About This Teaching
Ajahn Chah answers a man who told him that if everyone ordained for a few Rains, the world would stop progressing: families would not grow and nobody would build anything. Ajahn Chah replies that this is the thinking of an earthworm.
An earthworm lives in the ground and eats earth. As it keeps eating, it starts to worry that it will run out of dirt, even though the whole earth surrounds it and covers its head. People who fear that the world will come to an end without them, he says, are not earthworms but think like them.