Eve, the Apple of Temptation and the Bhagavad Gita

With Eve and the Apple of Temptation, once the fruit was tasted, this began man's downfall from God. 

So, how do we, as modern men, interpret this?

 This phenomenon is also described in the Bhagavad Gita:
"The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born of contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world."

Therefore, the Apple of Temptation was the passion of lust that brought about man's downfall.  However, God was kind and offered the ability to continue to attain God through that same passion.  

This can be done by turning that passion of lust instead into a yearning and love for God.  This transformation thus becomes a divine quality and attribute rather than a sinful quality.  The lust of passion is by far one of the strongest human emotions that can be experienced.  When this is turned towards God, the human being has a strong desire to learn and know God.  That yearning can subsequently be transformed into a form of ecstasy.  Since the soul, mind and body are one in this state of ecstasy, the feeling resembles that of intense arousal as one may experience during sexual intercourse.

In fact, the mutual attraction that a man and woman feel towards each other in the emotion and passion of lust is simply a misdirected emotional love and yearning for God.  Through the entanglement of Maya, a man and woman's vision is clouded into believing that this emotion is tied to this Earth.  Through this delusion, the passion of lust becomes an act simply to experience pleasure while remaining bound to the material things on this Earth.  Once a human understand the true nature of this emotion and passion, it can be used as a stepping stone to achieve the ecstasy associated with knowing God.

This concept can also be translated and leveraged to apply to a marital relationship.  The husband and wife must look for the divinity within each other and apply that jointly as a yearning towards God.  Once that Godliness is recognized in one's own partner, the sexual experience thus becomes removed from the sinful passion of lust and instead becomes divine.  The sexual experience thus becomes much more enhanced through this mutual understanding and love of God.  By understanding the divinity within each other, each partner can become a servant of the Lord.  This thereby means that each partner in the relationship participates in an effort to make the other partner happy.  Through this mutual love and understanding, both partners can experience intense pleasure since the relationship is no longer about satisfying one's own needs, but rather satisfying the needs of another.  This ultimately makes the entire sexual experience divine and incapable of incurring sin.

Through this knowledge and transformation of lust into a passion towards God, one can come to once again know the divine ecstasy of Heaven while still remaining on this Earth.

Jesus Christ and the Bhagavad Gita

Jesus Christ was also a follower of the principles and tenets of the Bhavagad Gita:

1.  Jesus Christ describes himself as the "Son of God".  All men and women of the world are children of God and therefore have the presence of divinity within them as is described in the Bhagavad Gita.
2. Jesus Christ also occasionally describes himself as God or one with God.  This describes the loss of distinction between the Self and the non-Self.  When you are working in the service of the Lord, one occasionally loses one's own identity and merges with the Supreme Self.  At this point in time, there is no longer any concept of "I".  The devotee and the Lord are one and act as one.
3. Jesus Christ often recognized that he was not God and simply stated that he was the servant of the Lord.  This means that Jesus Christ was not an Avatar of God in the Vedantic sense as Rama and Krishna were.  The Lord taking the form of man in the Vedantic sense retains all of his perfections and omniscience, thereby remaining the Supreme Personality of Godhead.  However, an avatar of the Lord outside of the Vedantic avatars is a man of normal birth that has been given divine commission from God.  With this divine commission from God, he may be able to complete amazing feats of work, however, he still remains limited by his human faculties.  He is neither able to predict or know all as is the case with the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
4. Jesus Christ recognized the illusion of Maya in this world that so entangles men and women and binds them to this Earth.  Since Karma requires that each man and woman pay for the sins that they have accumulated in prior births, there is no way to remove that entanglement or delusion from the eyes of those who have not achieved a propensity, desire or yearning for God.  The only way that these souls so entangled in Maya and bound to this Earth can achieve liberation is directly through interaction with the Lord or the Supreme Personality of Godhead.  Any amount of effort on the part of man will never be able to free these souls from their bondage.  Each man and woman on this Earth, while working in the service of the God, ultimately only works for their own liberation and salvation.  Jesus Christ, recognizing these tenets, knew that the only ways for these other souls to achieve liberation and salvation would be to sacrifice his own soul's liberation in exchange.  Therefore, Jesus Christ would continue to be bound to the Karmic cycle of human birth and death in order to continue serving the Lord throughout the centuries.  He would accept all the pain and suffering that is associated with human birth and death so that he could continually serve the Lord through all his various lifetimes.
5. Jesus Christ endured immense pain and suffering as a man in exchange for relieving the pain and suffering of other men and women.  Since he loved humanity, he accepted the pain and suffering of humanity as his own so that they could remain happy and free from sorrow.  By recognizing the divinity within each and every human being, he accepted this pain and suffering willingly.  He would then offer the pain and suffering of his devotees to the Lord, and request that they be relieved of their own pain.  Whenever he personally experienced pain and suffering, he knew of his disciples/devotees pain and suffering.  The Lord takes away all pain and sorrow as long as that it is offered to him in loving devotion.
6. Jesus Christ mentioned that humans can only "achieve salvation through Me".  That is not to say that Jesus Christ was the Supreme Personality of Godhead.  Rather, Jesus Christ was a servant of the Lord and was a man.  Since men and women can never achieve perfection, they cannot directly emulate the Vedantic avatars of God.  Instead, they must emulate a man who has realized God.  Therefore, by imitating the life of Christ, one can come to realize God and achieve liberation and salvation.