Proverbs 5:11 · World English Bible
Proverbs 5:11 Meaning You Will Groan at Your Latter End
You will groan at your latter end, when your flesh and your body are consumed,
What does Proverbs 5:11 mean?
The mourning comes when a mind has staked everything on the body and watched the body fail, as bodies do. This is not a punishment for wrong living but the natural grief of having asked a thing of the flesh that only the mind could give.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 5:11 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
The mourning comes when a mind has staked everything on the body and watched the body fail, as bodies do. This is not a punishment for wrong living but the natural grief of having asked a thing of the flesh that only the mind could give. The ego points to the body's decay as proof that loss is real, when it is only proof that the wrong teacher was trusted.
The body was never where the self was. A mind that learns this before the last hour is spared the sorrow of learning it too late.
Flesh and body: the ego's chosen home, mistaken for the self, whose fading it uses to make loss seem certain.
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Live Proverbs 5:11 today
- The next time you catch your own reflection and feel the small sting of aging, stay there a second longer and ask who is doing the looking. That one is not getting older.
- Spend time with someone whose body is failing them and talk to the person, not the illness. They are still entirely there.
- When tiredness or pain makes the day feel like a verdict on your life, separate the two. The body is having a hard afternoon, and that is all it is.
Who am I when the body I have been identified with is not doing well?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Epictetus
You are not your body, you are the one using it. Mistake the two and every change in it will feel like the end of you.
Buddhism · the first of the three marks
Everything made of parts comes apart. Grief is not caused by that fact but by asking the parts to be permanent.
Hinduism · Bhagavad Gita 2
The one who dwells in the body is not touched by what happens to it, as a person changing clothes is not changed. Learn this early and the fading is not a loss of self.
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