I have heard:

A man was brought to a court and the policeman said, “Either he is mad or he is completely drunk, because he was just standing in the middle of the road. I told him many times to move but he would not. I was surprised because I didn’t think that he was drunk and I didn’t think that he was mad. He seemed to be sane in every way and I smelled his mouth and he had not been drinking. But he would not move from the middle of the road.”

The magistrate said, “Tell me. Why were you standing there? Why didn’t you move when the policeman was telling you to again and again?”

The man was a very tiny man, very weak and thin. He said, “Sir, I had to choose between the law of the government and the law of my wife.”

The magistrate said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “My wife told me to meet her at exactly that spot at twelve o’clock. So I had to choose. Naturally I chose the law of my wife.”

The magistrate laughed, “That has been always the case. You go home. If that is the problem then one has to choose the law of the wife.”

Since Adam it has been so. The woman is the principle of the inner – not, certainly, of the innermost, but of the inner. She is just in the middle. The innermost you call the soul, the outermost you call the body, and just between the two is the psyche, the mind.

Adam followed Eve on this adventure into the world.

Then again, the parable about Jesus is the same. Jesus is born out of the Virgin Mary. Why virgin? Because if you understand rightly, virgin means a mind which is absolutely pure, uncontaminated by thought. Thoughts are represented by the serpent, because the ways of thoughts are very serpentine. If you watch your thoughts you will understand why they have been represented by the serpent. They are very serpentine, they walk without legs just like serpents, they wriggle within you. And they are very cunning and very clever and very deceptive – like the serpent. They hide in dark holes in your unconscious and whenever they have an opportunity they jump upon you. In the night, in the dark night, they come out; in the daylight they hide. When you are a little alert those thoughts disappear; when you are not so alert they come out, they start influencing you.

The Virgin Mary means a mind in meditation; Eve means a mind full of thoughts, full of serpents. Jesus enters again into the world through the Virgin Mary, through purity, through innocence. Thought is cunning; thoughtlessness is innocent.