A MISUNDERSTANDING
Once I went to a village and saw a man cut down a neem tree. Afterward, he began stripping the bark from its trunk.
“Why are you removing the bark?” I asked him. He smiled and replied, “If the bark isn’t removed, worms will get inside and spoil the wood.”
This was in 1965. Ten years later, in August 1975, I visited another village. There I saw the trunk of a neem tree that had been cut down but still had its bark. This reminded me of the earlier incident, and I thought I would test whether the villager’s words had been correct. I asked a man from that household to bring a tool and peel off the bark. When he did, I saw thick worms, about an inch long, under the bark. They were very soft, but they had chewed into the surface of the trunk, leaving deep channels across it.
This is how nature works. Nature teaches us that life in this world must be lived with great care. The order of the world is such that a single mistake can wipe out all your strengths. One lapse is enough to destroy all your opportunities. Nature could have protected the neem trunk even without removing the bark, but instead it set a rule: the owner must strip the bark, and only then will the trunk remain safe.
This same law applies to human life, because the rules of nature also govern the world of people.
In 1944, two men from Jaunpur (U.P.) started a business together. Their starting capital was only a few hundred rupees. But God blessed their joint venture, and in six years their business grew to a value of 30,000 rupees. Then disputes arose between them, and eventually they decided to part ways. On the advice of an arbitrator, it was agreed not to divide the business itself, but to assess its value and split it accordingly—one man would take half the value in cash, while the other would take the assets. That is what happened: one man received the goods, and the other received 15,000 rupees in cash.
In 1949, fifteen thousand rupees was equal to several lakhs today. The man who took the cash opened a cloth shop in a Jaunpur market. From the start, he found excellent opportunities, and within a year his capital had doubled. In the second year of business, he had entered a stage where a wide door to growth and success had opened before him.
But then a weakness slowly crept in. He became careless with his spending. His expenses on himself, his family, and his friends grew without limit. He forgot that of the one thousand rupees he took in from a day’s sales, only ten percent truly belonged to him; the remaining ninety percent belonged to the supplier. Yet he began to spend as if the entire amount was his income—just as a lawyer treats the full fee he receives as his own.
Such extravagance cannot continue in shopkeeping. The result was that within a few years he was bankrupt. Not a single rupee of the fifteen thousand remained.
After this, he lived for about fifteen years but was unable to restart any business. Someone advised him to perform a chilla (a spiritual retreat), saying this would solve his problems. He did so, but breaking the laws of nature cannot be corrected by a chilla. His situation only worsened, until finally, in 1971, in a state of distress, he was struck by a jeep and died on the road.
One mistake in life can ruin all opportunities and push a person to the very edge of failure.
This rule applies to all matters of life. With every neem tree there is a worm. With every matter there is a weakness attached. A person must guard against these weaknesses with the utmost care. In any matter where he is negligent, the weakness will take effect and spoil the whole affair.
If the owner of a neem tree were to protest against the insects that infest it, such a protest would never stop them from burrowing into its trunk. The presence of those insects exists by the permission of nature’s law—and whatever operates under that law cannot be eliminated.
In the same way, the “insects” that appear in the affairs of human life also exist by the decree of nature. They are bound to remain. To raise waves of protest or complaint against them is entirely futile. What we must do is seek means of protection, not waste our energy in protest.
Protection is one of the fundamental principles of life in this world. Only those survive who take care to safeguard themselves. Those who become heedless of their own protection will find, in God’s world, nothing but ruin.
