There is a beautiful story about a woman in India. She lost her needle in her house. She was too poor to afford a light in her house, so she went out of the house and was searching it in the streets. A gentleman inquired from her what she was doing. She said that she was searching for her needle? The gentleman asked, "Where did you lose the needle?" She said, "In the house." He said, "How unreasonable it is to search in the street a thing which was lost in the house!" She said that she could not afford a light in the house and there was a lantern in the street. She could not hunt in the house, she had to do something, so she must hunt in the street.

This is exactly the way with the people. You have the Heaven within you; and yet you are searching pleasures in the objects in the streets, searching that thing outside, outside in the objects of the senses.

(by Swami Rama Tirtha from Lecture delivered on December 17, 1902, in the
Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, U.S.A.)

The walls that imprison them are mental, not real.

A bear paced up and down the twenty feet that was the length of his cage. When, after five years, the cage was removed, the bear continued to pace up and down those twenty feet as if the cage were there. It was. For him!

Anthony de Mello, S.J

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