was the division of the sexes. To aid Amilius in the accomplishment of his mission, God moved to divide the soul into its two aspects—the active or yang aspect, and the receptive or yin aspect.11 By working together, the individual strengths of the male and female would complement one another. “… when there was that turning to the within, through the sources of creation, as to make for the helpmeet … then—from out of self—was brought that as was to be the helpmeet, not just the companion …” (364-7)
In their early years on earth, the souls of this group learned to use the attributes of the mind as they developed their mental abilities. At first, they used them in pursuit of spiritual matters, expressing the Divine within. These souls, attuned to the Creative Spirit and expressing its love in their activities on earth, were known as the “Sons of God.”
Gradually, however, some souls began to use more of the carnal mind and chose to live more in the thought of flesh than in the thought of spirit. They began to experience the world through the physical senses, experiencing desire, sex, ingesting first plant food, and later eating animal flesh itself. As they did so, the thought-body began to take on the form of that which they sought and began to harden, taking on the aspects of flesh as its vibrational rate slowed. “As these took form, by the gratifying of their own desire … they became hardened or set—much in the form of the existent human body of the day …” (364-3)
The downward spiral of devolution with its resultant loss of God Consciousness thus continued after the advent of Amilius into the earth. Many in this soul group became versed in the ways of the souls they had come to help. As they did so, these “Sons of Darkness,” as they are referred to in the readings, moved deeper into self-consciousness and away from God Consciousness. Self-consciousness became so great that they began to listen to another voice, a voice not of God, and not of evil, but the voice of self. This voice, the self-will as opposed to the God-will, is symbolized in the biblical account of creation as the serpent.
The souls’ continued desire for self-gratification led some to project a portion or aspect of themselves into a separate being, a type of “thought projection,” which had no will of its own but was subject to the desires and control of the soul which brought it into being. The readings refer to these as automatons “… that were retained by individuals or groups to do the labors of a household, or to cultivate the fields or the like.” (1968-2) The creation of these beings and their use as servants or slaves caused great dissension between those who remained true to their original purpose and those falling ever deeper into the self-gratification of materiality.
As Amilius, the Elder Brother, looked upon the errors that had occurred, he understood that the only way to overcome the physical world was to take on the aspects of materiality itself in order to demonstrate a way of escape from their carnal influences. He accepted that he would have to take on physical form—flesh and blood—and become as one of those lost in the physical world, so that he might experience the flesh in order to overcome it. By making this choice, Amilius determined to set the example for all to follow. He thus became the Way Shower, and took upon himself the burdens of a long journey that would lead humanity out of the darkness of separation consciousness and back to the light of unity consciousness with God.
There is an inmost centre in us all where truth abides in fullness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in … and to KNOW, rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.
—Robert Browning
2
Our Physical Heritage: Creation of the Human Body
So Spider Woman gathered earth, this time of four colors, yellow, red, white, and black … molded them … She sang over them the Creation Song, and when she uncovered them these forms were human beings in the image of Sotuknang.
—The Book of the Hopi
THE story of the creation of the soul, as depicted in the previous chapter, illustrates that we were created as spiritual beings of celestial origin. Yet the entry of the third soul group into materiality added a new dimension to our existence and marked the beginning of a long process by which we slowly built the physical side of our nature. As a result of this process, we reached a point where we might more appropriately be thought of as a “soul-body,” containing both the physical and spiritual elements. “… for in man we find both the spirit entity and the physical entity …” (900-24)
We cannot ignore the fact that there is a dual aspect to our existence. To ignore one aspect in favor of the other gives us only a part of the picture. In order to completely understand who we are and how our destiny will manifest, we must consider not only our spiritual selves, but our physical selves as well. This chapter will first consider the creation of the human body as told in the Cayce readings, and then consider the scientific view of human development and attempt to see if correlations can be drawn between the two sources of knowledge.
Creation of the Human Body
As stated in the last chapter, Amilius realized that he must experience flesh and blood in order to learn how to overcome them. He must take on physical form and yet somehow retain an awareness of his divine nature. He therefore created a new body, one capable of existing in the physical world and yet capable of possessing spiritual consciousness. “… when one individual [Amilius] first saw those changes that eventually made for that opening for the needs of, or the preparation for, the Universal Consciousness to bring into the experience what is known to man as the first created man.” (2454-3) Through this new body, the soul would then be able to arrest the process of devolution and begin its slow evolutionary climb upward back to God consciousness. It should be noted that this body, although flesh and blood, was not as vibrationally dense as the body we know today.
Thus did Amilius lay plans for the creation of the human body, also called the Adamic body, the Fourth Root Race. It is this physical creation which is recorded in the second chapter of Genesis. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” (Genesis 2:7) Note the timeline here, as the spiritual creation of the soul, told in the first chapter of Genesis, preceded the physical creation of a body. While the first creation was spiritual, after the likeness of the Creative Spirit, the second was earthy or physical, as symbolized by the dust of the earth.
There are indications in the Cayce readings that the creation of the physical body was directed by Amilius, hence making it a creation of the soul, and not a direct creation of God. “… the sons of God came together to announce to Matter a way being opened for the souls of men, the souls of God’s creation, to come again to the awareness of their error.” (2156-2) Physical man, “the last of the creations,” (364-7) created out of the elements of the earth might best be considered as a result of the soul’s development, a necessary consequence of the choices the soul had made. “… for when man was brought into being there was a variation in the creation.” (262-3)
Thomas Sugrue, Cayce’s well-known biographer and the author of other materials based on the readings, echoes this thought “… they [the souls] played at creating; they imitated God … and what had been set in motion gradually entangled the souls, so that they became trapped in the plan of earth’s evolution, inside the bodies they had themselves created [author’s italics].”1 Hugh Lynn Cayce, Edgar Cayce’s son and an expert on his father’s work, concurred with this interpretation, saying that it was man and not God who brought our physical bodies into existence and, by so doing, limited ourselves to three-dimensional consciousness.2 The soul, being spirit, was created by God and is therefore eternal. The body, created by God’s creation, has a finite existence.
Amilius, ever the Way Shower, set the pattern the others were to follow. We need to understand that this new body was not an individual creation but a group creation, which occurred in five places on earth at once, each manifestation representing one of the five “races” of man. “Man, in Adam (as a group; not as an individual), entered into the world (for he entered