What a terrible dream I experienced last night!’howled Gate-Keeper Yin to his wife. ‘A giant rat would not desist from chasing after me until, finally, with no place to turn, it had me cornered.’
‘Heaven protect us against such things! What did you do?’his spouse enquired earnestly.
‘What could I do but attack it,’ Yin continued. ‘And I fought hard let me tell you, but in the end I was sorely wounded. But then a very strange thing happened. Just as I lay in a defeated crumpled heap of humiliation, expecting the final mortal blow,the rat spoke to me. It said: “You win,” and immediately helped me up, which is when I awoke. What awful misfortune can it possibly foretell?’
‘My old mother was wise,’ answered his wife seemingly calmer in her remembrance of something. ‘She would say: 'When you have a fight with your conscience and get beaten, you win! Maybe that rat was your conscience and you’ve gone and
cornered yourself.’
This was taken from Lesson 8 in Volume II of The Teachings of Billionaire yen Tzu - if you want to read the rest of the story.
Yen Tzu goes on to say ...Conscience is that part of our consciousness that is vital to our development and growth. However, there is conscience and true-conscience. The former is subjective, the latter objective. We often think the function of our subjective, or conditioned, conscience, is to spoil life for those of us who are unlucky enough to be pricked by it. It could be said that, ‘your conscience doesn’t keep you from doing anything; it merely keeps you from enjoying it.’ In this guise it can be likened to an irritating acquaintance that you have periodically to tolerate. All too often we construct an entire framework of intelligent rationa-lies-ations in our attempts to justify actions that contradict our deepest sense of right and wrong.
I love this esoteric thought-provoking material. It sets me up for the day. Yen Tzu's book is timeless and wherever you open it I find words of wisdom to inspire me for that day. Has anyone else read any of his teachings?
Has anybody else ever read any of the teachings of billionaire yen Tzu?
ReplyDelete