The Parting of the Red Sea

In the last post, I briefly discussed the inner meaning of the plagues in Exodus. I told my friend Paul I'd say a bit more about that this morning. 

What I have in mind is the famous passage about the parting of the Red Sea.

For many years, scientists have attempted to come up with literal explanations of how this could have happened. It’s a big stretch; the body of water is huge, and the physical forces that need to be invoked to part it are commensurately enormous. Placing an army and a fleeing populace in the middle of such a cataclysm without doing permanent damage to them is a neat trick. 

The bottom line? It didn’t happen as an actual event. It’s an allegory.

It hardly takes a psychologist to see that Pharaoh represents the inner tyrant we all carry in us; the outer part of ourselves and its ego, which reigns supreme and musters a powerful army of rationalizations to enforce its opinions, impulses, and desires. This creates an entire kingdom of outwardness, the part of ourselves that faces the world and wants to rule it. In a reflexive paradox, the ego is blind to the fact that in wanting to rule the outer world, the inner world becomes collateral damage. We begin by thinking we can control others and the events surrounding us; but it always ends with us exercising tyranny over every part of ourselves that tries to remind us this is not only impossible, but wrong. 

We don’t know how to rule the inward kingdom within us wisely; how much more certain can it be that we can’t rule any outward kingdom wisely either? 

Good question. Ibn Arabi took it on in his little-known but extraordinary masterpiece (one of many from this medieval Sufi master-of-masters) The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom. Get a copy and read it. Expensive- but you won't regret it.

The tyrant in us pursues the inner parts that wish for  freedom, that experience nothing but fear and loathing under the rule of the ego. In the story, Pharaoh has a heart, but it is hardened, not once, but repeatedly. This means we build barriers within ourselves that refuse to acknowledge a loving attitude. We have the potential for it; but we keep failing to achieve it because we reject the good counsel of our spiritual parts. “Be kind and gentle,” they say; “be loving. Don’t try to control everything.” This counsel runs up against a hardened wall, those evil ministers and counsellors inside of us; and spiritual and psychological damage take place (the plagues.) The ministers are built of rationalizations and earthly desires, especially our wish to control by any means necessary.

All of this culminates in the parable of the flight from Egypt into the wilderness, which is a journey from the known — from civilization and all that it stands for — into the unknown, a place that is wild and by definition represents a piece of psychological and spiritual territory where instead of everything being controlled, nothing is controlled. While traditionally, wilderness and wild animals often represent lack of order and consequent danger, in this case, the wilderness represents freedom: an opportunity to live not under the tyranny of ego, but in an unknown place. 

In that place, nourishment comes from unexpected sources, given by the spiritual (manna from heaven) and water springs counterintuitively from rocks. There is nourishment everywhere in life, says the parable, even in places where it looks like there can’t be any. The world is rich in food, not poor; and if one trusts in God, says the parable, one will be fed. What we see as a desert is a place of spiritual abundance. A place of trial, yes; but also a place of sustenance and support. As all that the Israelites had is shorn away in its daunting austerity, a new truth is discovered. In the Abrahamic religions, the desert goes on continuing to convey this powerful symbolic value of transformation through suffering and trial for millennia, through the New Testament, and into monastic practice around the world.

But back to the parting of the sea. The water in the sea represents the truth of ordinary life; this is one level of its meaning. It also represents the unconscious, that part of ourselves that still preserves our spiritual life and protects it from the depredations of our ordinary literal psychology and the tyranny it inflicts on us. It's as though it were a veil drawn between what is known (Egypt, and the tyranny of the Pharaoh) and the unknown — the wilderness, that place where nothing is certain and animals (representing various parts of the psyche) run free. Animals, of course, have a much more complex set of symbolic values in the Bible, but no time for that here, except to mention that the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, especially the Garden of Earthly Delights, explore that in great detail — the whole painting is a visual representation of biblical parables of various kinds, which Swedenborg called correspondences: illustrations of heaven by analogy.

The armies of ego can’t cross the water. It parts: it has a natural tendency to allow the spiritual to pass through it without resistance, but the temporal, the natural, can’t complete the passage. In a supreme irony, Pharaoh and his army are of the water — they are of ordinary life — and instead of being able to pass through the veil that separates it from the wilderness, they are consumed by it: the waters close over them and take them back into the truth of ordinary life. In the literal sense, in this parable, Pharaoh and his army die; but that death is merely a return to the ordinary, to the order, the assumption, the predispositions that were already there. Water, ordinary truth, is their natural element; they can't escape it.

In the meantime, Moses and his people, the inspired spiritual portion of our Being, find safe passage. For them, the barrier of the truth of ordinary life is penetrable; and passing through it represents an invitation to discover a new relationship with both the world, each other, and God. Moses and his people literally (in a figurative sense, ha ha ha) go on to build a new world which is filled with miracles, but still ordered under law. This society is ruled not by the Pharaoh, but by Ten Commandments directly from God himself. Higher laws, they are engraved in stone; that is, of the earth and its nature, not of man (again, Pharaoh) and his own ideas. The higher (God's law) is expressed in the lower (stone) which receives it. It forms the character of the lower. 

https://zenyogagurdjieff.blogspot.com/2017/01/on-character.html

Furthermore, that which is built on a foundation of stone is durable; and Christ powerfully revisits this idea in the naming of Peter (Petrus, or stone) upon which the church is built. Peter is thus given an extraordinary authority: he represents law. 

Again, more could be said. Blah blah blah. But I think that’s enough for this morning.

There is a deep sorrow that penetrates the universe. We all have our ordinary sorrow, the sorrow of Pharaoh who fears losing his gold and his concubines and so on, and can’t control those uppity Israelites. But this is not the sorrow of the spirit. 

The sorrow of the soul is made of a finer energy that comes from a higher level; and it does not manifest by default in human consciousness or character. 

The sorrow of the soul is the finest substance penetrating universe; it carries and is by definition too rich a food for any human being to take much of. You can read about this the writings of the religious ecstatics of the middle ages, especially female writers such as Hadewijch and St. Teresa.

Descriptions of annihilation in bliss, which are common to many traditional religions, are all tales brought back from a deep contact with the sorrow of the soul, which produces not just ecstasy, but also agony at the same time. Joy and sorrow are not two different things; they are joined together in the Lord, and dispensed in small measure according only to need; never to desire.

The paradox of this is that the natural part of us, if it ever tastes such a thing, longs for it so powerfully that all else may be forgotten. The danger here is that we cannot take our eyes off the level we are on in the life we have been born into; we have responsibilities and duties in the outward world. That’s why we were put here. There's a point where the inward and the outward forces of the soul need to be balanced and we have to accept the level we are on and do the work that is required in it. 

A wish to be consumed and annihilated by the bliss of the Lord has its worthy aspects; but we were not put here for that, rather, to take in the impressions of Being and of life. Principally, to encounter the deep organic sorrow that penetrates the universe and can flow into the very marrow of our bones to feed the growth of the soul.

 Only by deepening our life and our experience of it can we begin to sense how that sorrow penetrates all of existence.

It's said, in some practices, that to take this in and concentrate its force, to suffer along with God, is the greatest task any human being can aspire to from their inward parts. 

It's furthermore said that the sacrifice Christ made on the cross was meant to represent a willingness to take on that suffering. This is a spiritual and metaphysical suffering which is only roughly approximated by the way that Christ was nailed to the cross and died.

These are spiritual matters; and although Christ represents them physically in the act of his sacrifice, they point towards an inner action of equal magnitude which must remain a mystery until we encounter it through our own sensation of Being.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.