What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the paradox that often society misjudges depth and meaning, valuing the superficial instead.
In this quote, Dallas Willard explores the ironic nature of perception, suggesting that what is profound and meaningful is frequently dismissed as uninteresting or trivial, while shallow thoughts are erroneously revered as deep. He uses the metaphor of 'flying upside down' to illustrate this reverse understanding, indicating that we often navigate through life misinterpreting true wisdom and depth.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion about the nature of knowledge.
The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.
The first act of love is always the giving of attention.
So many people would like to have guidance from God because obviously, if you have a word from God, it's the best possible thing. But they don't relate that to life as a whole. Often they want guidance as a way of opting out of the responsibility of making decisions.
The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
Zionism itself has paradoxically come to adopt some antisemitic logic in its hatred of Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the state of Israel. Their target, the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project, is constructed in the same way as the European antisemites constructed the figures of the Jew – he is dangerous because he lives among us, but is not really one of us.
...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep.
I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master
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