122. Verse 15 And Jehovah God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and to care for it.

'The garden of Eden' means all the qualities of the celestial man which are the subject here. 'Tilling it and caring for it' means that he is allowed to enjoy all these things but not to possess them as his own, since they are the Lord's.

The most famous rib in the Bible is, of course, the one taken from Man (or Adam) and formed into Woman (or Eve) in the Garden of Eden. This event illustrates a key moment in the spiritual history of humanity, one that still drives our lives today. The first Man formed in Genesis represents the earliest church on earth. The Lord raised early humans to a state in which they lived in love to the Lord and love for each other in communication with heaven, and knew from their affections what was true and good. They were also different from us in a couple of key ways. First, they had no sense that life was their own -- they felt all life, thought and emotion flowing to them from God. Second, they lacked the capacity to separate their hearts and their minds. They could not want one thing and use their minds to choose another; their minds followed their hearts. But in the Garden of Eden, the Man was lonely -- which represents the fact that people started to want their lives to be their own. So God gave them what they wanted by taking a rib from the man and forming it into Woman. The rib and the woman both represent the "proprium," which is sometimes translated as the "own" or the "as of self." It is a complex idea, but in a nutshell it is this: The proprium is the part of us that feels our life as our own, our thoughts as our own, our feelings as our own. This is ultimately false and evil and belongs in hell, because all life in fact comes from the Lord. But the Lord allows it so that we can be happy and can act in freedom. To create it for us, He had to take the lowest, least-alive aspects of us -- represented by a bone -- and build it into a part of us that does not feel the Lord but can still be kept alive. In particular, the rib represents the nearly-dead proprium, with barely any love or thought. The woman represents that proprium clothed with living flesh, or loves from the Lord felt as our own.