This otherworldliness might be bothersome had not, Kushner, who first found fame with his 1978 bestseller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, enjoyed enduring commercial success with his readable, nonsectarian inquiries into the basic but formidable questions of why life is the way it is, and why we are the way we are.
Indeed, many people think of Kushner as a kind of one-man wisdom industry. He can't count the number of people who have passed on ideas about what e should write about next. A leading contender is the idea of a sequel to When Bad Things Happen to Good People (about reconciling to loss), with the inside-out title, When Good Things Happen to Bad People (presumably, about envy). Now that's an idea that mystifies people, he said. In a world where the innocent and the good suffer, why do schnooks seem to prosper? During the session, he would tell why good things seem to happen to bad people, and why that bothers us so.
Kushner divided his talk into two halves, the first drawing on his 1993 book When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough, about rediscovering values, and the second from his latest book, How Could Do I Have to Be?, about the executive affliction, perfectionism.
Kushner began with a story he read as a youth, from about the year 1804 in Czarist Russian. A rabgbi found himself spending several months in the czar's jails. During that time he came to know his jailkeeper a little. One day the jailkeeper said, "You're a rabbi and a wise man, me, I'm not religious at all. People are always after me to read the Bible, but I can't see what the fuss is. Here, on the very first page, God asks Adam where he is. If he's God, why doesn't he know where Adam is? One man in the whole world and God can't find him."
The rabbi smiled, and said, "God knew where Adam was. He wanted Adam to ask himself where he was." And directly to the jailer he added, "You're 46 years old, and you are wondering where you are."
Where are we?
What Kushner remembers most about the story was his own reaction to it at age 21. "Nice story," he thought. "But why cheapen it with the mind reading trick?"
Later in life Kushner came to see the story differently. Guessing the man's age was not the point. The point was understanding that at a certain point in a person's life, he begins asking, like Adam, where he is, and what it is all about. The questions of middle age are not the same questions one asked as a young person. Middle age is a time for contemplating the meaning of time, and one's own attitude toward its passage.
Young people have an extravagant view of time. They assume it is endless. That is why young men make the best soldiers and the worst drivers -- they don't believe they can die.
We can only believe that so long. Eventually people around us begin to die, and we come to see that we will, too. Kushner related the story of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyitch, who one day learns that the illness he has been treating is incurable. Disconsolate, he wonders whether his whole life was a mistake.
This sense of incompleteness is especially haunting to Americans, who have a cultural horror of anything that does not "win." Superbowl winners are held up to heaven as the best among us; the team who lost that game, and was the second-best in the NFL, is held up to ridicule. Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale received the votes of 40 million Americans, and for their trouble are remembered as national laughingstocks.
There are two problems with this insistence on winning, Kushner said. First, it tells 95 percent of Americans -- those of us who never come in first on anything in our entire lives -- that we don't matter, and our lives, no matter how caring and involved, are of no account.
Second, the 5 percent who slog on to victory typically find out it is not all it is cracked up to me. Result: 100 percent disillusionment -- a 100 percent loss. Winning is only not everything, to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, it's hardly anything. One of the sickest aspects of our competitiveness is that it destroys the ability men have to be friends. Not "sitting around on Sundays watching football together" friends, but friends who can open up with one another and admit to weakness.
Kushner said that our society trains men to be skilled at competition and inept at relationships, and trains women to be the opposite. In such a pairing, women are the ultimate "winners," because as theologian and philosopher Martin Buber said, God is found in relationships. Buber never mentioned football.
Kushner described four ingredients of a life meaningfully lived. If you can answer yes to these questions, your soul is in pretty good shape.
To have a life, you
must share one.
When the first chill winds of mortality nip us, our reaction is often to rescue our lives from the captivity of family and responsibilities. Kushner told of a man in his late 30s who came for counseling when Kushner was still a congregant rabbi. The man claimed he was tired of the same old faces, he wanted to get away, buy a sports car, and start over. "Rabbi," said the man who had worked hard to provide for his family, "it's my last chance to be happy."
Where did we get idea, Kushner, asked, that happiness means cutting our commitments? It should be obvious to us that we have been happiest in our lives when people have most depended on us. Far from being happiness, life in a sports car and no one to share it with is a scenario for the deepest kind of sadness.
Happiness, he said, means taking obligations seriously.
To enjoy life, you must
accept pain as a part of it.
We are a palliated people. If we hurt, we take a pill. If we are afraid life will hurt, we decline to live, to avoid the pain.
People who deny themselves the ordinary pain of life often push themselves to extremes to feel anything. We have all heard of adrenaline-freaks who will jump off a bridge with a rubber rope tied to one ankle, just to feel alive. Could it be their courage for thrills is matched by their cowardice for everyday commitment?
Kushner quoted an engaged couple who wanted to alter their vows from "till death do us part" to "as long as love lasts." Both had seen the pain of loveless marriages, and did not want to chance that emptiness. We are afraid to commit totally, he said, because it will hurt too much if it does not work out.
Kushner's advice is to put ourselves in play and not worry about the pain. Broken hearts heal; the unused heart atrophies. On the plus side, he noted that post-divorce couple tackle the commitment with an endearing optimism, as if to say, "This time I will do it right -- to show him/her!"
Kushner suggests that those who blanche at taking emotional risks investigate real pain, and how ordinary people lived through it, and found new joy on the other side: victims of crimes and accidents, Holocaust survivors who bore new families. Before we give up on ourselves, we should see what human beings can stand.
Here's a tip on how to be stronger. University of Wisconsin researchers found that people could tolerate twice as much pain if someone else were there to see. A simple hand to hold onto doubles our pain threshold.
To be complete, you have
to fill in the blank spots.
The psychologist C. G. Jung said that the middle of life is when we need to stop doing the things we are good at, and go back and fill in the places we left blank when we were growing up. For instance, said Kushner, males often need to discover their female side, which we squelched as kids -- emotional openness and empathy.
Kushner recalled the recent movie A League of Their Own, in which Geena Davis stars as a gifted ballplayer in the women's pro baseball experiment during World War II. The key moment of the movie is when Geena Davis intentionally drops a pop-up to allow her sister, a slightly less gifted athlete playing on the other side, the victory. Women walked out of the theater afterward saying what a touching scene that was. Men walked out shaking their heads. To them, winning is worth breaking the heart of someone you love. That is the imbalance Kushner is talking about.
Competitiveness was a major theme of Kushner's talk. Though it makes the world of business go round, and though it is crucial in the development of young people, it is one of the first things to go as people hit mid-life and reevaluate what is important to them.
"Competition is how you find out how good you are. Once you finally find out, you can relax and accept the results."
To feel good about your life,
make a difference in the world.
"I am convinced no one wants to live forever," Kushner said. He quoted G.K. Chesterton, who bemoaned that so many pine for eternal life yet do not know how to get through a rainy Sunday.
We do not handle insignificance well, Kushner said. To feel complete, we must know that we made a contribution somehow. Something that will remain when we are gone, a mark that we can leave to show we were here.
The good news, he said, is that we don't have to write a great book, to achieve this. It is just as satisfactory to do nice things on a regular basis. Nothing is so memorable to others of our kind as a simple act of kindness. Cosmic good deeds have a shorter shelf life.
Consider the case of God himself. Go leads Israel out of bondage with a series of plagues that smite Egypt. He parts the Red Sea, lets the Israelites pass to dry land, then folds the water over the pursuing soldiers. He guides his people to safety as a pillar of fire.
You would think the children of Israel would be indelibly impressed by all this: "My God, forever." Yet in the very next chapter of the Bible we see them complaining about the itinerary, the food, the accommodations. Clearly, Kushner said, forever is a technical term meaning 72 hours.
On the other hand, a human-scale, everyday miracle -- the appearance every morning of manna to sustain them in the wilderness -- endeared God to the Hebrews.
So with us -- it is by the little things that we do that we make our mark on the world. As Dennis Prager encouraged us two years ago, Kushner urged us to consider whose day we might brighten with a word or phone call. Do something nice three times a week and your immortality is assured.
Why good things happen
to bad people
Before shutting down the first session half, Kushner paid off on his promise to explain Why Good Things Happen to Bad People.
"I don't believe they do get away with murder," he said. "They pay -- in one currency or another. It may not be what we wish it were -- public humiliation or criminal conviction. Maybe it is the sorrow of never knowing the satisfaction of being a good man."
Just as person blind from birth never sees flowers come out after a hard winter, people who only hurt others never experience the peace of connecting with them.
His last thought before heading for the donut table was that those of us who are entering our "wisdom time" (our 40s and 50s) have an uphill struggle to fight. For while we struggle to find meaning in the middle of our lives, our culture is depraved on the subject of time, and does everything it can to make us neurotic about old age, time running out, being over the hill, and out of the picture.
You cannot find wisdom while assenting to such nonsense, he suggested. Older people are simply more interesting than younger people. It's an unassailable fact, Kushner said. Older people have experienced more. Their fires competitiveness and immaturity have been banked. Except for sprinting and drinking coffee at night, there is no advantage to being young. Maybe, instead of getting older, in the sense of slowly dying, what we are doing is becoming richer -- in wisdom, understanding, and self.
"How good do we have to be?"
The second half of Rabbi Kushner's presentation was the antidote for the first. Where the first urged people to take action to discover who they are, the second reminded us that enough is enough.
"Being good" is a natural preoccupation of any good ethical system. Kushner joked that on t he subject of guilt, neither Protestants, Catholics, nor Jews concede any ground to the others. If you were raised right, you feel guilty.
This would be silly except that we really do feel guilty, and it really does have a negative impact on our lives. True to our innovative character, Americans have found ways to make even virtue neurotic. There are people who think bad weather is punishment for their sinful thoughts. And just about all of us have this dull sense that we could be doing more, should be doing more, that nothing we do is ever enough.
Kushner's advice: relax. Or at least try to. He himself was much the same way as a congregate rabbi, punishing himself when a weekly sermon fell short of his customary high standard. Even flogging his anti-perfectionism book on promotional tours, he has caught himself demanding perfect performance from himself. It's not an easy fix.
(Had he been Catholic, Kushner might have learned that asceticism, deliberately depriving oneself of pleasure in order to be closer to God, is a constant flirtation with the sin of pride. Neurotic guilt can thus be viewed as a form of narcissism: "I must be perfect because I'm better than other people.")
The knowledge of good and evil
Kushner traces his interest in the topic of guilt to two stories, one very old, and one that happened to him. The first is the story of Adam and Eve. It always struck him as excessive that God punished them with death, painful childbirth, and the other horrors of mortal life for eating some fruit. And what was the fruit? "The knowledge of good and evil." What was so bad about that?
The second story, that made him wonder even more about the first, occurred ten years ago. On a speaking trip to Baltimore, he was asked to visit a young Episcopal priest dying of AIDS. The priest was a devotee of Kushner's books. During their talk, Kushner asked if the priest ever felt his disease was a punishment. The priest said, to the contrary, that the disease opened his eyes to the love people felt for him -- from the medical staff and nurses, to the friends who came and embraced him, all ignoring the risk of contagion.
"I used to think I had to be perfect in order to be saved. What I now know," the dying priest said, "is that no matter what mistakes you may make, you have not lost God's love."
Beautiful, but it did not square with the story of Eden. If God is so loving, how could he banish all humankind, in the name of Adam and Eve, for all eternity because of one lousy mistake? It is easy to see, from that story, how we might get the idea that if we make one mistake, we get the cosmic boot.
Kushner bemoaned the sickness of a culture that preys on women's anxieties about appearance. "How many industries are propped up by manipulating the feelings of women who think they cannot be loved until they measure up to some impossible standard of perfection?" Perfectionism is the precipitator of anorexia and bulimia.
Victims of perfection
"The great truth is that women who are attractive to men are women who like themselves, and are at peace with themselves, and not obsessed with earning love."
Men don't have the same problem, but they have a good analog: insecurity about earning capacities. How can any man compete for love in a world that puts highest value on star athletes and movie stars and CEOs?
Parents are victims of perfectionism. How many couples drive themselves to anxiety attacks trying to be everything to their children 24 hours a day -- teachers, providers, playmates, watchdogs, cooks? One false move and the child will end up on death row without a high school diploma.
But do children have any use for perfect parents? Not especially. How many "great people" in history had children able to follow in their footsteps? More often, the kids of history's "great people" turn out to be messes. The models were too tough to match.
Indeed, it is a great relief for children, struggling to be competent, to see their parents are occasionally incompetent as well. Parents provide a better service to their children by modeling how to be good. The truth is we are never all we want to be. But we love them, and we are there for them.
Even The Bible, Kushner said, is not about perfect people, but about people who were conspicuously flawed, had terrible marriages, fought with their brothers, and so on.
Being more tolerant of our weaknesses makes us better able to accept the shortcomings of those close to us. It helps the father whose son inherited his klutziness, and will never be the shortstop is father dreamed of being.
It helps parents whose children, instead of becoming surgeons and moving in next door, don't become much of anything and keep moving back to the room they grew up in. It helps the mother who is angry that her child is not perfect, but an emotionally troubled kid who needs love, not a mother's disappointment.
It helps married people overcome the astonishing discovery that the person they courted so blissfully has foot odor, or is a slob, or could spend a few hours alone with an Ab Blaster™. Because the essence of a happy marriage, Kushner said, is not infatuation, but forgiveness. People who spend their lives as one flesh, who are physically and emotionally naked to another, will reveal every blemish, every shortcoming they have. But because we love them, we accept the flaws as part of the package.
Wise partners are those who instead of being worn down by their spouses' peccadilloes, accept them as the price of love -- like the husband's inability to ask for directions that causes them to be late for a wedding (it is Kushner's theory that this trait explains the 40 years the Israelites spent in the wilderness). Yes, we exasperate one another. But love does not diminish for that reason.
If God only loved perfect people, Kushner said, God would end up lonely.
A question of forgiveness
He described the story in an obscure Ingmar Bergmann movie, Winter Light. It takes place in a small town in Sweden. The protagonists are a Lutheran minister and his girlfriend. The minister should logically represent love and hope, but his sermons are cold and bitter. It is the ostensibly atheist girlfriend Martha who lifts people up at every opportunity.
Kushner's favorite scene occurs when they are walking and encounter a boy. The minister scolds the boy for missing church. Martha asks him how his brother is, the one who has been ill. It is obvious that the so-called religious person hasn't a clue about the spirit of Christianity, while the nonreligious person is as close as any of us will come to being a true saint.
A woman came to Kushner years ago and said, "Rabbi, ten years ago my husband walked out on me, left me with the kids to feed and clothe. I have had to work two jobs to make ends meet. I have no money to see the movies. I think about him all the time. What should I do?"
And Kushner said, forgive him. Yes, forgive him, not as a favor to him, but as a favor to yourself. Should we even forgive terribly evil people, like Hitler? If by forgiveness, we mean setting aside the deeds of Nazis and saying they were not repulsive, excusing or approving their deeds, then the answer is no.
As a Jew, Kushner said he wanted to be able to say to Hitler, "We won and you lost. We're here and you're gone. In losing you became synonym for everything that is vile. Your name is the worst curse there is."
"I cannot be obsessed with the holocaust," Kushner said. "If I let Hitler define Judaism for me, then I remain his victim, then he is still here, with the power to define and frighten me. The ultimate revenge against the Nazis," he said, "is to forgive them."
Let Hitler be Hitler
Meanwhile, we are not Hitlers, and our neurotic preoccupation with failure is a lie we tell ourselves. To those who feel they have done something bad, Kushner has a prescription: Do something good. Do good deeds to balance out your bad.
An older woman once came to Kushner, ashamed of a terrible sin she had committed: visiting her husband's grave on a Jewish holy day. "Because I was young, i tried to talk her out of her shame,": Kushner said. Then he had an inspired insight. Since the holy day fell on the 17th of the month, he instructed her to give $17 to charity. The woman brightened immediately. The cure for irrational guilt is irrational virtue! Atonement -- it works.
We deserve to hear two voices from whatever faith we subscribe to, Kushner said. Yes, the first is a prophetic voice, challenging us to be true to its precepts and values. But the second should be a measured voice of mercy and forgiveness, reassuring us of God's love.
That's God's message. Kushner's message to us is not too far afield. It is that is it hard to be a good human being, and we should not be so hard on ourselves.
Kushner finished by saying that his old understanding of the story of Adam and Eve was an immature one. As he has grown older (and as he would insist, much, much better!), he has come to see the story of Adam and Eve not as one of a horrific case of the excessive punishment of two individuals, but as an allegorical tale about the development of the human race.
"I see the story as a biblical account of evolution. It tells how our earliest ancestors at some point rose distinguishably above the level of animals, and entered a world din which they were conscious of themselves and their responsibilities toward one another."
Far from being a story of a fall, it is the story of terrific success -- in which mere animals caught a piece of divinity by acquiring the power to know, evaluate, and decide.
Success does not guarantee a happy ending. Free will prevents it from being one. But it presents us all with a glorious opportunity to be what we have in us.
"Those who follow, the Fates lead; those who resist, they drag."
Josh Hammond has updated this belief of the ancient Greeks and applied it to contemporary America in a way that offers answers for some of our most vexing social and organizational problems.
For Hammond, it's not the Fates but Seven Cultural Forces that propel Americans and their organizations toward their destinies [see sidebar]. His book, The Stuff Americans are Made Of: The Seven Cultural Forces That Define Americans, is the product of a personal intellectual odyssey that has found him managing the Oakland Ballet, advising presidents Carter, Ford and Reagan, founding America's first think-tank on quality, and editing Fortune's annual supplement on quality.
Looking at the sweep of American history, Hammond takes note of the many surface changes in demographics and behaviors, but beneath them he sees constancy, in the form of the Seven Cultural Forces. Companies that see only the superficial will always be zigzagging from one fad to the next, he says; whereas those that understand the seven forces acquire a gyroscopic momentum that moves them forward and keeps them on track.
Some of America's most successful business leaders agree with him. Federal Express chairman Fred Smith says, "Our company's founding was based in large part on the Seven Cultural Forces. They are a road map to help us get and keep our cultural bearings in this vast and complex global economy." Disney requires all its employees to participate in training based on The Stuff Americans Are Made Of, and Disney University offers the program to organizations nationwide.
The seven forces provide the business equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. No matter what you need to do, there's a tool there to do it right. Tackling quality? Hammond says you're a lot better off flowing with Americans' passion for fixing things and our acceptance of mistakes (Force # 5) than you are trying to impose a zero defects or Six Sigma mentality on people who just aren't built that way.
Wondering about your company's culture? The biggest mistake you can make is to define the culture and then expect people to conform. In itself that's against the American grain of insistence on choice (Force #1), and the culture you create is likely to violate many of the other forces. Build a culture based on the forces, and good things will naturally follow.
There's no "I" in team, you say? Prepare yourself for some big disappointments if you don't put it there. Heading onto that information superhighway? You'll do better if the forces are with you.
Hammond, who invented the phrase "Just say no to drugs," contends that the seven cultural forces help explain our personal accomplishments and frustrations as well as those in our cross-cultural relationships and in our public institutions. You can hear his thought-provoking views at The Masters Forum on January 28.
Hot Sauce
3
Hide and Seek
Once upon a time, a carefree young girl who lived at the edge of a forest and who loved to wander in the forest became lost. As it grew dark and the little girl did not return home, her parents became very worried. They began calling for the little girl and searching in the forest, and it grew darker. The parents returned home and called neighbors and people from the town to help them search for their little girl.
Meanwhile, the little girl wandered about in the forest and became very worried and anxious as it grew dark, because she could not find her way home. she tried one path and another and became more and more tired. Coming to a clearing in the forest, she lay down by a big rock and fell asleep.
Her frantic parents and neighbors scoured the forest. They called and called the little girl's name but to no avail. Many of the searchers became exhausted and left, but the little girl's father continued searching throughout the night.
Early in the morning, the father came to the clearing where the girl had lain to sleep.
He suddenly saw his little girl and ran toward her, yelling and making a great noise on the dry branches which awoke the girl.
The little girl saw her father, and with a great shout of joy she exclaimed, "Daddy, I found you!"
as told by Harold W. Polski and Yaella Wozner in Everyday Miracles: The Healing Wisdom of Hasidic Stories
http://www.talamasca.org/stories/story19.html
all the nice things already happened, more attrractive and optmistic 10 yrs ago, getting worse, how can I look forward, hate jobm,marriage dull and predictable, kids are dull and ordinary, if I like son's wives, look forward to weddings, 2 nice dats,
what am I supposed to do rest life?
quarter cent fathfule and loving, 2 children may yet make you proud, friends trust you, youcan become factor in congregation and community
she had bought message that sincenota winner, a loser
Preview
January 28:
Josh Hammond
"The Stuff Americans Are Made Of," p. x
EXTRA
Seven Years at The Masters
"Title" p. xx
Review
Harold Kushner
"When All You've Ever Wanted
Isn't Enough," p. 3
The chief executive of a large company was greatly admired for his energy and drive. But he suffered from one embarrassing weakness: each time he entered the president's office to make his weekly report, he would wet his pants!
The kindly president advised him to see a urologist, at company expense. But when he appeared before the president the following week, his pants were again wet! "Didn't you see the urologist?" asked the president.
"No, he was out. I saw a psychiatrist instead, and I'm cured," the executive replied. "I no longer feel embarrassed!"
Acceptance
Told by Anthony de Mello in
The Heart of the Enlightened:
A Book of Story Meditation
http://www.talamasca.org/stories/
Harold Kushner
God, Sin and The Masters forum
by Michael Finley
REVIEW
Kushner photo
goes here
A rabbi who loved to play golf defied God by playing 18 holes on Yom Kippur. While everyone else was atoning, he was out on the links.
By chance, on his very first hole his drive went right into the cup -- a hole in one.
The angels turned to God and asked, "Is this how you reward a rabbi who descrates a holy day?"
God shrugged and said, "Who's he gonna tell?"
A man stood on the seashore and watched a boy and a girl build a sand castle. It was an architectural masterpiece, replete with towers, turrets, and moats.
Eventually the ocean did what the ocean does -- a wave swept over the sand castle. The children, instead of lamenting the loss of their great castle, laughed, took one another's hand and ran further up the shore, where they began immediately to build another.
Lesson: it is easier to laugh at misfortune when you have someone's hand to hold onto.
The man felt good about himself as he boarded the crowded bus. He had seen himself in the mirror, and he liked what he saw. Sitting a few seats from where he stood was a strikingly attractrive woman. The two locked eyes, and the man smiled what he imagined was his most seductive, assured smile. The woman smiled back, rose to her feet and offered him her seat.
The young man's parents had hoped for great things from him. He earned straight A's through high school and was accepted on scholarship to Stanford. Imagine their dismay when one day he dropped out and went to live in an ashram, to meditate and live simply.
In his explanation to his parents, the young man wrote that for the first time in his life he had found peace. He loved life away from the competitive rat race.
So attuned was he to this new way of life that he he believed that in six months he would become the number one disciple. By June, who knows -- he might be number one.
Two state supreme court justices went fishing, and were surprised the lake was empty except for them. They deduced fishing season had concluded, and they were fishing illegally. Being judges, they decided to try one another, by the side of the lake.
"I find you guilty of fishing out of season and sentence you to $5," said one judge to the other, and the money was handed over.
"And I sentence you with a $10 fine," said the other judge.
"But, if it please the court, recent precedent suggests a more lenient sentence," said the judge.
"True," said the other. "but there has been too much of this going on lately."
The writer Agatha Christie was asked how she like being married to an archaeologist.
"It's marvelous," she replied. "The older I get, the more interesting he finds me."
Not everyone is as pro-forgiveness as Kushner. Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi war crimes investigator, described an altercation in a displaced persons camp during World War II.
An acquaintance borrowed $10, promising he would get the money back later that week, when a package arrived. The week passed, and another week, and naother.
Six weeks later, the borrower offered
Wiesenthal his $10. Wiesenthal declined to accept it.
"For ten dollars," he said, "it is not worth changing my opinion of you."
A passenger on the bus notices the man next to him has a shoebox with holes punched in the top.
"Oh, that's a mongoose." the man said. "It's a poresent for my uncle Charley. Sometimes Charley has too much to drink, and then he has nightmares with snakes in it. The mongoose will protect him from the snakes.
When the passenger pointed out that nightmare snakes are imaginary and thus pose no real danger, the man replied:
"I know that. It's an imaginary mongoose."
The Final Lesson
The devotee knelt to be initiated into discipleship. The guru whispered the sacred mantra into his ear, warning him not to reveal it to anyone.
"What will happen if I do?" asked the devotee.
Said the guru, "Anyone to whom you reveal the mantra will be liberated from the bondage of ignorance and suffering, but you yourself will be excluded from discipleship and suffer damnation."
No sooner had he heard those words than the devotee rushed to the marketplace, collected a large crowd around him, and repeated the sacred mantra for all to hear.
The disciples later reported this to the guru and demanded that the man be expelled from the monastery for his disobedience. The guru smiled and said, "He has no need of anything I can teach. His action has shown him to be a guru in his own right."
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