They came to the place which God had told him of. Abraham built the altar there, and laid the wood in order, bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, on the wood.
Altar: the raised inner center in the body set apart for meeting the divine, where the lower nature is offered up and the higher current received
Esoteric lens · Genesis 33:20
You blind fools! For which is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift?
But Aaron and his sons offered on the altar of burnt offering, and on the altar of incense, for all the work of the most holy place, and to make atonement for Israel, according to all that Moses the servant of God had commanded.
Don’t you know that those who serve around sacred things eat from the things of the temple, and those who wait on the altar have their portion with the altar?
Same symbol, 2 ways of seeing it. Tap one to jump to it.
Here the ego's plan reaches its most exact and terrible order, the wood arranged, the innocent bound, everything made ready for a death that guilt has rehearsed to the last detail. A mind can build a whole structure to hold its beloved down and call the arrangement holy, so completely does fear disguise itself as duty.
And yet all of it is only preparation, not the deed. The altar stands and the son is bound, but the moment of truth has not come, and what was so carefully arranged for death is about to be shown that death was never real.
The altar is the head, the skull that holds the Christ force within a person, and it is the altar that makes any offering holy, never the offering by itself. To fix on the gift while ignoring the altar is the blindness of those who tend the outer act and forget the inner center that gives it worth.
Whatever a person brings, the devotion, the effort, the surrender of the animal nature, takes on value only from the Christ force enthroned in the head that receives it. The gift laid on that inner altar is consecrated by the place it rests, not by its own size. What sanctifies the offering is the higher center within the head, and so the center is greater than anything set upon it.
One line per lens.
ALTAR s. worship of the Lord out of love. A. R. 392, 395, 648. A. rep. divine good, horns of the a. divine truths. That horns should be cut out of the a., shows that there is no other truth but what is grounded in good. A. C. 2832. A. of burnt offerings, s. worship from celestial love, and the golden a. of incense. worship from spiritual love. A. R. 395.
In Lensightful, names, numbers and symbols light up in the text. Tap one to see what it means in each tradition you choose.
Get Lensightful on the App Store