The Fish In The Bowl

Anecdotes

oi-Priya Devi

By Priya Devi

Thursday, June 24, 2010, 16:55

Freedom is vast while slavery is small. A short Sufi story reveals the truth.

A man once gifted a lovely golden bowl with a beautiful fish in it to a Sufi mystic.

The mystic felt sorry for the fish and released it into a lake to enjoy limitless freedom and space.

He then threw the golden bowl also into the lake as it was of no use to him who revelled in nothingness!

The next morning when the mystic walked up to the lake, to his surprise he found the fish back into the bowl that was floating.

The fish had chosen its way back to the bowl. It was her home and she was habituated to dwell there much in contrast to the mystic who thinks it to be a prison.

Osho says that freedom is vast and wild. It is unmanageable. One precipitates in the vastness of it.

Whereas one always wishes to thrive on a conditioned plane where one chisels his way to becoming somebody as everyone wants to become 'someone'

One is habituated to a confined way of conditioned life. One seeks comfort in conditioning which is slavery.

Slavery is small but which solidifies one to render the feeling of 'being big' in the limited confinement.

Osho says but in the vast freedom, one is just 'nothing'. Nobody wants to be a 'nothing'

The master thus points out that the most important requirement to attain freedom is the courage to dissolve in its 'nothingness'

Only then can one traverse the conditioned plane and breathe the air of true freedom!