Mental Illness
An old Cherokee Tale goes:
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle
that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves
inside us all.
“One is Evil – It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow,
regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies,
false pride, superiority, and ego.
“The other is Good – It is joy, peace, love, hope,
serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth,
compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked
his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
When
the Europeans first came to this country, the Native Americans noticed that
there was something seriously wrong with them. They said that the Europeans
were infected with “Wetico,” a word meaning “cannibalism,” not literally cannibalism
of the flesh, but rather “one who eats the life of another.”The Europeans
destroyed everything in their path and never were content with what they had. The
Native Americans viewed this as a sickness; a mental illness.
Why doesn’t everyone choose to feed
the good wolf? Why does poverty and injustice exist within the structures built
by the creature that has the most advanced communal accomplishments of the
natural world? I imagine that if you asked that question to a million people,
you would probably get almost a million unique perspectives on that question. Up
until recently, own answer has been ‘because cultures with a value system built
around building machines to dominate the weak have a Darwinian advantage over
those who value peace and equality.’ But I think it is far simpler than that. I
think that all actions for good or evil can be summed up as: “Someone felt, someone
valued, someone acted.”
We
treat the outside world as if it is clearly divided into good and bad things.
We base our happiness and our values on things that are external to us. But the
things that truly make the world evil do not exist in the outside world. In Hamlet, William Shakespeare writes: “There
is nothing good or bad, but thinking it makes it so.” It is not people, nor
hunger, nor equality that causes suffering. The things that make the world good
or bad lie within our brains. Our brains are the filter that makes a
meaningless world full of wonder and magic or full of death and destruction. Your
brain is why your grandfather’s death is sadder than a child soldier’s in
Africa or why a new sweater is more valuable than a bowl of soup for hungry orphan. Our thoughts and feelings are what ultimately drive us to be moral or
immoral beings, or for that matter to even draw the distinction between what is
moral and immoral. Whether we are here or not in a thousand years, the earth
will keep on spinning and life will continue and there will be nothing good or bad about it.
It is
not impossible to seek only what we need. It is not impossible to live a happy,
healthy life without the sickness of “Wetico.” But first, we need to understand
why our feelings prevent us from doing so. We need to unpack what makes us
happy and how all of us can achieve happiness without hurting others.
