This is a story I read somewhere ..in a book or email forward or social media post. It is about a Professor who demonstrates through a Mayonnaise jar and two cups of coffee..its available on Google that you can look up..but lemme take you through it. I contemplated on the matter and arrived at significant findings the product of which is MI version of the story. I wrote the story with the ‘coffee’ bit in it and then discovered a bettering twist to the story or two that would make the story taste slightly different than the flavours you are used to. I have the ‘coffee’ version and MI version. Which do you prefer?
A teacher walks in one day to class with a small glass Mayonnaise jar and places it on the table. He addresses the students and asks, “do you think this jar is full or empty?’ Some say “empty” and some say “the jar is full of air.”
He then pulls out a big stone from his drawer and places it inside the jar and asks, “do you think the jar is now full?” They say, “yes!”
He then puts in some pebbles that rolls down and fills the spaces around the big stone. He then asks, “what do you think now? Is the jar full?” Some laugh, some raise their eyebrows, then give the jar and discussion some thought and say a careful “yyees?”
He then pours in some sand and the grains fill up the space between the pebbles. He asks, “what do you think now?” They say, “its all full!”
He then takes 2 cups of coffee water and pours them into the jar effectively filling up every space available.
He then turns to the students and says, “Life is like this jar. It may seem empty sometimes or so full {depending on perspective} that we can’t seem to prioritise or know where we are headed but there is always something if only we pay close attention to what is not immediately visible in what we already have.”
“Our lives may be filled with one big concern that may be good enough to fill all our days and time, like our job or study subject or a relationship or a problem we would rather attempt solving than anything else may be of interest. We could be quite invested in this big stone and the joy it gives from achieving milestones through it that it would be quite an accomplishment in and of itself when looking back ‘in pensive mood’ or at the end of our life. It would be a full life well lived with just that one stone.”
“It may seem like there is no need or space for anything else until we look around. We may then see maybe a few circles of friends, family, neighbours, acquaintances we may have interacted with socially, noticed in passing or spoken to casually. These form the pebbles in our jar. Amongst them may be some whose presence we may have taken for granted or not counted quite well enough in our daily busyness of living. Nevertheless, they each add a certain quality in our experience of living and provide a variety that enrich our life in a way the big stone alone may not be filling in quite the same way. They may be the ones invisibly holding the big stone from rattling against the jar risking its existence. Nothing is ever really empty; we may just not be seeing or able to see what fills the space.”
“Dotting the time between our big stone activities and needful activities of daily living may be habits and hobbies we potter around with. We may or may not be as mindful with these habits and hobbies as we tend to be with our big stone but we bounce off of them, like on a bed, to buffer and buoy our everyday experience of living. They are like the sands of time or dust that gets precipitated with impressions and produce from our activities of daily living. Said another way, what we produce become offerings into the sands of time that we then live life from as a consequence of our choices but also feedback from to arrive at better choices. Some call this ‘karma.’ Our time could be more often than not buffed by the ‘karma’ or consequences arising from our mindful or unmindful actions that they may be the ‘bed’ we bounce off of and calling it ‘life.’ We change our actions and the sands sift and we then have different experiences of living and our ‘definition’ of ‘life’ changes as our mindscape from our experience repertoire changes. The sands of time are like the Return On Investments that form the health, wealth and wisdom as earnings to look back at ‘when in pensive mood’ as accomplishments. They weather/climate our emotional aftertaste from our experiences of living. They also make the word ‘karma’ have a meaning from experience. The sands of time can, quite understandably, fill a lot of the experiential space in our jar of life.
“It is not until we have space for sharing a cup of coffee with a loved one that we know how empty our life could be without it, even though our jar has been full with not so insignificant things. Without an appreciative caring somebody to share the ups and downs and everything in between, there may not be a bandwidth for a ‘normal’ life experience. There may just not be a perspective or a point of reference to ground the ‘essential homing why’ of it all to base life from.”
{My Partner is addicted to coffee and I imagine has been holding onto a ‘good nice value-enhancer discovered by generations of History’ by which to continue experiencing the ‘good life.’ I just do not think addiction of any kind to any thing is recipe for success; that it is a temporary crutch to hang onto until a better comes along – not something to base life by, like when sleeping or sitting around in pensive mood – a spade in the wheel one can learn to live without. I, being the ‘new’ ‘oxygen’ ‘spokesperson for Life,’ need to wower the already existing, and through Nirbeeja Yoga®️ have come to discover that water is better than coffee and has been the elixir of life since quite some time, is a better productivity-hack than any other intoxicant and in fact detoxifies the intoxication from hitherto whatsoever has been powering the world economy.}
“It is not until we have someone to share a cup of water with that we know how dry our life could be without it, even though our jar has been full with not-so-insignificant things. Without an appreciative caring somebody who knows the value of plain good ol’ glass and a simple tasteless odourless colourless cup of water to share the ups and downs and everything in between, there may not be substance for a ‘normal’ ‘ordinary’ life experience as proof that our jar is okay {not a fantabulous imagined construct of ‘normal’ in an isolated corner of our imagination}. There may just not be a perspective or point of reference to sound the ‘essential homing why’ of it all to base life from.”
“Make space for having a life that on retrospective reflection from time to time betters the quality of your cup of coffee water. Your life may feel better when you have someone to share such coffee water with that you want to get back to in making things better. In an infinite loop of unlearn-learn-relearn hinging on ‘learn,’ that coffee water feels better when you have a life that is topped up with that shared cuppa.”
Here’s a deepening into this analogy:
Our body is like this plain-glass jar, delicate yet strong enough to hold content with a potential space within to fill with all kinds of things. Living in a glasshouse as delicate as our body with space inside and outside, the degree of nonviolence we practice in our daily activities of living determines how long the jar remains a jar {ref: the adage, ‘people who live in glasshouses do not throw stones at others’}. It has a shape and may be even ‘invisible’ transparent as it is with nothing much to look at except maybe the glint of light reflecting off its surface making known its contours. Pretty unremarkable a jar of a person, unless there is some interesting content within.
A thing of beauty being a joy forever, maintaining the beautiful is what makes a jar worth returning to; nobody knows of a cookie in a dark corner nor can they leave a cookie ‘alone’ placed well within reach inside a crystal-clear glass jar.
The big busyness of our life that we want people to notice value of requires that clear jar so people can know you are up to something and what is that you are up to. It also has to be beautiful enough for people to want to continue to peek into what you are up to. Nobody resists flavourful tasty-smelling food cooking in the kitchen without a curious nose peeking up in askance, especially if they can see the joyful hustle involved in the cooking process {like in MITI BayBe World!}.
We, each, have the potential for creating beauty by healing that which mars the beauty, and the nonviolence that remains tends to maintain beauty, if not what is beautiful. We have the potential for nonviolence but it is our choices that ensure nonviolence remains.
The jar, big stone, sand and coffee water that grew from Earth all are made from silica – sand crystals that gives Earth substance. The tetrahadron of Tetragrammaton has a silicate entity at its Center {big stone?}. The physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology of the jar and its contents are all interrelated in life and when fundamentally balanced from a common base such as the silica that is Earth, a con-science holds life together inspiring and making life worth living.
Afterthought:
Here’s one of the ‘original’ versions of the story. Me thinks a ‘very large and empty industrial sized plastic mayonnaise jar’ may not take just 2 cups of coffee to fill up all the available empty space, especially after filling it with sand, which would sap up the liquid in no time let alone leave enough ‘coffee’ available to fill up any space whatsoever after that, so chemical and practical physics sense says the jar must be small, much smaller than the one said in this version of the story. {Link below.} The version of story I read had a big stone in a jar, not golf balls. The point I put this link here to the story is to bring your attention to the intention and moral of the story, which is different from the one I say above or the one I read..the one with the big stone. See which one you like. I think you should read all three versions; makes for a good range of perspectives to appreciate different versions of the ‘same’ story. Maybe you will read a classic text and read the many layers of ‘stories’ within the same piece of text. Maybe it will help you appreciate the benefits of ‘real’ news versus ‘fake’ news so you can arrive at the ‘true’ news to bring home the point of the whole circus of reading ‘news’ at all. There is, afterall, 3 sides to a story – the good story, your story, and the true story.
https://theretirementcoach.com/the-mayonnaise-jar-and-two-cups-of-coffee-7-2/
MI way (Meristem Intelligence® way) 
1 Comment