Proverbs 1:19 Meaning So Are the Ways of Everyone

Greed for gain is the belief that a mind can add to itself by subtracting from another, and its result never fails: it takes away the life of the very one who grasps. Every reaching-out to seize turns inward, so the one robbed of aliveness is always the owner of the greedy thought.

The ego promises increase and delivers loss, because there is nothing outside the mind to gain and no one but the self to be diminished by the trying. Peace works the opposite way. It asks for nothing and therefore loses nothing, and a mind that stops grasping discovers it already holds everything it was chasing.

Gain: the increase the ego swears lies outside and can be seized, the pursuit that quietly drains the one who chases it. The owners: the graspers themselves, the minds whose own life is the true cost of every attempt to take.

Greed is the lower appetite reaching outward for more, and the deep harm is that the reaching turns back on the one who reaches. The self that grasps for gain slowly drains the living force it was meant to keep, spending the inner life on things that cannot hold it. The more the outer hand fills, the more the inner man empties.

The owner and the thing owned are one person, the grasping self and the life it drinks from. What looks like winning is a quiet bleeding: the pursuit of getting eats the very vitality of the man who pursues, so the gain arrives and the life is gone.

Owners: the inner self that possesses the life-force and unknowingly consumes it by grasping outward

Lobha: Greed One of the three roots that harmful action grows from. Filling a house with plunder works the way feeding a fire works: more wood, bigger blaze, and the men planning that full house will never walk in and find it full. The ambush is laid for gain, but the wanting was already there before any traveler came down the road.

Ādīnava: The drawback hidden in what attracts Seeing the peril inside a pleasant thing. The common purse offered to the young man shines, and the shine is the entire recruiting pitch, so his father walks him around to the far side of it where the blood is. Bait works because the hook stays out of sight, and looking for the hook is the whole of this practice.

Mamaṅkāra: Mine-making The habit of stamping "mine" onto things. Ownership runs backward in this ditch: the loot in their hands has them by the wrist, and it can take their lives because they handed it that grip themselves. Stolen goods must be guarded, hidden, and fought over, so a man's days come to belong to the goods.

Kamma: Action ripening on the one who acts Deeds bear their fruit for the doer. They crouch in the dark waiting for someone else's blood and it is their own they are waiting for, the way a snare set carelessly closes on the hand that set it. Whether or not the loot ever arrives, lying in that ditch is already the life they have taken up.

Santuṭṭhi: Contentment Being satisfied with enough. Beside a purse that has to keep growing, a content man has nothing to lie in wait for, and nothing lies in wait for him. His wealth cannot be carried off by anyone, because it never rested on the size of the pile in the house.