Chapter 28 Mental Discipline
Judgement was the one emotion that the sage had the most difficulty giving up. As he wandered from village to village he always wondered why some people seemed to have so much and why others had so little. It was in these situations that he sometimes allowed anger to cloud his thinking.
There were many things he had learnt on his journey and one was that if you judge something then you don't understand it. For him it had always been an intellectual concept rather than a true feeling; he understood that the reason he was still judging poverty and the difference between the rich and poor was because there was something about poverty that he did not like about himself.
As he sat in the middle of the village and was surrounded by children he started to realize what it was. The picture of the children took him back to the village of his childhood. He was just like these children, barefoot and poor, but it was his disability that made him feel less than the other children. It really had nothing to do with the poverty. What he really wanted were guarantees. Seeing himself as disabled and disfigured he thought he was less than the other children and he wanted a life of guarantees as all he could see in his future was a life of suffering and judgement; the same judgement that he now proffered on others.
Now he understood, the Tao did not give guarantees. With the benefit of hindsight he could see that it was these difficulties in his earlier life which had given him the experiences and set him up to be the person he would become. It was difficult to watch suffering but with his perception he could see that it was what people needed to grow.
It was difficult to explain to others because they always made the same comment, 'But I would never have chosen that or no one would choose that.' The longer he walked the silent path of the Initiate the less he would come from logic; for logic was often blinkered by the ego and the more he came out of feelings; for it was in feelings that the higher self dwelled.
A young boy in ragged clothes, covered in dirt and snot running from each nostril approached the sage. In the background some of the adults yelled for the boy to leave the sage alone. As the sage looked towards them he could feel that they were embarrassed by the child; for he was from the poorest family in the village, a family so poor that they had no food, or land or even a place to call their own.
The young boy whose name was Quang sat down before the sage. For the longest time the sage did not say anything, preferring to watch the boy and wait for him to speak. The young boy did not know he was poor, only that his parents did not have things to give him like the other children received. To him it did not matter; he was always happy and playful even though he was bullied by the other children and I am sad to say some of the adults. But it mattered not to the young boy. He sat fascinated by the old sage, fascinated by his energy, for the one thing the young boy could feel was energy.
Quang smiled as the energy of the old sage enveloped him. It gave him a warm inner glow. "Tell me a story," asked the young boy his green eyes opened to whatever the sage had to say. The sage looked deeply into the boys jade green eyes and the impression which he received in that moment would last with him forever. He could see a soul that was far older than his, a soul in need of redemption. In a previous lifetime Quang had been a great Emperor who misused his power and the money of his people. He had treated his people without any regard for their needs, taxing them more than any other Emperor in the history of China. In that lifetime he had everything and he was here to redress the imbalance by having nothing in this lifetime.
It is for this very reason that when the soul incarnates that it comes as an empty book, as the good or bad deeds of a previous life, if remembered, would influence what we would become in this lifetime. Anyone with this knowledge may have judged the young boy and wished he suffered like he had made the others suffer in that past lifetime, but not the sage for he could see beyond the one or two lifetimes and what he saw was an eternal, immortal and infinite being who had incarnated at this time to learn lessons that only he and his higher self understood.
The sage smiled to himself; there was no higher or lower only infinite expressions of the Tao.
The sage told him the story of a young by who had been disfigured in a fire and whose disabilities made him the embarrassment of his village. And how one day a great sage came into the village and began to tell him stories and then the young boy became the apprentice to the sage and they travelled all over the country sharing in many adventures.
"Will that ever happen to me," said Quang?
"Who knows said the old sage. If you believe in something enough then anything is possible.
From that day forward the young boy would come and listen to the words and stories of the sage. One morning he arrived wearing clean clothes, they were not new but in much better condition than the old tatty clothes he normally wore. The next day he arrived with a pair of old sandals, but even stranger he arrived with two other young boys who wanted to listen to the old sage. Evidently the young boy had been sharing what he remembered of the Sage's stories with some of the children and for his kindness they shared some of their old clothes with him.
A few more weeks and many of the children from the village were coming to hear the stories and words of the sage. Stories which were shared with the adults by the children around the dinner table. Little did the sage know that these stories were having an effect like the ripples on a pond, directly into the hearts of anyone who heard them.
It was about this time that Quang's father gained work in one of the shops in the village and another person gave him a small house on his farm while he earned enough to rent or buy a place of his own.
The children and now some adults came to hear the old sage's stories. Many stories which were modeled on the many experiences he had as he traversed the land. Over the months that followed the young Quang started to tell stories of his own; mystical stories of dragons and Emperors. The more Quang stepped forward, the more the old sage stepped back. It was as it should be. His original stories had awakened the hearts of the people in the village and Quang was learning about kindness and through his stories he would educate millions of children in the future. He would never become a rich man, but in the way of the Tao, all his needs were met as he wandered the countryside to become one of a handful of legendary storytellers who lived in Ancient China. Stories filled with such heart and tenderness that they have become well known as parables even in our current day.
Stories which take us on the greatest journey that we will ever take, the journey from the head to our heart.
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