Monkey’s Trap

An Interesting system has been used for capturing monkeys in the jungles of Africa.  The goal is to take the monkeys alive and unharmed for shipment to zoos of America.  In an extremely humane way, the captors use heavy bottles, with long narrow necks, into which they deposited a handful of sweet-smelling nuts.  The bottles are dropped on the jungle floor, and the captors return the next morning to find a monkey trapped next to each bottle.

How is it accomplished? The monkey, attracted by the aromatic scent of the nuts, comes to investigate the bottle, the nuts, and is trapped.  The monkey can’t take its hand out of the bottle as long it’s holding nuts, but it is unwilling to open its hand and let them go.  The bottle is too heavy to carry away, so the monkey is trapped.

We may smile at the foolish monkeys, but how often we hold to our problems so tenaciously as the monkeys hold to the nuts in the bottle. And so, figuratively we carry our bottle around with us, feeling very sorry for ourselves, and begging for sympathy from others, even from God.

“ I believe that this is very true when we hold on to our bottles.  Every one has problems even a mighty man himself.  You can’t look to other people to handle your problems of greed, fear and attachments.  You can ask for forgiveness. Surely pray to God.  But the one you need to look to is yourself for the forgiveness.  If you can look inside yourself to find the place of happiness and not feel pity, you can be happy. You can search through your problems. You need to have faith in yourself.  This story, I enjoyed so much because it made me think about my own bottle. And I wanted to share with you”.

Chittaranjan  Jyotishi.