I don’t know how many of you have heard of Mulla Nasruddin; he is a famous Sufi figure from the medieval times who used to display the stupidities of humanity in an artful way.
In all of his stories, he is making fun of himself, and many people read his stories just for the entertainment, just for the laughter, but that’s the biggest mistake you can make while reading him.
Yes, his stories are funny but, in every story, there resides a deep message that can only be grasped if you are somewhat aware of your own behavior or nature. A wise shadow lurks in the foolishly humorous tales dedicated to his name.
For many, he died a long time ago but for me, he continues to live on since the very first day of human civilization. Mulla was born the day we got ourselves out of the scary jungles to create our own world, and he is still alive as I am writing this.
If you only think of him as a person who used to live once, you will never understand what his jokes are all about. You will read his stories just for a time-pass, just as an escape from your daily stressful life. That’s an insult to his work.
He represents the entire humanity, or to be more precise, the stupidness of entire humanity. He is in me, in you, in your neighbor, in your friends - continuously living as our stupidity. He is alive in all of us all the time, but we never tend to notice him because that would mean a direct confrontation with our own stupid behaviors and that is something we never want. We tend to laugh at the foolishness of others while ignoring our own way of acting and behaving.
He places a mirror in front of you. When you read his stories, you would want to laugh at the idiocy it represents, but you would also want to cry because that idiocy is not someone else’s but yours. When you laugh at his jokes, you are actually laughing at yourself.
As Osho said, “If you can laugh at yourself, you have laughed for the first time.”
You will learn more about yourself from his writings than you ever will from today’s so-called spiritual speakers or the so-called religions. All it would need is just a little bit of honesty. You can’t read his tales and be like “Hahahaha, the people are so dumb.” That’s what ego likes to do - it thinks that it is the only one that’s normal in a group of bizarre people. But when you observe your thoughts and actions honestly, you would find that the idiocy being depicted in his short stories is yours.
Focusing on how people act as long as you are unconscious of yourself does nothing other than nourishing your ego. That needs to stop. Only then will your reading of his anecdotes be worth it.
Let me share one of his tales:
Mulla Nasruddin once tied his donkey outside the alcohol shop to get something from the nearby shop. When he came back, the donkey’s entire body was painted with the red color and seeing this, Mulla got furious. He went into the alcohol shop with a red face and said angrily, “Whoever did that to my donkey, get up.”
Hearing him, a man who was double the size of Mulla and whose appearance alone was enough to scare the hell out of anybody got up and said in voice even more scary, “I did that to your donkey. What are you going to do now?”
Seeing that, it didn’t even take a second for Mulla to turn from an angry man to a seemingly nice person. The face that was boiling like a water at 100 degrees Celsius instantly changed into a smiling one showing respect like the ones you see at the Tim Hortons reception, and with that face he said, “Oh, so you are the respected gentleman who did so much good to my donkey. I was thinking about coloring my donkey too. So, I came here to thank you for the great act.”
You can read this story, laugh at it, forward it in funny social media groups and forget it - that’s what most people tend to do and that means nothing was understood out of the tale.
Or you can read it, find the subtle message being delivered, see how it applies to your own behavior, and then laugh at yourself - that’s the correct approach to Mulla’s tales and that’s the only way you are going to get some insight into your life.
The above tale depicts the opportunistic and political nature of our mind. Politics is not something that happens solely at the governmental level; it is the very nature of human mind to change its tone in respect to the security it is getting. Even a chameleon is not as quick in terms of changing its color as our mind.
How is it possible to live a truthful life if we are identified with something so untrustworthy and dishonest?
And there are so many stories like this one that I would suggest you give a read. Mulla’s stories will reflect your true face better than the mirrors we get from the marketplace.
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See the Good Soldier Svejk by Hasek. Similar.