A lifetime of eating at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil had produced a vision of saints and sinners. My heart ached to embark on a journey of liberation and taste of the Tree of Life where saint and sinner are one in love. Every saint has a story, and all sinners have glorious pages yet to be written.

Για μας όμως, που έχουμε γεννηθεί σε μέρες επαναστάσεων και καταιγίδων, όπου έχουν γίνει θρύψαλα όλα τα πιστεύω - για μας που το πολύ πολύ μεγαλώσαμε μ' αυτήν την αόριστη πίστη που αρκείται σε ορισμένους εξωτερικούς τύπους και που η αδιάφορη προσχώρηση σ' αυτήν είναι ίσως περισσότερο ένοχη απ' την ασέβεια και την αίρεση, - είναι πολύ δύσκολο, όταν αισθανόμαστε την ανάγκη της, να ανοικοδομήσουμε το μυστηριακό οικοδόμημα που οι αθώοι και οι απλοί έχουν βαθιά χαραγμένη τη μορφή του στις καρδιές τους. "Το δέντρο της γνώσεως δεν είναι το δέντρο της ζωής!" Παρ' όλ' αυτά, μπορούμε άραγε ν' αποβάλουμε από το πνεύμα μας ό,τι καλό ή ολέθριο έχουν ενσταλλάξει σ' αυτό τόσες ευφυείς γενεές; Η άγνοια δεν διδάσκεται.

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden, the tree of knowledge that, as I learned long ago, is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow.

This is perhaps what has made some suspect that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was really a banana.

After we eat of the Apple of Knowledge, however, all of us start to be aware of ourselves, and our consciousness starts to be divided from our being. We start to have an image of ourselves which blocks our true expression.

How do we go from there? There are two ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to find a self-image one is comfortable with. This is what most people do. It has some advantages since it causes the mind to operate reasonably undisturbed and it brings some peace to most people. People who find and maintain a self-image they are comfortable with are generally known as ‘happy people’.

It doesn’t mean a whole lot, because in fact this image they are comfortable with is completely fake. There is another road, the road of learning to get rid of all self-imagery. This is a hard road however and requires one to pretty much battle for the rest of ones life (which isn’t a bad thing at all since the sense and meaning of life are essentially to put up a good battle). One develops techniques to stop identifying with ones self-image. The more these mechanisms behind self-imagery are mastered the more easy it becomes to switch and correct ones identities. At some point we can simply get rid of the self-image and be reborn as the child we once were, but a different child who has the triumph of knowledge in his pocket.