The Wart of Great Price
In the great city of Cairo I met a young man who had strayed, lost and forlorn in his abasement, into the coffee room I was wont to habituate. Though commonplace in visage in all other respects, he was possessed of an exceedingly large and spectacular wart which had taken up residence on the tip of his nose. Pondering the dark and subtle mystery of this, I continued to relish my small yet odiferous beverage, warily eyeing the young stranger and sensing deep within my scorpion a portent looming like a kingly he-goat on the crest of a a hill. But as I placed my now empty cup on the table, and heaved a satisfied sigh, I saw there revealed in the grounds lying desolate in its bottom an omen that I would soon be having words, words of great destiny, with this young and warted youth.
   Apace he was by my side, and I heard uttered the words I have now grown wearily accustomed to, "Master Akiryon, what is truth?"
   "Ah," I answered, "had I a silver half-penny for each time that question has been asked of me, I too would be able to afford such a fine and splendid wart as that with which you have been blessed, my son."
   "Yes," the passionate and growth-endowed lad replied, "It is truly a fine and magnificent wart, and certainly the maidens find it charming, yet I sense deep within me that there must be more to this life than simply having a monumental wart on one's nose."
   To this I said nothing, but picking up a bowl of lentil stew and dipping my forefinger in the mixture, wrote upon the table three words: Go seek truth. At this the nosesome young man clutched my hand with disproportionate fervor and sprang mullet-like into the busy thoroughfare, soon becoming lost to my eyes in its currents, the very ebb and flow of humanity.
   Yes, I could have given this beguiling and proboscially favored youth the answer he so desperately sought. But what then? As I learned many centuries before from my dolphin teachers, "The ocean is indeed full of fish, yet each of us must needs catch his own."
   Years later as my wanderings brought me back to Cairo, I paid a visit to my favorite old coffee room. After regaling the guests with tales of peril and symmetry, I asked the proprietor for any news of the young and warted man who had gone so long ago to seek the truth. Sadly he informed me that, though the quest had begun well, it had ended in disarray. It seems that the marvelous wart had continued to enlarge itself, taking over the lad's entire nose until, through years of staring at it, his sight had become ambivalent and double-minded, and not heeding his immediate surroundings, stumbled into the road only to be trampled by an errant and disobedient donkey.
   "Ah," I sighed with the sodden weight of lifetimes, "I feared it would be so. He was blinded by the truth he sought, the truth that was right on the tip of his own nose, a truth so enormous he could not see it. And now that poor donkey must live a lifetime of shame and regret."

Dolphins, reincarnation, New Age, philosophy, humor, poetry, teaching, ascended masters, fish, Baba, crystals, spirituality, karma, India, idiots, Akiryon Baba Yat, The Dolphin Sky Foundation, zen, transcendental meditation, past lives, fish, satire, religion, religious satire, sufism, cetaceans, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Eastern religions