The “tree of life” is the inherent life of the organism; it is symbolised in the physical body by the various nerves and the spinal column. The spinal column represents the tree; the nerves, which carry the living waters, are the branches and the leaves of the tree. This is why it is written: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” (John 15:6, KJV).
This passage reveals that when a person believes that his or her life, substance, and intelligence are self-derived, they sever the connection with the Source, the Spirit. As a result, they fall into the domain of the ego and begin to revolve within a mental vortex whose governing tones are good and evil, birth and death, duality.
When a person sustains a thought for an extended period, whether uplifting or destructive, that thought becomes a directive issued to the cells, nerves, and subtle energies of the body. The longer the thought is held, the more deeply it imprints itself upon both the physical and energetic systems, empowering the body to manifest its vibration.
If the thought is negative, its influence gradually distorts the internal harmony of the mind and body. The degree of disharmony, and therefore the severity of any resulting illness, corresponds directly to the strength, duration, and emotional charge of the thought. Deeply rooted negative thinking can eventually give rise to profound mental, emotional, and even physical disorders.
Conversely, the same law governs positive thought. When a person holds thoughts of love, truth, purity, and wholeness with intensity and constancy, those thoughts nourish the body at a cellular level. They bring renewal, clarity, vitality, joy, and even profound healing. In this way, the human being becomes both the architect of illness and the architect of restoration, depending on the quality of thought they choose to cultivate.
Every month, a transmutation of the living waters takes place under divine order; thus are the “twelve manner of fruits” produced by the “tree of life in the midst of the garden” that garden being the spiritualised body. (This teaching returns us to Genesis 2:9.) Humanity is kept from partaking of this precious, healing, life-giving fruit only by thoughts of sensuality, clinging to and relying upon the five senses.
However, when this phase of sense-consciousness is lifted into Truth and dissolved by the acknowledgement that all things proceed from Spirit, and that Spirit is never sick, never poor, never fatigued, and never dies, the idea of purity is restored in the soul. As this purity is re-established, the body begins to express its original holiness and perfection. We partake of the fruit of the tree of life, the fruit of everlasting life, when we appropriate ideas of divine life, ceasing to view life as something transient, governed by birth and death, and instead recognising it as endlessly eternal, constant, continuous, indestructible, beautiful, precious, and everlasting.
WHAT THE TREE TRULY IS
In metaphysical and allegorical terms, the tree in reference ultimately represents the body of thoughts or ideas, the living structure that unites the heavens and the earth, the mind and the body, the formless and the formed. It is the inner framework and founation of consciousness from which the individual is either elevated or destroyed. It is not a physical tree in a garden.
Therefore, the “tree of life in the midst of the garden” symbolises the absolute Life Principle established within human consciousness by God. This principle is singular and unchanging: and it is the love of God. The love is pure and unchangeable in nature. It is from this love that all the laws of life and of the universes are created and operated.
The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” by contrast, represents the mind’s discerning faculty, the principle of duality. Humanity first apprehends Truth directly, yet must then interpret the relationships between ideas before right activity can be established within. This dualistic mode of thinking is one of the principal causes of humanity’s misconception of our true nature and of the divine law.
God cautioned Adam, the mind, to refrain from eating of the tree whose fruit is the knowledge of good and evil, for “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The fruit signifies the notions that arise when one believes life to be divided into opposites such as good and evil, hot and cold, life and death, and all other polarities that emerge from dualistic thought. To eat is to accept, to believe and to trust in. To “die” does not indicate physical death, but a descent into negation, a state in which we lose awareness of our divine nature and surrender mastery over mind, body and soul through erroneous thinking. The warning was to avoid perceiving life in a dualistic manner, or else risk losing control of the inner faculties. For life is singular in essence, and its true nature is love.
This tree of the knowledge of good and evil is closely connected with individual free will, which stands in immediate contact with the serpent. The serpent represents our sense-consciousness and our emotional nature. When we choose the mortal perception of life, we bind ourselves to duality, symbolised by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to its inevitable consequences, which ultimately lead to decay.
In Genesis, after the mind was exposed to the idea of duality by Adam eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God said, “Behold, the man has become as one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever.” Genesis 3:22 KJV
Meaning, when we lay aside the mortal perception of life (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) and take up the spiritual idea of life, (the tree of life), we open the door to the realisation and the acknowledgement that the I AM, God, is one, and His love is one, and His love is creative power expressing life in divine order in us, through us, to us, for us, with us, and all around us for eternity.
Nothing and no one exists apart from the power of God.
Nothing acts or stops without God.
Nothing lives without God.
Nothing becomes or comes into existence without God.
God is One.
To choose the tree of life is to choose the remembrance and the gift of the one eternal truth.