Thought this was a nice metaphor for the practice as a whole.A story about Ajaan Lee illustrates this point. Once he was going to take a number of his students — both lay people and monks — on a trip into the forest. They were going to meet at the main train station in Bangkok, take the train up to Lopburi, and then go into the forest from there.
Now Ajaan Fuang went along on the trip, and he knew that if you went with Ajaan Lee you had to take as little as possible, so he packed only a very small bag. But many of the other students didn't know this. Some of them brought three or four bags, and large ones at that. Perhaps they thought they would hire porters in Lopburi to carry them into the forest.
At any rate, when they got to Hua Lampong, the main station in Bangkok, Ajaan Lee saw all of the bags that everyone had brought, so instead of getting on the train he started walking up the train tracks. Now if the ajaan is walking on the tracks, everyone else has to walk on the tracks. So very quickly, people started walking behind him, struggling to carry all their bags. After a while, many of them started complaining that the bags were too heavy. At first Ajaan Lee said nothing and just kept walking. After a while, as the complaints got more insistent, all he said was, "If it's heavy, throw it away."
So, one by one, the students stopped to sort out their bags. Whatever they really needed, they put in one bag. And as for the remaining bags, they threw them into the lotus ponds on either side of the tracks. When they got to the railroad station at Saam Sen, which is the next railroad station north of Hua Lampong, Ajaan Lee saw that everybody's bags were small and manageable, so he let them all get on the train. In this way he taught them an important lesson: that you have to be very careful and selective about what you try to take with you.
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Didn't know this one. Thanks!