[ 14 ] The last to speak were the people on the east side. They said, “We
agree with what our friends have said. We humans learn from and through
others, not from ourselves. Therefore we need to recognize and acknowl-
edge that everything we know, understand, and have wisdom about comes
from God. There is no other way for us to be born or generated by God
and become an image and a likeness of him. An image of God is what we
become by acknowledging and believing that all the goodness of love
and goodwill and all the truth of wisdom and faith that we have
received and are still receiving come from God, and none comes from
ourselves. A likeness of God is what we are as a result of experiencing
these things in ourselves as if they were our own. We experience them in
this way because rather than being born with knowledge, we acquire it
as we go along. Our acquiring of knowledge seems to us to be some-
thing we do ourselves. God grants us this experience so that we may be
human rather than animal. Our seeming autonomy in intending, think-
ing, loving, knowing, understanding, and becoming wise allows us to
acquire knowledge, elevate it to an understanding, and turn it into wis-
dom as we put it to use. This is how God unites us to himself, and how
we unite ourselves to God. None of this could take place unless God
had provided for us to be born in total ignorance.”
[ 15 ] After this statement the whole group wanted to form a conclu-
sion from their discussion. Their conclusion was, “We are born without
any knowledge so that we can come into all knowledge, make progress in
understanding, and move onward into wisdom. We are born without
any love so that by intelligently applying what we learn we can come into
all love, can come to love God through loving our neighbor, and can
thereby develop a partnership with God that makes us truly human and
allows us to live forever.”
[ 16 ] Then the participants picked up the document and read the
third topic for discussion: “What does the tree of life mean, what does
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil mean, and what does eating
from them mean?”
They all asked the group on the east side to unravel this mystery,
“since,” they said, “it is a matter of deeper understanding and you who
are from the east have a blazing light, meaning that you have a wisdom
that comes from love. This kind of wisdom is in fact what the garden of
Eden means, where the two trees were situated.”
The people on the east side replied, “We will give an answer, yet
because human beings receive everything from God and nothing from
singke
(singke)
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