Matthew 21:19 Meaning Seeing a Fig Tree by the Road

A mind can wear the whole appearance of life and yield nothing that nourishes. The tree full of leaves and empty of fruit is the ego's display, the show of righteousness with no love inside it, the form of holiness that feeds no one. What looks alive from the road is barren where it counts, because it grew for the sake of being seen rather than for the sake of giving.

What has no reality cannot be sustained, and when the mind withdraws its belief from the empty show, the show falls away. This is not punishment but the simple end of a thing that never lived. Only what bears the fruit of love goes on; the rest was always leaves.

Fig tree: the ego's outward display of holiness, all appearance and no substance. Leaves: the show of righteousness that hides an inner emptiness, the form without the love. Fruit: the giving that proves a mind is truly alive, the love that actually nourishes.

The fig tree is a state of mind that shows only appearances and yields nothing a person can live on, all leaves and no fruit. The word spoken to it is the word of one who has awakened to the fact that his own assumption is law. He refuses that barren state permanently and it withers. A state holds its life only from the attention given it, and withdrawn attention is death to it.

The fig tree cannot answer back, and it makes no difference that fruit was out of season. The redeemed word does not wait. When a person turns from a condition that feeds him nothing and declares he is done with it, giving it no further belief, the condition dries at the root. What a person stops sustaining in himself cannot go on standing.

The fig tree is a person whose life makes a full show of leaves and yet bears no inner fruit, all outward religion and no awakened awareness within. The higher self, hungry for real substance, comes and finds only the display, the covering foliage of belief and observance with nothing ripened underneath. When such a state is seen for what it is, it withers; a way of being that only performs and never bears cannot last, and it dries from the root once the light of awareness falls on its emptiness.

Leaves without fruit is a life crowded with religious appearance but empty of any real inner change. What happens is that such barren display, once seen clearly, simply dries up and falls away.

Fig tree: a person's whole religious life, leafed out in appearance yet meant to bear real inner fruit Leaves: the outward show of belief and observance, the covering that hides an emptiness beneath