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1 Kings 11:40 · World English Bible

1 Kings 11:40 Meaning Therefore Solomon Sought to Kill Jeroboam

Therefore Solomon sought to kill Jeroboam; but Jeroboam arose, and fled into Egypt, to Shishak king of Egypt, and was in Egypt until the death of Solomon.

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What does 1 Kings 11:40 mean?

Peace already won inside a person turns on itself here. The state of stillness reached through meditation moves to destroy the increase of the flesh, but the fleshly power does not die; it escapes down into the lower mind and waits there, sheltered, until the peace itself is spent.

From the Esoteric reading below.

1 Kings 11:40 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

ESOTERIC

Esoteric

Peace already won inside a person turns on itself here. The state of stillness reached through meditation moves to destroy the increase of the flesh, but the fleshly power does not die; it escapes down into the lower mind and waits there, sheltered, until the peace itself is spent. This is how gains from meditation are lost. The calm you build does not simply erase the appetites; they retreat below and outlast the quiet if it is not renewed.

So the 2 live on the same ground and trade places. When stillness fades, the increase of the flesh comes back up out of the lower mind with all its old strength, and the ground once ruled by peace is ruled again by craving.

Jeroboam: the increase of the flesh, the growing power of appetite and craving in a person Egypt: the lower mind, the dark region below where fleshly power hides and waits out the season of stillness

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Esoteric lens

Live 1 Kings 11:40 today

  1. You had a good stretch, maybe a week of sleeping well and staying off your phone at night, and then it quietly unravelled. Do not treat that as failure. Start again tonight, same small thing, no speech about it.
  2. When a friend says they are back to an old habit they thought they had beaten, skip the surprise. Tell them it was never gone, only waiting, and that starting again is the whole practice, not a restart penalty.
  3. Under real pressure, a hard deadline or a bad week, the old pull comes back with full strength. Expect it before it arrives, and decide now what the one thing is that you will keep doing anyway, however badly.

Which quiet thing in you is waiting out this calm stretch, ready to come back the moment you stop paying attention?

The same truth in other traditions

Buddhism · Dhammapada

Craving is cut back but not cut out; like a tree felled at the trunk with roots untouched, it grows again and again. Only the root ending ends it.

Zen · Dogen

Sitting is not a store of calm you fill once and spend later. It is something returned to daily, because the mind that wandered off will wander off again.

Sufism · al-Ghazali

He warned that the appetites are not killed by a season of discipline, only driven into hiding; they wait quietly for the first slackening of attention.

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