Genesis 19:17 · World English Bible
It came to pass, when they had taken them out, that he said, “Escape for your life! Don’t look behind you, and don’t stay anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountains, lest you be consumed!”
Two who could see clearly took them by the hand and set them outside the burning city. The one word pressed on them was to keep their eyes forward and not turn back.
From the Ego v. Being reading below.
The same verse, read by 3 traditions.
EGO & BEING
Two who could see clearly took them by the hand and set them outside the burning city. The one word pressed on them was to keep their eyes forward and not turn back. A life was collapsing, and the pull to turn and hold what was dissolving would have fixed them inside the ruin.
Looking back is the mind refusing to let a finished thing be finished. The plain below is everything falling apart. The mountain is higher ground, the stillness above the smoke. A person who keeps moving toward it, without turning to grieve the flames, walks out alive.
ESOTERIC
The whole urgency here is a movement upward through the body, off the flat ground of appetite toward the raised place in the skull where awareness rises above the senses. To look behind is to keep the attention fixed on the burning cities of the lower nature, and to stay clenched there is to be dissolved back into them. The plain lies level with the flesh, where nothing lifts.
What happens in a person is a turning of the inner gaze forward and up, away from the smoking wreckage of old cravings toward the summit where thought becomes light. Attention held on the ruined lower life is ruined with it; attention drawn to the crown survives.
Mountain: the crown of the head, the high inner place where consciousness rises out of the reach of the senses Plain: the flat ground of the flesh and its appetites, level ground where awareness never lifts
SELF-HELP
A rescue only finishes when a person stops treating the place they were pulled out of as an option.
The eyes set the state. Turn them back toward what is burning and longing floods the body, longing slows the legs, and slowness on that plain is a sentence. So three exits get closed at once rather than one: the backward look, the halt short of the hills, the quiet plan to settle at the edge of the old country.
Being taken out by the hand is not the same as leaving. Rescue handed to a person still has to be finished on their own feet, and finishing it means surrendering the compromise version of escape, the one that stays within sight of what it fled.
Ego v. Being lens
What are you still turning back toward that has already finished with you?
A teacher is asked about the way and answers, let go. Asked again, let go of that too. What you carry out of the fire is what keeps you in it.
Clinging to what is passing away is the root of suffering. The pain is not in the change, it is in the grip.
He wrote that the one who grieves what is lost loses the present as well. Looking backward costs you the only life you actually have.
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Ego v. Being
Esoteric
Self-Help