The universe is whole. All there is is wholeness. The only “good” or “bad” we will ever encounter is the belief that something is good or bad.
The idea of “good and bad” is what brings about bad.
In the Garden of Eden it’s not that everything was better. It’s that everything was understood: that everything is, always has been, and always will be, whole.
In the beginning there was no problem.
The problem began when Adam and Eve started to believe in the idea of “bad.” To say they succumbed to temptation and “ate from the The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” is just a poetic way of saying that the idea struck them that there’s not just eternal wholeness, but a division of wholeness into “GOOD” AND “EVIL,” “God” and “human,” even “this” and “that.” When they had that idea, their minds split everything in two. They looked around and found evidence of it everywhere (it’s what the mind does with its ideas: It goes to work proving them). So they thought they understood something. It felt like knowledge. Of course, they were mistaken. Nothing had changed in God’s universe, only that they were now laying a filter of separation over everything and suddenly there was embarrassment and shame and anger and fear - all of it painful and all of it innocent confusion.
And even that wasn’t a problem.
It became a problem when they believed it. And when they believed it, they immediately fell out of the paradise of clear thinking (the only paradise there is) and into the hell of stressful thinking (the only hell there is)...just as it happens for everyone. Nothing changed about their location, but everything changed about the world they lived in.
The very idea of evil, the idea of bad, is what creates hell. And it does so immediately, right there where you are. Believing there is evil IS the evil. It’s the basis of all suffering, all war - within us and between us. But it’s false. It’s entirely imagined. There’s no way to experience anything bad without the thought “bad” followed by a belief in that thought. Without the thought (or with the thought but without a belief in the thought) everything is whole, divine. Always.
This is why God (Reality) warns against believing we “know” good and evil: because it just ain’t true and believing it creates suffering.
When I get still, question my stressful thoughts, and return to the truth prior to any story I tell myself about it’s goodness or badness, I understand, rediscover and return immediately to, the Garden of Eden.
...until the next time I believe I’m experiencing something bad, then the beautiful journey toward Eden can begin again.
And as grace would have it, the universe never stops being whole.
Eden never goes away.
So I can always return to it simply by noticing.