The Panicky Pigeon
"I simply told the pigeon to calm down and follow the light. The minute he took my advice, he was a free bird again instead of senselessly colliding with...
“I simply told the pigeon to calm down and follow the light. The minute he took my advice, he was a free bird again instead of senselessly colliding with the walls of an imaginary prison.”
Chapter Six:
This chapter is the second part of our reconciliation plan with God. Chapter Five compared life’s difficulties to a thorny wild raspberry thicket or a mountain rose bush – you have to weather the thorns in order to obtain the fruit or the flower. This chapter discusses the type of suffering that a person induces by his or her own actions and teaches how to prevent it. By the end of this chapter, you will hopefully be at complete peace with God – no more grievances and no more anger.
Self-induced Suffering – an unlocked jail
Now, we’re resuming our allegorical hike up Mount Patience with Old Isaac. We’ll soon learn how self-induced suffering resembles an unlocked jail.
The Panicky Pigeon
Isaac takes you the rest of the way through Raspberry Forest and up the mountain trail to an elevation of about 5500 feet. Shortly before sunset, you reach your prearranged lodging for the night, a quaint hunter’s cabin with a redbrick fireplace and a breathtaking view.
Looking down the mountain, you can see the miles of progress you’ve made up the trail since you left Old Isaac’s Inn. What a wonderful feeling of accomplishment – you’ve climbed, learned new things, and grown. You’re not the same as you were at the outset of your journey. Nevertheless, you can’t sit on your laurels – there’s still ground to cover. Isaac recommends that you rest up here for a day and then continue on your way up the trail to tranquility.
The pine-scented mountain air is indescribable, and since the weather’s a bit warm for this time of the year, you and Isaac decide to sleep with the windows open. You both fall into a deep, satisfying sleep to the serenade of crickets, tree frogs, and an old hoot owl, the self-appointed governor of this neck of the woods.
Before daybreak, you awake to a frantic flapping sound. A pigeon has randomly flown in your window, and the poor little bird is panic-stricken. It flies from one wall to another, and thinks that you’ve trapped him inside the cabin.
You try to calm him down: “Look here, pigeon, we’re not even out of our sleeping bags yet! Nobody’s set a trap for you. Open your eyes – the two windows are wide open!” The pigeon won’t listen. He ricochets from one wall to another like a billiard ball. After a few minutes of frightened flight around the cabin, the pigeon is exhausted. He comes to rest on the fireplace mantel.
Isaac tries a different strategy. In his best cooing accent, he says, “Fulluhoo – hullabaloop – hoodulahoo”. The pigeon acknowledges his message, nods, and flies out of the adjacent window.
You pop up out of your sleeping bag in amazement and ask, “What did you tell the pigeon? Isaac, do you really know how to communicate with a pigeon?”
“I simply told the pigeon to calm down and follow the light. The minute he took my advice, he was a free bird again instead of senselessly colliding with the walls of an imaginary prison,” Isaac explains.
Let’s think about the lesson of the panicky pigeon. The pigeon flew into the cabin on his own free will. Once inside, it felt confined and threatened, like a prisoner in jail. The windows were open the whole time, and it was free to fly away whenever it wanted, but the bird was so stressed that it couldn’t see the light.
The pigeon story reminds me of self-induced suffering. Self-induced suffering resembles a prisoner that was thrown in jail on a ten-year sentence:
For weeks, the prisoner wailed, complained, knocked his head against the wall, cursed his misfortune, and was angry at the whole world. One day, in the peak of frustration, he pounded on the door of his cell. Suddenly the door flew open.
The astonished prisoner peeked outside, and saw that the corridor of the jail was empty – not a guard in sight. Still apprehensive, he tiptoed his way to the jailers’ office and to the front door. No one stopped him; he simply walked away to freedom.
Confinement in a jail with an unlocked door is senseless. Yet, people confine themselves to a prison of needless inner turbulence every day. A substantial amount our suffering in life is self-induced. Therefore, once a person realizes that certain actions induce trouble in life, and learns to refrain from those actions, the trouble disappears. No law says that you have to suffer so much! You can terminate a good portion of the anguish in your life with the ease of walking away from an unlocked jail.
The concept of self-induced suffering is easy to understand: A heavy smoker that suffers from shortness of breath, a chronic cough, high blood pressure, and frequent headaches, is daft to blame The Almighty for his or her ills. The Almighty didn’t design the human lung to be tar and nicotine proof. If your car were malfunctioning because you gave it the wrong type of fuel, or used frying oil instead of motor oil, would it be fair to be angry with your service mechanic or with the auto manufacturer? Obviously not.
The smoker, if he or she really desires, can walk away at any time from the nicotine prison, and regain good health within a few short weeks. Shortly after discarding the cigarettes, ailments begin to disappear. A person doesn’t need a high level of spiritual awareness to realize that cigarettes are a health hazard; federal law requires printing a warning on every pack. Yet, many people choose to ignore the surgeon general, the AMA, and their body’s own warnings, and continue their life of needless suffering, like a lethargic prisoner in an unlocked jail.
A person with developed spiritual awareness understands that even self-induced suffering, like a cough or shortness of breath resulting from smoking, is also a gift from God. The Almighty sends those ailments as messages to his beloved children, which in effect say, “You shouldn’t be smoking! Stop doing damage to yourself!”
In all fairness, giving up cigarettes – or any other habit – is not an easy task. For some, it’s a war. Many other types of self-induced suffering are subtler and more difficult to detect and to eradicate from our lives. We can’t win a war without effective weapons. In the war against self-induced suffering, we need a cogent plan of action.
The remainder of this chapter is divided into two sections: Section one is the Three-Stage Plan for preventing self-induced suffering; section two discusses twelve common causes of self-induced suffering.
To be continued…
(The Trail to Tranquility is available in the Breslev Store.)
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