Spiritual Treasures

So then following on from that, there is the parents' material wealth.

So what does that symbolize? It might be a bit confusing to find that in a Buddhist story.

Well, it symbolizes kind of more the father's or the parent's spiritual treasures, really.

So his great wealth shows that he's living from that place of growth and development where he wants to offer something.

He wants to find his son.

He wants to offer some of his riches and some of what he's learned rather than simply satisfying his basic needs.

So he's coming from a much wider, higher perspective, the father.

And then the father or the parent never forgets his child.

He always thinks of him, longs for a reunion.

So you can look at that as the parent sort of seeing the child suffering from this wider perspective and his potential to overcome it.

And although the son or the child from a small perspective is unaware of all of this and full of fear in relationship life it's kind of has this tunnel vision the parent can see the potential and they can try and help them so in a way we can think of the father and son or the parent and child as two also we could think of them as two unintegrated aspects of the same person of us maybe you know sometimes we have these aspects of feeling very low in confidence and then we might be very confident in another area of our lives.

And in a way, we need to bring those parts of ourselves closer together.

And that can sometimes take quite some time and quite some hard work to kind of heal and make it possible for that person to live life to their full potential and to develop our minds to their full potential.

One example from philosophy, I suppose, would be, some of you might have come across this Plato's parable of the cave.

Have any of you come across that? So it's basically a parable where some people are living inside a cave, and quite a dark cave, a little bit of light coming in from the top, and can only see shadows on the walls, people moving about, sort of outside a cave up there.

And they think that the shadows are all there is, that the cave where they live, the quite claustrophobic cave, is all there is, and the shadows are actually the only other beings there are.

And they can't see the whole wider, bigger world outside.

So it's a little bit like that, the father and the son.

So the people from outside the cave need to find a way of showing the people in the cave.

Actually, there's much more.

The people in the cave themselves don't have that vision.

They can only see where they are.

They're sort of trapped in their small state of mind.