which indeed is smaller than all seeds. But when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.”
Bird: the mind in eager pursuit of desire, moving so fast toward the world that it cannot see the cost
Christian Psychology lens · Proverbs 7:23
He cried with a mighty voice, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and she has become a habitation of demons, a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hateful bird!
All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds.
He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; he also spoke of animals, of birds, of creeping things, and of fish.
Same symbol, 3 ways of seeing it. Tap one to jump to it.
Seed, kingdom, and the man speaking are one meaning in three images. A figure who can be said in something this small is being taken inside the people who hear him, no longer only someone who lived and taught but something that grows in a person and works from within. From outside, that looks like a personality getting larger and an awareness that takes in more than it used to.
Least of all seeds is an honest account of how this teaching began: unnoticed, easy to step over, with nothing in it promising a tree. An early Christian group, the Naassenes, who read scripture as a map of the inner life, called the seed the divine point that widens into God's kingdom. Men who spent their lives over furnaces, hunting the one substance that changes everything, saw their secret matter in that same small beginning, the tiny dose with power to cure completely, and read it as the wonder hidden in the whole world rather than as heaven.
An attack thought sent out without a real cause finds no place to land in a mind that has claimed its innocence. Guilt is what gives a curse its landing ground, and where the mind refuses to receive the accusation as true, the words pass over like a bird that never alights, unable to make a home in what will not house them.
The world is full of judgments hurled from fear, but none of them can touch a mind that knows it has done nothing to deserve them. The curse hangs on the belief that it is earned. Withdraw that belief, and it simply keeps flying, having nowhere in the mind to come down.
Babylon is the confused lower mind of a person, the inner city of mixed and warring thoughts built up over a lifetime of living in the senses, and its fall is the collapse of that whole disordered mental world when the higher light rises. Its very name carries the confusion of tongues, the scattered voices that never agree within a divided man.
The devils and foul spirits are the base impulses and the birds are the flighty restless thoughts that nest and circle in an unclean mind. When the sensual lower nature finally breaks down, all the dark impulses and scattered thoughts it once housed are exposed as the tenants they always were.
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