The Scorpion and the Frog

One day, a scorpion looked around at the mountain where he lived and decided that he wanted a change. He climbed over rocks and under vines until he reached a river. The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to reconsider. He couldn’t see any way across.

Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help.

“Hellooo Mr. Frog!” called the scorpion, “Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?”

“Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you won’t try to kill me?” asked the frog hesitantly.

“Because,” the scorpion replied, “If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!”

Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. “What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!”

“This is true,” agreed the scorpion, “But then I wouldn’t be able to get to the other side of the river!”

“Alright then…how do I know you won’t just wait till we get to the other side and then kill me?” said the frog.

“Ahh…,” crooned the scorpion, “Because you see, once you’ve taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!”

So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud. The scorpion crawled onto the frog’s back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog’s soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream.

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog’s back.

“You fool!” croaked the frog, “Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?”

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drowning frog’s back.

“I could not help myself. It is my nature.”

Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.

Self-destruction. “It’s my Nature,” said the Scorpion…

I came across this story of the scorpion and the frog and thought it was a story descriptive of the harm that can be inflicted when you don’t truly understand people’s real nature. Often, people like to use reassuring words or portray a certain image to get another person to like them, to hire them, to promote them, or to get favors from them. Their true nature may only come out much later and then it is too late because the other person believed in an ideal that did not exist.

One of the practical benefits of psychological astronumerology is uncovering people’s genuine personality. By analyzing the stars and numbers, we get to the root of the person. We can see what their driving motivations are. At a fundamental level, people have the same core personality when they are seven as they do when they are 70.

I am not saying that people can’t change but generally we overestimate the extent people are able to change. This desire to change someone’s personality is probably the biggest cause of disappointment in any human relationship. Deeper change for the better always comes from inner motivation, and that too is generally precipitated by a life-changing event that allows for deeper surrender.

We cannot expect people to behave in a way that runs counter to their nature, even when they could do harm to themselves by behaving that way. The frog knew intellectually that serpents naturally sting and there was a good chance that he could be killed. However, the frog chose to ignore that possibility because he figured that the serpent wouldn’t willingly want to act against its own interests and be killed himself.

In the end, the scorpion’s natural response is to sting. It is as natural to him to sting as it is for the sun to rise each morning. While we can easily get angry at the scorpion for stinging, it is just as foolish as to get angry at a cat for chasing a mouse. Both the scorpion and the cat are designed to do these actions, it is part of their purpose.

A person may have good intentions for misleading us. Perhaps they thought it would hurt our feelings if they revealed the truth. Or perhaps they wanted to please us and genuinely thought they could do something that they really can’t do. We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Alternatively, the person may lie to us to get their own way, even if they know it could hurt us or is not in our best interests. Or perhaps in getting revenge on us, they don’t care if they hurt themselves in the process. The bottom line is that information is processed selectively and people often do not make the best decisions. 

In any of these cases, it benefits you to be proactive and consciously seek out objective information in understanding the behaviour and thinking of the people that you deal with everyday. It is better to gain a deeper understanding of someone so that you are more appreciative of why they say and do the things they do. Because of various relationship dynamics inherent in every intimate relationship, you are not seeing most people through a clear lens. It is colored with your expectations, hopes and desires of that person and of your relationship with them. 

What is the biggest takeaway from the story of the scopion and the frog? For me, it was a beautiful description of the pitfalls of expecting people to be something they are not and then getting hurt when they inevitably disappoint. In the words of my revered teacher Maya Angelou, “When a person shows you who they are the first time, believe them.”