Tao and the selfish

The Sufi teaching story, "Bayazid and the Selfish Man", shows how difficult it is for an adult to free himself from the power of ordinary consciousness and consensus reality, even when he believes he wants to:

One day a man reproached Bayazid, the great mystic of the ninth century, saying that he had fasted and prayed and so on for thirty years and not found the joy which Bayazid described.

Bayazid told him that he might continue for three hundred years and still not find it.

"How is that?" asked the would-be illuminate.

"Because your vanity is a barrier to you."

"Tell me the remedy."

"The remedy is one which you cannot take."

"Tell me, nevertheless."

Bayazid said: "You must go to the barber and have your (respectable) beard shaved. Remove all your clothes and put a girdle around yourself. Fill a nosebag with walnuts and suspend it from your neck. Go to the marketplace and call out: 'A walnut will I give to any boy who will strike me on the back of neck.' Then continue to the justices'session so that they may see you."

"But I cannot do that; please tell me something else that would do as well."

"This is the first move, and the only one", said Bayazid, "but I had already told you that you would not do it; so you cannot be cured."

Shrine of Bayazid Bastami in Bastam near Shahroud.