Christ Taught Freedom

It’s important to realize when Jesus told the parable of the lost son, he was offering a map of your mind. His teaching of the human mind is true whether you identify as a Christian or not.

There are three aspects of the mind Jesus focused on and he gave them familiar labels (father, older brother, younger brother). The father represents the top-down manager of your mind and the sons are the grunts. The human mind is hierarchical.

The father aims to maintain the status quo, the privileged older brother is stuck in the status quo, and the younger brother is capable of freeing himself from the status quo to explore other realities.

Life is not about working a nine-to-five job for decades with occasional vacations, looking forward to a retirement which cannot deliver on the hope. Many people at least partially realize this, but they are (psychologically) stuck. Much like how the older son is stuck in the parable.

One of the biggest sticking points is the false idea that it’s all-or-nothing. It’s the idea that if you even open the door to identifying with the younger brother, then you are at risk of losing all the progress and investment you’ve made in the life of the older brother. The truth is that once you’ve established the routine of your daily working life (older brother), then you can maintain it on autopilot while engaging the younger brother aspect of life.

You can live a double life where you are obeying and maintaining the status quo while undermining it at the same time. This is how you incrementally inch your way toward the freedom to access a better reality.

The cost: more effort will be required and you will have to lower yourself from the privileged position of the older son to identify with the younger.