Ego is always on the lookout for ways to destroy; but spirit is always on the lookout for ways to save. The universe seeks out people and situations that are open to receiving and furthering the next formation of love. Pharaoh’s daughter found the baby Moses among the reeds at the side of the Nile and raised him in the palace as her own. Unbeknownst to anyone in the palace, Jochebed became Pharaoh’s maid and helped raise the child. Love never dies; it simply morphs.
Notice that the cruelty in this story was demonstrated by the most powerful figure—Pharaoh. But the otherworldly forces that overcame his cruelty were channeled through the most powerless. Moses’s mother had no power before Pharaoh’s decree, and yet her love created a path by which Pharaoh’s cruelty was undermined. Love led her to do something, which led to someone powerful enough within the worldly system who could take it from there.
How often it is that we might not know what to do, who to call, where to seek help, or how to find the solution to a problem when forces much greater than us are stopping us. Yet, in keeping our hearts open—in cleaving to faith and not succumbing to despair—we will do something that leads us to someone who can give us a helping hand. If Jochebed had merely given up, Moses would not have survived. Her message to the sufferer is clear: do what you can. When we truly embrace the realization that God has an answer to every problem, that the universe is wired for our deliverance, then we can trust that as long as we persevere, a way out of darkness will appear.
THE BURNING BUSH
Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s palace, with the opportunity to escape the cruel fate of the Jewish slaves. Yet he had an emotional connection to his people; although he was not raised among the Jews, their suffering moved him. So much so, in fact, that he killed an Egyptian slave driver whom he saw beating a Jewish slave. Running away to escape retribution for his deed, he traveled to the land of Midian, began a new life as a shepherd, married, and had a child. It was there, grazing sheep one day, that he encountered the burning bush.
It’s so interesting, isn’t it, that Moses was a murderer? While it could be argued that his killing the slave driver was justified—maybe he would have killed the slave and Moses felt that he had no choice—it’s an important reminder that the child of destiny, and that means all of us, is not without his own dark shadows. Many times we are depressed not because of what someone else did to us, but because of something that we ourselves did. And the ego, which led us to make the mistake to begin with, tells us that having made it, we are damaged goods, failures, ugly, repugnant even to God. Yet it was after Moses had committed murder that God appeared to him in the burning bush.
In other words, nothing—absolutely nothing—can make us less loved by God, less chosen by God, or less programmed by God for a destiny of greatness. If anything, our exposure to the darkness of the world, both in ourselves and in others, increases our depth of understanding, which then increases our value as conduits of His power. What the ego darkens, God illumines.
There is a beauty in the innocence of those who haven’t seen enough of the world to know anything but light. There’s an even greater beauty in the innocence of those who have seen so much of the world that they have seen darkness, yet then chosen light. Even when we feel we have turned our backs on God, it’s important to remember that He hasn’t turned His back on us. He cannot, for love is incapable of turning its back on its creations. The point is for us to choose love today, even if we didn’t choose it yesterday. God didn’t look at Moses and say, “What?! You expect me to use you after the mistakes you made?” Rather, it wasn’t long after Moses made a huge mistake that God called him to greatness.
Grazing his father-in-law’s flocks one day, Moses saw an angel appearing in a bush that was burning but not consumed by the fire. Angels, as defined in A Course in Miracles, are “thoughts of God.” So Moses in a way was no different from anyone else taking a walk through nature, or “tending the flocks” by helping people in some capacity or another and having an epiphany. An awakening. A burst of enlightened understanding. A sense of knowing. This is not a different kind of inner knowing than what you or I or anyone else might have. God speaking to Moses was not an event that is different from the way He speaks to any of us; it’s a symbol for the way He speaks to all of us.
And what did Moses hear from God? First, he was told to take off his sandals. The sandals are a symbol for that which touches the earth. We are told to approach God without our sandals, for the space wherein God dwells is holy ground. We surrender our worldly concerns there and come to Him with nothing but our open hearts.
We are constantly distracted today by ultimately meaningless things, all of them binding us to the regions of the earth. A twenty-four-hour news cycle, outrageous politics and world events, ridiculous gossip—all clutter our consciousness and keep us bound to the world of suffering. In approaching God, we must take off our sandals. We must “clear our heads.”
In the Russian Orthodox Church, Moses’s encounter with the burning bush is described as his ability to see “uncreated energies” or “glory.” It is interesting that the bush was not consumed by the fire but burned continuously. God speaking to Moses from the burning bush does not signify one event, but rather a realm of consciousness that Moses visited. It is an eternal stream of divine fire burning within all hearts at all times.
Born in light (a creation of God) to a people persecuted by Pharaoh (the ego) and destined, after great trial, to be a leader (the story of the Exodus), Moses reflects the psychic journey of every soul. Each of us is born of God, then wanders into the slavery of ego consciousness, and is ultimately guided by the voice of God to travel to the promised land and take our brothers and sisters with us.
I AM WHO I AM
In his encounter with the burning bush, Moses heard the voice of God. If someone walks into a room these days and says, “God told me this” or “God told me that,” we might have reason to wonder whether or not they’re in touch with reality. On the other hand, if someone meditates and prays on a regular basis, then absolutely they begin to hear what in A Course in Miracles is called the “Voice for God.” Serious spiritual practice makes you a finely tuned intuitional instrument. Just as we hear the ego’s voice constantly lambasting us with negative messages, we can quiet the mind and hear the small still voice within, which is the voice for God. It’s not that one sounds like Tony Bennett and the other sounds like Lady Gaga. They both sound like you. One sounds like you when you’re hysterical, angry, and selfish; and the other sounds like you when you’re peaceful, calm, and loving. All of us hear the voices of either ego or spirit in our heads all the time, but only one of them is the real you.
Moses knew he was hearing the voice of God, but he didn’t know how he would say that to others. “Tell them,” said God, “that I AM WHO I AM.” This passage has been translated and interpreted in myriad ways, as are all religious stories. One interpretation says God described Himself not as “I AM WHO I AM” but rather “I AM WHO I SHALL BE.” From a spiritual perspective, both are accurate—because who we are in essence exists beyond time. What’s most important is the revelation that the God within us is our essential self; the essence of God is the essence of each of us, and the essence of each of us is the essence of God. When we are speaking from our true selves, or from love, we are expressing what the Voice for God has told us. Through prayer and meditation, we begin to hear the small, still Voice for God. Our purpose on earth is to then reflect, in words but also in actions, what we have heard.
The voice of God directed Moses to go back to his people, to tell them that God had chosen him to lead them out of slavery to the Promised Land.
So imagine this: You’re taking a walk, and all of a sudden you have an epiphany, a sense of divine presence. And it doesn’t last just for a moment; it’s a high that lasts for a while. And it’s not just pleasurable, it’s directive. You get a feeling, a sense of mission, a calling—you have a very strong sense that God has work for you to do. You’re here to he
lp lead your people out of suffering and to peace.
What?!
And Moses has the same reaction any of us would have, basically saying, “No way!”
“Who am I,” Moses asked God, “that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” God responded with three points: first, He rebuked Moses for having the audacity to doubt God’s choice of vessel; second, He told Moses he would be aided by the wondrous powers of his staff, or rod; and third, He told Moses He would send his brother Aaron to be Moses’s mouthpiece.
In other words, no matter what problems we might throw up to God as reasons for why “I can’t possibly do that, Sir,” his response to any argument we make is: “Actually, yes you can.”
The soul is programmed for greatness of mission. When we are dissociated from that ray of light, we descend into darkness. Much unhappiness in this world is due to the fact that people are failing to perform the greatness of their missions, and they know it. Each of us has such a mission, for each of us is a child of God. Yet in failing to ask God what that mission is, and in failing to make ourselves available to Him so He might guide us to do it, we fall into the neurotic patterns of a soul that does not recognize itself or remember why it’s here.
In my book A Return to Love, there’s a paragraph that begins, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” That one paragraph, often misattributed to Nelson Mandela, has become very well known. And why? Because it points to the ego’s resistance—as well as the soul’s mission—to fully claiming the greatness of our potential as children of God.
The power of Moses’s staff has great significance, as it refers to the power of spiritual consciousness. Like Merlin’s wand, the staff is a symbol for focused, light-filled, disciplined thinking. It channels the power of thought when it travels straight down from the divine, making the human mind a conduit not only for God’s thinking to be done on earth, but for his will to be done on earth.
In order to prove his power, God told Moses to throw the staff onto the ground, at which point it turned into a serpent. Moses fled in fear, but God told him to pick up the serpent by its tail—and it turned back into a staff.
The transition of the staff from terrifying serpent to miracle-making source of power refers to the relationship each of us has to the power of our own minds. The ego shrinks from spirituality because it shrinks from our greatness. It suggests that surrender to God is dangerous, that if we go there, we’ll be out of control. Yet once we pick up the serpent, and take charge of our minds, then the energy of the wily serpent turns into our greatest support in performing our God-given missions.
Each of us has a staff—the unlimited power of thought—and like Moses, we are meant to use it to perform God’s miracles. When our thoughts are high and loving, loving effects result; when our thoughts are low and fear-based, they do not. When Moses held up his staff, the Israelites were victorious; when he let down his staff, Israel’s enemies prevailed. For him, as for us, it was not always easy to carry the staff of God. At one point Moses’s hand grew tired and he didn’t feel he could hold up his staff any longer. Aaron and Hur then helped support him so that “his hands remained steady until sunset.” Our staffs often feel heavy and burdensome as we reach for our higher selves; such effort goes against our ego instincts. Sometimes we cannot take the high road in life without the support of friends and loved ones. But just as support arrived to hold up Moses, it arrives to hold us up as well.
MOSES’S GREAT MISSION
The story of Moses involves not only God’s calling him to a great mission, but also God’s helping him to perform it. A Course in Miracles asks whether it is reasonable to assume that God would give us a job to do and not provide us with the means to accomplish it.
God told Moses what to do and how to do it in order to free the Israelites from slavery and lead them to the Promised Land, or the “land of milk (sustenance) and honey (sweetness).” The first order of business was persuading Pharaoh to release his slaves. Of course, Pharaoh initially refused Moses’s injunction to “Let my people go.”
To that, God responded with the Ten Plagues of Egypt—from the water of the Nile turning into blood, to the land and people being covered with frogs, to lice infecting people and animals, plus seven more all the way up to and including the death of all firstborn Egyptian children—to finally convince Pharaoh that indeed he should do as God was asking. The Ten Plagues are powerful symbols of how a life lived in slavery to the ego’s dictates stops working. First you lose your self-respect. Then you lose your friends. Then you lose your money. Then you lose your lover. At a certain point, you get the message.
The tenth plague—that is, the death of all Egyptian firstborn children—was particularly horrendous. Moses told the Israelites to put the blood of a spring lamb on the doorposts of their dwellings so that the angel of the Lord would “pass over” that house and spare the firstborn (hence the Jewish holiday of Passover). The blood of the spring lamb means the energy of the new, the innocent; it is that to which we are to devote our dwellings, or our internal selves. Metaphysically, this story is not about the children of the Egyptians being killed by God’s decree; rather, it refers to the fact that wicked thoughts shall come to naught, and innocent thoughts shall be protected and blessed.
One would think that with all Moses had done for the Israelites, they would be heartened by his appearance among them. But they were ambivalent about their journey out of Egypt; they were skeptical and resentful as much as filled with gratitude and praise. They had become accustomed to slavery; they had resigned themselves to a certain level of suffering. How often we, too, when faced with the task of making a break for freedom, see slavery to the familiarity of the ego as preferable to the uncertainty of change. Our dysfunctions can form a perverse kind of comfort zone.
We often see the voice that draws us out of bondage (the name of Moses means to “draw out”) at least at first, as more a reminder of our pain than a deliverer from it. As slaves, the Israelites knew they would be fed and housed; if they fled, how could they be certain that they would survive their journey to the Promised Land? How often we too prefer the trials and tribulations of the ego to the trials and tribulations of self-actualization. We prefer to cope with our internal slavery rather than to rock the boat and make a break for freedom. We accept the false comforts of victimhood rather than assume the responsibilities of victory. Yet Moses represents the voice in all of us, always drawing us out, drawing us up, drawing us forward to the truth of who we are and the greatness of our purpose here.
EVEN IF IT TAKES A MIRACLE
Finally Pharaoh freed his slaves. And on that night, in the rush of “Hurry before he changes his mind,” the Israelites fled. But when they reached the northern tip of the Red Sea, the Israelites looked back in horror to see the Egyptian army rushing toward them. Pharaoh had decided that he wanted his slaves back. The ego never retreats; it never says, “Okay, go,” and actually means it. Whenever it says, “You can go now,” it in fact means, “Go—until I’ve figured out how to get you back.” It takes a miracle, a spiritual awakening, to free ourselves from the ego’s clutches.
How many times have we felt despair akin to what the Israelites must have felt when they saw Pharaoh’s army? They could move forward into the sea and drown, or stay in place and be overtaken by the army and killed, or returned to slavery. How often we too feel like we made a break for freedom, and are then drawn back into the ego’s bondage. We need more than self-will to save us then; we need a miracle. The Israelites looked to Moses to save them, and he did.
At that moment one of the great miracles of history occurred, one of the most powerful demonstrations of God’s action on behalf of His people. In that moment, God instructed Moses to raise his staff and stretch out his hand: “And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the s
ea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground.” Of course the Egyptian army followed, and we all know what happened to them.
The parting of the Red Sea is one of the great biblical demonstrations that God will do whatever it takes, including transcending time and space, to pave the way for His children’s deliverance. The universe is programmed to rescue us from the ego’s armies, whether they be our own obsessive thoughts or conditions of the outer world. We are safe to dive into the waters of spirit, even when we fear we will drown there, for God will prepare for us a safe crossing and the ego will be stilled.
Knowing that God can and will do anything to save His people—and all of us are His people—is one of the bulwarks of an enlightened life. A thought such as “That couldn’t possibly happen” becomes replaced by, “I don’t need to know how it will happen; I only need to know that it will.” According to A Course in Miracles, “There’s no order of difficulty in miracles.”
After the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, they sang a song of celebration. Miriam the prophetess, a woman who thus spoke for God, sang, “Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.” This singing means the singing of our souls after we’ve been released from our suffering. “Singing to the Lord” is a reference to finally feeling free to express ourselves fully, without fear—to finding our own voice, our own life force, our own emotional freedom after suffering imprisonment to the ego’s demands. Many of us have found ourselves “singing to the Lord” in ways we had never sung before, emerging from traumatic periods in our lives with talents and abilities that we didn’t know we had before our “time in the desert,” the times of our own personal despair.
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