Solomon, the wise prophet, held daily audiences at which his subjects would narrate their problems and he would provide solutions. One day, a man in complete distress fell on his knees before Solomon, who asked him what the man’s problem was. The man said, “Just a short while ago, as I was crossing the street, I saw the Angel of Death. He glared at me with such disdain that I am sure he is coming for me. Please save me!”
“The Angel of Death takes his orders only from God and follows them diligently. What do you want me to do for you?” asked Solomon. The man replied, “My life is in your hands. Tell the wind to carry me to India, where I will be safe from the Angel.” At Solomon’s bidding, the East Wind carried the distraught man to India.
The next day, Solomon caught a glimpse of the Angel of Death among the crowd in his court. He called the Angel and asked him, “Why did you frighten my subject with your gaze yesterday? What wrong did the man do?”
The Angel of Death was surprised. He told Solomon, “I did not look at him with wrath at all. Actually, I was astonished to see him here. God had commanded me to take his life today in India. I wondered how he could ever reach India within a day. I looked at him with surprise, not anger!”
When you look at everything in life with the eyes of want and greed, whom do you hope to escape? Yourself? God? Is that possible?
Background: This is my version of a story from the book The Book of Rumi: 105 Stories and Fables that Illumine, Delight, and Inform, translated by Maryam Mafi. I have reproduced the last para from the book.
Jalaluddin Rumi was a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. His famous work is the six-volume Masnavi, which contains short teaching stories such as the one above. We can find great truths in Rumi’s work.
Great. Another individual exposing truths in life and about life. It is important that people read such works as they are small and consumes no time and never are they boring. It is possible that pollen from such works will rub off on our thinking process. It is important that by reading such stories we should be able to see new insights in life. It is also possible to discover that life is full of chaos, and never orderly, and we should allow it to remain so without artificially disturbing it. One will relish the joys of life only if it is left to itself.
Not so clear. Should we say most of things are imagination not actual facts or man is conditioned due to insecurity.
Either way, the essence of life remains obscured. Not going into the realities of the episode, it is better to live in chaos as life by itself is beyond anybody’s grasp. That being so, man has remained conditioned for ages to seek and find security all the time. Every approach that he makes is with the intention of remaining superior to others so that he can find security from such endeavours. But nature has its own ways and all his efforts to harness it has remained elusive and scattered. Alternatively, it is more simple to understand and live with nature so that sense of conditioning or the sense of insecurity abruptly vanishes, with everything seeming possible and we move away from the realms of imagination. Desire and wants automatically die.
….what’s meant to be…is meant to be