Jeremiah 12:11 · World English Bible
Jeremiah 12:11 Meaning They Have Made It a Desolation
They have made it a desolation. It mourns to me, being desolate. The whole land is made desolate, because no one cares.
What does Jeremiah 12:11 mean?
The neglected self falls to ruin and grieves in silence for the attention it never receives. The land is the whole ground of a person, the body and inner life meant to be tended like a garden, and desolation is what settles over it when consciousness turns entirely outward and stops keeping the ground.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Jeremiah 12:11 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The neglected self falls to ruin and grieves in silence for the attention it never receives. The land is the whole ground of a person, the body and inner life meant to be tended like a garden, and desolation is what settles over it when consciousness turns entirely outward and stops keeping the ground. That the land mourns is the ache in a person no one names, the quiet sorrow of a life running to waste. The single cause given is that no man lays it to heart, no one turns inward and takes their own condition seriously enough to work it.
All the emptiness comes from one omission. When a person never brings their own inner ground into the heart and tends it, the whole field of the self goes to weeds and mourns for want of care.
The land: the entire inner ground of a person, body and consciousness, meant to be tended like a garden Desolation: the ruin that settles over that ground when a person turns wholly outward and stops keeping it The heart: the inward center where a person would carry and work their own condition, left empty when the self is never taken seriously
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Esoteric lens
Live Jeremiah 12:11 today
- Give yourself fifteen minutes today with nothing in your hands and no screen on, and just check how you actually are. Most of us answer that question for everyone except ourselves.
- Tell one person something true about how you've been doing lately instead of the short version. Saying it out loud is often the first time you hear it yourself.
- When the day is full and you tell yourself you'll deal with yourself later, pick the smallest real thing and do it now: water, a walk around the block, one honest sentence in a journal. Later is where whole years go.
What part of my own life have I been meaning to tend to since some date I can no longer remember?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 33
Knowing other people is cleverness. Knowing yourself is the real light, and without it every outward mastery is still poverty.
Judaism · Pirkei Avot
If I am not for myself, who will be for me. The tending of your own ground is nobody else's job.
Zen
Chop the wood, carry the water, and sweep your own doorway. The practice is the daily keeping, not a single grand gesture.
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