silence shared in words
presents
The Philosophical Frog and the Centipede
...one of Aesop's fables.
A centipede
is just going for a morning walk.
Now, a centipede has one hundred legs.
A frog looks at him,
cannot believe his eyes,
blinks his eyes,
looks again...
a hundred feet!
How does he manage?
Which one to raise first,
then the second,
then the third,
then the fourth...?
One hundred legs!
If you forget the number?
you will be caught in your own legs
and fall down.
He rushes up to him,
jumps,
stops the centipede and asks him,
"Uncle,
I should not stop you on your morning walk,
but a very philosophical question
has arisen in my mind,
which I cannot solve.
l am just a frog, you know.
Only you can help."
The centipede says, "What is the problem?"
The frog explains to him,
"This is the problem:
I saw your hundred legs,
I counted them;
and the problem is,
how do you manage?"
The centipede said, "I had never thought about it.
I will try
and see how
I have been managing.
I have never thought about it. I really have never looked down
and counted the legs.
You are great;
you are a mathematician
and a philosopher!"
The centipede tried,
and you can
visualize what must have happened.
He fell immediately,
all his hundred legs
entangled in each other.
He was very angry at the frog and said,
"Never again ask anybody such questions.
Keep your philosophy to yourself!
You idiot --
l have been managing
my whole life,
and not only I,
millions of centipedes
are managing perfectly well.
Nobody has fallen like me.
But now I am afraid:
you have
created such a question in my mind
that if I don't
get rid of this question."
I may not be able to walk at all.
Now tell me how to get rid of this question.
The frog said,
"I don't know.
I am myself puzzled.
I asked you because
you are an experienced person, an old centipede,
and you go every day for a morning walk;
if you cannot solve it, how can I?
I am just a poor frog."
I don't know what happened
to that centipede afterward, but
I can imagine that his whole life must have become a mess.
Again and again the question
would have come to him,
"A hundred legs!
Am I putting the right leg in the right place?"
Life has its own ways.
The moment you start managing everything,
you spoil it.
Allow life its freedom.
About love, allow freedom,
and don't be guided by fixed ideas.
Experience!
Don't go with the idea that love is permanent or not permanent.
Experience, and you will know what it is.
Don't take the criterion about what is true and what is not true from others.
These are the teachers who have been spoiling the whole of humanity.
They tell you how to walk,
which leg first and which leg second,
and if you put them in some other order you are a sinner,
you will fall into hell.
Hell is far away -- you will fall here
Copyright© OSHO International Foundation, Switzerland
www.OSHO.com/copyright
OSHO is a registered Trademark of OSHO International Foundation