Exodus 21:15 · World English Bible
Exodus 21:15 Meaning Anyone Who Attacks His Father
Anyone who attacks his father or his mother shall be surely put to death.
What does Exodus 21:15 mean?
Father and mother are the 2 roots inside a person: the father the active spirit and the giving mind, the mother the receiving nature and the deep feeling that carries and forms. To strike them is to turn against the very sources from which one's life flows, to attack the generating powers within rather than honor them.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Exodus 21:15 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
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ESOTERIC
Esoteric
Father and mother are the 2 roots inside a person: the father the active spirit and the giving mind, the mother the receiving nature and the deep feeling that carries and forms. To strike them is to turn against the very sources from which one's life flows, to attack the generating powers within rather than honor them. When the lower will rises against its own origin, it severs itself from what feeds it.
Death here is the plain consequence of that severing. A faculty that assaults the springs of its own being cuts the current that sustains it and cannot go on. The one who wars against father and mother in himself, against the spirit above and the soul beneath, ends the flow that kept him alive, and that part of him falls still.
Father: the active spirit and giving mind within, the higher source that begets and directs Mother: the receiving soul and forming feeling within, the deep that carries and nourishes what is conceived
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Live Exodus 21:15 today
- Today, when a thought of yours feels clear and quiet, do not immediately argue it down. Treat your own mind as something worth listening to instead of the thing you are always correcting.
- Call or message someone who gave you something you still live on, a parent, a teacher, an old friend. One sentence of real thanks, nothing elaborate, just naming what came from them.
- When you are stretched thin and the easiest target is yourself, stop the sentence that begins with what is wrong with me. Trying to run on self attack is like driving with the fuel line cut.
What in me am I living on while treating it as an enemy?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching
Everything that grows returns to its root, and the one who cuts the root loses the branch too. Stay near the source and you keep your strength, war against it and you dry up.
Analects of Confucius
Honoring the ones who gave you life is the root from which every other decency grows. Pull up that root and there is nothing left for the rest of your character to stand in.
Bhagavad Gita
The self can be your closest friend or your worst enemy. It is friend to the one who has mastered it and enemy to the one who turns against it.
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