“There is one tree bearing two kinds of fruits. Its name is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Like its name, are its fruits: namely, good and bad fruits of life and death, of love and hate, of light and darkness. This tree was put before Adam, and even if he had in his innocence the liberty to look upon it as a tree of God’s wonders. God’s prohibition did not allow him to place his desire in it and eat of it, but threatened that (if he would do so) he would die from its fruit. For this was a tree of division where good and evil battled with each other: but in a battle there can be no life: For battle brings forth destruction, and destruction brings forth death, life lives in the sweet unity of love. Therefore, when Adam ate from this tree, a battle started within him, and in this battle he lost his life.

Nevertheless wretched men will not learn through such fall and damage. His desire is still for that tree and its fruits. Man is always desirous to have the division of manifold things, and man is always battling, when he could return to the unity of simplicity, if he only would come in peace. Life’s light stands in the middle to point out to men the way to this first rest, and the Father in the heaven lets his Sun rise over good and evil: But everything grows after its own fashion, and man is only too apt to look upon the stars of the manyfoldness, and in his own discretion, to choose them for his ladders, though they make him stray many times from the true light, and detain him in the whirlpool of uncertainty. This whirlpool of uncertainty leads more and more out of the innermost face of the Sun into the outer (world) and can find neither end nor place of rest, unless it leads from the outer (world) back again and seeks the beginning, from which all the smaller star-lights originated.”

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