As Henry Luper says, there are two or three resources in man. One is reason, another perception and the other thinking. These are all terminologies. There is only one and that is understanding which forms the quality of what I receive and what I come to know. It is not that which reason says, or that which my feelings, as such, show me. There are different kinds of reason. Each person sees the world according to the character of his reasoning. This includes even the way he sees material objects and colors. Certainly, two types of reasoning will describe one color differently. We do not see the world as it really is, but rather, we see the world as we really are. This need, which is an essential part of man, has been explained with subtlety and extreme profundity in the philosophy of the creation of man.

The man who has had everything, who is satisfied and who has felt no need or suffering and who has had only pleasure and blessings within his reach, was told not to eat the forbidden fruit. But he was deceived by the devil and ate it. He reflected for the first time. It is all very clear what that tree was and the effort of Islamic and Jewish interpreters to verify whether it was an apple tree or a sheaf of wheat or something else is all in vain.

It is clear that after they ate the fruit, as the Qoran says, God came to see them. He called them, but they did not come. They said they were ashamed of their nude bodies. God realized that they had eaten the fruit of that tree. It means that they had not previously been aware of their nudity, indecency, ugliness and shamelessness. This was why they were happy. Because of this, they were in paradise. It has been clearly and directly stated in the Qoran and the Old Testament that this was the fruit of perception and consciousness. The Qoran explicitly refers to it. It is clear from the text that as soon as man swallowed this forbidden fruit, the sight of paradise becomes an earthly world of pains, smaller than the needs of human beings. This is the meaning of fall and descent.

The Garden of Eden is on earth and it is this earth. We can see now as always that the more human beings eat of that fruit (consciousness the more they sense that their life upon the earth is constricted. They suffer more in sensing the inadequa- cies of others The less they eat, the more peace they have ant the more pleasure they experience. Their needs are immediately met by winning a lottery ticket.

This is why they say that in paradise, by just saying a prayer, they will have everything they want. can there be any thing simpler than this? And is there anything more true than this?

But why is this fruit, which has been eaten more than once by man and is continuously being eaten, forbidden? Because it makes the human being fall from that comfort, satisfaction, ease and pleasure and begin to feel things lacking in the world. The walls of unaware- ness close in on him, narrow the passage to his soul and cause him pain. He is always moving, searching, struggling, working and wanting. He will not be satisfied. Whoever eats from the fruit and attains another stage of consciousness, feels more need and this is what to rebel means.

Who is the one to rebel? The one who is conscious. Rebel against the will of God? What is the will of God ? The will of God is the law which exists in history. The will of God is the law which is inherent in nature. The will of God is the tribal laws and the laws of human societies. It is the law that exists in the physiology of my organism which makes me be part of mankind, a living being in this world.

Hence, the will of God which tells us not to eat from that fruit, is the four bounds, the four forces, the four chains that want to keep us in this atmosphere. When one reaches the state of perception and consciousness, one is freed from the determinations of nature, history, society and the self.

This is what Hegel calls absolute will, free from primordial nature, the primordial state of being, and this very term of Hegel's is what our mysticism is all about. It is with the same words of Hegel that our religion says that we will return to God. It is this very term which in our religion says, 'I created man in the image of Myself' and 'I made him successor upon the earth.' This means that the human being, in his struggle, becomes free from the bonds of nature and the laws that nature has used to build him. But because nature builds him, it rightfully intrudes. In this latter state, the human being is only an animal or a plant. He frees himself from the prison of history, for as historians say, each person is the result of his own history.

He is freed from prison, laws and social traditions. All human beings are products of their social environment, social laws and relations save those who reach absolute consciousness and are freed from their material and worldly prison. That is, they are freed from their paradise. This freed human being, to the extent that he has freed himself, reaches a state of consciousness and knowledge. We see that it is through this technique that we continue to free ourselves from social laws and thereby dominate society.

The human being of today, changes and builds his society, whereas human beings of the past were built as their tribe or society demanded. No one who is part of a tribe has ever reached the state of consciousness to be able to change his social traditions or change his religion or change his social relations and his life. He does not feel, for there is no 'I' for him. There is no free and liberated human being. The human being who is his own prisoner means that all the drives, attractions and tendencies which nature created in him to enable him to continue living, have bound his will in the trap of these physical demands. He pushes all of these away and then that human being reaches that absolute consciousness, the will to choose, and comes closer to God. He comes closer to the image of God in which he was created.

It is the human being who attains such a level of consciousness and feels liberated and separated who becomes lonely. It is this lonely one who sees the world to be too small. It is this lonely one that feels the anguish, it is the needs of this human being which are not satisfied by the earthly benefits and blessings of nature.

The human being never approaches colorlessness and should not wish to do so. Colorlessness means death. It means becoming a vegetable. The human being should wish to replace inferior needs with superior ones and hope to feel greater and higher pains. Who is the one who has more agitation and thirst? Not the one who is more prosperous or the one less so. This is not the question. It is the one whose needs are more and superior. It is this human being who is more anxious and under more stress.