Exodus 3:1 Meaning Now Moses Was Keeping the Flock

Moses is not a man but an unfolding plan within a person, the pull that leads awareness up and out of its ordinary grazing. The flock he tends is the run of daily thoughts. Leading them to the backside of the desert is turning attention away from the familiar and worn, toward the far edge of the mind where something higher waits. The mountain of God is the raised state of consciousness a person reaches when he climbs above the level of mere fact.

At that height the awareness of being, the plain sense of I am, is met as the ground of everything. Horeb is where a person leaves the low pasture of what merely is and stands in what he chooses to be. The climb is inward. The God found on the summit is a person's own I am, unconditioned and free to declare itself anew.

Consciousness drawn out of the lower nature tends the faculties before the higher call arrives, keeping the flock of its own mental energies under an older, natural wisdom that has cared for the powers through a long season of strife and judgment. That earlier wisdom is enough until something greater stirs.

Leading the flock to the backside of the desert is turning the whole herd of thoughts away from the outer world into the far, hidden inner ground where the lower self is stripped bare. Only there, in that emptied place, does the ascent begin and the mountain of God is reached: the raised, elevated state of awareness where the deeper voice finally speaks.

Moses: consciousness drawn out of the lower nature to lead the faculties upward Flock: the thoughts and mental energies a person tends and leads Jethro, priest of Midian: an older, natural wisdom that tends the powers through a season of strife before the higher call Backside of the desert: the far, hidden inner ground reached by turning from the outer world, where the lower self is stripped away Mountain of God, Horeb: the raised, elevated state of consciousness where the deeper voice is heard

A man tends another man's animals at the edge of nowhere, and precisely there the ground turns holy. The wilderness is where the call finds him, because the call rarely arrives in the middle of a settled life. Life itself begins to blaze in front of him, demanding an attention he can refuse only at great peril. Something addresses each person like that. The leader is the one who turns toward it rather than away.

Our problems choose us as much as we choose them. Moses did not plan a mountain of God at the backside of the desert. He wandered into it while doing ordinary work faithfully. Meaning tends to hide in that direction, in the thing that catches your notice and will not release you. Follow what commands your awe, tend the flock in front of you, and the burning thing waits to reveal who you are meant to become.