Luke 15:15 Meaning He Went and Joined Himself to One

A mind in want will bind itself to whatever the country of separation offers, and what it offers is servitude to fear. Having refused its own inheritance, the wandering part now attaches itself to a master that cannot nourish and sets it to a labor that only deepens its hunger. This is the bondage the ego always gives in place of the freedom it promised: the mind that would not stay a beloved son consents to become a hired hand in a land that starves it.

The work among the swine is the lowest reach of that bondage, tending what a mind so cut off cannot even eat. Yet the depth is telling, for it shows plainly that separation offers no honest home, only harder and emptier tasks, and a mind can sink no further before it is ready to turn back.

The citizen of that country: the ego itself, the master of the land of separation to whom a frightened mind binds itself for supply it cannot give. The fields: the arena of fearful labor, the ground where a mind estranged from love toils without being fed. The swine: the meanest cravings of the separated state, the appetites a lost mind is set to serve yet cannot satisfy.

Having spent everything on the outer world, the son now belongs to it. He attaches himself to a stranger and is sent to feed swine, and this is what happens when you look for your identity entirely outside yourself. You become a servant to form, tending appetites that are not even your own.

The far country is any state of consciousness in which you have forgotten your source. There, work becomes servitude and living becomes the endless maintenance of things that cannot feed you. The more you look for yourself only in outer things, the more completely you end up serving them, and the labor of that service is as empty as feeding swine.