Amos 5:20 · World English Bible
Amos 5:20 Meaning Won’t the Day of Yahweh Be Darkness
Won’t the day of Yahweh be darkness, and not light? Even very dark, and no brightness in it?
What does Amos 5:20 mean?
The great day longed for, when the divine floods the whole man at last, arrives on the outer, sensing self as pure darkness. What the lower mind takes for the coming of God is felt by it as a blackout, because the current that lights the awakened person blinds the one still ruled by the senses and their appetites.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Amos 5:20 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The great day longed for, when the divine floods the whole man at last, arrives on the outer, sensing self as pure darkness. What the lower mind takes for the coming of God is felt by it as a blackout, because the current that lights the awakened person blinds the one still ruled by the senses and their appetites. To the flesh, the very approach of spirit reads as extinction, not dawn.
There is no brightness in it for that self at all, and none is promised. The animal reactions and the outward-facing mind cannot register the higher light as light; it registers only its own end.
The day of the LORD: the hour the divine current rises fully through a person and overtakes the ordinary waking mind Darkness: the total blackout the sense-bound self undergoes, since it has no faculty that can read the higher light
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Live Amos 5:20 today
- When something true dismantles a story you liked about yourself, stay in the blank for a day before you rebuild. You will want a new story fast, and waiting is the harder and better move.
- If someone close to you is going through the stage where nothing makes sense anymore, do not hand them an explanation. Sit with them in the dark part and keep showing up, which is the only help that works there.
- Under real pressure, stop expecting the clarity to arrive as relief. Sometimes it arrives as everything you counted on going quiet, and you can keep walking anyway.
What if the blank stretch I have been calling failure is the part that is actually working?
The same truth in other traditions
Hinduism · Upanishads
The eye cannot see the one that gives it seeing; the senses have no instrument for what lies behind them, so their report comes back blank.
Taoism · Zhuangzi
The frog in the well has no word for the sea, and when the sea is described to it, it hears only nonsense and dark.
Zen
Before real seeing opens, a person passes through a stretch where every familiar handhold is gone and nothing has replaced it, and that emptiness is not a wrong turn.
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