Proverbs 23:5 Meaning Why Do You Set Your Eyes

The mind is asked why it fixes its sight on what has no substance. What the ego stores has no reality to hold it in place, so it slips away exactly as a dream dissolves when the sleeper begins to wake. To grieve its going is to have believed it was ever there.

A mind that has staked its peace on such things watches them vanish and calls it loss, when nothing real can leave and nothing that leaves was real. The steadiness a person longs for is not in what flies away but in the changeless love that could never be taken.

Riches: the ego's treasure, the appearances the mind grips as if they could make it safe Wings: the built-in vanishing of everything unreal, the way illusions carry themselves off Eagle: the swift and effortless flight of what has no substance, the dream lifting out of sight

Anything a person stares at long enough will look big enough to organize a life around, including things that are not there.

A fortune gets its weight from how long a man looks at it. Fix the eyes on a number and it inflates until it can run a calendar, a marriage, and a decade, and the inflation registers as importance. Urgency follows, urgency spends the hours, and the hours go into something whose entire mass came from being watched.

Aiming the correction at the eyes rather than at the money is the practical move, because wanting less is nearly impossible on demand while looking elsewhere can be done this afternoon. The man who never moves his gaze discovers at the end that the thing had wings, and the years he fed into it left with it.