THE following story demonstrates the importance of your state of mind.

The King had an elephant of which he was extremely proud.

The elephant could be relied upon to make quite sure that the King's ceremonial processions were well ordered and passed off peacefully. The elephant was very reliable.

However one day, quite out of the blue, and during an important royal celebration the elephant lashed out quite unexpectedly and seriously injured one of his passengers.

The King was most upset and ordered the elephant's keeper to try and find the explanation for the incident which was so out of character.

The elephant's keeper decided he would spend a period of 24 hours with the elephant to try to understand its strange and violent behaviour.

By evening no explanation had emerged. The keeper felt dejected as he settled down for the night in a stall in the elephant house where the elephant slept.

However, at about 2 o'clock, the keeper awoke to the sound of a loud conversation. His eavesdropping revealed that a group of robbers were planning their next evil deeds, in a stall right next to the elephant's. The keeper had his answer!

He chased the robbers out of the elephant house and the next morning reported to the King that he had found the explanation for the problem. the king ordered a watch to be kept on the elephant house during the night.

The moral of this story is that we need to be aware of how easy it is to pick up someone else's poisonous state of mind.

Michael Jackson

Altrincham Interfaith Group