My son Paul got a job with a large chain of guitar stores. He had never worked in a retail organization before. The pay was based on a small salary plus commission.
They put him through an extensive sales training. It was the usual stuff on how to approach a customer, present the product and mostly of course, close the deal and make the sale! It was almost like a car dealer’s pitch, “Do you want the red car or the white?”
He wasn’t doing well. To make matters worse…
This is a story of the lake and the three big fish that were in it, one of them intelligent, another half-intelligent, and the third, stupid.
Some fisherman came to the edge of the lake with their nets. The three fish saw them.
The intelligent fish decided at once to leave, to make the long, difficult trip to the ocean. He thought, “I won’t consult with these two on this. They will only weaken my resolve, because they love this place so. They call it home. Their ignorance will keep them here.”
Ganesha went outdoors one day to play and found a stray cat. Too small to know better, he began to pull her ears and tail. He roughed up that poor cat and even began to beat her with a stick, making marks on her head till, yowling, she ran for her life. Some hours later Ganesha went into the house. His mother, to his astonishment and dismay, was looking terrible. Her hair was a mess, she had scratches on her face and she limped from the bruises on her body.
“Mom!” cried Ganesha…
Deep in his slumber, one night a man had a very real, yet surreal dream. He dreamt that he was walking along the beach with God. As he looked up at the sky, he saw all the scenes of his life flash by along with two sets of footprints: one set for himself, and another for God.
After all the scenes had flashed before him, he looked back at those footprints and noticed something quite disturbing: At the most difficult times in his life, he saw only one set of footprints.
The wife of a man became very sick. On her deathbed, she said to him, “I love you so much! I don’t want to leave you, and I don’t want you to betray me. Promise that you will not see any other women once I die, or I will come back to haunt you.”
For several months after her death, the husband did avoid other women, but then he met someone and fell in love. On the night that they were engaged to be married, the ghost of his former wife appeared to him…
There was one great master, a Buddhist master, Nagarjuna. A thief came to him. The thief had fallen in love with the master because he had never seen such a beautiful person, such infinite grace. The thief asked Nagarjuna, “Is there some possibility of my growth also? But one thing I must make clear to you: I am a thief.
And another thing: I cannot leave it, so please don’t make it a condition. I will do whatsoever you say, but I cannot stop being a thief.
Well it’s time for the biggest outdoor meal in the entire country and every religious group and denomination was represented. The pigs were represented by the hogs head of their order, “Hampiguos” (Ham-pig-u-us), a wise pig philosopher, who talked and talked about every religious intellectual thing he could think of to show what a bright pig he was, but in the end, people just saw him as a pig.
Once, in a time that was not, there was a castle of the mind, a good castle in medieval times, which was a time that followed after the least of evil times, which came after the void of evil times, when there was no evil at all. But evil was very present in this time and it was difficult to find anyone who had virtue.
The Good Castle of Medulla Oblongata was a refuge for the spiritual and the creative. The castle protected those souls from the empty, vacant spirit, which lay in wait outside.
Bap was scared. She could smell death on her master, who was also her protector. She had been with him now 4 years, since her master rescued her during a rainstorm, when she was separated from her first masters.
Her master was an over weight loner, who had no one in his life except Bap, his cocker spaniel. He didn’t want to be a loner, but he had a bad self image problem and believed no one would want to spend time with him, so he found ways of making that self fulfilling prophecy come to pass.
