2160. Verse 4 Let now a little water be taken, and [all of you] wash your feet, and recline under the tree.

'Let now a little water be taken' means that they were to draw near and bring themselves down from Divine things nearer to His intellectual concepts. 'And wash your feet' means that they were to take on something natural so that during the state He was then passing through His perception might be improved. 'And recline under the tree' means towards the perception of the state through which He was passing, 'tree' meaning perception.

2265. 'Behold now, I have undertaken to speak to my Lord, and I am [but] dust and ashes' means, it is clear, [the state of] humiliation as to what the human was in comparison. Reference to the Lord's state when in the human, or His state of humiliation, and to the Lord's state when in the Divine, or His state of glorification, has been made several times already. It has also been shown that in a state of humiliation He spoke to Jehovah as if to another, but in a state of glorification to His own Self, see 1999. Here, because 'Abraham', as stated, represents the Lord when in the human, it is said in that state that the human in comparison with the Divine is 'dust and ashes'. This also is why that state is called the state of humiliation. Humiliation arises from the self-recognition that by comparison one is such. By the human here it is not the Divine Human that is meant but the human He derived from the mother, which He utterly cast out and in its place put on the Divine Human. It is the former human - that from the mother - which is referred to here as dust and ashes. See what has been stated above in 2159.