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Proverbs 6:14 · World English Bible

Proverbs 6:14 Meaning In Whose Heart Is Perverseness

in whose heart is perverseness, who devises evil continually, who always sows discord.

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What does Proverbs 6:14 mean?

The crookedness was never in the gestures; it lives in the heart, in the mind's own deep decision to see separation everywhere. From that one choice the ego devises without pause, because guilt must keep manufacturing reasons to feel wronged, and it scatters discord the way a hand scatters seed, so the division it believes in seems confirmed on every side.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 6:14 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

The crookedness was never in the gestures; it lives in the heart, in the mind's own deep decision to see separation everywhere. From that one choice the ego devises without pause, because guilt must keep manufacturing reasons to feel wronged, and it scatters discord the way a hand scatters seed, so the division it believes in seems confirmed on every side.

All of this is one mind at war with itself, dressed as a quarrel between many. Trace the discord back to its single source and there is only a frightened mind to be comforted, and the sowing stops for want of a field.

Heart: the deep place of decision in the mind, the level where the choice for separation is actually made Discord sown: the inner split cast outward like seed, conflict scattered abroad so the belief in division looks true

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Proverbs 6:14 today

  1. When you catch yourself building the case against someone in your head, rehearsing the argument you will win, stop the rehearsal. That courtroom only ever has one person in it.
  2. In one conversation today, be the person who does not pass the tension along. Someone hands you irritation, you set it down instead of handing it to the next person.
  3. If you are the one feeling wronged in a meeting or a family dinner, ask yourself what is actually frightened in you right now. Answer that quietly, and the fight loses most of its fuel.

Which argument am I having inside that I keep trying to hold outside?

The same truth in other traditions

Dhammapada

It says that all we are arises from what we have thought. The outer quarrel starts as an inner one, and the inner one is where it can be put down.

Buddhism

The second arrow is the one we fire ourselves. The first event may come from outside, but the long suffering is built at home.

Sufism · Rumi

He opens the Masnavi with a reed cut from the reed bed, crying ever since for the place it was torn from. The whole complaint is about a separation that the reed keeps alive by believing in it.

Mid-century illustration of Jesus teaching the crowd on a hillside above the sea

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