched and ready to fight. So we also fight the very thing that brought us here in this human form to begin with.

From this vantage point, the process of sexuality seems dangerous.

We become afraid of it.

That’s why we make up this moralistic rule about it being bad.

Why pleasure feels dangerous

This idea that pleasure is frightening will only continue to the extent that one is not free in their soul.

In other words, if we believe that there’s an authority somewhere who decrees we are wrong—or are doing something bad—we will continue to be frightened.

But we can shift our identification to ourselves. We can come to know that we are the ones who can decree what is right and wrong for us.

Then pleasure won’t be frightening.

There are other aspects to this as well. For example, there is self-responsibility.

If we’re afraid to take total responsibility for all aspects of our lives, the experience of pleasure will be both frightening and painful.

It can touch us so directly—nakedly and at the core of ourselves—that it seems unbearable. So we defend ourselves against this.

We cloak it so as not to feel so vulnerable to the pleasure.

The result? Numbness.

When we penetrate this numbness, the first inklings of feelings will be the sensations of shame and embarrassment.

It will be like being naked in front of clothed people.

But this doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else. The feeling is toward ourselves and our own closed ego that puts this covering on itself.

When we feel the shame of being authentic—of letting ourselves be naked and real—we are directly tapping into this fear of pleasure.

Just before this, there’s often the shame of pleasure, the shame of being real, of being ourselves—of our breathing, naked, real selves.

And this frightens us.

Because it feels too exposed, too vulnerable.

The soul cramps itself up and hardens itself against this feeling.

If we can pause, right here, aware of this feeling, and just let it be felt for a few minutes—even a few seconds—we will meet this feeling.

We can speak into the depths of our divine being. This can give us the courage to enjoy pleasure—to be naked unto ourselves.

This is the only way to become fully real.

 It’s how we access these immense universal powers that exist within and around us.

There are literally infinite possibilities for expansion. We can have more creative experiences than we can imagine.

Such possibilities only exist when we can allow ourselves to be naked in pleasure. To be naked in the creative forces as they exist in each one of us—without shame.

This symbolism is conveyed by the biblical story of Adam and Eve in paradise.

This connection is exactly what this myth is about.

Reading the symbols within

The analogies and symbolism found in the Bible should not be considered as one-time historical events. They are being constantly recreated in our souls.

With Adam and Eve, we need to separate them from the distortions that human minds and human religions overlaid onto them. Then we can see what they represent.

Then we can find the truth as it exists in them as well as in ourselves, right now.

For example, as we said, Adam and Eve leaving paradise relates to our fear of pleasure, our fear of being naked—of being real. All our difficulties, hardships and feelings of enslavement accrue from this.

The myth of Adam and Eve also includes persuasion by a serpent.

The serpent has been given many symbols. In this case, it mainly connotes what we consider to be the animalistic life force.

This is the pleasure force as it moves in humanity.

And just as the snake is not really low, it is not low. It is only our vision that makes it seem so.

In addition to being a symbol of fertility, the serpent is also a symbol of wisdom. This life force—that is said to be animalistic, low and blind—has a tremendous wisdom of its own.

It’s only the distorted life force that is blind and destructive.

But in its original beauty, it has its own wisdom.

Fertility here goes beyond reproduction. It’s also fertile in the deepest sense—in its creativity—representing the abundance of life with its multi-faceted possibilities.

The tree symbolizes the wrong kind of knowledge.

It is intellectualization that separates us from the immediate experience of the moment. This can only happen when the mind, body and real divine spirit are integrated.

When these aspects become fragmented, then knowledge gets separated from experience. In that case, the mind and the experience can be very different, as we all know.

That mind is a Tree of Knowledge split off from the feelings and experience of the person.

Free will and freedom

It’s not that Adam and Eve were supposed to eat the fruit and be driven out.

There is no “supposed to” here.

Each created being has free will—totally and completely.

This isn’t a reality we can know in our heads. We have to have experienced, at least at times, what it feels like to be in the flow of this being-force to understand this.

That’s what it means to be free, with no limitations and no authority who demands anything of anyone.

Such a staggering realization is frightening for the young aspects that still live in us. These immature aspects fear what this kind of freedom would mean.

But when we can gather the perspective that self-realization is a privilege, not a difficulty—the same as self-responsibility—then freedom becomes a wonderful delight.

This world we live in is wide open.

There are no “musts.”

There is just the lawful workings of highly organized forces that we are always welcome to shun. We are perfectly free to not understand or heed them—and to suffer the consequences.

We are the ones who choose to suffer.

The choice to suffer

And at some point, as we approach self-realization, we will uncover this important truth: we deliberately suffer.

We don’t have to—we choose it.

We hold onto destructive attitudes out of spite, stubbornness or resistance. Or maybe we just want to punish someone—life perhaps, or our parents—for not letting us have our way.

This childish spitefulness and stubbornness, it’s always in there somewhere.

Each one of us has a dose of it.

That’s the part of us that is clinging to suffering. Even when we’re aware of it, we won’t give it up.

We see the way to freedom down a suffer-free route—but we resist. It can be a long time before we turn to go in the right direction.

It’s as though we think it’s safer to suffer. This, of course, is highly illogical—so we push this thought down into our unconscious.

Then our conscious mind glorifies this into a religious command coming from a god that says: Yes, we should suffer because it’s good for us.

Humanity can—if we want to—turn our suffering into something fruitful.

We start by seeing that we choose suffering—all the time.

The most fruitful part happens the moment we see ourselves purposefully choosing it. In that moment, we can become ready to give this up.

But not a moment before.

For many, this is a strange concept. But if we travel deep into our souls, we’ll find this isn’t a theory.

None of this is merely theory.

We can know this to be true once we find these pieces within ourselves—if we are willing to go this way, courageously and with an open mind.

The way forward is not through accepting this as a mental concept. We must experience all this, as a reality that lives within us.

That can only come by clearing away our inner obstacles. We must understand them and then transform them, by fully facing them.

We can’t experience the great freedoms and riches of the universe with our ego self.

We must be integrated with our greater self—our real, divine self.

That happens as a byproduct of doing the work of self-development. Over time, we will organically live, more and more, in our original state—as our naked, authentic selves.

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