Anyone Can Preach But Only a Middling Few Can Practise What They Preached

Question: There are people who are good at giving spiritual advice to others but when their lives spiral into an abyss of pressure and turmoil or when they face crisis, they fumble, tumble and flip, not being able to practise what they preached. Why is that so?

Swami Dayananda: "Paying lip service to obligatory values is no more useful than the chorus of parrots in a tree, who were singing out, 'Be careful of the hunter's net!' A wise old parrot had seen the hunter coming and had called our the warning. But the silly flock did not look at the ground to spot the hunter---to understand the fact of the situation---to establish a personal content for the words they had heard from the old bird. Instead, they continued to sit happily on the branches of the tree repeating the words which were empty of any real meaning for them: 'Be careful of the hunter's net!' Even after the net had descended upon them, they wriggled and squirmed, caught in the web, screeching: 'Be careful of the hunter's net!'

"When I claim as my standards values in which I fail to see any personal gain for myself, I am in as risky a position, so far as expressing those values, as were the parrots in the tree, who mindlessly repeated the warning."

(pg. 17, The Value of Values).