In the poetic unfolding of Genesis 2, there is a sacred sequence that quietly reveals how imagination operates as the creative power of God. The Garden of Eden is not a distant paradise lost to time, but a symbol of the inner world—the meeting place between divine consciousness and human experience.
Let’s consider the progression:
“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food;
the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
(Genesis 2:8–9)
Only after the trees are described do we read:
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.”
(Genesis 2:10)
This divine order—trees first, then rivers—is no accident. It speaks to the invisible processes of manifestation and the creative movement of consciousness.
The Trees: States of Being Planted by God
Before any flow, before any outward movement, the trees are planted by God.
This points directly to Genesis 1:11:
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself…”
This is a spiritual law: everything reproduces after its kind, and the seed is within itself. In other words, your world flows from the seed of your own inner assumptions—self-contained, self-generated. Imagination is the seed. The garden is the soul. The trees are the resulting states.
That God Himself plants the trees suggests that the capacity for every imaginable state already exists within you—implanted by divine design. It is not you, the surface personality, who creates the seed of life. Rather, the divine “I AM” within has already prepared the ground.
The Tree of Life: Pure Awareness of Oneness
The Tree of Life stands as the symbol of imagination rightly used. It is awareness of the singular power—the undivided state where all things are seen as flowing from within. In Neville’s terms, this is the realisation that "I Am" is God—the beginning of all that is seen and felt.
To eat of the Tree of Life is to live in this recognition: that life flows from you, not to you. It is the tree of sustained vision, clarity, and inner dominion.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: The Divided Mind
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, on the other hand, introduces duality. It is the mind caught between opposites—judging appearances as either “good” or “bad,” becoming entangled in the illusion that there is more than one power.
Neville often said, “There is no power outside of man.” The moment we step into the belief that outer circumstances possess power of their own, we have “eaten” of this tree.
This tree is not evil in itself—it simply represents the consciousness of separation, the fall from imaginative unity into reactive living. It is the tree of misused imagination: the imagination turned outward, mistaking the shadow for the source.
The River: The Flow That Follows the Planted Assumption
Only after the trees are planted and described does the river begin to flow.
This divine order reflects the principle that inner states precede outer movement. The trees—planted by God—symbolise inner assumptions and divine potential. The river that flows from Eden represents the natural movement of life that proceeds from what has been internally accepted.
Neville taught that manifestation is not caused by effort or logic, but by feeling a state to be true. The feeling waters the garden. It causes the trees to grow, and from there, the river flows effortlessly into experience, dividing into four heads—symbolising the full expression of the assumed state in the physical world.
A Garden of Choice
Placed in this garden are both trees—Life and Good and Evil. The choice remains within us every day: to live from Oneness or to fall into duality. To remember that imagination is the source—or to believe that outer effects are separate from inner cause.
But both trees were planted by God, which reveals something liberating: even the knowledge of duality, even the experience of separation, is within the plan of awakening. Nothing is outside divine purpose. Even the divided mind eventually brings us back to unity.
Eden Never Left
The Garden of Eden is a symbol of your inner world—a world where divine imagination has already planted the seeds of infinite states. The Tree of Life is the awareness that you are the creative power. The Tree of Knowledge is the temptation to forget that truth and become reactive.
The river, then, is the flow of your world—moving always from the inner to the outer, from seed to manifestation.
To return to Eden is not to go backward in time. It is to remember what has always been true: that you are the garden, the tree, the river—and the God who plants.
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