Luke 13:4 Meaning Or Those Eighteen

A second instance is offered, and this time no human hand was involved; a tower simply fell. Here the mind's habit is laid bare even more plainly, for it will read even an accident as a verdict, insisting that those crushed must have been guiltier than the city that stood. This is the ego's determination to see a moral order in misfortune, to make every collapse a sentence handed down, so that suffering can be believed just and the fearful self can imagine itself spared by its own merit.

But a falling tower proves nothing about the worth of those beneath it. The mind that reads condemnation into the rubble is not perceiving a truth about the dead; it is displaying its own compulsion to find someone guilty.

Tower in Siloam: the sudden calamity the mind strains to read as punishment, the fall it insists must be a verdict on the fallen Jerusalem: the whole company of minds that stood untouched, held up as the innocent against whom the crushed are wrongly judged

Jerusalem is the higher consciousness, the pia mater, the mother-center of the brain, and to dwell in Jerusalem is to live in that raised awareness. The question rejects the crude arithmetic that counts the fallen as worse sinners than the rest, the same arithmetic prophecy writers use when they twist a collapse into a sign and a reason for war. A calamity is not a ledger of guilt.

Siloam is the pool of peace reached in meditation, the still water where a person is sent to wash and see. The number 18 is the number of life, and reduced it becomes 9, the mind. So even a falling tower and a death are set against life and against the seat of higher awareness, not against a scoreboard of who deserved to be struck.

Jerusalem: the higher consciousness, the pia mater, the mother-center of the brain Siloam: the pool of peace reached in meditation Tower: a raised structure of thought that stands and can fall within a person 18: the number of life, which reduces to 9, the mind