Revelation 22:18 Meaning I Testify to Everyone Who Hears

The book is the pattern of your own unfolding, the prophecy that must be fulfilled in you and not in outer history. To add to it is to condition a clear desire with plans and lesser aims it never needed. The warning is the law described, not a threat from above: whatever a person adds, the same is added back to him. A wish burdened with qualifications returns those very qualifications as the obstacles that trouble a life.

The plagues written in the book are simply the fruit of that meddling, the complications a man breeds when he cannot leave his assumption whole. Imagination gives itself to one felt end. It works undivided and uncompromised. So a person is served by a desire held pure and clean, and hindered exactly to the degree he clutters it. What he adds to the wish, life adds to his trouble.

To testify is to swear from the root of generation, the word bound to the testicle, the organ once laid hold of when an oath was given, so this is a witness made from the deepest creative center of the body. The prophecy is any sacred writing, not a forecast of coming events, and the book is the book of life, the coded record carried in a person's own inner structure. Adding to these things draws the plagues, the physical afflictions that press a person back toward stillness and the inner work.

The warning is that tampering with the sacred pattern already written in the body brings on the very bodily distresses that will finally drive a person to sit quiet and meditate.

Book: the book of life, the coded record within the body. Plagues: physical challenges and afflictions that drive a person toward meditation. Prophecy: any sacred writing, not a prediction of future events.