Exodus 2:11 Meaning In Those Days

The grown Moses going out to his brethren is the awakened mind turning to look on what shares its own origin, the parts of a person born of the same seed within. The burdens he sees are the weight the lower mind lays on the higher, and the Egyptian smiting a Hebrew is exactly that: the carnal Egyptian nature, the lower mind, striking the spiritual one. To spy this is to become aware of the violence a person's own lower thinking does to the higher within. The kinship is the point, for the one struck is a brother, of the same inner house.

What a person watches here is the lower mind beating down the higher inside the one body, and the awakened self at last seeing that this attacker and this victim are both its own.

Moses: the awakened mind grown to full awareness Egyptian: the carnal lower mind that strikes Hebrew: the spiritual nature within, struck by the lower mind Brethren: the inner parts born of the same christ seed, of one house

Moses goes out to his brethren and looks on their burdens. He does not have to. He was drawn from the water and raised in the palace, and the whole architecture of his comfort depended on not seeing. Every incentive tells him to keep his eyes on the smooth marble in front of him. To turn instead and look at the affliction of his own people is the first dangerous act of his life.

But watch what looking does to a man not yet ready to carry it. He sees the Egyptian striking the Hebrew, and his sympathy detonates into violence. The one lifted up by circumstance, who has not disciplined the force inside him, tips over into the tyranny of excess. Attention to suffering is where responsibility begins. Rage in service of the oppressed is still rage, and it will bury the very cause it meant to defend.