Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation) today we look at yet another aspect of our personalities commanding self, highlighted through this tale.
Also as we begin today ‘let us remember this about ‘Attention’. Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
“The Commanding Self” here points to the “mixture of primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, which inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding”.
Written in response to requests for “clarification, interviews, question-and-answer sessions, lectures”, the following section of the book present study theme intended to enable the student to observe the functioning of their own emotional and conditioned responses.
THE DEMON AND THE HAPPY COUPLE
There was once a happily married couple, whom a demon decided to separate. He went first to the wife, in the guise of an old woman, and muttered that her spouse was behaving in a distraught fashion because he was in love with another woman. Then he went to the husband, in the form of a palmist, and told him that his wife was secretly involved with another man.
When the husband went home from his work that evening, it was quite natural that he should be uncomfortable with his wife, and she with him. Because of this tension, however, each concluded that there must be some truth in what he or she had been told.
Of course they were not certain about their suspicions; and the demon knew this and developed another phase of attack. He told the woman that he had a spell which would reclaim her husband’s fidelity. “This,” he said, “can be accomplished by cutting three hairs from his beard. Here is a razor with which to do it.”
Now he told the husband, who was starting to question the truth of the soothsayer’s reading, that his wife would attempt to kill him that very night.
When the man got home, his wife asked him to lie down and rest and he did so, pretending to go to sleep. As soon as she thought it was safe, she took out the razor and advanced upon him with it – and the husband opened his eyes to see this “proof” of her murderous intentions.
The husband, so continues the story, killed his wife, and the neighbors, alarmed and infuriated and panicking, killed him. Finally, everyone in their town took sides and there was a clash in which almost everyone there was killed.
The Commanding Self – Idries Shah
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