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The Yahweh experience,
as
outcome of true pilgrimage Moses,
the prototype pilgrim
When Moses’ true origin was discovered he lost his (false) identity and his power, and he was driven from Egypt. He entered the desert (phase, i.e. the burning out of the past, i.e. of his falsely acquired identity), eventually finding a ‘safe house’ and where he spent the next few years tending goats and making children, not really a wholly fulfilling function for a once so powerful individual. Moses had a major personal problem. He had become a powerless non-identity (i.e. a non-entity). That problem represented itself to him as an occasional peak of fiery anger (reinterpreted for village consumption as a fiery peak). Eventually he decided to confront his problem and began a (indeed, continued his) pilgrimage up the mountain (i.e. of his unresolved problem). When he got to the top of the mountain, he was confronted by a burning bush, i.e. his unresolved problem. A Voice commanded him to take off his sandals, thereby reducing him to slave (total non-entity) status. In fact, by taking off his sandals and hiding his face (normally the seeker prostrates herself, thereby also hiding her face), Moses gave up (i.e. admitted total failure) and put himself at the mercy of the Voice. The Voice identified itself (i.e. as the G-d of the Israelites, but not of the Gauls, Incas, Ainu (of Hokkaido) or, indeed of the Egyptians), then told him what he needed to do in order to create an identity that would fulfil him and return him to full unit of identity (i.e. to True Self) status.
When he asked the Voice (and which was his own genie, in other words, his ‘return to perfect functioning’, hence to goodness program, and which comes with the equipment of all living creatures at birth), who It (and, by implication, who he, Moses) was, indeed, what It (and he, Moses) was, it replied (with the Tetragrammaton):
“ Y H V H ”, sometimes spoken (but not spoken) out as "Yud He Vav He", and whose userfriendly translation could be ‘I am what (that or who) I am’** or a
zillion other translations-cum-interpretations (see Wikipedia) In fact,
no one knows what YHVH stands for, save that it is a title (i.e. a job or
status description) rather than a (proper) name. Note: at that time the supreme
power (Hebrew: el, or eloah, and whose plural is generally
taken to be elohim, i.e. the powers (the ancient
Israelites had no concept of God, nor indeed of a soul. The notions of God
and soul were Greek inventions and first enter the OT in its Greek
translation, the Septuagint), and which are reputed to have created the world
in Genesis 1) of the Israelites was El Shadai, and which could either mean
‘The Power of the Mountain’ or ‘The Power that destroys’. The term YHVH, now vocalised as Yahweh, was not in fact a name
(no one yet has produced God’s name, though many claim to know it) but a
title, that is to say, a status (or job) description (like ‘|Lord’ or
Excellence’), much as the appellations Chavvah, retained as the name Eve, and
describing her function as ‘the mother of all living’ and Adam, describing
his origin as ‘made of dust or (red) ground’, were not a proper names. The Voice gave Moses the universal (or in principle) solution to his problem (and that of every pilgrim), namely ‘You are … who (meaning what) what you are’, or ‘You are what you make (real) of your self’. Moses then returned to his pilgrimage to his True Self, finally achieving it by leading the Children of Israel out of Egypt. Since archaeologists, both physical and literary, have now revealed that the Children of Israel were never enslaved en masse in Egypt, nor that they helped in the building of the Pyramids, as suggested by Charlton Heston & Co, nor that Moses actually existed but appears to be a composite character, the story of Moses’ turnaround by the Voice is fundamentally an oracle about the fundamental status of a (and THE) True Self, and which provides the pilgrim with a ‘general direction’ map, the particular details to be filled in by the pilgrim. The story of Moses, though made particular with both fictitious and factual data, is a metaphor for pilgrimage as such. It begins with the loss of a false identity and power, thereafter describing the downward (i.e. withdrawal, hence desert phase) path to total giving up (i.e. to shutdown prior to restart). At shutdown, i.e. when the pilgrim sinks/reverts to her lowest operations platform (i.e. to original factory settings prior to identity), the genie (i.e. the human’s basic survival program, elsewhere called God, or the Holy spirit, ins some quarters Christ) is most powerfully activated (hence is ‘heard’, sometimes seen or felt distinctly in the dark emptiness …before creation, that is to say, before the emergence of real identity). It presents (or channels) the basic (hence universal) solution state (later on to be elaborated with local data) to the pilgrim ‘waiting’ at GO, thereby fixing the goal and indicating the means to the recovery of identity and power, i.e. to unit of identity status, thence to the experience of the miracle of the process of creating real identity (i.e. the actual Yahweh (or God) function). Then the pilgrim begins the hard and hot (i.e. desert plus oases driven) task of self-transformation into the new True Self which, when made real as a particular reality, produces the experience of both relative and absolute fulfilment. Moses completed his pilgrimage, which was to lead the Children of Israel out of Egypt and to, but not into, the Promised Land. The ethnic cleansing of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites and from their lands and the settling there of the Children of Israel (i.e. of those who strive for the God EL, not for Yahweh or El Shaddai) was not his brief. ** The
version of the universal goal of pilgrimage first proposed in the earliest
Upanishads is ‘tat tvam asi’, meaning ‘That thou art’ or ‘Thou art that’. Its
very ambiguity gives it oracle status. The former statement was later fleshed
out as sat (realness)
chit (identity) ananda (power,
transformed as bliss). Another possibility
according to the Complete Jewish Bible by author David H. Stern, proposes
that the Tetragrammaton be pronounced letter for letter in Hebrew and that
the name of God should be rendered by spelling out the four letters,
"Yud He Vav He", the meaning assumed to be "I am what I
am" as revealed to Moses in the Torah (Exodus 3:14).
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