The people of India, having been pestered by monkeys over the years, developed an ingenious way of trapping them. They would dig a long, narrow hole in the ground and then use an equally long, slender object to widen the bottom of the hole. Then they would pour rice down into the wider portion at the bottom of the hole. Monkeys like to eat. In fact, that’s a large part of what makes them such pests. They’ll jump onto cars or risk running through large groups of people to snatch food right out of your hand. People in South India are painfully aware of this. (Believe me, it’s surprisingly unsettling to be standing serenely in a park and have a macaque come suddenly barreling through to snatch something from you.) So the monkeys would come along, discover the rice, and stretch their arms deep into the hole. Their hands would be at the bottom. They would greedily clutch as much of the rice as possible into their hands, making a fist in the process. Their fists would fit into the larger portion of the hole, but the rest of the narrow opening was too small for the monkeys to pull their fists through. They’d be stuck. Of course, they could just let go of the food, and they’d be free. But monkeys place a high value on food. In fact, they place such a high value on food that they cannot force themselves to let go of it. They’ll grip that rice until either it comes out of the ground or they die trying to pull it out. It was typically the latter that happened first.

This story illustrates a concept of value rigidity. Value rigidity is what happens when you believe in the value of something so strongly that you can no longer objectively question it. Now what are your rigid assumptions?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsing