Here is an old Buddhist story about a prince who was very handsome. Every morning, when he woke up, he would look at himself in the mirror and exclaim, "Ah! How beautiful!"
One day he woke up and picked up the mirror the wrong way. Because he was looking at the unpolished back of the mirror, he couldn't see his face. He ran out of his palace into the streets yelling, "My head is gone! My head is gone!" He went completely crazy, looking everywhere for his missing head.
Finally one of his friends found him and grabbed him. "Why are you running around like this?" his friend said. "Your head isn't missing."
"NO, no, my head is gone. It's gone," cried the prince. They took him back to the palace, but no matter what they said, they couldn't calm him down. Because they didn't have straitjackets in those days, they tied him to a pillar. Because he was screaming so much, they put a gag on him.
He kept struggling, but you can only struggle so long, and when he finally calmed down a little, his friend hit him in the face.
"My head is there, after all!" the prince shouted. He was beside himself with joy. For the next few days, he went around telling everybody how wonderful and miraculous it was that he had found his head. His friends just looked at him in disbelief. But it took a long time for him to stop being so exuberant about the fact that he had found the head that had been there all along.
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