Matthew 21:21 Meaning Jesus Answered Them

The power of a mind lies in the certainty it gives its thoughts, and where there is no doubt to divide it, nothing it wills stands against it. Doubt is the ego's single weapon, the belief that the mind is weak and its intentions unsure. Withdraw that belief and the mind discovers it was never bound by the obstacles it thought were solid.

The mountain is any seeming impossibility, the fixed and towering problem the ego insists cannot be moved. To a mind wholly given to love, such things have no more substance than the barren tree, and they dissolve into the depths as easily. What blocks a mind is only its own uncertainty, and where that is healed the way is already clear.

Mountain: the seeming impossibility, the fixed obstacle the ego swears cannot be moved. Sea: the depths into which every unreal barrier dissolves once the mind stops believing in it.

Steady inner conviction, held without the divided pull of doubt, dissolves the great obstacle that stands between a person and spiritual realization. That obstacle is the ego, sitting like a mass of rock across the path, and meditation is what commands it to lift and drop into the churning waters below, where the emotions and the unconscious close over it. (In his fixed key the mountain is the higher realm of consciousness itself; here the verse's own order to remove it reads the immovable ego-mass being cleared.)

The withered fig comes first because the same power that stops the outer fruiting of religion also moves the inner weight. When belief is withdrawn from the carnal, church-fed mind, its leaves dry from the root; and the will that can wither that tree can also cast the ego down into feeling and be free of it.

Fig tree: the outer fruiting mind of religion, which dries up once belief is pulled back from its root. Mountain: the massed ego, the rock of the lower self standing across the inner path. Sea: the churning emotions and the unconscious, the deep that receives what is cast down.