Mark 5:9 · World English Bible
Mark 5:9 Meaning He Asked Him
He asked him, “What is your name?” He said to him, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
What does Mark 5:9 mean?
Asked to name itself, the torment reveals that it was never one thing but a crowd. This is the nature of fear once it is brought into the light: it has no single face, only a multitude of separate terrors that seemed to fill the whole mind because they were never counted.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
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The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Asked to name itself, the torment reveals that it was never one thing but a crowd. This is the nature of fear once it is brought into the light: it has no single face, only a multitude of separate terrors that seemed to fill the whole mind because they were never counted. What is looked at plainly can no longer pretend to be the self.
The answer exposes the ego's whole strategy. It survives by seeming vast and many, an army where there is really only one mistaken belief endlessly divided against itself. Its overwhelming legion is fragmentation, not power, and a house so divided has no strength to hold against the truth that the mind was always one Self, and whole.
Legion: the belief in separation revealed as a crowd of fears, the ego seeming vast and many where there is only one mistaken thought divided against itself
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Live Mark 5:9 today
- When dread feels like a solid wall, open your notes app and list the separate worries one by one. Four or five named items are a very different thing than one enormous cloud.
- Ask a friend to hear your worry list out loud without fixing any of it. Things shrink considerably when they have to be said in order.
- Before a hard call or review, write down the one outcome you actually fear. Most of the panic was the other twenty you had not bothered to separate out.
If I counted my fears one by one, how many would be left?
The same truth in other traditions
Zhuangzi
Give the thing its outline and it stops being everywhere. Fear fills the whole room only while it refuses a shape.
Buddhism · Naming the Hindrances
To say "this is restlessness, this is doubt" is already to be less ruled by it. Counting the crowd shrinks it.
Stoicism · Seneca
Much of what we dread we have never actually examined. Set it out in plain daylight and most of it turns out to be rumor.
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