Matthew 24:12 Meaning Because Iniquity Will Be Multiplied

Love does not fail on its own; it grows cold only where the mind has been taught to expect attack. As guilt accumulates and is believed, the heart pulls in its warmth to defend itself, and this contraction is called prudence when it is only fear. A mind convinced the world is dangerous protects itself by loving less, not knowing that the protection is the wound.

Yet love cannot actually cool, for it is what the mind is; only its awareness dims behind a wall of self-defense. The remedy is never to summon more feeling but to lay down the belief in danger, for love returns the instant the mind stops rehearsing why it must be withheld.

Many: the many minds, each one a place where love is either remembered or covered over by fear.

As the crooked and lawless energy multiplies in a person, the warmth at the heart-center drops and feeling hardens into ice. Iniquity is the inner distortion, the bent condition of a mind out of true, and where it spreads the loving faculty loses its fire the way a lamp starved of oil loses its flame. Cold love is not hate but the numbness that creeps in when the higher energy is spent on disorder.

The measure of a person's fall is the temperature of the heart. When the lawless impulses fill the field of thought, the many faculties that once burned toward the center go slack and chill, and the man feels less because the fuel of feeling has been diverted. This is the quiet dimming that precedes the deeper sleep, warmth leaving the inner house.

Many: the crowd of feeling faculties within a person, whose collective warmth cools as inner disorder spreads