Mark 5:15 Meaning They Came to Jesus

A mind healed is a quiet thing, and its quiet is what frightens those still loyal to their fear. Where there had been raving and chains, now there is a self at rest, covered and sane, wanting nothing and threatening no one. This is the miracle, which asks nothing of the body and changes only the one who looks.

Yet the onlookers are afraid, for a sane brother is a witness against the whole belief that madness is who we are. Fear does not tremble at torment, it trembles at peace, because peace shows the ego that everything it defended was never needed. What they see is their own innocence offered back to them, and to the mind that still prizes guilt, innocence can seem the greater loss.

Him that was possessed: the part of the mind once ruled by fear and now returned to reason Legion: the many terrors that had passed for a self and have quietly gone Clothed: the covering of a mind that no longer needs to expose or defend itself

The man had been torn among many forces at once. A legion is a crowd, and that is what he was inside, a person split into pieces, each pulling its own way, none of them in charge. To others he looked wild and beyond reach.

Then he is found sitting quietly, dressed, himself again. The many voices have been gathered back into one person who can hold them. And the odd thing is that the onlookers are afraid. People who have never faced the crowd inside themselves are unsettled by a man who faced his own and came through whole. His calm shows them exactly what they have been avoiding.

Anattā: Not-self Anattā is the absence of an owner behind what a mind does. A man who answers to Legion has a crowd for a name, many forces at work and nobody in charge, which sits closer to how minds usually run than the single steady "I" people assume they are. Once the torment is seen as a mob of passing states, it loses the one thing it needed, someone to belong to.

Vimutti: Release Vimutti is the mind let go of what gripped it. Chains and irons had been fastened on this man and torn apart again, because nothing tied from the outside reaches the thing doing the harm. Release shows up here in plain human facts: he is dressed, he is down from the tombs, he is sitting among people rather than howling on the hills.

Samādhi: Collectedness Samādhi is the mind gathered into one place. Sitting is the whole report: a body that ran the slopes night and day and gashed itself on stones has come to rest on the ground. A settled posture follows a settled mind, so the neighbors can read the change from a distance, before a word is spoken.

Sati: Presence of mind Sati is knowing what is happening while it happens. In his right mind he can hear his own name, watch the herdsmen coming up with half the district behind them, and answer when someone speaks to him, none of it possible while he lived among the graves. Presence is ordinary work and it makes no show, which is why the man at the center of this is doing nothing more striking than sitting still.

Bhaya: Fear Bhaya is the flinch of a mind whose footing has shifted. A screaming man in the tombs was a known quantity, dreadful but placed, and the whole district had built its habits around him; a calm one, clothed and conversing, fits nowhere in that arrangement. Their fear stands in the spot where relief belongs, and it hardens quickly into asking Jesus to leave the region.