Articles

A man grew up with the decision that he would be satisfied with nothing but the very best. This decision helped him to become very successful and very rich, so he now had the means with which to provide himself with nothing but the best.

Now it so happened that he was suffering from a severe attack of tonsillitis, a condition that could have been dealt with effectively by any qualified surgeon in the land. But, impressed as he was with a sense of his own importance, and goaded by his obsession to provide himself with the very best that the medical world had to offer, he began to move from one town to another, one country to another in search of the best man for the job.

Each time some particularly competent surgeon was recommended to him he began to fear that there might just possibly be someone who was even more competent.

One day his condition became so bad and his throat so infected that an operation had to be performed immediately for his life was in danger. But the man was in a semi-comatose state in a god-forsaken village where the only person who had used a knife on a living creature was the village butcher.

He was remarkably good butcher and went to work with a will but when he got to the man’s tonsils he didn’t quite know what he was supposed to do with them. And while he was busy consulting people who knew as little as he, the poor patient for whom nothing but the very best was good enough, bled to death.

It is said that when the Great Library of Alexandria was burnt down, only one book survived. It was a very ordinary book, dull and uninteresting so it was sold for a few pennies to a poor man who barely knew how to read.

Now that book, dull and uninteresting as it seemed, was probably the most valuable book in the world for on the inside of the back cover were scrawled in large, round letters a few sentences that contained the secret of the Touchstone – a tiny pebble that could turn anything it touched into pure gold.

The writing declared that this precious pebble was lying somewhere on the shore of the Black Sea among thousands of other pebbles that were exactly like it, except in this one particular that, whereas all other pebbles were cold to the touch, this one was warm as if it were alive. The man rejoiced at his good luck. He sold everything he had, borrowed a large sum of money that would last him a year and made for the Black Sea where he set up tent and began the painstaking task of searching for the Touchstone.

This was the way he went about it: he would lift a pebble; if it was cold to the touch he would not throw it back on the shore because if he did that, he might be lifting and feeling the same stone dozens of time; no, he would throw it into the sea. So each day for hours on end he persevered in his patient endeavor: lift a pebble, if it felt cold, throw it into the sea; lift another… and so on, endlessly.

He spent a week, a month, ten months, a whole year at this task. Then he borrowed some more money and kept at it for another two years. On and on he went: lift a pebble, feel it…. it was cold, throw it into the sea. Hour after hour; day after day; week after week…still no Touchstone.

One evening he picked up a pebble and it was warm to the touch-and, through sheer force of habit, he threw it into the Black Sea!

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Mechanical action rules over Conscious Action??