The Christ story involves a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on Holy Rood, the matty was he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the Father are one.

Getting back into that Garden is the aim of many a religion. When Yahweh threw man out of the Garden, he put two cher- ubim at the gate, with a flaming sword between. Now, when you approach a Buddhist shrine, with the Buddha seated under the tree of immortal life, you will find at the gate two guardians-those are the cherubim, and you’re going between them to the tree of immortal life. In the Christian tradition, Jesus on the cross is on a tree, the tree of immortal life, and he is the fruit of the tree. Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree-these are the same figures. And the cherubim at the gate-who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you’ll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed-fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you’re approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but see the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won’t be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through.

We are kept out of the garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what think to be the goods of our life.

God’s idea, in this story, was to get Adam and Eve out of that Garden. place of oneness, of unity, of no things. When you eat the Fruit of the What was it about the Garden? It was a division in the nature of people or Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, you know about pairs of opposites which include not only good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, but male and female, and God and Man as well.

Man has eaten the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Lest he eat the fruit of the second tree, which is that of immortal life, God throws Man out of the Garden and places two cherubim, with a flaming sword between them, to guard the gate.

Adam and Eve are separated from God and they are aware of this break in their sense of oneness. They seek to cover their nakedness. The question becomes, how do they get back into the Garden? To understand this mystery, we must forget all about judging and ethics and forget good and evil as well.

Jesus says, “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” That is the way back into the Garden. You must live on two levels: One, out of the recognition of life as it is without judging it, and the other, by living in terms of the ethical values of one’s culture, or one’s particular personal religion. These are not easy tasks.

I said that God exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden, but actually they exiled themselves. The fear is that of death and the desire is for more of this world:fear and desire are what kept you out of Garden.It is not god who keeps us in exile but ourselves.

This story yields its meaning only to a psychological interpretation. If you explain it as an historical event that occurred at some distant time back there, it seems ridiculous. There was no Garden of Eden as a concrete place. To believe so is to misunderstand and misconstrue the metaphoric language of religion.

You cannot even find a date for the idea of it. In the evolution of the species, did it arise with Homo erectus, when the human brain measured 1,000 cubic centimeters? Or did it come later with Neanderthal man, or just prehistoric with Cro-Magnon? When did this notion come?

This idyllic spot is not an historical fact. The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites man and woman, good and evil-are as holy as that of a god.

Let us look around this Garden now that we stand imaginatively within it.

“In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say ‘Aha’, that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say ‘Aha’ to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.”