Blind Sight

Trey Smith

A poor man decided one day to get rich, so he put on his hat and coat and went to town.

As he walked through the center of town, pondering the question of how to get riches, his glance happened to fall on someone carrying a quantity of gold.

The poor man rushed up and grabbed some of the gold. He was caught as he tried to flee.

The magistrate asked the poor man, "How did you expect to get away with the gold, with all those people around?"

"I only saw the gold," explained the poor man, "I didn't see the people."
~ from Vitality, Energy, Spirit: A Taoist Sourcebook by Thomas Cleary ~

I recently purchased this book. It provides a wide sampling of Taoist writings. The story above is from the Book of Lieh-Tzü. I wrote a brief post on this story back in February 2009.

In the previous post, I took the easy way out! I zeroed in on the financiers of our day because their focus is on the accumulation of wealth and not people (well, except for themselves and their kind). In truth, though accurate, it was a lazy association because the poor man in the story represents each of us.

How often do we become fixated on a product, an idea, a relationship or a job? It gets into our psyche and we don't factor into the equation other important variables. All we know is that we WANT whatever it is and nothing will stop us from obtaining it. It doesn't matter who we hurt or disappoint. It doesn't matter who we have to knock down or step on. Our desire is so great, nothing else matters!

Once we have whatever it is in our clutches, reality starts to sink in. Sometimes we discover that this great object of our desire isn't as all encompassing wonderful as we thought it would be. Sometimes the people we neglected or hurt in our mad dash for the goods return to let us know that we will now face some serious and/or ugly consequences. Not so infrequently, it's a good measure of both.

Though our eyes are wide open, often our vision is blind.