A meditator at dawn as a white dove descends above a coiled serpent
In 2017, during a deep meditation with my mentor Rouppa Jetto, a hypnotherapist and Buddhist practitioner, I experienced what I now understand as the descent of the dove. There was a flickering, brilliant white light that, in hindsight, fluttered like a dove, and a feeling of pure ecstasy, beyond any physical pleasure I had ever known, that lasted nearly a minute. That moment lies at the heart of what the saying “be wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove” now means to me.
On this blog, I read scripture as inner wisdom conveyed through story, not as a historical record. I write for anyone who was raised being told what every verse meant and still senses that something more lives and breathes in these words. If you read the Bible literally, you are welcome here too, and nothing in this article asks you to surrender that.
In the King James Version, Matthew 10:16 reads:
“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
The customary Christian reading is that followers should be shrewd enough to perceive danger while remaining innocent in their conduct. Do not be naive, yet do not lie, harm others, or meet hostility with hostility either.
The setting matters. The Jesus of scripture sends the disciples out as sheep among wolves, an image of people walking straight into opposition. The saying is no summons to become a wolf; it asks for vigilance and goodness at once. That is a sound and respectful reading, and the inner reading below has no need to dismiss it. It simply asks what the same words disclose about the movements of power and love within you.
The serpent winds its way through the whole of scripture, and it is far more than a mere emblem of evil. In Genesis it is the wisest creature in the garden: “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1, KJV).
In the wilderness, Moses is commanded to raise a serpent of brass upon a pole, and whoever looks upon it lives (Numbers 21:8 to 9, KJV). The serpent that once signified danger becomes, once lifted up, an emblem of healing.
John carries that image forward: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14, KJV). Read inwardly, the lifted serpent is a power raised from below, no longer held captive in its former state.
The dove is every bit as rich. It returns to Noah bearing the olive leaf once the flood has passed, and it descends upon the Jesus of scripture at his baptism. Throughout scripture the dove is the sign of the Spirit, of peace, and of love coming to rest upon a person.
In the Kundalini traditions, the serpent power lies coiled at the base of the spine and ascends through the body to the crown. Energy that once flowed downward turns and climbs. I have explored how this relates to Christian language in Kundalini Spirit vs Holy Spirit.
I do not write about this as mere theory. In 2018, I heard a sound like wind in both ears, and then an electrical current began at the base of my spine and worked its way upward, so intense that I believed I would die if it reached my head. It did. That was the serpent rising in me.
This is the inner meaning of “wise as serpents.” It is not only about being shrewd in a perilous world; it concerns an inner power that, once awakened, transforms your state from the ground up.
Neville Goddard devoted an entire chapter of Seedtime and Harvest to the theme, entitled “Be Ye Wise As Serpents.” In it he says:
“Man is told, therefore, to be “wise as the serpent” and learn how to shed his skin”
The image of shedding skin is an image of a change of state. You need not remain identified with an old self merely because you have worn it for a long time. A new assumption asks you to release the beliefs and reactions that belong to the former state.
“The injunction to be “wise as serpents” is the advice to man to awaken the power of his subtilized body”
And he renders it practical:
“Experiencing these states in imagination until they have sensory vividness, you will externalize them as surely as the serpent now externalizes its skin.”
In a 1970 question and answer session, Neville described the serpent ascending in his own body:
“Then came that day when the energy that went down into generation is turned around and moves up into regeneration, when the serpent within me turned up as a fiery being right back into my skull from which it came.”
When I first read those words, I recognised my own experience in them: the current turning about and rising up the spine into the skull.
There is an ancient initiation drama that reveals why the serpent’s wisdom cannot simply be seized. The mystic Manly P. Hall recorded it in The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), in his chapter “Qabbalistic Keys to the Creation of Man”. Adam comes upon a tree bearing jewels for fruit, and coiled about its trunk is “a flaming, winged serpent crowned with a diadem of stars.” The serpent declares who it is:
“I am the guardian of the Tree of Knowledge and I have sworn that none whom I can lead astray shall partake of its fruits.”
(Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages)
That is the test: the serpent’s power is guarded by the serpent itself. So long as you can be led astray by it, chasing the dreams of power and the seeds of desire it sows in you, the fruit remains beyond reach. Adam passes only when he sees through it all and renounces its dominion. Then the serpent vanishes in a blaze of light, and an angel stands where it had been:
“I am the Lord who is against thee and thus accomplishes thy salvation.”
The very force that drove Adam outward into desire is, once he ceases to serve it, revealed as the force that lifts him. The angel says it plainly: “I have awakened in thy soul the immortality of which I myself partake.” This is TrueCosmic’s reading of the drama, but it rests naturally beside Neville’s words above, the energy that went down into generation turned around and rising into regeneration. For anyone who has felt that current climb the spine, a flaming, winged serpent crowned with stars needs very little explanation.
This is what it means to be wise as a serpent. Not cunning, nor clever in the ways of the world, but awake to the truth that the power you once feared as your adversary was always the Lord in disguise. I go deeper into Hall’s drama, and what it reveals about Adam and the gate of Eden, in my article on where the Garden of Eden really was.
Christians have long been taught to recoil from the serpent, and the reason is a single story misread. Manly P. Hall saw it plainly. Surveying the serpent mounds of the Americas, the hooded cobras of India, the brazen serpent of the Jews and the uraeus coiled upon the brows of Egypt’s pharaohs and priests, he concluded in the chapter “Fishes, Insects, Animals, Reptiles and Birds” of The Secret Teachings of All Ages:
“Among nearly all these ancient peoples the serpent was accepted as the symbol of wisdom or salvation. The antipathy which Christendom feels towards the snake is based upon the little-understood allegory of the Garden of Eden.”
He then names what the serpent in Eden truly guards:
“The tree that grows in the midst of the garden is the spinal fire; the knowledge of the use of that spinal fire is the gift of the great serpent.”
And he presses the very question this article began with:
“If this be not so, why did Moses raise a brazen serpent upon a cross in the wilderness that all who looked upon it might be saved from the sting of the lesser snakes? Was not the brazen serpent a prophecy of the crucified Man to come? If the serpent be only a thing of evil, why did Christ instruct His disciples to be as wise as serpents?”
For Hall, the wisdom of the serpent is the knowledge of a fire that lies within man himself. The Egyptians wore it openly on the forehead. Beneath an engraving of the uraeus he wrote: “The spinal cord was symbolized by a snake, and the serpent coiled upon the foreheads of the Egyptian initiates represented the Divine Fire which had crawled serpentlike up the Tree of Life.” Read in that light, the instruction of Matthew 10:16 is not advice to be crafty. It is a reminder of what you are: a tree of life with a fire coiled at its root, waiting to climb.
In the wilderness Israel is dying from the bites of “fiery serpents” (Numbers 21:6), and the remedy is the strangest in all scripture:
“Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.” (Numbers 21:8, KJV)
The cure for the serpent is the serpent, lifted up. John’s Gospel takes the image and turns it inward: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14, KJV).
Neville insisted this is no relic of desert history. In his lecture Follow Me he calls the episode in Numbers “an adumbration of the event, for when the Son of man is lifted up it is an extremely personal experience.” He knew, because it happened to him. In One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days he recounts the morning it came:
“On the 8th day of April, 1960, a bolt of lightning split me in two from the top of my head to the base of my spine and I separated. At the base of my spine I saw golden liquid light, which I knew to be myself. Fusing with it, I ascended like a serpent in a fire of lightning back into my skull, as it reverberated as though shattered.”
He set that vision beside two passages: the serpent lifted up, and the curtain of the temple split in two. Matthew records that at the crucifixion “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom” (Matthew 27:51, KJV), and the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us exactly what that veil is: “through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Hebrews 10:20, KJV). The temple is your body. The veil is your flesh. The tearing is not a figure of speech but an event.
I can add my own witness here. On the day the serpent rose in me, I experienced the splitting of the curtain exactly as Neville described it. It was as though my body were being torn in two.
Hall traced the same ascent through the language of the Mysteries. In his chapter on the Hiramic legend he writes that “Sufficient similarity exists between the Masonic CHiram and the Kundalini of Hindu mysticism” to treat both as one Spirit Fire, which is lifted “through the thirty-three degrees, or segments of the spinal column” until it “enters into the domed chamber of the human skull.” He reads the wilderness story in the same key: “Out of Egypt, Moses (the illuminated mind, as his name implies) led the tribes of Israel (the twelve faculties) by raising the brazen serpent in the wilderness upon the symbol of the Tau cross.”
Hall also notes that there are “thirty-three segments in the human spinal column; and Jesus was crucified in the thirty-third year of His life.” And where is that crucifixion set? At “a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull” (Matthew 27:33, KJV). The fire climbs the thirty-three segments and comes to rest in the skull. Neville explores that place in his lecture Where Is Golgotha, and I have written about the wider Christian question in Kundalini Spirit vs Holy Spirit.
Two Hebrew words keep the secret of this teaching in plain sight. In Hebrew every letter is also a number, as we explore in biblical numbers and their hidden meaning, and words that share a value were read as sharing a hidden kinship.
The serpent of Eden is nachash (נחש): nun 50, chet 8 and shin 300, a total of 358. The Messiah is mashiach (משיח): mem 40, shin 300, yod 10 and chet 8, also 358. As one Jewish commentary on Torah.org puts it, the two are “equal, 358”. The tempter and the redeemer carry the same number because they are one power facing two directions: the force that draws you down into the world of the senses is the very force that, turned about and lifted up, becomes your salvation.
The second word is saraph, “burning” (Strong’s H8314). It is the word for the “fiery serpents” of Numbers 21 and for the serpent Moses is told to set upon the pole. It is also the word Isaiah uses for the beings who stand above the throne of God: “Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings” (Isaiah 6:2, KJV). Neville drew the same line in his lecture I Am The Cause:
“Now, the serpent of scripture is described in the 6th chapter of the Book of Isaiah as the seraphim which surround the throne of God.”
The creature that bites Israel in the desert and the being that blazes before the throne bear one name. Which of them you meet depends on which way the fire is moving.
Neville never comments directly on the phrase “harmless as doves.” I want to be candid about that. Yet he speaks of the dove constantly, and in his teaching it follows the serpent: first the power rises, and later the dove descends, the Holy Spirit, as a seal of love. He even counted the days, in his lecture “One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days”:
“Start counting from the day the child appears, to the descent of the dove, and you will discover it to be 1,260 days.”
The closest he comes to explaining “harmless” is in his lecture “Reconciliation”:
“When one wears the body of love he is incapable of doing anything save in love, and therefore everything in his presence is harmless, for perfect love casts out all fear.”
That lends the word a deeper resonance. Harmlessness is neither weakness nor silence. It is a state of love in which your power is no longer wielded to injure, control, or frighten anyone.
Neville taught two things, and he named his 1961 book after them: The Law and the Promise. The Law is the creative power of imagination, which you can practise tonight. The Promise is the plan of redemption that unfolds within you in its own time. He described its great events again and again, and in his lecture No Other Gods he listed them in order after the birth from above:
“the second great event is the coming of David; the third is the splitting of the Temple of your body from top to bottom and the ascent, like a serpent, into heaven; and the fourth is the descent of the dove.”
Read Matthew 10:16 against that list and the verse opens like a door. The serpent and the dove are not two virtues to balance in polite company. They are the third and fourth acts of the Promise, written into a single line of the Gospel: the power that rises through the torn temple of the body, and the love that descends to seal it.
This is where the difference between the Law and the Promise matters most. The Law is yours to practise, night after night, and it rewards devotion. The Promise is not yours to command. It cannot be manufactured, forced or scheduled, and no technique, breathwork or force of wanting will tear the veil before its hour. TrueCosmic teaches the Law as a daily practice and leaves the Promise to arrive when it will. As the next section shows, it does not even keep the same order for everyone.
Read through Neville, then, “be wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove” is not counsel to be crafty but pleasant. The serpent is the power that rises; the dove is the love that descends. Wisdom is the power ascending, harmlessness is the love descending, and you need both.
Either one alone goes astray. Power without love curdles into manipulation: using your imagination to pressure, punish, or control people. Love without power remains passive: kind, but unable to hold a boundary or change anything at all.
In ordinary life, the balance looks like this. You can listen attentively before agreeing to something, decline when a request crosses a line, and walk away from a situation that is not safe, all without lying, threatening, or trying to control another person. Prudence is not deception, and innocence is not gullibility.
I must confess that my order was the reverse of Neville’s. In his pattern the serpent rises first and the dove descends later. For me, the dove came first, in that 2017 meditation with Rouppa, and the serpent rose a year later, in 2018.
I do not share that to quarrel with Neville. I share it because it matters if you are waiting for a particular sign, or trying to force your inner life to keep someone else’s timetable. The pattern is real, but the sequence is no formula. Stay attentive, and let your experience unfold in the order it arrives.
This is a practice, not a trick. Consider an archer refining the shot: the archer does not grow skilled by demanding that every arrow strike the centre on the first attempt. Each shot is a small correction, and the skill deepens through return after return. Persistent assumption works in just the same way: what matters is coming back, not one dramatic effort followed by anxious checking.
Hold the serpent and the dove in the same moment: the power to choose and to act, and the love that governs how you act. You may find the new state never needed to be manufactured at all. Like a seed, it only needed water.
Keep reading: The Story of Samson in the Bible: Delilah, the Seven Locks and the Power You Keep Giving Away and David and Goliath Meaning: The Giant, the Five Stones and the Son of I AM.
Reading scripture for its inner meaning is an ancient tradition, and the plain sense of the verse is where it begins, not where it ends. Like the firstborn son in scripture, the outer reading comes first, and the inner meaning, the power that rises, comes to rule over it. Nor is that realisation a mere footnote: it is the very catalyst for transformation.
The customary reading is to stay alert to danger while remaining innocent in your conduct. The inner reading adds that the serpent is the power rising within you and the dove is the love that descends, and that you need both.
Matthew 10:16, where the Jesus of scripture sends forth the disciples “as sheep in the midst of wolves.”
In Seedtime and Harvest, in a chapter entitled “Be Ye Wise As Serpents,” Neville wrote that the injunction is counsel to awaken the power of the “subtilized body” and to learn to shed your skin, by which he meant an old state.
No. The same image carries subtlety in Eden, healing in the brass serpent of Numbers 21, and exaltation in John 3:14. Its meaning depends on how the power is moving and what it serves. In an ancient initiation drama recorded by Manly P. Hall, the serpent guarding the Tree of Knowledge is revealed as an angel who says, “I am the Lord who is against thee and thus accomplishes thy salvation.”
The word is Sanskrit and never appears in scripture, but the experience it names is there in symbol: the fiery serpent set upon Moses’ pole (Numbers 21:8), the Son of man “lifted up” (John 3:14), and the veil of the temple “rent in twain from the top to the bottom” (Matthew 27:51). Manly P. Hall compared the Kundalini of Hindu mysticism to the Spirit Fire lifted through the spine, and Neville Goddard described ascending “like a serpent” into his own skull.
It was the serpent of brass that Moses set upon a pole in Numbers 21, so that anyone bitten “when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” Jesus applied it to himself in John 3:14. Read inwardly, it is the creative power lifted up the spine: the same force that wounds while it moves outward heals once it is raised.
Neville distinguished the Law, that imagining creates reality, from the Promise, God’s plan of redemption unfolding within each person. He described its great events as the birth from above, the coming of David, the splitting of the temple of the body with the ascent like a serpent, and the descent of the dove. The Law can be practised; the Promise arrives in its own time.
“Be wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove” is at once a teaching about clear action in a hard world and, read inwardly, a map of spiritual awakening. The serpent rises as power awakens. The dove descends as love seals that power in harmlessness.
Whatever you are facing, you need not look beyond yourself for the answer. It already dwells within you, together with the same power that brought all things into being, and it is yours to summon. You are the one who awakens it, and when you let love guide it, nothing can stand against it. Fear not.
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