Skip to main content

Imprisonment


Parable

Manav was arrested and thrown into a dark dungeon.  No one told him what his crime was.  When they hurled him into the dark cell whose door shut with a bang, all that he could see was a beam of light passing through a slit-like ventilator at the top of one of the walls.  Silence and darkness enveloped him.

He stretched his body and touched the narrow sill of the ventilator.  He pulled himself up and looked out through the ventilator.  The light outside helped dispel some of his gloom. 

He spent most of his time and energy doing the same thing day after day, without once caring to explore the darkness in the cell. 

If only he had explored the darkness, he would have discovered that the door was not locked.

What stood between him and his freedom was his obstinate clinging to the narrow slit.


Acknowledgement: This parable is adapted from Sheldon B. Kopp’s book, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2014 at 6:52 PM

    Wow ! Such a nice parable. I haven't read the book.. would you recommend.. what is it about ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 6, 2014 at 7:11 PM

      The subtitle of the book is: "The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients". the author takes examples from classical literary works such as Shakespeare's Othello, Kafka's K, and Don Quixote to analyse certain psychological problems of people in quest of meaning in life. The author's basic premise is that an adult cannot be a disciple: hence kill the Buddha (that's Zen koan). Neither a spiritual guru nor a psychotherapist can reveal your truth; you have to discover it for yourself, the guru and the therapist can be lamp posts on the way...

      the book is fairly good. On a scale of 5, I'd give it 3.5 rating. The problem is that there's a tendency for the author to seek popularity at times... Secondly, the book was published in 1972 and psychology has undergone much change after that.

      Delete
  2. Anita SabatFebruary 6, 2014 at 7:18 PM

    Gosh! He could have escaped...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 6, 2014 at 7:22 PM

      Exactly, Anita. That's just the point. Now, please transfer the metaphor to our life!

      Delete
  3. RajlakshmiFebruary 7, 2014 at 1:06 PM

    And this is how we miss out.on life... We cling to one thing and forget that there's a whole different world ... a different aspect of life.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 7, 2014 at 4:03 PM

      Let me quote Kopp: "... we are defeated not only by the narrowness of our perspectives, and our fear of the darkness..."

      Delete
  4. ManiparnaFebruary 7, 2014 at 3:34 PM

    Nice parable..

    How we miss things in life..sigh..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 7, 2014 at 4:04 PM

      A whole big world remains unexplored because of our clinging to something...

      Delete
  5. Bushra MuzaffarFebruary 8, 2014 at 5:58 AM

    I so agree with the author's disdain to cling to the last leaf . But that makes me wonder what pushes us into this myopia. Is it our upbringing, the society and environment or the collective acceptance of grandness of life while on the contrary it is simple.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 8, 2014 at 9:40 AM

      People have the herd mentality, Bushra. They follow the majority. And the majority view today is that wealth is the only value, external beauty is what matters, and so on. If we stand out of that, as you say, life becomes much easier - much simpler at least.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...
6 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more