And then I entered the office where he was resting on the sofa, almost ready to die. I said, “Wait!” And I told the peon on the way, “Don’t call anybody, for the car or for the doctor. There is no need. I will take care.”

I said, “There is no need to die right now. One day you will have to die, but just take a few minutes’ time. You just look at these notes…what you said to your wife.”

He said, “You are a strange student, you would have killed me. Just another two persons more…And if they had said, ‘You have died,’ I would have believed it.”

I said, “This is just in answer to our controversy.”

If people go on saying something to you again and again you start believing it in spite of yourself. You may doubt the first time, but when it goes on being said continuously a belief arises in you, and you forget the doubt.

You have been told that you are sinners. You have been told that you are born in sin, and strange arguments have been provided to you why you are born in sin: because Adam and Eve disobeyed God. Now the Christian theologians say that although six thousand years have passed since Adam and Eve were removed by God from their place in the Garden of Eden, because they had disobeyed…He had told them not to eat from two trees: one tree was the Tree of Knowledge, and the other was the Tree of Eternal Life.

I think Adam and Eve did exactly what anybody with any intelligence would do. These are the two things: wisdom and eternal life – what else do you want? And God is providing you with everything else, that means just chew like the buffaloes, sit under trees. And the tree he had prohibited was an apple tree.

In the very fact of God’s prohibiting, God dies as love, God dies as compassion. Otherwise, if God were the Father, he would have told the children, “These are the two trees that you should not forget: wisdom and eternal life.” But this was reminded to Eve by the devil. The devil seems to be the first revolutionary in the world. He persuaded Eve.

I looked at this story from many angles. Why did he not persuade Adam? Because even if Adam is persuaded he will be obstructed. If Eve insists on not eating it, poor Adam is after all only the poor husband. Rather than persuading the husband he persuaded the wife. And since that time every advertisement is for the wife. Every church functions because of the support of the woman.

But his argument was right, and he had chosen the right person to persuade. He said, “God has prohibited you. Do you know the reason why? If you eat these two fruits, wisdom will make you enlightened, and eternal life…. And you will be just as powerful and as potent as God himself. And God is jealous of that; he does not want you to become gods. He wants you to remain worshippers – saints, sinners, but never gods. But these two fruits can make you real gods.”