How interesting were some of the toys that I played with in my childhood! After a few weeks or a few months of playing, I used to dismantle them into their constituent parts to see what lies beneath. It was the intense curiosity to see what laid beyond that drove me to do this.
One of those toys that I can still remember was a battery-operated, remoter-control train. The train came with a quite long circular railway-track with stations at regular intervals. Many of the toys, even in those early days for sophisticated toys, had pretty complicated features and required ‘operating manuals’. The train also had one.
The manual had instructions, among others, regarding where and how to put the batteries in the train, what type of batteries were required, how to put the individual compartments and the engine of the train together (they came separately within a big box with a really nice picture of the train on the track), how to put the different pieces of the railway-track together (they also came in pieces), how to put the train on the railway-track, and finally how to operate the train through the remote-control, allowing the train to stop on its track at each station for a while (as though it were picking up passengers from the station, while dropping off some others) , and then letting it run again.
The train could also run on the floor of my small room, and sometimes I did let it run on the floor. In those instances, the train would ultimately hit one of the four legs of my bed, which was located at one corner of my room; or, it would hit one of the four walls; or, one of the legs of a small round-shaped wooden table that I used to like so much.
Sometimes the train, running out of its track, would hit the door of my room or the wardrobe where all of, or at least most of, my clothes were. The wardrobe almost reached down the floor from a considerable height with four really small and cute legs. When the room-door was wide-open and the train, fiercely running on the floor, instead of banging on it went out of the room through the open door, the train would end up rolling over the spiral stairway that landed somewhere in the hallway.
Thus, running out and beyond the railway-track would always get the train in some sort of accident, some of which – like rolling down and over the spiral-stairway – could have been fatal for the train and its miniature passengers, to say the least. Fortunately enough, the train survived all these numerous accidents and gave me company, along with its passengers, for a long time.
When the train ran on its track, according to its ‘operating manual’, it did what it was supposed to do or, let us say, what it was made for; when, on the other hand, the train ran off its track to places, where its ‘operating manual’ was quite out-of-place and irrelevant, it did things that it wasn’t supposed to do or, let us say, things it wasn’t made for. I believe that is the difference between “being normal” and “being abnormal”.
As was the case with the train from my childhood, we human beings have been born with ‘operating manual’ to follow and a track to tread on. If we venture off our track to places, people, and events to which the ‘operating manual’ that we are supposed to follow is quite out-of-place and irrelevant, we are actually doing things that we are not supposed to do as human beings and the end-results of our actions and responses will be disastrous and catastrophic. The ‘operating manual’ is within us – it’s the uncorrupted ‘human heart and soul’, and our track is where our ‘heart and soul’ as such leads us.
To be able to discover or, let us say, to find oneself in a position to discover the track we human beings are supposed to tread on, one must have an uncorrupted ‘heart and soul’ to begin with; then one must be open to all the possible and probable ‘ways of life’ and let her ‘heart and soul’ to choose from them without letting her mind influence its decision (i.e. choice) in favor of this or that ‘way of life’.