Excerpts - Dead Horse Story (from side 10)

Excerpt from March 18, 1978 Workshop in D.C.*
(*Audience participation is in parentheses--notations in brackets have been added for clarification )

Dr Bob says:

At the risk of telling a story I've told before. We were sitting on the bank of the Rio Grande River. Now the Rio Grande River is a dry sand bed most of the year; but April 14th, they open the gates of the big dam and the water comes down the river. That's a big river for irrigation purposes.

One day when the river opened, I was on the banks of the Rio Grande. We had a place that we worked at then. The water came down and a few minutes of the water coming through, a dead horse came floating by.

Now if you let the dead horse alone, it would go on around the bend. I don't know where it would go, perhaps the Gulf of Mexico--and it'd be out of my way. There was a couple of guys that worked there with me thought how terrible it was for a big old dead horse to be laying in the river. So they got a rope, threw it on the dead horse and pulled it onto the bank. Now they were stuck with a dead horse. It took a long time to get rid of that dead horse. Nobody, then, could justify shoving it back in the river. While it was in the river, I could sure justify letting it go on. They pulled it in right close to where we worked.

So I would say don't pull any "dead horses" in. Just let it go on. So the parable is that if a "dead horse" meaning a thought, or situation, or event; [that doesn't have validity at the moment] comes to mind; it can be there for a few minutes and then it's gone. If you pull the thought, situation or event in, [you start trying to analyze it, fix it, justify it, condemn it, criticize it] you're stuck with it. I don't want to be stuck with any more dead horses. Ok?