The Camel Trader

In ancient time, there was a camel trader, who was known far and wide as being the best camel trader. This camel trader looked on the world as if it were his own personal habitat, as if nothing else mattered except his own existence. He would trade a camel, sell it, and then feast upon the proceeds -- for days. He would buy things for his friends - or what he considered to be his friends. In truth, this camel trader eventually squandered all of its wealth and only had one camel left. The one camel that was left was not a very good camel. It was a little sickly. It was a little diseased. It was very hungry, and it was not big enough to be very useful to anyone.

The camel trader was sitting in the street because it no longer had a place to live. with a hungry stomach that was almost as hungry as the camel's. He had no hope for the future; he had no money; and he owed much to others because not only had he spent his own fortunes, but he had borrowed money to buy camels along the way and had not repaid that money because of his feasting. He had spent others' fortunes as well.

So the camel trader was looking at his last camel, when he was approached by a rug trader. This rug trader was nowhere near as flambuoyant, and others within this country thought he was very strange, because it did not - you might say - enjoy life in the same way that other traders did. This particular rug merchant stayed to himself; he did not spend a lot of money for food; he did not spend a lot of money for shelter. But he always seemed to be self-contained and happy. He approached the camel trader and spoke, "I will make a deal with you. That deal is that I will make you once again the richest camel trader in the nation: provided that you follow what I tell you. And if you do not follow what I tell you, you will owe me two years of servitude as if you are a slave. For that deal, I will buy this camel from you."

The camel trader, being very hungry, looked upon the possibility that he could sell this camel, and he said, "Certainly. I will do so." The rug merchant said, "No. You agreed too quickly. I do not want that form of agreement; I want you to be certain of what I mean. If at any time after I purchase this camel, you disobey my directive, you owe me two years of your life. If at any time you do not expend the monies that you have in the way that I direct you to, you owe me two years."

The camel trader thought about it for a little while and then finally did agree. The rug merchant then told him: "What you will do is to obtain a job working for the other camel merchants. Cleaning the stall. You will clean up after the other camels, and what is not camel food, you will sell as fertilizer; for now you have become a fertilizer salesman. You personally will live and sleep with this camel. It will keep you warm at night. Anything that is camel food that you clean up, the camel gets to eat. The money that you obtain from the sale of the camel waste, as fertilizer, becomes money that you will utilize in the following way. One third of it, you and I will go about and set up agreements with all of your creditors to pay it back. One third of it, you get to spend in any way you choose, which may be best spent on food, shelter, but then again, you have that choice. And one third of it will be placed in my care for your future." The camel trader then did so.

Each day the camel trader worked, each day he moved the camel waste, and each day it sold that waste. Eventually, the camel got fatter. Because it was sheltered with the other camels, it became healthier. And it became something that was desired as the finest camel in the land. The camel trader knew that it wasn't his own camel. One day, the camel trader was approached to sell his one camel, and he could not do so. So the camel trader approached the rug salesman and said, "There is someone that wishes to buy the camel."

The rug salesman then said, "All right. I will sell you the camel: Providing you will use the proceeds from the sale of the camel in exactly the way that I have told you. One third for your future; one third for now; and one third for your past." Then the rug merchant sold the camel for the one third that the camel trader had placed away for the future from the sale of the fertilizer. Then camel was sold again to the new buyer. One third of the sale price was to be spent paying back what the camel merchant owed. One third belonged to the camel merchant. And one third was spent buying new camels.

The camel merchant thought about this for a moment, "How can I buy new camels with this one third? It is not enough." And the rug merchant said, "Yes. It is. For you will take this one third, and you will buy three camels. And you and I will search throughout this entire city, or the nation if necessary, and find three camels that are in at least as bad a shape as the camel you started with."

One person's beautiful camel is another person's debt. One person's scruffy camel is another person's wealth.

audience: Is that what actually allows us to focus? On this moment. And in the present, so the past and the future being appropriately attended to, but not a diversion. It allows it all to funnel into this moment.

Yes. And your future can start benefitting your now, just as your past can. When you become overly concerned with the possible what-might-be's, you have a shattered dream. When you become overly concerned with the possible ways that you have done it in the past, and limit yourself in thinking you can't do it a different way in the future, you also shatter your dreams.

There is another adaptation of that in the Bible. I believe that they give the impression that the merchant is the devil, and you just sell your soul. That would be more like: if you put all of it in the present, all of it in the past, or all of it in the future, that you really would be selling your soul.

Yes.

What if it appears as though, at the end of all this, there wasn't a third left over?

There was. If there was a third for the future, there was a third for the past. If there was a third for the merchant, there was a third for the future. If you have one penny, you can make it into three. If that becomes the only thing you concern yourself with, is dividing it into its thirds.

Then you no longer owe. If you have repaid the debt, you no longer owe. If it is that you have eliminated the past effectively, by satisfying the past's demand on the present. Then, you have the ability to move toward the future.

The camel merchant saw it as impossible to pay back all of those that he owed. But the reality is that from the first camel, and the good faith to do so, he then had the capacity to have three camels. He continued on, tending to the other camels, and he continued to feed these three new camels. And he sold each one of these new camels at its own time, when it grew to be then desirable to others, and took that money, and again hunted out what was a comparatively useless camel. After some amount of time, he had then repaid every one he had ever borrowed money from. He had also freed himself from the incurment of his debt of gratitude. And he had made himself again one of the richest in his own endeavors. And he never stopped cleaning the camel's stalls.

Because it was necessary?

Yes. It was a recognition that that was an important necessary element. And instead of seeing it as a punishment, he saw it as opportunity. You have the opportunity, in almost every endeavor that you work with, to find camel droppings. You simply ignore them, because you don't quite look at them in a way that you say they smell good, or they are useful. But the reality of it is: If you dry camel droppings, you can burn them and stay warm. If you plant camel droppings, things grow quickly. So.

An example of that, is I'm doing typing now. And I'm trying to get rid of that part of it, because I want to. So I can change that idea?

The typing is camel droppings. Take from it one third that is yours to do with as you choose, one third that moves toward your future, whatever that might be, and one third that takes care of your past. Would you like to know one of the things that is your past? Last month's bills.

Children In The Forest

Life is not a thing to be solved. It is a most wondrous mystery to be enjoyed. It is a place to play.

This is a story of two children in the forest. These two children each have an idea of the things they have seen in the forest. In their ideas, each one believes they have found the most wondrous things within the forest. Each child knows this to be the truth, for they have seen it with their own eyes. One has seen the large rock that glitters in the sun and this is most beauteous to it, and it is amazed and finds wonder in its discovery.

The other has found the cool brook that winds and wends its way through the forest, and within the brook are many fishes, and small things swimming, and this child finds this to be most wondrous.

Each childone holds a perception of what they believe, and each child is so certain that they have seen the most wondrous part of the forest, that each is unwilling to accept that there is some other part that is most wondrous also.

When the two begin to speak to each other one says, ``I have found the most beauteous thing in the forest.'' And the other one listens, knowing that what must have been found is the stream, for that is surely the most beauteous thing. And when the other speaks of its rock and what it has found, the one who has seen the stream thinks, ``You have not seen the most beauteous. That is not the most beauteous.'' And that one speaks out that that is not the most beautiful thing in the forest, that the most beautiful thing is what I have found.

If the first one who has seen the rock begins to doubt that what t has seen is beatiful, is that low self-esteem? And if the second child insists that its stream is more beautiful, is that high self-esteem?

To judge either of these beliefs will most likely be untrue. It is not the certainty and the surety of the steps of the one you look at that describes esteem. It is the understanding of the steps and why they were taken.

If the second child, the one that has seen the stream - looks upon this situation, and instead of saying it is not the rock that is beautiful but the stream. If it said, ``I wish to see this rock you have seen, for I have found the stream to be most beauteous. Perhaps we may both see both things.'' Then you may look upon that and say that child has self-esteem, that is confidence. It has looked and it has an understanding that it does not know all things yet. But it also understands that for its purpose it knows the stream. It knows that part which was its purpose and it is able to change, not having to have its stream be the most beautiful, but willing to accept that there can be more than its singular view of life.

That, in truth, is the confidence that you seek. That, in truth, is the self-esteem, the ability of you to say that the part that you are involved in, you have your involvement with. That you can see it and know it for yourself. That you can see it and know it as part of your life. It does not have to be the same as someone else's.

Each day you allow your self-esteem to be attacked, because you are not creating it. And that is the most wondrous thing of self-esteem. No one else can make a judgment of your self-esteem. Others can look upon it. Others can judge it. They can say you have it and you are a victim of low self-esteem, or they may say you are a victim of high self-esteem. But only you can have self-esteem. Only you can know it, and that is created by the amount you are willing to estimate that you are part of whatever is involved around you - how much of you you will give to it and how much you will receive from it.

You have a concept in your society that self-esteem is a mark of overachievers and underachievers. But I will give you a thought, overachievers and underachievers are both that way from fear. They are not that way from any other thing.

Those who are overachievers are afraid that they are not achieving or not doing enough and that they will not be seen by others to be valuable.

You are not less because you are not as much as another thinks you should be. You are only less because you are not what you think you should be.

Those that are underachievers are very often afraid of all the pain they have felt from their perceived mistakes, and having those things they have done be perceived by others as failures, as not of value.

If you can perceive that you have failed because another has said you have failed, you are giving up your ability to estimate your value. And that becomes low self-esteem.

If you look to others and have them judge you, whether you have done enough or not, and you do not stop until you have someone else tell you that you have done enough, is that any greater esteem and estimate of self? Is it truly higher self-esteem to be stubborn in your life, that you must be right and another must be wrong?

It is most wondrous that you use this thing of self-esteem in your world as a way to justify stubbornness. You perceive very often that one who has very high self-esteem is one that always perceives themself right, that they have a certain confidence that they are right. But yet it does not occur to you he may have to defend being right because he is so afraid of being wrong. That is most wondrous also.

Balanced place is that you can never truly be wrong. You can not be attached in a balanced way to the events around you. You can not be involved as much it is that perhaps balance would say that you should be. You can perhaps not give as much of your energy as you have committed to do and agreed to do. But you cannot be wrong. You may be part of something or you may be apart from it, but you still are not wrong.

The esteem that you hold for yourself must be the estimate of you with relationship to all other things around you.

So, I will give you most wondrous thing. If you are afraid to join closely with another, that fear comes from an uncertainty. That uncertainty has grown out of a place where you do not know your part of whatever it is that you are involved with. If you simply do one thing, and that is to look upon your life and say how closely you will be involved with it, then you, as the child in the forest, will not look upon the rock as something less, but will be willing to accept that perhaps the rock is beautiful too. And you will not be like the one that looks upon the rock and cannot accept that the stream is something of value. You will be willing to look at this situation and say, ``Is this not most wondrous? Not only can I have the rock but I may explore the stream, I can give myself that experience as well. I do not have to be locked into one form of beauty. I may see many.''

You do not have to do that from the doubt that your view is the right view, you may do it from the joy and the ability of you to see more than one thing.

The child part of you that experienced the thing that was fearful and angering, forever judges things that are similar to that. That judgment causes you to have an estimate of yourself at a given moment in your life, that is somewhat less than what you may estimate your involvement can be. You estimate that the closest you can be to another person is perhaps only so close. And that is because being this close to them has been painful in your past. So you estimate that while it looks like you could be this close that it will be painful, you try to guess what will happen. And in your guessing of what will happen, very often you keep yourself away from the true experiences of your life.

The child then looks in the forest and guesses that if he sees the stream that he may be right, or he may be wrong. The child that says, ``I know the rock is the most beautiful because I found it.'' is the child that does not have the experience of both the rock and the stream.

Life is not a thing to be solved. It is a most wondrous mystery to be enjoyed. It is place to play. But you hold the judgments against yourself, and those judgments make you have an estimate that you cannot be of value to another. Or make you have an estimate that the only value you can be is to yourself.

In this thing then, to find a place where you can estimate yourself in truth to the true nature of your involvement, is to find a place where you can stand in the forest and accept that you do not want to see that of the stream, that you are satisfied with the rock. And in speaking in that way perhaps that child may speak, ``Yes, but I find the rock so fascinating to me now that the stream does not bring pleasure. The thought of the stream at this time is a distraction from the pleasure that I find in the rock. Later perhaps I will have the stream. I will not say it is not beautiful, I will only say that I will wait for that form of beauty.''

Your estimate then may also say, ``No, I will not be involved in that. My life is full as it is. I do not need more, I do not want more. I do not desire more. I wish to have it as it is for this time, but that does not mean at some other time I will not have more.`` You are not less because you are not as much as another thinks you should be. You are only less because you are not what you think you should be.

That is the time when you become unconfident of yourself - when you perceive that you could be more, when you perceive that you want to be more, when you perceive that you desire to be more - and yet you take no steps because of fear that to be more will be more burden upon you.

So, good self-estimate is that which is the ability to look upon a thing and to say, ``Yes, I will be involved in that - yes I will, or no I will not.'' To stop, to be in that which is in some amount of your own confidence, to confide in yourself that is not what you desire to do, that that is not what you want. Very often it is that you think in your life that because another says you should be a certainty of way that you must be that way. That happens more as a result of doubt of what you should be involved in, than doubt of self. It happens more as a form of believing that all things that you are, are things that are imposed upon you from outside of you. It is most wondrous. All things that you are, are what you will allow yourself to join with.