Don’t Make Assumptions
The Story of the Cookie Thief is an inspiration story, offered as an insightful poem that offers a brilliant life lesson to you on why we should not make assumptions too quickly. Everything is projection, and when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
This teaching will help you focus, question assumptions and help you give the benefit of the doubt to others. It will help you to choose your responses carefully. To remember that attitude is everything. It will remind you that things are not always as they may appear to be. It will remind you of our inherent judgmental sides, locked deep within our shadow selves. It is only when we are pressed and squeezed like a bunch of grapes that we can truly see what is inside of us.
This inspirational work presented as The Story of the Cookie Thief, helps us to remember to keep the main thing, the main thing. We should always focus on self first, and then give and respond from that standpoint. Our minds are geared to make assumptions at lightening speed to protect us from threats. However, our million year old brains tend to over do this and we end up being defensive in our thinking, as well as our approach to others. The first act of war is defence.
So, learning to be open minded, letting go of our harsh judgmental natures, will help us transform our lives and connect better with other people. So many of us have good intentions to spread love and peace in the world, yet we get bamboozled by automatic thinking time and again.
How many times in our lives, have we absolutely known that something was a certain way, only to discover later that what we believed to be true … was not? Be inspired. Namaste.
The Story of the Cookie Thief, the poem by Valerie Cox
A woman was waiting at an airport one night,
With several long hours before her flight.
She hunted for a book in the airport shops.
Bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop.
She was engrossed in her book but happened to see,
That the man sitting beside her, as bold as could be.
Grabbed a cookie or two from the bag in between,
Which she tried to ignore to avoid a scene.
So she munched the cookies and watched the clock,
As the gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock.
She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by,
Thinking, “If I wasn’t so nice, I would blacken his eye.”
With each cookie she took, he took one too,
When only one was left, she wondered what he would do.
With a smile on his face, and a nervous laugh,
He took the last cookie and broke it in half.
He offered her half, as he ate the other,
She snatched it from him and thought… oooh, brother.
This guy has some nerve and he’s also rude,
Why he didn’t even show any gratitude!
She had never known when she had been so galled,
And sighed with relief when her flight was called.
She gathered her belongings and headed to the gate,
Refusing to look back at the thieving ingrate.
She boarded the plane, and sank in her seat,
Then she sought her book, which was almost complete.
As she reached in her baggage, she gasped with surprise,
There was her bag of cookies, in front of her eyes.
If mine are here, she moaned in despair,
The others were his, and he tried to share.
Too late to apologize, she realized with grief,
That she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief.
One of the most profound things that I have learned by teaching people self-reliance over the last decade, is that almost everything out there is a projection. It is a projection of what we are experiencing on the inside. One way of describing that is when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, and that can be very, very true for a lot of people, for example, who have left treatment, left a wellness experience, and have gone home and said to people in the home, “guys you can stop mucking about now, please stop being so nice. I really don’t need you to be anything other than yourselves…only to have the family say, “But we’re not putting anything on, we have always been like this!” And, the person who had to go through a spiritual awakening has gone home to something completely different. And nothing has changed except themselves. So change can be really profound.
Rumi said we are the mirror, as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste of this eternity in a minute. That is exactly how the yin and yang of life tend to go. You know, people talk about projection in terms of how we see a movie. We see a 2D image on a screen, and we could fall in love with those characters far more than we fall in love with the real ones in our lives.
The family for example, of the person who went home and saw that everything changed, and felt the love and the warmth of people that was there all along, which she could never feel inside, although she yearned for it.
There is an inspirational poem by Valerie Cox. It is called the Cookie Thief. It is about projection and about us making egoic demands on ourselves, where we perceive and get the wrong picture in the end.
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