When Adam went and took Eve, _after_ the apple, he didn't do any more than he had done many a time before, in act. But in consciousness he did something very different. So did Eve. Each of them kept an eye on what they were doing, they watched what was happening to them. They wanted to KNOW. And that was the birth of sin. Not _doing_ it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, they had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves. And they felt uncomfortable after. They felt self-conscious. So they said, "The _act_ is sin. Let's hide. We've sinned." No wonder the Lord kicked them out of the Garden. Dirty hypocrites. The sin was the self-watching, self-consciousness. The sin, and the doom. Dirty understanding. Nowadays men do hate the idea of dualism. It's no good, dual we are. The Cross. If we accept the symbol, then, virtually, we accept the fact. We are divided against ourselves. For instance, the blood _hates_ being KNOWN by the mind. It feels itself destroyed when it is KNOWN. Hence the profound instinct of privacy. And on the other hand, the mind and the spiritual consciousness of man simply _hates_ the dark potency of blood-acts: hates the genuine dark sensual orgasms, which do, for the time being, actually obliterate the mind and the spiritual consciousness, plunge them in a suffocating flood of darkness. You can't get away from this. Blood-consciousness overwhelms, obliterates, and annuls mind-consciousness. Mind-consciousness extinguishes blood-consciousness, and consumes the blood. We are all of us conscious in both ways. And the two ways are antagonistic in us. They will always remain so. That is our cross. The antagonism is so obvious, and so far-reaching, that it extends to the smallest thing. The cultured, highly-conscious person of to-day _loathes_ any form of physical, "menial" work: such as washing dishes or sweeping a floor or chopping wood. This menial work is an insult to the spirit. "When I see men carrying heavy loads, doing brutal work, it always makes me want to cry," said a beautiful, cultured woman to me. "When you say that, it makes me want to beat you," said I, in reply. "When I see you with your beautiful head pondering heavy thoughts, I just want to hit you. It outrages me." My father hated books, hated the sight of anyone reading or writing. My mother hated the thought that any of her sons should be condemned to manual labour. Her sons must have something higher than that. She won. But she died first. He laughs longest who laughs last. There is a basic hostility in all of us between the physical and the mental, the blood and the spirit. The mind is "ashamed" of the blood. And the blood is destroyed by the mind, actually. Hence pale-faces.