Matthew 15:6 Meaning He Shall Not Honor His Father

A mind can build a rule that lets it withhold love and still feel righteous, and this is the ego's oldest trick, to dress refusal in the clothing of principle. What was meant to join is turned into a reason to keep back, and the mind congratulates itself on obedience while its heart stays closed.

So the living truth is emptied by the habit laid over it. Love was the whole content of the command, and a tradition that excuses the mind from loving has quietly cancelled the only thing that mattered. When a rule becomes a way to justify withholding, it no longer serves God at all, however holy it looks.

Father and mother: the near ones the mind is meant to love and honour, the closest place where love is either extended or refused.

Father and mother here are the inherited moods and fixed opinions a person is born into, the handed-down outlook he honors without question. Tradition is the settled habit of judging by appearances, of letting yesterday's conclusions decide today. When a person honors these above the living command working within him, that inner command is made powerless, canceled by the weight of what he already assumes.

The commandment of God is the creative word rising in a person, the imagination that would remake his world if it were obeyed. It is emptied of effect whenever old habit is trusted more than present assumption. What a person honors rules him. The past he refuses to drop is the only thing standing between him and the freedom already offered.

Inherited habit can be raised so high that it silences the living inner law, and when handed-down custom is honored above the deeper commandment written within, the true voice is cancelled. Father and mother here stand for the received teachings and old conditioning a person carries, the authorities of the past pressing on the mind. When these are made supreme, the direct inner knowing is left with no force, its power emptied out by the weight of tradition. The finer commandment does not shout; it is easily buried under rules kept only because they were always kept. What is exposed is a mind that has traded its own living guidance for the dead machinery of habit.

When a person bows to inherited custom above the inner law, the deeper guidance is drained of all its effect.

Father: the received teaching and inherited authority pressing on a person Mother: the old conditioning and handed-down custom a person carries