John 11:50 Meaning Nor Do You Consider That It Is

This is the ego's oldest argument, that peace can be bought by sacrifice and that someone must be destroyed so that the rest may live. Fear always believes that guilt can be gathered onto a single figure and killed, and that with that death the danger will pass. So it counsels a murder and calls it wisdom, convinced that suffering laid on one will spare the many.

Yet this is the very belief the awakened mind has come to undo. Salvation asks no death and no exchange of one life for another; it asks only that guilt be seen as unreal and laid down entirely. The mind that thinks it must sacrifice to be safe is defending the dream that made it afraid, for nothing needs to perish where nothing real was ever lost.

One man: the figure onto whom the fearful mind heaps its guilt, the scapegoat it believes it can destroy to purchase its own safety The nation: the many parts of the self the ego promises to spare, the imagined beneficiaries of a sacrifice that saves no one