2. The Tree of Life II

What does it really mean: Not eat of the Tree of Life? You will perhaps no longer find incomprehensible what I have to say concerning these words if you bring before your soul in a reasoned way the meaning of ‘to have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ Each can say to himself: If what we call the Luciferic temptation had not taken place, man would obviously be in a different position in this earthly life; for as he is now, the effect of the Luciferic temptation is mingled in his earthly life. This means: in our earthly life we attain to a certain kind of knowledge, a certain way of confronting things with our intellect and reason in order to get certain knowledge of the things of the world. Nevertheless it is quite clear that we should have had a different knowledge of things if the Luciferic temptation had not come to pass. This is exactly what the two-fold utterance implies. It means that the knowledge we obtain of the world and its phenomena is a knowledge that has entered through the Luciferic influence, a knowledge that represents the course of evolution which has entered through the partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. All our knowledge is the sort—such as it has become—that had to enter as a result of the tasting of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Had man not partaken of this Tree, then a different knowledge must needs have been there from that which exists under the present ‘normal’ circumstances, where Lucifer works within our existence.