Jeremiah 4:23 · World English Bible
Jeremiah 4:23 Meaning I Saw the Earth
I saw the earth, and, behold, it was waste and void, and the heavens, and they had no light.
What does Jeremiah 4:23 mean?
Beneath every shape your eyes have rested upon lies a stillness with no shape at all. When the mind grows quiet and the world loses its solidity, you glimpse what was here before anything took form: the earth without form, and void, the space out of which all appearance arises.
From the Ego v. Being reading below.
Jeremiah 4:23 through 2 lenses
The same verse, read by 2 traditions.
Ego v. Being
Clinical Psychology
EGO & BEING
Ego v. Being
Beneath every shape your eyes have rested upon lies a stillness with no shape at all. When the mind grows quiet and the world loses its solidity, you glimpse what was here before anything took form: the earth without form, and void, the space out of which all appearance arises.
This emptiness is not a lack. It is the living source from which every thing is continually born. Once you have felt that formless ground, you no longer need the passing shapes of the world to tell you who you are.
Ego v. Being lensGo deeper in the app
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Clinical Psychology
Beneath every ordered life sits the chaos it was built to hold back. The prophet looks and sees the world undone, formless and dark, the exact condition that preceded creation. Order can collapse back into that. What was shaped can lose its shape when the shaping stops.
Complacency forgets this terror. The light was never guaranteed and can be withdrawn, and the void waits one abdication away. Do not imagine the structure around you is permanent. It stands because someone keeps making it stand, and it needs you to hold the darkness at its edge.
Clinical Psychology lensGo deeper in the app
Ego v. Being lens
Live Jeremiah 4:23 today
- Before you unlock your phone in the morning, sit for one minute with nothing on, no music, no feed, no plan. Let the room be a room before you fill it with content.
- On a walk or a drive with someone, let a silence go longer than is comfortable instead of patching it with talk. See what shows up in the space you did not fill.
- When your identity feels wobbly, after a rejection, a job ending, a relationship shifting, remind yourself that whatever holds you is not one of those shapes. Nothing that came and went was ever the floor.
If every label you carry fell away today, what would still be here?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 11
The usefulness of a cup is the empty space inside it. What holds everything is the part with no shape.
Heart Sutra
Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. The openness is not a hole in things, it is what things are made of.
Upanishads
Before name and shape there was one reality, whole and still, and you are not separate from it.
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