Genesis 18:2 Meaning He Lifted Up His Eyes and Looked

To lift the eyes is to stop looking at the ground of one's own worry and see who is actually standing near. The moment this mind truly looks, it runs, because recognition of love is not slow and reluctant; it is glad. Fear hesitates and calculates, but a mind that sees its true visitor does not weigh whether to approach.

The bowing is not fear before a power that threatens. It is the natural response of a mind that remembers what it is meeting, and greets holiness in another rather than suspicion. What arrives as strangers is welcomed as friends the instant the eyes are raised.

Three men: the appearance of love arriving as if from outside, the holy presence the mind meets in what seems other than itself. Tent door: the open threshold of the mind, the place it either runs to meet love or stays behind.

Abraham is the state in which the promise of a child is made, imagination itself taking on human form, and the three who stand before him are the announcement of that promise arriving from within. To lift up the eyes is to raise attention from the outer scene to the inner visitation. He runs and bows because the whole self yields to what is being disclosed, welcoming a birth that reason would call impossible.

The child promised to Abraham and Sarah against every fact of their age is the wish fulfilled, brought forth beyond what the senses allow. This is how the inner birth announces itself. A person entertains a state assumed to be already so, bows to it as one bows to a guest of higher rank, and by that glad reception the promised thing takes root. The Christ child, the answered desire, is born within when the visitors are met and honored rather than doubted.

3 figures appearing at the opening of the tent are resurrection and rising new life showing themselves at the door of the head. The tent is the human brain, the covering of the skull, and its door is the point in the head where inner vision meets the higher levels of consciousness. The number 3 carries new life, the sun rising again out of its low place, so the 3 standing near are that fresh living force arriving at the threshold of the mind.

Lifting the eyes and bowing to the ground is the personality yielding, the lower self lowering itself so the higher can be received. A person draws near and gives way, and in that bending the new life is welcomed into the head.

Tent: the human brain, the covering of the skull Tent door: the point in the head where inner vision opens onto the higher levels 3 men: resurrection and rising new life, the number 3 as the sun risen again