Numbers 13:32 · World English Bible
They brought up an evil report of the land which they had spied out to the children of Israel, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people who we saw in it are men of great stature.
Whatever a crowd agrees is impossible becomes impossible, because the agreement ends the only test that could settle it. The words chosen to describe a place install a picture, the picture sets the state, and a camp waking up in terror will always vote to go backward.
From the Self-Help reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SELF-HELP
Whatever a crowd agrees is impossible becomes impossible, because the agreement ends the only test that could settle it.
The words chosen to describe a place install a picture, the picture sets the state, and a camp waking up in terror will always vote to go backward. Height was measured accurately. The meaning attached to the measurement was manufactured, and meaning is what people act on.
A description repeated often enough stops functioning as a description and starts functioning as a border, a fence the mind mistakes for the horizon. Nobody has to guard it. The land itself never stopped a single person; a sentence about the land stopped everyone, and a generation died of it within walking distance of what they had been promised.
Self-Help lens
What have you called impossible so many times that you stopped checking?
A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The word about a thing is not the thing, though people spend lives arguing with the word.
Strip away the story and describe only what is in front of you. Most of what frightens us was added in the telling.
The frog in the well explains the size of the sky with total confidence. The walls were the well's, not the sky's.
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