A guru was once attempting to explain to a crowd how human beings react to words, feed on words, live on words, rather than on reality. One of the men stood up and protested; he said, ‘I don’t agree that words have all that much effect on us.’
The guru said, ‘Sit down, you son of a bitch.’ The man went livid with rage and said, ‘You call yourself an enlightened person, a guru, a master, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
The guru then said, ‘Pardon me, sir, I was carried away. I really beg your pardon; that was a lapse; I’m sorry.’ The man finally calmed down.
Then the guru said, ‘It took just a few words to get a whole tempest going within you; and it took just a few words to calm you down, didn’t it?’
From Anthony De Mello’s Awareness