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The Book of Exodus says that the people were told to collect manna only for one day and on the Sabbath for two days. If they collected for two days on any other day but for the Sabbath, it rotted but for the Sabbath it did not. What is the meaning of this?

The Guide: The manna is the symbol for spiritual strength, spiritual truth, divine blessing, all the material you need to advance spiritually, to find yourself and God. With the people of the best intentions – the most diligent workers in God’s vineyard – it is often timing that is so important: the proper distribution, for instance, of the active and passive forces, as discussed in Lecture #29 The Forces of Activity and Passivity – Finding God’s Will.

Both forces have to be utilized harmoniously in the human soul so that each fulfills its function properly. Often one side of your nature tends to be overactive in the wrong way while your other side is overly passive, again in the wrong way. When you are spiritually active, you tend to hoard the strength you may need for the morrow, or the knowledge that you may need for the morrow. This cannot be done.

The text you quoted says, in different words, that you have to live in the moment, or what you call the Eternal Now. Each moment has its own requirements, and meeting them can only be done by living completely in this moment. It also says: you should not take on more than you can chew at the present time.

However, you do need a little reserve at certain times for the periods when you cannot muster the strength to have inner or outer activity. The Sabbath, as you know, signifies among other things the day of inactivity, the day of rest. In life, everyone has to go through periods when they cannot muster the force to be active. They are tired, they have to rest. And this may also be good spiritually.

Everything absorbed in the period of activity has to be assimilated in the period of passivity. And for these times you need a little reserve. But ordinarily, if you feel in the full strength of active life – spiritually, physically, emotionally, on all levels – you cannot possibly hoard. Human beings do that often, again on all levels.

They are so anxious, they are so full of fear that they do not trust God, do not trust the harmony of their own innermost selves that will fit into the scheme of divine law, that will go with the stream. They think they have to take care of the future. By this I do not mean that you should be careless. No extreme is ever right. But live in the Now and make the best of each moment.

Then your manna will be always fresh and will be given to you every day anew. Simply because you live that way, when the next passive period comes around, you will quietly nurse what has so beautifully grown during the active period. You will instinctively sense that you have received enough.

This will happen only when you live in harmony with the movement of the active and passive streams of your personal life, only when you have refined your inner senses so much that you feel clearly what each period signifies: the active or the passive – the weekday or the Sabbath. The analogy applies also to the duration of the periods; the active periods have to be longer than the passive ones, although the latter always have to reoccur regularly.

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