A Parable

There once were two young men. Both decide to climb a mountain, one from one side and the other from the other side. The lower area of the mountain was covered with flowers and rocks. Both young men managed to climb over these things and decided that they could still climb higher.

At this point, people below the mountain pointed out two things:

Theres nothing up there;

You’ll only have to come down again.

However both the men had made up their minds and did not let these

comments bother them. The young man on the left side, thought about the fact that ‘there’s nothing up there’. He didn’t want to believe that. He’d seen the Sun [red] and the Moon [yellow] up there but he wanted to see it more

closely. So he continued to climb. As time passed he saw the red and the

yellow more closely. By the time he got to the top of the mountain he know it like the back of his hand. When he saw the red he knew where the yellow had to be. It was just that he knew these things with time and experience. He also knew that people could be wrong. There were no flowers and rocks at the top but those were not what he was looking for in the first place. He had grown much richer in thought and experience and that could hardly amount to the ‘nothing’

that he had been warned of.

Meanwhile the other young man on the right side had traveled quite a

distance when he looked down and began to wonder, was it he that was so high up or was it the people who were so far below. He climbed some more and saw the sky with the clouds and wondered if he was climbing into the ocean, which had large white fish swimming in it. It was all very confusing but he knew that staying where has was, was not going to answer any questions so he kept climbing higher. When he got to the top he was almost sure that he was on the

top, but the people below, who stayed below knew that he was on the top. And he remembered what they had said about his ‘only having to come down again’. He thought to himself: ‘only have to come down again?’ but I do want to go down and know again what its like down there, and I want to know what its like to

slide down a mountain and I will only know these things because I climbed so high to know them.

So he came sliding down the glaciers of the mountain, enjoying every second of it. And the people thought he was mad but they couldn’t help but be jealous of that look of freedom and enlightenment in his eyes.

Can you guess who these two men were? Actually they could be you or me or anyone.

There was also a third man who was neither young nor old but considered

himself to be quite able by nature. He had neither climbed the mountains, nor had he slid down them but he had watched the young men do it, and he had watched them grow old as they did it. And he told others about doing it, and he spoke of the time of when he might do it. Or wake up in the morning saying that he had dreamt that he was doing it. He wanted to do it, and show every one,

and show himself. I think he identified with the young-men-growing-old men. But do you know what he did instead?

Nothing. He just sat and waited for someone to write this story so that

he could point out that he was actually mentioned in a story that other people read [can you imagine, a story with me in it!] and that man could be me or you or anyone.