The Purifying Water
Mayim (“water” in Hebrew) is the flood that will drown your spiritual embryo if you heed the body’s questions, destroying all that you’ve worked so hard to assemble within.
The flood comes as a ruthless force that can destroy everything. Those desires that couldn’t endure the questions, meaning those that didn’t “come into the ark,” truly perish in its waters: “And all flesh perished that moved upon the earth.” And yet, the paradox is that for all its ruthlessness, the flood also purifies.
However, it purifies only those in whom the desires to attain the spiritual world prevail. It is as if man doesn’t even hear the rational questions of his body as he advances toward the goal, no matter what. In this case he acts like Noah, building himself an ark (finding the right books, the right teacher, and the right environment). He will also take shelter there with his numerous individual desires that are yet to be corrected (but will be corrected as the ark “sails” the flood waters).
The Meaning of 40: Bestowal, the Protective Womb
“Then the flood came upon the earth for forty days, and the water increased and lifted up the ark, so that it rose above the earth.”
Forty is a very significant number in spirituality. Naturally, we’re not talking about days here. The number forty represents the quality of bestowal, the Creator’s quality.
Forty is also the numerical value of the letter Mem (?). It resembles a closed space.
If you manage to withstand those forty days of the mind’s onslaught and not break, “the water will lift up the ark” and it will “float on the surface of the water.”
Let’s repeat one last time how you can cleanse, rather than drown, in the time of the flood, and how you can become a “spiritual embryo” and enter the Mem.
To accomplish this, you must pick up the necessary books and begin to “wash” yourself with them, as though with clean water. Bathe in the Light of Mercy, which, through your correct study, will cleanse you on the outside.
You draw it like a magnet by reading these books, and it will fill you on the inside when you are open to the Light and its quality of bestowal, whereupon the Light will enter you.
It is precisely the Light of Mercy that helps you reveal the one desire amidst all your other desires, the desire called Noah.
The Birth after the Purification in the Ark
How long must your desires for spiritual advancement remain in the ark?
For as long as it takes for the “flood waters” to rise above the “earth” (your remaining desires) until they “drown” in the Light of Mercy, cleansing to such an extent that you can use them correctly for your inner, personal and only desire, known as “Noah.”
You were in the ark, detached from all the egoistic desires. You didn’t use them, but remained “inside” the books and the thoughts of spiritual ascent, like an embryo in the mother’s womb. You were under the Creator’s protection, sheltered by Him. You reveled in that silence; it was like Paradise. But now you’re grown and mature, and the time of your emergence into the world is nearing. It’s time to begin your “exit from the ark.”
This means that you must begin your own path, to “leave the Creator’s womb,” as if with female waters, to be born and start working with your thus far “light” egoistic desires. You didn’t take them with you into the “ark,” having put them on hold for the right time. Now that they’ve been properly washed and cleansed with “flood waters,” it’s time for you to start correcting them.
In doing so you become increasingly closer to the spiritual world, to the Creator, since the end goal is the correction of the entire ego. Only then will you feel free, immortal, and absolutely blissful. This is what the Creator wants for you. This is the only condition under which you can be close to Him.
“What Is the Meaning of Noah’s Ark and the Flood in the Bible?” is based on the book, The Secrets of the Eternal Book: The Meaning of the Stories of the Pentateuch by Semion Vinokur.
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