”How can I get out of my chains, my attachment, my ideas, my prejudices?”

[Raz]

A man came to Sheik Farid, a Sufi mystic, a great Sufi mystic and a very strange man. The man said, ”How can I get out of my chains, my attachment, my ideas, my prejudices?”

Farid had his own way of answering things. Rather than answering to the person he simply ran to a pillar which was nearby, clung to the pillar and started shouting, ”Save me from the pillar!”

The man could not believe what is happening – is he mad or something? And he was shouting so loudly that people started coming from the street in. A crowd gathered and they asked, ”What is the matter with you? Have you gone crazy? You are holding the pillar, not the pillar holding you. You can leave it!”

And the man also said, ”I had thought that this man is a man of great understanding and he seems to be just a madman! I had asked a very subtle question, a very spiritual question which has always been asked by seekers: how to get out of my attachments with ideas things people? And rather than answering me he simply jumped and clung to the pillar and started shouting, ’Save me from the pillar!’”

Farid looked at the man and he said, ”If you can understand this, then you don’t need any answer. Go home and ponder over it. If the pillar is not holding me, neither your chains are holding you – you are holding them. I can leave the pillar – look I am leaving the pillar and I am saved!"

-Rajneesh