1 Samuel 19:1 · World English Bible
1 Samuel 19:1 Meaning Saul Spoke to Jonathan His Son
Saul spoke to Jonathan his son, and to all his servants, that they should kill David. But Jonathan, Saul’s son, greatly delighted in David.
What does 1 Samuel 19:1 mean?
Saul is the stuck religious mind, the good-intentioned old way of thinking that means well and yet, feeling the new life rising, orders it killed. David is the beloved, the true self, the part of the personality that lives surrounded by inner war and keeps being hunted for it.
From the Esoteric reading below.
1 Samuel 19:1 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
Saul is the stuck religious mind, the good-intentioned old way of thinking that means well and yet, feeling the new life rising, orders it killed. David is the beloved, the true self, the part of the personality that lives surrounded by inner war and keeps being hunted for it. The command to put him to death is the entrenched lower mind trying to snuff out the tender thing waking inside a person, because the awakening threatens the rule it has always held.
The servants sent to do the killing are the carnal thoughts, the errand-runners of that fixed mind. Yet the beloved is not so easily ended, and the love binding Jonathan to David, soul knit to soul, is the natural bond of one life drawn to another, refusing the order to destroy.
David: the beloved, the true self within, the part of the personality that lives surrounded by inner war Saul: the stuck religious mind, the well-meaning old way of thinking that turns to kill the new life it feels rising Servants: the carnal thoughts, the errand-runners the lower mind sends to do its violence
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Live 1 Samuel 19:1 today
- Catch the voice that says you are being ridiculous when something new stirs in you, a different kind of work, a softer way of speaking, and let the stirring stay alive for one more day before judging it.
- When someone you know well shows you a side of them you did not expect, resist the sentence that puts them back in their old box. Ask them about it instead.
- In a meeting where a fresh idea gets killed fast, say one sentence that keeps it breathing. You are not endorsing it, you are refusing to let reflex do the deciding.
What in you have you been quietly trying to talk out of existence?
The same truth in other traditions
Zen · Shunryu Suzuki
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few. The old practiced way of knowing is exactly what shuts out the new thing.
Tao Te Ching 48
In learning you add something every day, in the way you let something go every day. Growth often means dropping what you were sure of.
Hasidic teaching
There is nothing so whole as a broken heart. The careful rule-keeping self guards hard against being opened, which is the one thing it needs.
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