subject: You Don't Have to Take the Painful Route Through Life - The Little Prince Series [print this page] You Don't Have to Take the Painful Route Through Life - The Little Prince Series
Daily Insight from the Story ofThe Little Prince
The story of the Little Prince devotes a whole chapter to the dangers of baobabs. They represent counterfeits of the real thing, which are rosebushes.
In the movie Coco Chanel, Gabrielle (who becomes known as Coco) grows up in an orphanage looked after by nuns, then becomes a seamstress in a factory. In due course she meets a gentleman who sweeps her off her feet.
When she is invited to the gentleman's chateau, austensibly to meet his family, she finds that his family isn't there after all and neither was it planned that they would be.
The man is fabulously wealthy, all of which is attractive to Gabrielle. But she is outraged that he lied to her.
A new plant had sprouted in her life, but the lie revealed it to be a baobab instead of a rosebush.
Coco should have followed her inner knowing and left right then. But how many of us dally with situations like this because the individual seems so charming or a particular set of circumstances so tantalizing?
This is why the Little Prince is at such pains to explain to the crashed pilot he has become friends with that you can't afford to give a baobab an inch or it will make a mess of your life, if not fracture your very soul.
The pilot, who is the narrator of the story, tells us that he and his friends have been skirting this danger for a long time, which is what most people do. We see a situation that spells danger to our being, but instead of getting clear away from it we toy with it.
The oh-so-charming gentleman sweet-talks Gabrielle into moving in with him. Warned by those she works among of the risk she is taking, she nevertheless plunges headlong into the relationshipcausing a lot of hardship for herself when she has to leave and has inadequate means of support.
We can certainly learn from our entanglements with baobabs, be they in the form of a lover, a job, a location, or some other tempting situation. But do we have to become completely enmeshed and cause ourselves such intense grief?
Does a situation have to turn into acatastrophe before we awaken?
It depends how attentive we areor, to use an Eastern term, howmindful.
Learning to extricate ourselves from the danger of baobabs in our life before they encompass us and swallow us up is one of the most crucial lessons we need to learn in our journey into higher consciousness.
We learn to beaware, watchful, observant. Then when a new shoot appears in our life we check it carefully, daily, lest it proves to be a baobab instead of a rosebush.
It's about learning to listen to our inner knower, paying attention to what we are hearing and seeing instead of fooling ourselves that it will be all okay.
The reality is that weknow very early on in any situation whether it's going to turn out to be a baobab or a rosebush. Our trouble is that we don't pay attention to what we know.
The narrator of the story of the Little Prince tells us he has made an especially large and colorful drawing of what it's like to deal with a baobab once it has established itself in your life and taken you over. Youlose yourself in it.
This is the only drawing of this detail and magnitude in the entire book, and the reason for it is the urgency of the warning we are being given.
It isn't necessary to take the painful road through life, amassing pain that's self-afflicted because we don't pay attention to our inner knower. It's far preferable to take the direct route, the conscious route.
Just how to detect a baobab as opposed to a rosebush at the earliest moment so we don't fall prey to its clutches is our topic tomorrow.
