Teaching Story - The Changed Water

by Life Positive

At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed with different water, which would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.

When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened.

Unable to bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else, he drank the new water, and became like the rest.

- Idries Shah