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Preface
5 Planes of Existence
Introduction
Five Planes of Manifestation
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SERPENT MORE SUBTIL THAN ANY BEAST OF FIELD
A symbol of the desire-mind, which is more
penetrative and captivating to the ego than any of the lower desires
(beasts).
"The serpent in the Genesis story, which ever after crawled upon the
ground, is the allegorical symbol of man's lower animal desires,
which had only come to be recognized as lower when it was seen that
they resisted the upward striving towards an ideal. The subtilty of
the serpent in its conversation with Eve represents the struggle
within man's mind, the wavering between his upward impulses and the
insidious attractiveness of his downward tendencies. . . . Man was
now in a position to choose deliberately in any given instance
whether he would strive upwards, or obey the animal nature which
pulled in the opposite direction." - A. H. M'NEILE, Expository
Times, June 1906.
"Sin is a subtle, elusive, inapprehensible thing, if we attempt to
grasp all its movements. We understand why in the first sin it took
as its first typical representation the figure of the serpent, which
cheats the eye with sinuous changes of place continually, refuses to
be located, and while it leaves no doubt of its existence is seen
only in flashes and a wavering indistinctness." – PHILLIPS BROOKS,
Mystery of Iniquity, p. 3.
“In Egypt, in India, in Scandinavia, in Mexico, we find clear
allusions to the same great truth (of the god crushing the serpent).
'The evil genius,' says Wilkinson, of the adversaries of the
Egyptian god Horus is frequently figured under the form of a snake,
whose head he is seen piercing with a spear. The same fable occurs
in the religion of India, where the malignant serpent Calyia is
slain by Vishnu in his avatar of Krishna; and the Scandinavian deity
Thor was said to have bruised the head of the great serpent with his
mace.' Among the Mexicans, we find Humboldt saying that The serpent
crushed by the great spirit Teotl, is the genius of evil." - A.
HISLOP, The Two Babylons, p. 60.
But now when they had eaten, the Wrath of God's anger did awake in
the SERPENT Monstrous image, viz. the properties of the Dark World,
namely, the Devils introduced Desire, which now had its seat in the
Monstrous image-in the Serpent's essence. In this instant all the
forms of subtlety and craftiness did awake in the Human
Mystery."-JACOB BоCHME, Mysterium Mamum, p. 92.
"Desire is appetite with consciousness thereof. . . . Desire is the
actual essence of man, in so far as it is conceived as determined to
a particular activity by some given modification of itself." -
SPINOZA, Ethics, Bohn, Vol. II. 137, 173.
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