Matthew 12:30 Meaning He Who Is Not with Me Is

There is no neutral ground between fear and love, for they are not two points on one road but two whole ways of seeing, and the mind is always looking through one or the other. To imagine a middle place is only the ego's wish to keep its foothold while pretending to reach for the light.

Every thought either joins or divides. A mind that gathers sees the one interest all share and draws them together; a mind that scatters sees separate bodies with separate stakes and cuts the world to pieces. So the choice is not between good behavior and bad but between wholeness and fragmentation, chosen again in every instant.

The reading names two ways of seeing rather than symbols; where a verse carries no figure that stands for something in the mind, the key is left unwritten.

The me that must be joined is a person's own imagination, the one power that shapes his world. To be with it is to give it undivided belief, to trust the unseen assumption over every report of the senses. To be against it is to hedge, to keep back a portion of faith for the outer facts, and that reserved doubt is the whole opposition. A person is either wholly identified with the power within or he is working against himself.

Gathering is the quiet inner speech that collects a life around one settled premise, the words a person says to himself from the feeling that his wish is already fulfilled. Scattering is the divided mind that speaks from the premise of lack and pulls its own world apart. Whatever a person is not building inwardly toward one accepted end, he is undoing. His world is fashioned by the conversations he keeps having inside, not by his effort outside.