I enjoy reading meaningful stories and parables. A good writer can pack a lot of meaning in a short narrative. A great writer or a spiritually enlightened person can pack enough meaning in a short story or parable to last thousands of years. Such a narrative draws us instinctively and we want to find out the hidden meanings. As children, we let the story carry us in its magical mystery and imagery. As young adults, we wonder what possible meaning exists in these little “silly” tales. As mature adults, we dig deep into each word and each sentence; try to “nail down” a meaning that makes sense to us. Or, we reject the story; it does not make sense at all; too simplistic and not sophisticated! We try to intellectualize the story from our base of knowledge and experiences and measure it at our own level of expectations. As we mature spiritually, we realize that we can never exhaust the meanings of a story nor “nail down” an exact meaning. We move ourselves out of the intellect and into the intuition as we ponder the many ways to understand and interpret a story.

Most spiritual traditions rely heavily on parables and stories. Parables and stories contain many psychological keys that help us understand the wisdom of the great teachers and the silliness of our separative and exclusionary thinking.

In the process of unfolding the meanings of a parable, we unlock levels of our intuition. It is not the logical mind that grasps the inner meanings of any Teaching but the intuition. Parables and symbolic stories are told so that we can develop our higher senses. Reading parables, meditating on them, writing about them, and thinking about them are processes that unlock the doors of our higher faculties.

A Great Teacher anchors the real Teaching at the highest level possible and this makes His or Her work timeless. The longevity of the particular Teaching depends directly on the level of contact of the Teacher. “Flavor of the month” teachings come and go as fast as yesterday’s news. They rise only because of clever marketing and sink as soon as the marketing is over. However, every time a Great Teacher tells a story, it is firmly anchored at the highest level that the Teacher was able to contact at the time of the writing or telling. The Teacher knows all the meanings and symbols of every word that is stated and this vision is imprinted in the story. There is a vibration that impregnates every word. That is why it takes so much thought to try to unravel a little parable. We never really unravel a high-level story or parable completely until we are able to put our consciousness at the same level from which the story originated. Stories and Parables beckon us and pull us in.

I came across the following story from a book on the Sufis. I found it fresh and applicable. It is attributed to The Chisti Sufi Order, founded by Khwaja Abu-Ishak Chishti, who was born early in the 10th Century AD. Here it is:

“Once upon a time, when the science and art of gardening was not yet well established among men, there was a master-gardener. In addition to knowing all the qualities of plants, their nutritious, medicinal and aesthetic values, he had been granted a knowledge of the Herb of Longevity, and he lived for many hundreds of years.
“In successive generations, he visited gardens and cultivated places throughout the world. In one place he planted a wonderful garden, and instructed the people in its upkeep and even in the theory of gardening. But, becoming accustomed to seeing some of the plants come up and flower every year, they soon forgot that others had to have their seeds collected, that some were propagated from cuttings, that some needed extra watering, and so on. The result was that the garden eventfully became wild and people started to regard this as the best garden that there could be.
“After giving these people many chances to learn, the gardener expelled them and recruited another whole band of workers. He warned them that if they did not keep the garden in order, and study his methods, they would suffer for it. They, in turn, forgot — and, since they were lazy, tended only those fruits and flowers which were easily reared, and allowed the others to die. Some of the first trainees came back to them from time to time, saying: “You are the ones who are departing from truth in this matter.”
“But the master-gardener persisted. He made other gardens, wherever he could, and yet none was ever perfect except the one which he himself tended with his chief assistants. As it became known that there were many gardens and even many methods of gardening, people from one garden would visit those of another, to approve, to criticize, or to argue. Books were written, assemblies of gardeners were held, gardeners arranged themselves in grades according to what they thought to be the right order of precedence.
“As is the way of men, the difficulty of the gardeners remains that they are too easily attracted by the superficial. They say: “I like this flower,” and they want everyone else to like it as well. It may, in spite of its attraction or abundance, be a weed which is choking other plants which could provide medicines or food which the people and the garden need for their sustenance and permanency.
“Among these gardeners are those who prefer plants of one single color. These they may describe as “good”. There are others who will only tend the plants, while refusing to care about the pats or the gates, or even the fences.
“When, at length, the ancient gardener died, he left as his endowment the whole knowledge of gardening, distributing it among the people who would understand in accordance with their capacities. So the science as well as the art of gardening remained as a scattered heritage in many gardens and also in some records of them.
“People who are brought up in one garden or another generally have been so powerfully instructed as to the merits of demerits of how the inhabitants see things that they are almost incapable — though they make the effort — of realizing that they have to return to the concept of “garden”. At the best, they generally only accept, reject, suspend judgment or look for what they imagine are the common factors.
“From time to time true gardeners do arise. Such is the abundance of semi-gardens that whey they hear of real ones people say: “Oh, yes. You are talking about a garden such as we already have, or we imagine.” What they have and what they imagine are both defective.
“The real experts, who cannot reason with the quasi-gardeners, associate for the most part among themselves, putting into this or that garden something from the total stock which will enable it to maintain its vitality to some extent.
“They are often forced to masquerade, because the people who want to learn from them selfdom know about the fact of gardening as an art or science underlying everything that they have heard before. So they ask questions like: “How can I get a more beautiful flower on these onions?”
“The real gardeners may work with them because true gardens can sometimes be brought into being, for the benefit of all mankind. They do not last long, but it is only through them that the knowledge can be truly learnt and people can come to see what a garden really is.”

References & Resources:

The story of the Garden is reprinted from the book The Way of the Sufi by Idris Shah, pp. 117-119.

For an excellent study of Parables and the psychological keys contained in them, especially using the Parables of Christ, see The Teachings of Christ, Volume 3: The Transformative Power of Christ.

This article first appeared in TSG Foundation’s Outreach Newsletter, July-August 2008 issue. For an article on the Parable of the Seed, from the Parables of Christ, click here.