There was once a man who had two sons; and the younger said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the property.’ So he divided his estate between them. A few days later the younger son turned the whole of his share into cash and left home for a distant country, where he squandered it in reckless living. He had spent it all, when a severe famine fell upon that country and he began to feel the pinch. So he went and attached himself to one of the local landowners, who sent him on to his farm to mind the pigs. He would have been glad to fill his belly with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. Then he came to his senses and said, ‘How many of my father’s paid servants have more food than they can eat, and here am I, starving to death! I will set off and go to my father, and say to him: Father, I have sinned, against God and against you; I am no longer fit to be called your son; treat me as one of your paid servants.’ 

So he set out for his father’s house. But while he was still a long way off his father saw him, and his heart went out to him. He ran to meet him, flung his arms round him and kissed him. The son said, ‘Father, I have sinned, against God and against you; I am no longer fit to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! fetch a robe, my best one, and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet. Bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us have a feast to celebrate the day. For this son of mine was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found.’ And the festivities began.

Now the elder son was out on the farm; and on his way back, as he approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked what it meant. The servant told him, ‘Your brother has come home, and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and pleaded with him; but he retorted, ‘You know how I have slaved for you all these years; I never once disobeyed your orders; and you never gave me so much as a kid, for a feast with my friends. But now that this son of yours turns up, after running through your money with his women, you kill the fatted calf for him.’ – ‘My boy’, said the father, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. How could we help celebrating this happy day? 

Your brother here was dead and has come back to life, was lost and is found. ~ Joshua Emmanuel the Christ

For me, this is the most important parable. It contains the very essence of truth. What did the son say to his father? ‘Give me my share of the property.’ What is his property? Mind – everything that is Mind, including matter. The ‘younger son’ is a soul passing through the Idea of Man, the Human Idea. The elder son is an Archangel. He also has his share of the property, which means that Archangels are using Mind, too. So our brothers who stayed with the Father have their ‘share’ – which is Mind. The ‘younger son’ – that is: ‘human beings’ – spends his share on ‘reckless living’ – experiences in the worlds of separation.

As Joshua describes it, the Lords of matter, the Lords of Separation, had him as their slave. They sent him out to look after the pigs. What are those ‘pigs’? The elementals he had created. And he was content to eat the food those pigs were eating. That refers to the filthy combination of the low elementals, which pollute mind and emotion. These are the elementals which Joshua called ‘deaf and dumb spirits’ (Mark 9:25) .

But then he came to his senses. ‘What is this that I am eating?’ he said. ‘What are all those thoughts and emotions I have? Do they satisfy me? I am   eating the same food as the pigs.’ So he decided to leave and go back to his Father.

This is another very important point. All the while he was thinking those thoughts, his father knew it. Then he started thinking how to behave towards his father. ‘Am I worthy to be his son? Let me go back and sell myself into his service.’ But when he had taken some steps towards his father, the father rushed to him and embraced him. So the father is waiting for his return.

What did he say, the Father? He told the Archangels to dress him, in the best clothes he had. ‘You are my son’, He said, ‘you are not a servant. You are a son!’ What is meant by ‘a servant’? The elementals of the Archangels, the angels. They are the ‘servants’. He gave him his own best clothes. He didn’t deprive the Archangels of their best clothes. Then he put a ring on his finger.

An Archangel only gets a ring on his finger when he returns as a Self-Realized Being, after going through the human experience. I have contacted the Archangels many times and I tried to make them understand time, what we humans know as past, present and future. ‘We are in the Eternal Now’, they reply. They understand the Eternal Now, for they have always existed ‘now’, they exist ‘now’ and they always will exist ‘now’. So they do not understand past, present and future. What interests them is their work and the Truth, expressing their nature as they are, without understanding time.

The ring on his finger is symbolizing the knowledge and understanding of eternity. Eternity is movement without beginning and without end. Infinite Beingness is eternal motion. Suppose somebody moves on a ring, he will move eternally without having a beginning and an end. This is the sense of eternity. A human being moving on the ring, can understand the nature of past, present and future. But for a being at the centre of the ring, and the movement – as the Archangels are – there is no past, present, and future, only the Eternal Now. In the parable of the prodigal son, it is stated clearly, that when the prodigal son returned home, first the father sacrificed the well-fed animal, that means the material body; ‘flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of heavens’ (1 Cor. 15:50) . This is obvious. Then the father gave him the best dress he had for a prince, the same dress that the Archangel – the elder brother had. There is no distinction between them in that. But when the prodigal son was given a ring on his finger, his father made him different from the Archangels in heaven.

So the ‘elder brother’ (which means all the orders of the Archangels) is complaining, ‘You never offered me a sacrifice.’ But the Archangel never had a material body to sacrifice. As we said, the ‘fatted calf’ means the material body. His father told him, ‘You are working as a lord of the elements for humans and for animals, but they are not yours. So you have nothing to kill. But he, my younger son, has dressed himself with matter.’ Sacrificing, killing a ‘fatted calf’ means killing the involvement with matter. The elder brother, the Archangel, had never enslaved himself to matter, so he had never needed even a ‘baby goat’ to be sacrificed to set him free. ‘So why do you complain?’ the Father asked. ‘Everything I have, is it not also yours? You have not been deprived of anything that is yours.’

The Archangel never used Mind in the way humans are using it, projecting elementals, good and bad. In this way, human beings learn lessons leading eventually to their return to Absolute Beingness, the Father, with the knowledge and understanding to be accepted as a child of God.