Matthew 23:15 · World English Bible
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves.
The ego is tireless in spreading itself, and what it spreads is its own fear dressed as conviction. A mind convinced of its separation will cross any distance to win agreement, because company in the belief feels like proof, and each new follower is handed the same guilt the teacher never healed, only doubled.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
The same verse, read by 2 traditions.
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
The ego is tireless in spreading itself, and what it spreads is its own fear dressed as conviction. A mind convinced of its separation will cross any distance to win agreement, because company in the belief feels like proof, and each new follower is handed the same guilt the teacher never healed, only doubled.
What one teaches, one strengthens in oneself. The zeal that travels sea and land is guilt seeking reinforcement, and it makes the taught more bound than the teacher because inherited fear carries no memory of a gentler choice. The only teaching that frees is the one the teacher has accepted first, for a mind can pass on only the peace it has actually let in.
Sea and land: the whole reach of the world the ego will travel to find agreement for its fear, the outer search that stands in for the inward change it avoids. Proselyte: the mind newly enrolled in the belief in separation, the follower handed a borrowed guilt heavier than the one who gave it.
ESOTERIC
The Bible teachers and the religious literalists cross every water and stretch of ground to win a single convert, and what they hand him is not the kingdom within but their own system of fear. A child of hell is action driven out of the lower carnal mind and the ego, and that is what gets multiplied: the convert takes on the teacher's fear and doubles it.
What travels across the sea of the emotions and the land of outer circumstance is the anxious literal reading, and it takes deeper hold in the one who receives it. Second-hand fear grows stronger than the fear it came from, because the convert never learned to look inside where God actually dwells.
Sea: the moving emotional waters a person crosses to reach others Land: the solid ground of outer circumstance, the visible world religion works across Child of hell: action born of the lower carnal mind and the ego, here doubled in the one who takes on another's fear
Christian Psychology lens
What am I urging on other people that I have not yet made peace with myself?
The sage teaches without piling up words, and leads by having first become quiet inside. Where there is still striving to convince, there is nothing yet worth passing on.
A teacher can hand on only what they have actually tasted. Secondhand certainty becomes a heavier cage for the student than it ever was for the one who built it.
Do not talk about your principles, live them, and let people meet the result. The loud missionary urge is usually a sign the lesson is unfinished at home.
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Christian Psychology
Esoteric