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 FISHERMAN’S NEIGHBOR
There was once a poor fisherman, who just managed to keep body and soul together, through his work.
One day he cast his net and brought up a fish with a golden ring in it. He took this ring to the king, as that was all he could think of doing with it. The king who was delighted, gave him much more than the ring was worth, but in the form of bags of small change, which were more useful to a fisherman, and moreover, something which he could understand better.
When he got home, the fisherman asked his small son to go to the neighbors to borrow his weights and scales, to weigh the money.
The neighbor, thinking of himself as very clever, and having decided to find out whatever he could about the fisherman, smeared some fat on the pan of the scales. “Whatever he has, some of it will stick to the fat and I’ll know what he has in the house,” he thought. Sure enough, when the scales were returned, there was a silver coin sticking to the fat.
Now the neighbor decided that he must discover how the fisherman had got hold of money: so much money, indeed, that he had to weigh it. He and his wife took it in turns to lurk outside the fisherman’s window, so that they could hear what they could hear.
Now they were both a bit deaf, but would not admit it.
While he was listening, the neighbor heard the fisherman discussing with his wife what he had done. He understood everything except that instead of “a gold ring taken to the king,” he thought the fisherman had said: “a whole load of cats”- because, in their language, the two phrases sounded very similar.
He went home at once, and spent several days rounding up as many cats as he could. Then he took them to the king. When they were released in the throne-room, they went wild; bit people scratched the valuable draperies. The fisherman’s neighbor was, of course, flung into a dungeon.
Entering into an enterprise without the requisite basis will, more often than not, turn out something like this.
People do not understand this because they attribute other causes to what is always, in fact, their own lack of correct preparation. In the case of the fisherman’s neighbor, of course, he did not learn a lesson from his greed and deafness, since he was able to blame the fisherman for “knowing that he was there and deliberately deceiving him.”
But we are not like that, are we?
The Commanding Self – Idries Shah
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