The Old Hindu Parable That Will Forever Change How You See Life’s Problems

The story of the deadly snake on the road

Image by Foto-RaBe from Pixabay

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There is a famous story in the teachings of Advaita Vedanta (non-duality), often used by ancient mystics as a teaching tool for their disciples.

The story tells of a villager returning home at dusk when he suddenly sees a snake on the road in front of him, blocking his path. He immediately panics and staggers back.

Fearing that the snake might be deadly, he begins to worry and tries to think of a way to get past it.

“What do I do?” he asks himself. “Should I try to kill the snake? Should I try to scare it away? Could I try and run past it?” He stands there, scared, ruminating about his problem and unable to move forward.

What he fails to realize however, is that the dangerous snake that he is so afraid of is actually just a lifeless rope lying on the road, left there by a passing traveler.

The Dark Veil of Ignorance

The point of the story is to illustrate how our own ignorance creates our suffering.

How often do we jump straight into trying to fix a perceived problem without ever questioning the assumptions that underlie it?

What if I’m wrong about this? What if I’m misperceiving the situation? What if I’m missing a key piece of information? What if I’m not seeing the bigger picture?

Perhaps this is why Albert Einstein had famously said,

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

No matter how much time the villager spends trying to think up a solution to his apparent problem, he will fail to solve it because the problem doesn’t exist in the manner he thinks it does.

The snake that he is so afraid of is not real and his problem is illusory.

What the mystics tried to impart to us through this story was that the nature of most of our problems is illusory. We project our own fears and insecurities onto a wholly neutral reality and perceive our life to be mired in problems that don’t really exist.

We then proceed to imagine solutions to these imagined problems. Before we know it, we get so immersed in a dark cloud of negative thoughts that we fail to see the reality underneath.

It’s tempting to believe that our compulsive thinking about a problem grants us a better understanding of it and helps us to resolve it. But what good is an understanding that is based on a flawed premise to begin with?

Trying to come up with an imaginary solution for an illusory problem will only perpetuate the illusion of the problem. Or, as author and spiritual teacher, Hale Dwoskin, put it,

“The only reason we want to understand our problems is because we are planning to have them again.”

The Light of Awareness

The villager’s story is finally resolved when he musters up enough courage to get closer to the ‘snake’ and shine the light of his lamp at it. It is at this moment that he discovers it to be a rope. He is relieved to realize that he had nothing to be afraid of all along.

Metaphorically, the light of the lamp represents knowledge and awareness while the darkness represents ignorance.

The rope is a symbol for reality in its natural state, completely neutral and non-threatening, while the snake symbolizes our inner fear, projected onto reality, imbuing it with meaning.

As soon as the light of awareness is shone into the darkness, it vanishes all at once, just as the snake ceased to be a snake the moment the villager saw it to be a rope. Reality hasn’t changed, only his understanding of it did.

It is no wonder that meditation and mindfulness are staple practices taught by Buddhist and Hindu mystics. They aim at quieting the very mechanism creating most of our life’s problems, the thinking mind that misperceives reality.

It is therefore important to leave space in our mind for self inquiry, to question our own thinking, just in case it turns out we are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

What if the problem that keeps you up at night is not what it appears to be? What if the metaphorical snake blocking your path is just an inanimate rope?