Jonah 4:11 · World English Bible
Shouldn’t I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can’t discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much livestock?
Mercy falls upon the crowded inner city because the countless thoughts massed there live in confusion, unable to tell the right hand from the left, spirit from flesh, the true from the reflex. Ur means light; Nineveh under its root carries the sense of continual growth and multiplication, the mind that keeps breeding habit without judgment.
From the Esoteric reading below.
The same verse, read by 2 traditions.
ESOTERIC
Mercy falls upon the crowded inner city because the countless thoughts massed there live in confusion, unable to tell the right hand from the left, spirit from flesh, the true from the reflex. Ur means light; Nineveh under its root carries the sense of continual growth and multiplication, the mind that keeps breeding habit without judgment. What runs the human system is not condemnation of that swarm but a patience that will not destroy it while it stays blind.
The more than 120,000 persons are the ungoverned faculties, and the cattle beneath them are the appetites and animal drives that also belong to the field of a person. Nothing in the body is thrown away; the whole population is spared and given time to wake.
Nineveh: the crowded inner city of thoughts and habits multiplied without judgment across a lifetime Sixscore thousand persons: the countless ungoverned faculties of the mind, unable to tell spirit from flesh, right hand from left Cattle: the animal appetites and bodily drives grazing beneath conscious thought, kept alive and not discarded
SELF-HELP
Sometimes the most loving thing anyone can do is refuse to hand a person the conditions they are demanding.
Granting the demand would have ended the misery in a second, and God declines; a man given the world he insists on keeps the standard that made him wretched and needs the world rearranged again next week. God goes after the measure by which the city had already been sentenced, setting a hundred twenty thousand who know nothing, and their cattle, on the scale.
The rage is exactly the size of the gap between what justice was believed to require and what mercy delivered, which means it can be closed without one Ninevite dying. Whoever will not let a standard be touched meets a generous world as a run of personal insults, and ends up preferring death to a good day that happened to somebody else.
Esoteric lens
Which part of myself have I already written off, that might only be waiting to learn?
The sage does not cut away what seems useless. All the ten thousand things are held and fed, the confused along with the clear, because nothing in the whole is foreign to it.
Goodwill is extended to every being without sorting them into worthy and unworthy. The untrained, reactive mind is treated as the one most in need of kindness, not the one most deserving of being cut off.
People act badly out of ignorance of what is good, not out of a wish to be bad. Seeing that, the right response is patience with them, and the same patience is owed to the untaught parts of yourself.
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Esoteric
Self-Help