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THE FALL.
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pent, the emblem of crookedness and impersonation of desire which is the root of ignorance and all other troubles, appeared before him and tempted him, through his wife, and led him to believe that the forbidden fruit was 'a tree to be desired to make one wise.' The inevitable consequence of this change in the mental attitude of Adam was that his faith in his previous state of happiness was lost, and he felt that he would be happier with the additional knowledge to be acquired by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This attitude implied that he no longer believed in his own happiness and wisdom. It was a confession of being ignorant and unhappy, for there was the desire to become like Gods. The result was that by virtue of the unchanging, immutable laws which govern the forces on the mental plane, the state of this inner conviction of unhappiness and ignorance was materialized in an outward phenomenal form. Man would like to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but he must pay its price first! The mere circumstance that there is in you a desire for knowledge is a clear admission of your ignorance. This admission expresses your condition in your own words, and the law of Faith, which materializes mental impressions, is at once set in motion, and works out the rest. This is why man became ignorant to begin with ; this is why the immediate result of the eating of a little from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil was ignorance.
We have already seen that the true state of happiness for man can be none other than the consciousness of being the Sat-chit-ananda himself, that is, of his own
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