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Proverbs 6:28 · World English Bible

Proverbs 6:28 Meaning Or Can One Walk on Hot Coals

Or can one walk on hot coals, and his feet not be scorched?

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What does Proverbs 6:28 mean?

Again the mind is shown its own experience and asked to admit it. A mind cannot walk a path of grievances and expect the walking to leave it whole; each judgment it steps on marks it, and the pain it feels is the record of where it has chosen to tread.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 6:28 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

Again the mind is shown its own experience and asked to admit it. A mind cannot walk a path of grievances and expect the walking to leave it whole; each judgment it steps on marks it, and the pain it feels is the record of where it has chosen to tread. The ground does not burn a mind that never walks there.

The kindness in this question is that it locates the fire in the choosing, not in some cruelty of the world. If the coals are the mind's own condemnations, then the mind is not their victim but their maker, and what it makes it can lay down. To see this is to understand that the road itself was chosen, and that another road was always open.

Hot coals: the grievances and judgments the mind chooses to walk upon, each one marking it with the pain of its own condemnation. Feet: the mind in motion, the part of it that chooses which ground to tread and carries the cost of that choice.

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Proverbs 6:28 today

  1. Watch your commute or your first scroll of the morning for how many small verdicts you hand out. Each one costs you something you have been blaming on the day.
  2. With the family member who always sets you off, try one conversation without the running commentary in your head. Same person, different ground underfoot.
  3. When work gets tense and you start sorting people into right and wrong, stop and deal with the actual problem instead. The problem is usually smaller than the sorting.

How much of today's pain came from the road I chose to walk?

The same truth in other traditions

Dhammapada

All that we are arises from what we have thought. Walk a path of bitter thoughts and the pain follows you like a shadow.

Stoicism · Epictetus

It is not events that wound people but their judgments about events. Change where you walk and the ground stops burning.

Taoism · Zhuangzi

The one who insists on being right carries a weight nobody put there. Set the judgment down and the road is easy again.

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