The Buried Treasure

Written by Eugene Morgan

A dying farmer said to his two sons, “I don’t have much longer to live.  I have buried something in the vineyard and I want you to find it after I am gone.  If you do find it, then I have given you all that I have.”  The sons thought the father meant some kind of treasure in the vineyard.  So after the father died, the sons went to the vineyard and took a spade and dug thoroughly every inch but found no treasure.  That summer the vineyard had harvested a large crop of grapes.

This is one of my favorite fables.  What do you think is the moral of the story?  I think many of you would say that the moral of the story is the fruit of hard labor,  is the treasure.  I think the treasure is something else.  But before I tell you what I think is the treasure how did the farmer get his sons to work?  It was the sons’ switch in  mindsets that propelled them to work.  In the sons’ minds they were digging for treasure not plowing the vineyard to grow grapes.  When the father said, “I have buried ‘something’ in the vineyard.  The sons had filled in the gap of what they thought “something” meant.  Based on the sons past experience “something” meant treasure.  The father knew his sons well enough not to tell them if they work the vineyard they would be rewarded for a large harvest of grapes.  Instead, he had to find a way to motivate them to do something in the vineyard.

According to Milton Erickson, “Your unconscious contains a vast repository of experiences forged with integrity.”  For example, in order to read and write, we first have to learn the alphabets.  At the beginning it is a difficult task to learn the difference between a lowercase ‘d’ and a lowercase ‘b’ and to remember to dot the ‘i’ or cross the ‘t’.  After learning all 26 letters of the alphabet, we begin learning to put letters into words; words like “apple”, “bat”, “cat” and “dog.”  We begin to place meaning by the use of word-and-picture match exercise.  For example, we would learn to match a picture of a dog to the word ‘dog’.  This creates in our unconscious mind a link between the two: the picture and the word.  When we read, “The dog is wagging its tail” we base it on a lifetime of experience.   We automatically elicit an image of a dog wagging its tail in our minds’ eye.   My image of a dog wagging its tail would look differently from someone else’s image of a dog wagging its tail.  My image of a dog might be a bulldog versus someone else’s image of a dog, a German Shepard.  Again this is based on different past experiences.    Once we learn something, it becomes automatic. These learnings goes to the back of the mind so to speak.   “All your lives you have been learning things, transferring them to your unconscious, and using, automatically….” Milton Erickson

Experiential learnings became unconscious learnings.  So what do I mean by unconscious learnings.  I mean that all your experiential learnings are stored up in your unconscious mind.  Before you were able to learn how to walk, you first had to learn how to crawl.  Before you were able to learn how to crawl, you first had to learn how to move your legs and feet.  So learning how to move your legs and feet took a conscious effort.  After you’ve learned how to move your legs and feet consciously, the learning became unconscious – experiential learning.   Milton Erickson rediscovered this experiential learning when he was struck with polio.  Milton Erickson had to relearn how to move his toes, move his right and left legs while  watching  his baby sister learn how to walk for the first time.

I believe this is where the treasure lies.  You carry the treasure within you.  It’s in your unconscious mind.    The father from the fable was wise to find something in  his sons’ past experience to motivate them.   The treasure lies within his sons.

We have a tendency to look externally for help with our problems.   But Milton Erickson’s primary goal was to have his patients find solutions from within so as to make healthy changes in their lives.