Luke 15:24 Meaning For This

Death here is not the ending of a body but the state of a mind that has chosen fear and called its own sleep reality. To be dead in this sense is to have forgotten the Source, and to be alive again is simply to remember, for nothing had to be created anew, only awakened. The mind was never destroyed by its wandering; it was only dreaming that it could be.

Lostness and foundness happen in perception alone. What Love calls found was never truly missing from Love's sight, and the joy that breaks out is the natural response of a mind that sees at last it was home all along. The merriment is not relief that a danger passed but the gladness of a truth that was always so.

Son: the mind that mistook its own sleep for death, alive the instant it consents to wake.

To live identified with the ego, cut off from your own depth, is a kind of death even while the body walks around. The son was not physically gone. He had been asleep in unconsciousness, absent from the aliveness of his own Being. To be dead in this sense is to be lost in thought, and to be found is to return to presence.

That is why there is such joy. When a person awakens, when awareness comes home to itself, the life that lay dormant grows vivid again. The gladness is not sentimental. It marks the most real event there is, a human being coming alive to the present moment after a long absence.

The son here is you, the awareness of being, wandering through the states you take on until you remember what you are. Death is not a body in a grave. Death is the stretch of living inside a self so small you forget you are the one who imagines. To be lost is to answer only to your circumstances, to believe the world outside makes you. The father is the awareness that never left, waiting behind every mask you wore.

Coming alive is nothing more than turning around and knowing yourself again as the source. The father does not weigh whether you deserve the welcome. He runs to meet the son the instant the son turns. The whole house grows merry because the return needs no repair and no penance. A person who remembers he is the imaginer has already come home.