The Lessons From A Honeybee

Sri Ramakrishna

oi-Staff

By Super

Monday, May 28, 2012, 14:57

Hovering over trees, shrubs and plants, sniffing and sampling the flowers to check how much of nectar is available there, it lives—the honeybee. Making honey is its mission of life. Its life is a life of constant chase for flowers. This is what takes it to gardens, jungles, shrubs and groves. It keeps buzzing over the flowers and once it settles down on a flower, it is absorbed in sipping the honey. It becomes quiet. No more sound, no more movement, no more anxiety.

Sri Ramakrishna, one may recall, used to compare the human mind to a honeybee. As long as the mind is doubtful and undecided, it makes sound. It hops from one object to another, sampling and sniffing various ideas and lines of thinking. Not only that. After 'gathering' some ideas, it wants to tell that it has done so. Hence, it keeps shouting its ideas, weighing them, criticising or praising them— discarding some, retaining some others. But once the mind settles down on Truth or on the path leading to Truth, it becomes quiet. No more commotion or sound of any kind—only sipping the honey.

There are, of course, other less-fortunate creatures that lack this one-pointed pursuit of Truth. They keep 'sampling'. They lack nishtha, devotion to one ideal. They are yet to discover the 'honey'. Undecided and unsure, they have neither a clear goal nor any set view as to what is good for them. They just seek—what they seek they do not know. Aimless and unfocused, they lack direction. They have a travel-sense but no destination-sense. Theirs is a life of hopping—now on a flower, then on a dung-heap, again on a thorny undergrowth. Anything, any place would do for them. A Sanskrit verse describes them thus:

'Just as a housefly that searches for (festering) sores, or as a pig snouts for filth (in a flower garden) and a worm which is born and lives in a dirty dung—so are the people with mean intentions.' What a vivid description of the uncultivated mind! A housefly is never welcome. If there are flies around, there is always a suspicion of some uncleared garbage or dirt somewhere. Dirt and flies are thus synonyms. So is a pig. So are the insects or worms found in the dung. The insects are a part of the dung. If you try taking them out of dung—oh, that blessed act of 'compassion'!—they would simply die; dung and filth is their life, and cleanliness, their death.

Such is the case of an uncultivated and unregenerate mind. It is gross and unrefined. It finds no point in thinking positive and higher ideas, accustomed as it is to negative and low or cheap ideas. Such a mind has the characteristic of a housefly, pig and worm, all rolled into one.

Read more about human glory, 'housefly mindset', self control etc... in the Next Page

About the author

Swami Atmashraddananda

Swami Atmashraddhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and editor of The Vedanta Kesari from the year 2004.