When God created humankind, He did so from His Spirit. That is, our original model was not physical but spiritual. The carnal human being we are today is a degradation of the spiritual being we were in that first creation. This alteration occurred as soon as our first progenitors transgressed the divine command. The account of the life of Adam and Eve says:
“Adam and Eve wept for having gone out of the Garden, their first home. And indeed, when Adam saw that his flesh had been transformed, he wept bitterly together with Eve for what they had caused.”
Those who gave us origin were transformed—from bodies of light into material bodies. From a spiritual creation they passed into a physical one. This transformation was necessary so that the punishment for the transgression would be fulfilled in the body and not in the spirit. For if the spirit had been condemned, there would have been no possibility of salvation. The wage of a spiritual offense is death. And the offense was disobedience to the spiritual command that God, the Creator, had warned them not to violate.
They had to leave Eden because that place belongs to the dimension of God, accessible only to those who possess a body of light, not a physical one like the one they acquired after the transgression. It is a dimension not made of matter like the one that surrounds us.
From that alteration onward, human beings began to be born on earth, within the animal realm. The first pair was created in the spiritual domains, and God placed them in a beautiful garden in which to live. That garden was part of the Kingdom of God. It was not a place separate from His dominion and governance over the earth, but rather the access point between divine lordship and the material world.
There are two accounts of the origin of humankind in the Bible—two sources of memory of creation that seem to contradict one another. This is because they cannot be understood as a single cohesive literal narrative. Since they were not written as related accounts, they appear disconnected: one describing a spiritual creation and the other a terrestrial one. The book of Genesis did not include the annals of the creation of the first spiritual pair endowed with the image of God, which is found in the Book of the Life of Adam and Eve, and which I consider to be the correct account of their creation.
Genesis 1 states that God made humankind in His image and likeness, that is, in resemblance to spiritual beings. Although we use the word “man” to describe this creation of God, the man described there was not “man” in the strict human sense of the word. “Man” is what we are today, but God made our original model—Adam and Eve—of spiritual nature, as He Himself is. The Book of Adam and Eve uses the word bright. Many scriptural authors refer to this as light.
In chapter 2 of Genesis, however, the creation of man is described as follows:
“Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”
To believe that God created us in His own image and also believe that He created us from dust implies a contradiction. The word image in the context of Genesis 1 means representation, likeness, and appearance of God. This physical appearance that we have today is not God’s; it is that of our earthly parents. In reality, the image of God no longer exists in us as it did at the beginning, because when Adam and Eve disobeyed, God removed that likeness—described as bright in the Book of the Life of Adam and Eve—and provided them instead with a material body.
There is therefore no real appearance or image of God in the “creation from dust” account. In chapter 2, the clay figure becomes a living being through God’s breath of life. According to this version, God created a physical human being and then gave him life through the breath or spirit from the divine source. Thus, man was flesh, and the flesh became alive through the spirit God gave him—but he was never a fully spiritual being as described in the Book of the Life of Adam and Eve.
Nevertheless, our original creation was spiritual. We were made spiritual beings, and our spiritual bodies were altered into animal beings through the transgression of our first parents. This understanding was lost to humanity over time. It is not newly discovered; it was at least accessible during the formation of the canon. The Church adopted the belief that we were created from dust and that God breathed His Spirit into us to give us life. This mindset has obstructed our true destiny, our growth, and our spiritual transformation.
Originally, we were created as spiritual beings endowed with heart, reason, and speech, and the Creator gave us a form of flesh. That “flesh,” in quotation marks, was not like the one we have now, nor did it function in the same way. For example, Adam and Eve did not have bodies covered with skin as we do today. The Book of their Life says:
“But when I learned of your transgression, I deprived you of this bright light. Yet in My mercy, I will not turn you into darkness; instead, I have made you a body of flesh and have given you skin that can endure cold and heat.”
According to this source, what we call eternal death—identified with fire and called hell—is described in this account of human creation as eternal darkness. Adam and Eve did not know what darkness was until they arrived in exile on earth, because God is light, and His light illuminates all dominions where His Word is respected and obeyed. In His realms, there are no luminaries that provide light.
Adam says to the Lord:
“And this darkness, O Lord, where was it before? … During all the time we were in the Garden, we did not see it, nor did we even know it existed. Eve was not hidden from me, nor I from her, and there was no darkness separating us. Both she and I were in a bright light.”
This darkness separated them from the light of God. It was the consequence of disobedience to the Source, which deprived them of His Light. The only real and original Light that exists is the very nature of God. In fact, only 5% of the universe is visible; 95% is dark matter and dark energy. Within the visible portion are the stars, which emit their own light. Everything else—planets, bodies, creatures—only reflects what it receives. Even the light of stars has an end: they are born, shine for a time, and then die. The Creator’s light, however, has no end. It is eternal. And that was the light that clothed the first pair—a light not coming from the sun or the stars, but from the Spirit Himself.
But when they took from the knowledge of evil, that light was extinguished—not because God destroyed them, but because the presence that illuminated them withdrew. They were left in a world without its own light, and God, in His compassion, created the sun: a borrowed lamp to illuminate their days. We have light on this planet because the Divinity, in mercy toward our first parents, provided luminaries such as the sun so that they would not live in constant darkness.
The Genesis account of the clay figure is not the same as that of the Book of Adam and Eve. According to that book, it happened in reverse: humanity was first a spiritual being, and through the fall underwent an alteration that made it primarily earthly, as we are today, together with all vital and physiological functions. The body we now possess is the result of the spiritual fall of our first progenitors.
Being deprived of the body of light that Adam and Eve originally had was a consequence of spiritual justice. God warned them that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of evil, they would die:
“Do not eat from that tree, for on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.”
The transformation occurred so that they could be saved from darkness and from the eternal condemnation that the initiator of this path of death—a spiritual being—had received. The body would serve as both a vehicle of punishment and of salvation. What had to be saved was the spirit—our true nature and being. God could not leave the transgression without consequence, because the payment for spiritual disobedience is death, yet He would save them. The lesson and the penalty was the death of the body in order to save the spirit.
Thus, death becomes a curse that turns into a blessing. Physical death ends the body, but the spirit God has given us—His Spirit—cannot die. The body dies because the spirit withdraws from it. Spirits return either to the Light with God or to darkness if they reject reconciliation with Him by their own will.
From the beginning, God anticipated the need for the body should Adam and Eve choose the wrong path—something possible through free will, the capacity God gave us to choose our own way. From the very moment of the first transgression, and even since creation, God has been involved in caring for and saving His children from wrong decisions when necessary. According to the Book of Adam and Eve, the body was altered so that they could survive on earth, since their existence would now be terrestrial, as we know it today, beginning at the moment they were forced to leave Eden.
The book continues, stating that before the transgression, our first parents had not turned their hearts toward earthly things:
“Therefore Elohim had compassion on them, and when He saw them diminished at the gate of the Garden, He sent His Word to our father Adam and to Eve in their fallen state.”
When it says that He saw them diminished, it means that our first ancestors lost the strength, abilities, faculties, and gifts with which they had originally been endowed—gifts that came not from the flesh but from the Spirit. To understand these spiritual capacities, one need only think of the works Jesus performed during His time on earth.
The first loss was the body of light with which they had been created. The text states:
“And the Lord said to Adam and Eve: You have transgressed by your own free will and left the Garden in which I placed you. By your own free will you transgressed through your desire for divinity, greatness, and an exalted state like Mine. Therefore, I deprived you of the bright nature you once had and brought you out of the Garden into this rough and troubled land.”
When the Lord says, “I deprived you of your bright nature,” He is saying that He deprived them of their spiritual nature—the image and likeness of God—because they transgressed through their own free choice.
Elsewhere the text says:
“And Adam said to Eve: Our eyes once saw angels praising in heaven, and they saw us as well without ceasing. But now we do not see as before; our eyes have become flesh and cannot see as they once did. What is our body today compared to what it was in the ancient days when we lived in the Garden?”
And again:
“Then the Lord Elohim said to Adam: When you were subject to Me, you had a bright nature within you; for this reason you could see heavenly things. But after your transgression, your bright nature was taken from you, and you can no longer see heavenly things, only what is earthly and within reach of your hands—the capacity of the flesh, which is brutish.”
There was undoubtedly a closing of the ability to perceive what we call the spiritual world. Their spiritual form was transformed into an earthly body. Their eyes became physical. It was a transfiguration of their spiritual corporeal form. It is difficult to describe the spiritual appearance with which God created Adam, but it was not physical in nature, nor did it have the physiology of our present bodies.
In one passage, Adam asks God to remove him from the altered body after the transgression:
“Then Adam wept before the Lord and said: O Lord, I have transgressed a little, yet the punishment is severe. I ask You to free me from its hands, or else have mercy on me and take my soul out of my body now and remove me from this strange land.”
Adam understood his offense but not the magnitude of its impact on himself and on his descendants—humanity. He asks to be freed “from its hands.” From whose hands? From the hands of the transgressing angel into which he had fallen through disobedience. Adam was not asking for death; he was asking to return to his former spiritual and luminous state. To inhabit an animal body and dwell on planet Earth was, for the first human pair, like being confined in a prison cell—a punishment for unleashing the knowledge of evil among the children of God.
Since the transformation from spiritual to earthly occurred, we can no longer see beyond our own noses. But God’s plan from the beginning of the fall was for us to recover the strengths, faculties, and gifts with which we were originally endowed in the Spirit and by the Spirit. That is, there must be an inner inversion from material to spiritual in order to create true balance, until our bodies themselves are transformed by God. This is what Jesus achieved and demonstrated through the manifestations of God’s power in His body transformed by the Spirit.
Genesis says that after creating them, God placed them in Eden, a paradisiacal yet earthly place. However, in the work referenced here, Eden was a place where matter could not dwell. If animal flesh could not dwell there, neither could the fallen angel inhabiting a serpent. Eden was located at the boundary between earth and God’s heaven. This open connection between earth and the heavenly kingdom was closed when the first parents violated the command, because disobedience cannot dwell in God’s domains. The Garden of Eden was part of God’s realms—His Kingdom.
The intention behind the builders of the Tower of Babel—to construct a tower that reached the heavens—was not only arrogance and defiance of God’s authority, but also an attempt to create an entrance into the Kingdom against God’s will, which had closed it to humankind. Ancient peoples must have had a rudimentary knowledge of a portal, of communication between heaven and earth, because it truly existed: the Garden of Eden. The only reason Adam and Eve could be there was because they possessed a form of light or spiritual nature like God’s and submitted to His governance.
When our first parents transgressed God’s command, He expelled them from Eden because they violated the law and because a physical transformation had occurred. To return to Eden, we must be transformed into spiritual beings—a promise God made to Adam and to us, his descendants.
The Book of Adam and Eve states:
“Then Adam and Eve returned to the cave, sorrowful and weeping because of the alteration their bodies had suffered. And from that moment they knew they were transformed beings and that all hope of returning to the Garden was lost. Their bodies now performed strange functions, and they understood that all flesh needs food and drink to survive and that they could no longer enter the Garden.”
Then Adam said to Eve:
“Behold, our hope is now lost, and so is our confidence to enter the Garden. We no longer belong to its inhabitants, for from now on we are of the earth and dust, inhabitants of the land. We shall not return to the Garden until the day Elohim has promised to save us and bring us back into the Garden, as He promised.”
The Book of Adam and Eve tells us that the first human beings had bodies of light or spiritual bodies. These were altered into earthly or animal bodies. A small portion of God’s light that longs for reconciliation with our Creator Father remains within us. The farther we move away from God, the smaller that light becomes. The more spiritual growth occurs in us through the process of transformation, the more light shines from within.
The Scriptures say:
“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.”
Why is it so important to understand the scope of these words? Because light overcomes darkness. God’s light does not exist in the earth, nor in the sky above us or around the planets. It exists only partially within His children—those men and women who, through reconciliation and divine forgiveness, entered His covenant.
When our first parents were overcome by the fallen entity, God gave them a prophecy of faith and hope:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers. Her offspring will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
This enmity signifies conflict between the children of light and the entities of darkness. This spiritual hostility will be won by the children of Eve when we, her descendants, crush the serpent’s head—symbolizing absolute dominion over evil and the recovery of authority over the earth. This will fulfill Jesus’ prayer: Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Such dominion requires the transformation and transcendence of humanity, returning to its original spiritual state as in the beginning, when they were in the Garden, filled with grace and the bright nature with which God created them.
When God brings an end to the curse of death into which humanity, the earth, and all material creation fell through the first transgression, there will no longer be any need for the sun. Darkness will be removed forever, and God’s light will illuminate everything completely. All things will be new and different from what we have known, and God’s will shall be done on earth as in heaven. God is light, and we were made in His image and likeness. The ultimate goal of the human being—if one so chooses—is to return to the spiritual origin of light.