Charles Fillmore (in Dynamics for Living) wrote:
The Fall
Adam in his original creation was in spiritual illumination. Spirit breathed into him continually the necessary inspiration and knowledge to give him superior understanding. But he began eating, or appropriating, beliefs in two powers--God and not-God, or good and evil. The result, so the allegory relates, was that he fell away from spiritual life and all that it involves.
Having developed a consciousness apart from his divine nature, man must "till the ground from which he was taken,"that is, he must come into a realization of God as the source of his Being and must express ideas in harmony with Divine Mind.
In Talks on Truth, Fillmore wrote: “We are by birth a spiritual race, and we should never have known matter or material conditions if we had followed the leadings of our higher consciousness.”
From this it is clear that Fillmore understood the Fall as a fall away from spiritual illumination or “spiritual life and all that it involves.” The knowledge of good and evil represents a belief in two powers, God and not-God, which flatly contradicts the basic premise of Unity: “There is one Presence and one Power in the universe, God, the Good.” Unity’s belief is that we must know good only, and understand evil only as the absence of, or ignorance of, good. The serpent symbolizes what Fillmore calls sense consciousness, presenting the temptation to live by external appearances.
Some modern Unity teachers try to interpret Genesis 3 in a positive light. They say that what God created in spirit, the Divine Ideas created in the “involution” story of Chapter 1, can only be manifested through evolution. Genesis 3, then, does not portray a fall but rather the beginning of the precipitation of Divine Ideas into manifest form. Humankind had to take this step to realize its divine purpose, and the rest of the Bible is the story of how that evolution has worked out.
I simply cannot reconcile that with the text of Genesis 3. The author clearly intended to paint the incident as a negative fall. It involves direct disobedience of God’s command. It involves Eve and Adam believing the lie of the serpent that God has misled them. It shows God cursing them as a result. There is no way, to my mind, that anyone can understand this as a positive occurrence without completely disregarding most of the chapter.
I do believe that the bulk of the Bible, between the Fall and the New Jerusalem in Revelation, is a story of evolution. But it is not a story of how humanity has evolved from primitive beginnings to the heights of divine manifestation, becoming something never before seen. Rather, it is a story of the evolution from a separated consciousness back to a pre-existent unitive consciousness. We are not bringing something new into existence; we are recovering our awareness of what has always, already been True.
A Course in Miracles agrees with the original Fillmore teaching. It declares that, “The world was made as an attack on God.” In a more detailed passage it says:
"You may be surprised to hear how very different is reality from what you see. You do not realize the magnitude of that one error. It was so vast and so completely incredible that from it a world of total unreality had to emerge. What else could come of it? Its fragmented aspects are fearful enough, as you begin to look at them. But nothing you have seen begins to show you the enormity of the original error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and to force you to make further substitutions.
That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected and drawn between you and the truth" (T-18.I.5:1-6:2).
To me, the decision to know good and evil is the “original error” the Course mentions here. The physical universe “arose to hide it” and is now “the screen on which it [the error] was [and is] projected.” Far from being a positive step towards a divine goal, that decision was a “vast and completely incredible” error. Spiritual growth consists of the denial of that error and the affirmation of the Truth of Oneness.
