The story of the Prodigal Son ties in neatly, Doctor.  It's a story of the ego.  You can be led by it;  look what happens.  You go and squander everything.  And  then finally after all that, you return.  To your father and brother, to your true self, your true Atman nature.  You return to the way of the Universe, to abundance rather than scarcity, to a better place psychologically.

That was my problem.  Not that this was what I was intent on...  Not that I even was ever that much of a big egomaniac.  In fact, I don't think I was.  I was a pretty agreeable guy, a bit shy.  Not a particularly big ego, strangely enough, by most people's standards.   But the ego comes out.  It comes out when you don't want it to.  Because it has to protect itself, against the real truth, which we can only see by being very much in touch with our deeper imaginations.   Hard stuff to talk about.  But the ego makes you act out, in a way different from the way you want.  And it's your own ego that's the hindrance, the most frustrating thing, a cloud that hangs over you.  No wonder.  It defends itself, makes you do dumb things against your own interest.  What is it defending?  Itself.

And then the habitual way leads you to a certain kind of approach or habit, also subtly reinforcing the ego.

This is why one has to go think long and hard.  Why Jesus went out into the desert, or Buddha went through his ascetic starve-himself period.   It's like you have to cleanse yourself.

Maybe that's why I wrote that book, to kind of lay it all out for myself, like, what went wrong, what would I do differently now, how would I see things...  What is the ego?  What is me?

But, you still are living in that state, even if you don't see it, where your true self can find its way.  And, of course, the way things are isn't as bad as you've been making them out to be.  It's just your ego, again, hanging crepe, being habitually dramatic.

So things are reasonably okay, I guess.  Just have to make the best of things.  Live and learn.  Maybe it all works out, because you have to learn these things the only way you can, by going through them.

So when is it ego?  When is it the real you?  The real you goes with the flow, right?  But it has to be healthy and do healthy things...  You have to recalibrate your perceptions and your habits, I guess....

The universe is healing who I really am.  It's telling this entity I am to let go and be content.  To find good things that way.

But struggling against the beast of ego, I can see why I'm not very social on my days off...

It's nice to wake up not feeling so down about everything, you know...  Like not dwelling on the past, and thinking, well, truly thinking, things work out.  Takes something to get you there....

That's what you'd want a story to be about, you know...  The real potential in human beings, what they could become if they shed their egos, to be their true, like, yoga Atman selves.    What would that look like?  Happy ever after?  Something from Madison Avenue on the cover of a Brooks Brothers Catalog?  No.  I don't think so.  But still, even with all the poor suffering that might be involved with bucking the trend to be the big success, economically, professionally, maritally, even with all that, maybe a human being can flourish and be something, something like Jesus was...

Christianity bears a subtle warning, don't try this at home, does it not?  Don't want to end up like Him...  The Bhagavad Gita tells us to fight back, take the yoga path, and that's better than just sitting there hiding under the bed, go out and slay, the yogi way.

But how do we imagine what that enabled freed person might look like?  We'd have to trace him back to his roots, watch him grow, and then, yeah, wait and see, what kind of person he turns out to be.  It's like it would have to be expressed in art, in some form of biography, but one with a claim as to what that biographical history might represent, how to interpret, how to interpret 'the Idiot,' or, whoever he is...  (Was poor old Van Gogh up to that, before the cadmium got to his nervous system?)



Barrooms are, of course, places of ego.  That's what makes them so troublesome.  The peddling of the bad influences, the supposed pleasures...

And the story of what happens to Christ, it's like a real-time account of all the egos...  Egos, egos, egos.  No wonder we all have to side with Him.  And maybe He is telling us that these battles do play out in real life, that they are real.  That you are called to join the battle, by being the real person.

But, you know, as I think about, as an aside here, where was he as a young man?  How did he manage  the keep a low profile?  What was he up to, what was he like?  There have been sketches in various Gnostic gospels, but, maybe he was away in India or something...   What was he like as a student, ha ha ha...