Cherokee Wisdom

"All of us have come to the present with some memory, some experience, that has affected us negatively.  It would be hard to live in a world of hurt and not be touched by it.  Remember that when we seek we find.  And it may be by helping others."  Walking Buffalo

The Cherokee elders had this figured out a long time ago.  I was paging through my original 12&12 today when I ran across this definition for egotism that I had jotted down a long time ago: "The practice of talking and thinking about oneself excessively because of an untrue sense of self-importance."  Whew, doggie.

"Meditation takes energy.  You need courage to confront some pretty difficult mental phenomena and the determination to sit through various unpleasant mental states.  Laziness just will not serve."

My hope originally for meditation that it would help me make unpleasant mental states go away by learning to ignore them.  I was unhappy to discover that the point was to sit with those negative feelings, to look at them squarely and without flinching.  When I ignore things I don't like they get stronger and stronger, as if I'm feeding them energy.

In my quest for even more impressive spiritual awareness I've been listening to some podcasts about the inner workings of the human brain.  Clever little animals, our brains, conditioned by instincts and upbringing and self-protection to take all kinds of sneaky shortcuts to ease our transit through the carnal world.  This one stuck with me recently: the difference between independence (common and cherished in the Western world) and interdependence (as practiced by most of the rest of the world).  And the thing that's so interesting to consider is that any way of living that didn't work in the long run eventually died out so that each system still in play today has stood the test of time and proven beneficial to a society.  We find out, of course, that each system has its strong points and its weak ones - nothing is perfect, in other words.

Anyway, in the West we're conditioned to value independance which we interpret as the right to do whatever the hell we want to do even when we're swimming against the current.  We don't generally feel the need to ponder how our actions affect the whole system.  The freedom is amazing but it can lead to isolation and depression because we don't feel part of a larger whole.  In the East interdependence is prized.  When one acts there's a lot of consideration as to how it affects our families, our neighborhoods, our faith communities.  There was a guy who lived around the corner who flew a flag that said "Fuck Joe Biden" in his front yard.  OK, I get it - he didn't like Joe Biden but there were a lot of kids living on the street.  Obviously, he didn't care, thinking it more important that he gets to express his opinion than to consider what his neighbors had to go through to explain this to their school-age children.  This group think can be very reassuring but it can also be very restricting.  In Vietnam when two people marry they go live with the man's family while in China they end up with the woman's relatives.  This is just how it was done.  No individual could say: "I don't want to do that" and feel part of a group.  Being a Westerner even the thought of living with my in-laws makes me gag and I know SuperK feels the same way if the tables were turned.