Chapter 93July 19, 1958

they are the same features, the same person.

Thus I saw how horrible is the sense of sin, how much it belongs to the world of falsehood.

A peach should ripen on the tree; it’s a fruit that should be picked when the sun is upon it. Just as the sun falls on it, you come along, pluck it and bite into it. Then it is absolute paradise.

There are two such fruits – peaches and golden green plums. It is the same for both. You must take them warm from the tree, bite into them, and you are filled with the taste of paradise.

Every fruit should be eaten in a special way.

At heart, this is the symbol of the earthly Paradise and the tree of Knowledge: by biting into the fruit of Knowledge, one loses the spontaneity of movement and begins objectivizing, learning, questioning. So as soon as they ate of this fruit, they were full of sin.

nature, his own truth, must spontaneously find the right way of using things. When you live according to the truth of your being, you don’t need to learn things: you do them spontaneously, according to the inner law. When you sincerely follow your nature, spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think or look at yourself acting or start questioning, you are full of sin.

It is man’s mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery it brings. Animals are not at all unhappy in the way we are. Not at all, not at all, except – as Sri Aurobindo says – those that are corrupted. Those that are corrupted are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt, for their whole aspiration is to resemble man. Man is the god. Hence there is dissimulation, hypocrisy: dogs lie. But men admire that. They say, ‘Oh! How intelligent they are!’

They have lost their divinity.

Truly, the human species is at a point in the spiral which is not very pretty.

But isn’t a dog more conscious, more evolved than a tiger, or higher in the spiral – that is, nearer the Divine?

It’s not a question of being conscious. There is no doubt that man is more evolved than the tiger, but the tiger is more divine than man. One shouldn’t confuse things. These are two entirely different things.

The Divine is everywhere, in everything. We should never forget it – not for a second should we forget it. He is everywhere, in everything; and in an unconscious but spontaneous, therefore sincere,