Genesis 34:30 · World English Bible
Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have troubled me, to make me odious to the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites. I am few in number. They will gather themselves together against me and strike me, and I will be destroyed, I and my house.”
These stories are symbolic psychology, not literal history, and here the spirit itself recoils at the cost of the purge it has carried out inside the self. Jacob is the spirit, and his fear of being made to stink among the dwellers of the low lands is the anxiety of the higher self after it has cut down the lower thoughts, feeling exposed and outnumbered among the crowding powers of the ordinary mind.
From the Esoteric reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
ESOTERIC
These stories are symbolic psychology, not literal history, and here the spirit itself recoils at the cost of the purge it has carried out inside the self. Jacob is the spirit, and his fear of being made to stink among the dwellers of the low lands is the anxiety of the higher self after it has cut down the lower thoughts, feeling exposed and outnumbered among the crowding powers of the ordinary mind. The house he fears to lose is the whole self, the temple of the person he dreads may be overrun.
The Canaanites are the dwellers of the low lands, the human mind at its ground level, and the spirit worries that these massed lower forces will gather and destroy it. This is the inner drama of a person who has begun to clear the mind and now feels the remaining lower nature press back, threatening the very self that did the clearing.
Jacob: the spirit within a person House: yourself, the whole temple of the person Canaanites: the dwellers of the low lands, the human mind at its ground level Perizzites: the scattered open-country thoughts of the lower nature that mass against the spirit
Esoteric lens
What am I afraid I will lose if I stay with what I have already chosen?
The Tao warns that what rises high draws the wind. Standing apart brings exposure, so the sage stays low and soft rather than asserting the new ground.
After the Buddha's awakening, Mara returned with armies and doubts. The old mind does not vanish at the moment of clarity, it comes back to test whether the clarity will hold.
Marcus wrote to himself about the dread of other people's opinion, how thin it is, and how a mind that has set its own course should not be governed by the crowd's murmur.
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Esoteric