Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), This week again let me bring to your attention an interesting excerpt from this thought provoking work, ‘Knowing How to Know’, by Idries Shah. In this work the author draws our attention to concealed patterns, normally invisible to our customary modes of thought.
Excerpt:
The Spice-Market
I get letters all the time from people who think like the monkey with his clenched fist in the bottle.
The fist, in these cases, is the rigidity of their thought. ‘I have this,’ they say, ‘and I just want the other.’
In the fable, though the monkey possessed a cherry, or a nut, or something, he could not do anything with it because of the bottle. In some versions a hunter creeps up on the hampered apes and captures him, cherry and all…
Although the letters are frequent enough to keep my mind on this subject, I have just another one, from a man to whom something similar actually happened, and I want to share the story with you.
This man, as he freely admits, is and was rather a miser. He lives in a Middle Eastern city, which has a spice market.
Too stingy to buy spices to flavor his rice, the man used to go out and trail his cloak near the open sacks of ground spices, so that enough of the powder would adhere to it for him to dust off at home and put in his food.
He did this for something like a quarter of a century, and nobody ever suspected him, although the shopkeepers knew his face well enough.
One day recently, there was a robbery, and large quantities of spices were stolen. The police, looking for suspects, were told by some children that the miser always smelt of spices, though they never had seen him buying any.
He was interrogated, and at first refused to say why his clothes smelt as they did. When arrested on suspicion and taken to court, the miser confessed the truth. Nobody believed him, and he was fined an enormous sum: more than he would have spent on spices for the whole of his life, if he had got them in the normal way.
Now he writes to me. Guess what he says? ‘Is there no justice in the world, that an innocent man can be convicted on circumstantial evidence?’
He hasn’t even realized that he is a thief.
Now here we have nature imitating art, a true event paralleling fiction in the real world.
You can buy your copy from any of the bookstores near you or via any on-line portal selling books or also by clicking the following link:
Concluding today’s session.
Let us remember: 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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Pandora | iHeartRadio | JioSaavn | Podchaser | Gaana | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS