Not Consumed

And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire but the bush was not consumed.

Just reading this from Exodus from the Old Testament, I had the feeling that here is the divine, the flame of fire, but rather than the individual self simply dissolving into the great Oneness, the Void, etc when meeting the divine, as is a very common spiritual of sense of things, here now by contrast the individual self maintains his existence within the earthly life, where matter and spirit co-dwell, rather than simply dissolving, being consumed by the divine. There is more now to life than simply seeking “the dissolving of the illusory ego”, or such sensibilities as within Eastern religious philosophy - and which is a general sense of the New Age movement also, where the individual life is something to dissolve, preferably painlessly, into the present, and individual self, summarised as the ego, is whitewashed out of existence. The bush is consumed, we’re back to a divine bliss, and the mess of earthly life and all its difficulties is removed from the equation. Here matter, or the life of physical being, are a sensed enemy of the spirit, a felt contradiction to the desired pure spiritual reality.

But just to repeat the point, here with the burning bush, by contrast, the divine can be experienced, but no, earthly life and the individual self are not consumed. There’s great meaning and depth in the individual life, the co-dwelling of spirit and matter. Obviously it could be said I’m reading far too much into that one line, but that’s the immediate sense I had from reading it a while ago.