A DONKEY ONCE KICKED ME
Near our township there are a couple of farms and sometimes we used to visit one of the farms, which also had a front shop to sell the farm produce.
The owner Abraham is a very friendly person full of energy working all daylong doing things which seemed endless. In between he manages to say hello and chat with us and say something to make us laugh.
He had a donkey in this farm and he loves it more than he loves his wife, he says. We laugh and say he couldn’t be serious.
“Believe me,” he says, “my wife keeps pushing me all the time. If I sit for a minute to cool my body (he had a huge body like the Sumo wrestlers- I always think of him whenever I see sumo on TV-) she immediately knows it and is quick to put me on my toes on the next job. But my donkey doesn’t bother me. She will stay where I tie her and wait for me without shouting or protesting”
His wife comes around and greets us. He says she is unbelievably smart in everything including cooking all kinds of food and if there was any proof needed all we had to do was to look at him. He laughs fully opening the mouth with some golden teeth shining and illuminating the neighbourhood. His wife laughs too, pointing out his huge belly. She is almost a match to him in size and he feels comfortable in the knowledge that he is not alone in the joy of gigantic proportions.
We are now curious to find out what his donkey looked like. He took us to the farm happy that there were people interested in his darling donkey.
It was a beautiful donkey well groomed with large eyes and an alert nose sensing the presence of strangers and signaling to the brain to be ready to give instructions to its hind legs to kick the intruders if necessary, if they came too close. You could see it positioning the body for such an eventuality when you try to approach it. Whenever you go near its front it will bring its back towards you. Nature provides them the instinct to automatically extend hospitality to any guest, particularly humans. They know that humans come as friends and the next moment they try and climb over them.
Being an active donkey this one was always on the lookout for greener pastures. So he had to tie it with a rope to a post that was hammered in the middle of the open field. He had allowed a long rope to let it wander as far as his field stretched without encroaching upon the neighbour’s field.
While we were there it started moving around grazing here and there. It could move quite a bit but still within the allotted radius. I noticed that it had been moving in clockwise direction. I could see several turns of the rope on the post, wound like a spiral, which has narrowed down its movement to a small radius.
In time it would get completely restricted if it continued in the same line and end up close to the post. That will be a very difficult situation indeed.
If only it could think a bit and see that it was getting restricted, it could perhaps realize that it was still within its capacity to undo this self imposed restriction by simply changing direction and moving counter clock wise.
For some reason donkeys don’t seem to think in such ways as humans do about things which don’t even concern them -like me thinking about the plight of this 4 legged friend about whom I didn’t even know that he existed in my near neighborhood ). For one thing it may not even be aware of it as some thing to be concerned about. Its stomach may be quite full and all the food it needed was perhaps right there closest to the post and by all probability it had never occurred to it that a much wider variety of tasty, nutritious, abundant food was to be found all around just beyond its 20 feet radius which has been deliberately cut off from its reach for the simple reason that it has allowed itself to be tied to the post by its caretaker and owner.
I was stunned. Was I not like that donkey?
In spite of the wonderful unique thinking and decision making apparatus given to me entirely and exclusively for my use if I so wished to use it, how ignorant and inefficient I allow myself to be by letting accumulated dogmas, other people's opinions and unnecessary false conditionings to control me and prevent me from enjoying the freedom of unlimited unbounded awareness of the omnipresent reality lying hidden inside my infinite soul just waiting to be uncovered.
Is there any significant difference between my ignorance in allowing myself to be surrounded by walls meant to protect me but in actual practice mostly isolate and restrict me and the ignorance of this donkey in allowing itself to be tied to the post deceived into believing that the rope lets it wander far and wide.
To experience the unlimited freedom of mindfulness, the open minded state of infinite awareness, it is necessary to cross the boundaries of conditioning that come with every manmade religious, cultural social and other dogma that so easily characterize our life into thinking that it is just part of our karma.
When we do what we do we justify it so easily as our karma. If I am rich it is because of my good karma. If I am poor it is because of my bad karma.
Cause and effect over simplified.
Is it so?
If my wealth is the effect of what I have done before acting as the cause is it not logical that this wealth is also a cause for things to come? Is it not a chain of cause-effect-cause without beginning and end?
In a chain like that, is it not in your power to do something to undo and break the chain if you so wish? Is not such a power built into the chain of reality?
The donkey in front of me had given me such a kick that it had shaken the cobwebs in my attic and made me see some far reaching insights.
I thanked my sumo friend and his darling donkey and left the farm still trying to come to terms with the new found wisdom.
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hasyananda
20.3.2008
