And Moses said unto God , Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel , and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name ? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM : and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel , I AM hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3: 13 – 14)
YeHoWaH, is an attempt at pronouncing the Hebrew four letter name of the One who spoke to Moses from the burning bush. In Hebrew the letter-names are Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey, the corresponding letters (Y-H-W-H) are the English equivalents of the Hebrew letters and are capitalised in the opening word of this paragraph. These letter-names are telling for, taken as a whole, the One reveals Its Name simply as ‘to Be’ or ‘I AM,’ ‘to Exist‘. Now the name Moses means what is drawn out which is a reference to the fact that he was drawn out from the river of Egypt (Ex. 2:10). So the full statement given to what is drawn out is I-Will-Become-What-I-Will-Become.
Essentially, the revelation of the name given to Moses describes what arises in the perceptive faculties of every human mind that has been prepared for its reception. Genuine spiritual development runs parallel with an increasing awareness of the nature of the Divine Being which is the revealing of Its name. This is captured in the image or symbol of the burning bush. This symbol reveals the name or quality of God and it is that, Being Itself, as to its very nature, is love. The burning bush represents the faculty of spiritual perception that develops within receptive minds and into which the Divine can speak Its name and reveal Itself. It speaks or inflows continuously into every human mind but Its name is only received directly by that which has been drawn out of Egypt’s river, this river being the great stream of spiritual knowledge that gives life to the natural plane of the human mind. So Moses is the name that describes genuine spiritual teaching which when embodied in the human mind, takes the human form, being represented in the Word by a man named Moses.
Genuine forms of spiritual teaching are truths or principles that have been elevated or drawn out of the lower stream of memory knowledges through a desire to make them the basis for our life. It is these that are able to form a higher plane of understanding within the mind. Moses represents that higher spiritual understanding or plane within the human mind that can bring to conscious awareness the name of the Divine. Now a name describes the spiritual quality of a thing and the Divine Name describes the Divine Nature of that Being that is continuously seeking to reveal Itself to human consciousness. Moses is that to whom and, through whom, the Divine Esse is revealed. Spiritually understood he is the Divine Truth drawn from Egypt’s river of life. This river of Egypt is found within the human mind and is the flow of knowledges received through the letter of the Word. These course their way through the natural plane of the human mind as that rudimentary understanding of spiritual realities which can be received through the sense of the letter of the Word.
Coming to the letters of the name Itself, more is revealed. The first letter is named Yod but Yod is also the Hebrew word for hand. The hand, due to it being the principle anatomical structure through which consciousness expresses itself spiritually symbolises the power to put into effect what is desired. In the Cabbalahistic mystical tradition this letter of the Hebrew aleph-bet symbolises what is universally human. This is because the human hand gives expression to the content of the human mind and so as a symbol, carries a powerful representation of what is uniquely Human in an Infinite and Eternal or Divine sense.
The teachings for Spiritual Christianity are centred on the supreme theological truth that the Divine and Human are One in the Lord, that He is the Divine Human. This reference to what is Human carries nothing of a finite quality within it and is to be understood only in an Infinite and Eternal, or Divine sense. The Yod in the Tetragrammaton therefore symbolises this Divine Human in its power or omnipotence. It is the power of Divine Being or Divine Love given form through the Human or Divine Wisdom. Spiritual Christianity also teaches that the Lord is Divine Love and Divine Wisdom and that these respectively are Divine Substance and Form. And while these can be thought of as two, in the Lord they are a ONE and cannot be separated. So, Divine Love and Divine Wisdom is what constitutes the Divine Human and this is the Universal Human that powers every finite form of human consciousness which, when in its order of life reflects the Divine as Its image and likeness. What follows from this then is that a human being is only truly human to the degree that their sense of life is grounded in the conscious acknowledgement of the Divine Human as the source of its life. That what is of love and wisdom within the human heart and mind is the Lord present with a human being. What this shows is that a human being is only human to the degree they consciously acknowledge and are in an effort to make the Lord’s love and wisdom the basis for their life.
This now brings us to the remaining letter-names of the name of God, these being Hey-Vav-Hey. These can be usefully examined together as a whole in the light of what has just been said regarding love and wisdom and their relationship. The letter-name Hey occurs twice with an instance being found either side of the letter-name Vav. The letter-name Vav means a pin or nail or that which affixes things together. In the Hebrew language this letter also serves the same function as the English word and, that is, as a conjunction. The word Hey in Hebrew means breath and as pointed out, occurs twice in the Tetragrammaton. Breath is life; consciousness. In Spiritual Christianity, the teaching is that a human being receives its life from the Lord into the inmost part of the mind that stands above conscious perception and this is called the soul. This inflowing life is found in the book of Genesis where it is called, the breath of lives,
And the LORD God formed the human of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives; and the human became a living soul …. (Genesis 2: 7)
The life that is received into the human mind from the Divine Human is love and wisdom. While the life that flows from the LORD into the soul of a human being is One, when it is received more exteriorly so as to be consciously perceived, it becomes as if it were two distinct streams of life.
This is captured in the use of the plural form of the Hebrew word for life, lives, and also in the reference to nostrils which being dual, represent the two perceptive faculties that make up the human mind. The One life, as it becomes conscious within the receiving mind, is felt to be the receiver’s very own inner life manifesting as their thoughts and affections. We see then that this life is not felt to be something flowing in from another but is experienced as two seemingly distinct streams of mental activity arising from within oneself as the source. These streams being the life of the heart or will with its affections, and the other being the life of the understanding with its intellectual functions. For it is the Divine Love as received into the faculty of the will that animates all that belongs to the affectional life within the human mind. Similarly it is the Divine Wisdom that is received into the understanding faculty and this gives it its life through animating all that belongs to its intellectual functions.
In the pictorial image of the last three letter-names of the Tetragrammaton this arrangement of the human mind is wonderfully depicted. Of course the life that the Divine Human Is, is One and not two. Yet this life of Divine Love and Divine Wisdom can be conceptually distinguished as if it were two, for love and wisdom can be spoken of as if they are separate. This quality of distinguishable Oneness is symbolically represented in the name through there being two Heys. That they can’t be separated and so shouldn’t be thought of as separate in the Lord is illustrated by the conjunctive function of the letter-name Vav found in between the Heys which effectively binds them together so that their actual Oneness stands forth to view in the symbol of the letter-names.
As for the image’s application to the human mind, it speaks to the spiritual work every human being is called to. Genuine spiritual work seeks to bring the two streams that make up the life of the human mind together whereby the will and understanding form a whole, or one mind. This is achieved through the marriage of those goods and truths that have been drawn out of the Word and made one with the life through their practice. These goods form a new will and its truths, a new understanding which, when united through life of charity gives birth to a genuine human being whose mind is in the form of heaven. Such a mind, a mind in which heaven is reflected, is only possible where there is a willingness to go to the letter of the Word to draw out spiritual truths that can be used to examine the quality of the affectional and intellectual lives of the mind. This work of self examination and repentance to which every human being is called, involves identifying evils so that they may be shunned as sins against the Lord. It is this work that facilitates the heavenly marriage and is depicted in the meaning of the letter-names found in, YeHoWaH, the Name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush.
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM : and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel , I AM hath sent me unto you.