Genesis 34:4 · World English Bible
Genesis 34:4 Meaning Shechem Spoke to His Father
Shechem spoke to his father, Hamor, saying, “Get me this young lady as a wife.”
What does Genesis 34:4 mean?
Religion tries to seize and possess the inner spiritual virgin by force, claiming the sacred emotion for itself. The demand to be given the damsel to wife is the grasping of the lower nurturing thought, reaching up to its own source to lay hold of the inner feeling and bind it.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Genesis 34:4 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
Religion tries to seize and possess the inner spiritual virgin by force, claiming the sacred emotion for itself. The demand to be given the damsel to wife is the grasping of the lower nurturing thought, reaching up to its own source to lay hold of the inner feeling and bind it. Shechem is the shoulder, the region of physical thought, and his craving to take the emotion in marriage is the flesh moving to own what should have stayed free within the still center.
He speaks to the father, the right hemisphere of the brain, appealing to the higher seat to hand over the emotions as a possession. This is how the outward, forcing mind attempts to capture the sacred inner feeling and make it its own rather than letting it rest in the higher ground.
Shechem: the shoulder, the physical thought that reaches to possess the inner feeling Father: the right hemisphere of the brain, the higher seat appealed to Damsel: the emotions, the sacred inner feeling the lower nature seeks to claim
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Live Genesis 34:4 today
- When a good feeling shows up today, resist the urge to pin it down, photograph it, or make it mean something. Let it be the size it is.
- If you want something from someone you love, affection, reassurance, a certain answer, ask plainly instead of maneuvering for it. Taking it by pressure makes it worthless once you get it.
- Under pressure to perform a feeling you don't have, at a meeting, a dinner, a call, say less rather than faking more. Borrowed warmth is worse than honest quiet.
Is there something tender you've been trying to own instead of simply keeping company with?
The same truth in other traditions
Taoism · Tao Te Ching
Hold a thing too tightly and you lose it. What is alive cannot be owned, only accompanied.
Buddhism
Grasping is the root of suffering, even grasping at good feeling. The moment you clutch it, it turns into something else.
Sufism · Rumi
Love cannot be captured or set to work. Whatever you drag into your own service stops being love.
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