Proverbs 17:21 · World English Bible
Proverbs 17:21 Meaning He Who Becomes the Father
He who becomes the father of a fool grieves. The father of a fool has no joy.
What does Proverbs 17:21 mean?
Whatever a mind brings forth in fear it must then live beside as sorrow, for the ego fathers only thoughts of separation, and each one turns to look back at its maker with the same accusing face it was given. The grief here is not punishment sent from outside but the natural weight of having chosen fear as a teacher and called its offspring one's own.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 17:21 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Whatever a mind brings forth in fear it must then live beside as sorrow, for the ego fathers only thoughts of separation, and each one turns to look back at its maker with the same accusing face it was given. The grief here is not punishment sent from outside but the natural weight of having chosen fear as a teacher and called its offspring one's own.
Joy cannot arise from what guilt conceives, because guilt can only reproduce itself. A mind fathers a different world the moment it changes teachers, and thoughts born of love carry no sorrow home, for they were never meant to accuse anyone.
Fool: the thought of separation the mind conceives when fear is its teacher, an idea that returns to burden the one who made it Father: the mind seen as the source of its own thoughts, the power that gives rise to what it will then have to live beside
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Live Proverbs 17:21 today
- When the suspicious story about someone starts writing itself in your head, catch it early and ask if you actually know any of it. You will live with that story all day if you let it finish.
- Before you repeat something unflattering about a person to someone else, let it stop with you. You do not have to raise that thing and then live beside it.
- Under pressure, when the worst reading of what someone did is the easiest one, choose the plainer one instead. It costs the same and it does not follow you home.
What thought have I been feeding that I would not want to live next to much longer?
The same truth in other traditions
Buddhism · Dhammapada
Everything we are follows from what we have thought, and sorrow trails a mind built on harm the way a cart follows the ox. The thought comes first, always.
Hinduism · Bhagavad Gita
What you dwell on becomes what you are drawn toward, and from that comes clinging, and from clinging comes suffering. The chain starts in the mind, so it can end there.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
The soul takes the color of its thoughts, over and over, until that is simply what it is. You will live inside whatever you keep thinking.
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