Luke 12:56 · World English Bible
Luke 12:56 Meaning You Hypocrites
You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky, but how is it that you don’t interpret this time?
What does Luke 12:56 mean?
People become very skilled at reading the outer world, the weather, the markets, the moods of a crowd. Yet the same person is often completely blind to what is happening inside him and in his own time.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
Luke 12:56 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
People become very skilled at reading the outer world, the weather, the markets, the moods of a crowd. Yet the same person is often completely blind to what is happening inside him and in his own time.
The reproach falls on this split. It is far easier to study things at a distance than to face the harder question of what this moment demands and what is stirring in one's own depths. Turning that same attention inward, reading one's inner weather as carefully as the sky, is the work most people avoid their whole lives.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live Luke 12:56 today
- Before you open anything with a screen this morning, give yourself thirty seconds to answer honestly how you are. Not the version you will give at work. The real one.
- When you are mid conversation and find yourself reading the other person closely, their tone, their face, what they really meant, turn the same care on yourself for a moment. What am I feeling right now, and why.
- In traffic or a long line, when the commentary about everyone else starts up in your head, let it run out and then ask what mood you actually walked in with. Usually the irritation came with you.
I can read the room in seconds. When did I last read myself that carefully?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 33
Knowing other people is a kind of cleverness, but knowing yourself is a different order of seeing. The first wins arguments, the second changes a life.
Dhammapada
It is easy to see the faults of others, the text says, and hard to see your own. We winnow the whole world like chaff and leave ourselves unexamined.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
He wrote that people will go to great trouble to learn what their neighbors are doing and take no trouble at all to attend to what is happening in themselves. Everything they need is right there and they look past it.
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