John 1:30 · World English Bible
John 1:30 Meaning This Is He of Whom I Said
This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who is preferred before me, for he was before me.’
What does John 1:30 mean?
The one speaking here stands for the part of a person that wakes up first, the everyday self that learns, chooses, and prepares the way. Naturally, it assumes it is the center of everything.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
John 1:30 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
The one speaking here stands for the part of a person that wakes up first, the everyday self that learns, chooses, and prepares the way. Naturally, it assumes it is the center of everything.
Underneath, a larger center has been forming. Most people only meet it in the second half of life, often after a hard struggle, and it feels like a stranger from outside. Yet it was there before the everyday self appeared. It comes later but is greater and older, because the everyday self was formed by it, and only now turns to recognize where it truly began.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live John 1:30 today
- Think back to a plan of yours that fell apart and led somewhere better than you had aimed. Sit with the fact that something in you knew more than your plan did.
- Ask an older person in your life what they wanted at your age and what they got instead. Listen without making it a lesson, and let their answer sit in you for a few days.
- When a goal you have pushed for years stops moving, try loosening your grip for one week instead of pushing harder. See what wants to happen when you stop arranging it.
What part of you was there long before the person you have been trying to be?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 25
Something formed before heaven and earth, silent and vast, is the mother of all things. It came first, though we meet it last.
Upanishads
Two birds sit on one tree. One eats the fruit and busies itself, while the other watches in silence, and only slowly does the first bird turn and recognize the second.
Zen
The self you work so hard to build was never the whole of you. What you are looking for is what is doing the looking.
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