The Life of a Certain Man (Part 1)

★Learning from the Life of a Certain Man

Today, let’s tell the story of a certain man’s life, in the style of an old folktale.

It will surely prompt your own realizations and help you forgive and love yourself and become one with the light of life.

[Once upon a time, in a certain place, there lived a young man who was the very picture of a strong sense of justice.

He condemned everything that strayed from the “ideal” he pictured, and spent his days criticizing, judging, and in the end, harshly blaming.

“Why don’t you ever act with any thought for others?!”

“Look who’s talking. You’re just the same.”

“What?! You’ve got no right to say that to me!”

Since he was like that in everything, quarrels never stopped around him.

He believed that such behavior was the very “justice” he ought to carry out, and he never doubted it for a moment.

He was full of confidence, so at first, many people admired him and gathered around him.

But as time went by, one after another, people left him.

Seen from another angle, it was a picture of him pushing people away and heading for the peak of solitude.

As he turned the pages of life’s calendar, thirty, forty, at last he was left all alone.

And not long after, he fell ill and took to his bed.

By then, there was no one left to help him.

One day, gasping for breath and writhing in pain on his sickbed, he had a dream.

It was a dream of a world where everything around him, lying in his bed, was covered in mirrors.

★In the World of Mirrors

There, whenever he sent out a thought, the self reflected in the mirrors hurled those same words back at him.

The thoughts he sent out were all criticism and bad-mouthing of others, so all of them were hurled at the self lying in bed from the selves beyond the mirrors at every angle, and it was more than he could bear.

Feeling sick, he hid his head under the covers and thought:

“Why do I have to be told such things by others all the time?”

In the time spent brooding and agonizing, he suddenly thought:

“Ah, the words I’ve sent out in the past weren’t going to the people I aimed them at; they were all coming back to me.”

“My suffering was also because the poison of my own words was eating away at my own heart.”

From the moment he thought that, his heart grew lighter before his very eyes.

And little by little, the thoughts he sent out turned more reflective.

“Ah, whatever others think, whatever they say, whatever they do, none of it was ever harming me.”

“What mattered was what I thought about the words, thoughts, and deeds of others.”

“And that was a chance to make me notice things I was doing myself, things I was fixated on… in other words, the disharmony within me.”

“I couldn’t see it as about me; I ignored my own faults and was convinced it was all about others.”

“All I needed to do was turn what I thought about the things and people I saw and heard outside back toward myself, and come to know myself.”

“That was all I needed to do.” (To be continued)