Genesis 9:13 · World English Bible
Genesis 9:13 Meaning I Set My Rainbow in the Cloud
I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be a sign of a covenant between me and the earth.
What does Genesis 9:13 mean?
The bow set in the cloud is the band of colors the one white light breaks into as it descends into denser matter. Spirit is pure and undivided at its source; passing into the mist of the lower nature it fans out into the spectrum, and that spread of color is the sign that the high and the low are bound together.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Genesis 9:13 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The bow set in the cloud is the band of colors the one white light breaks into as it descends into denser matter. Spirit is pure and undivided at its source; passing into the mist of the lower nature it fans out into the spectrum, and that spread of color is the sign that the high and the low are bound together. The cloud is the watery, half-formed state of the flesh where the light meets resistance and refracts.
The covenant is the standing link between the undivided source and the body of earth it fills. What appears as a promise about weather is the built-in tie between the single light above and the many-colored life it takes on below.
Bow: the spectrum the one white light breaks into as spirit descends into matter Cloud: the watery, half-formed state of the lower nature where the light meets resistance and refracts Earth: the physical body, the ground of matter the higher light is bound to
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Live Genesis 9:13 today
- Look at one ordinary thing today, the light on a wall, the color of your tea, your own hand, and let it be beautiful for ten seconds without photographing it or saying anything about it. That is the whole practice.
- With someone who is nothing like you, a relative with other politics, a coworker you find difficult, try holding the thought that they are a different color of the same light. You do not have to say it, just let it change how you listen.
- On a gray, foggy, stuck kind of day, when nothing feels clear, remember that a rainbow only ever shows up in the mist. Clear skies do not make one. The murk is where the color comes through.
Where am I treating the mess and the mixture in my life as a problem, when it might be the only place the color can show?
The same truth in other traditions
Hinduism · Upanishads
The teaching says the one self appears as the many, the way one fire throws countless sparks. The variety is not a fall from the source, it is the source showing itself.
Sufism · Ibn Arabi
He described creation as a mirror in which the single light sees its own face in endless forms. Every color is the one light meeting a surface.
Taoism · Tao Te Ching 42
The one gives rise to the two, and the two to the ten thousand things. The many are never cut off from the one that spread into them.
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