John 5:2 Meaning Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate

Jerusalem is consciousness itself, the whole of your awareness, and the sheep market beside the pool is the ordinary traffic of the mind, thoughts driven in and out all day like animals through a gate. The five porches are the five senses, the five openings through which the outer world keeps reporting what is and is not so. They cannot enter the water.

The pool is imagination, and its name Bethesda means the house of mercy, so the water is where mercy waits, below the noise and below the reports of the senses. A person enters that water only by growing still, stepping in past the traffic of the mind and past what the eyes and ears insist upon. What heals is reached there, in the quiet imagining under everything the senses say, and not in the crowded porches where they keep watch.