The village girl drew out the bucket from the deep, dark well and as she poured it into her clay pot ready to carry on her head back home, she noticed an unpleasant odour. She spilled away the bucket and drew out another with the same results - a bad smell. By this time her friends had turned up with their clay pots. One of them remembered that whenever the well gets dirty the water gets smelly, so they decided to spend the morning drawing up buckets of water and spilling them away. the clean water would be coming up from the ground and the dirty water on was removed. They carried on until nightfall, but the water stunk worse than ever. A wise, old woman walked passed and noticed the girls spilling water, she said "If you want to get rid of the smell, then you have to remove the cause of it." She continued, "I guess some animals fallen in there and having drowned is rotting away." The girls pulled out a few more buckets of water , one of which contained a dead cat. Then they skimmed the remaining dirty water and that is the story of how the well was cleaned.

Baba Nand Singh jee said that this dead, decomposing cat is EGO. This dead, rotting cat is inside us and is giving a bad smell to everyone around us. No matter how many good actions we do, like seva, simran, paat and donations of daswand to charity, if it is done with ego then we still stink. Its like talking out buckets of water to clean the well but not dealing with the cause of the problem.

Khalsa jee, we have to remove ego, then our seva, simraan, paat and donations of daswand to charity will be pure and acceptable.

 

Posted by Harjit Singh Lakhan

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