Joshua 6:1 · World English Bible
Joshua 6:1 Meaning Now Jericho Was Tightly Shut Up Because
Now Jericho was tightly shut up because of the children of Israel. No one went out, and no one came in.
What does Joshua 6:1 mean?
Jericho is the walled city of the old self, the fortified pattern of habit and defense a person builds to keep the flesh secure, and its name carries the moon, the pale borrowed light of the lower mind that shines only by reflection and never from its own source. Sealed tight, nothing passing its gates, it is the sensory self barricaded against the rising forces of spirit, refusing every exit and every entrance because it senses the higher powers massing at its edge.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Joshua 6:1 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
Jericho is the walled city of the old self, the fortified pattern of habit and defense a person builds to keep the flesh secure, and its name carries the moon, the pale borrowed light of the lower mind that shines only by reflection and never from its own source. Sealed tight, nothing passing its gates, it is the sensory self barricaded against the rising forces of spirit, refusing every exit and every entrance because it senses the higher powers massing at its edge.
The children of Israel are the awakened faculties, the parts of a person that strive toward the divine, and their nearness is what shuts the old city down. The walls close not from strength but from fear: the fortified ego has felt the approach of the very awareness that will bring it down, and it locks itself in with the thing it most wants to keep out.
Jericho: the walled city of habit and defense, the moon-lit lower self that shines by borrowed light and bars itself against the spirit Children of Israel: the awakened inner faculties that strive toward the divine and press against the old self's walls
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Live Joshua 6:1 today
- When you feel yourself closing off, phone face down, headphones on, door shut, not out of real tiredness but to avoid being reached, sit with that for a minute before you act on it. Ask what exactly you are keeping out.
- With one person, let in something you usually deflect. When they ask how you are, answer with the true thing instead of the smooth one, and let the conversation go somewhere you did not script.
- In a meeting or a disagreement where you can feel your position hardening, say out loud that you want to hear the other side again. The defensiveness that feels like strength is usually fear that something true is getting close.
What am I guarding so carefully that I have stopped letting anything in or out?
The same truth in other traditions
Zen
The tighter the fist closes around what it holds, the less can be received. A mind shut to protect itself is also shut to everything that could feed it.
Tao Te Ching
What is hard and rigid is near its breaking point; what is soft and yielding survives. The defended wall is already the weaker thing.
Sufism · Rumi
The cure for the pain is in the pain itself, so the seeker is told not to flee it. The self that seals every opening to stay safe seals out its own remedy.
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