Over the years, I have been blessed and honored to know and hear many Elders from many traditions. I have learned a great deal from them about what it takes to be a real human being. My only regret is that I cannot place individual names to all of the following wisdoms; suffice it to say that their communities include Unangan, Yupik, Inupiat, Tlingit, Athabascan, Maori, Hopi, Sioux, Cree, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Maya, Tarahumara, Mapuche, Inca, Metis, Zulu, Hawaiian, and Inca.
“Nothing is created outside until it is created inside first.” We are angry at others because we are angry at ourselves. We criticize others because we are critical of ourselves. We are separate from others because we have separated from our hearts. We may hate others because we hate ourselves. We trash the environment on the outside because we trash the environment inside. We judge others on the outside because we are judgmental of ourselves first. This statement probably had more effect on me than any other wisdom. When I took those words to heart, I began my healing journey in earnest. Now I remind myself of this simple but profound wisdom. The Elders knew that “the most unselfish thing we can do is to focus on healing ourselves first. We can’t offer the world that which we do not have.” If I want peace, I must practice, think, feel, and know peace within, then I can offer it to the world. If I want to eliminate “separation” in the world manifested in such things as wars, violence in all its forms, racism, destruction of the environment, and all such ills, I must first heal the separation within myself.
Healing separation within myself requires recognition of what it means. The Elders say that “we must look to the root causes of anything before we can heal.” The root cause of separation is separation from the heart. A wise Yupik, Harold Napolean, recognized this in himself. When he was a young leader with a wife and children, the pressures were too much for him and he took to drinking himself into a stupor. One day while he was drunk, his little boy died under his watch. As a result, he lost his job and his marriage. While in prison, he looked deep within himself. What was the root cause of his drinking? It wasn’t that it was an addiction or that many of his friends drank. He realized that this drinking was killing his people and himself. His people had suffered much, beginning with the Russian fur traders’ arrivals to his land, and then the U.S. government. He coined the words “Great Death” to refer to his people’s suffering, which included diseases brought in from the outside that wiped out as much as eighty percent of a village.
What was causing the drinking, suicides, drug abuse, domestic violence, and depression in his community? He then came across the story of Vietnam vets who returned home by the tens of thousands taking to drug abuse, addictions of all kinds, and depression. Many took literally to the hills not wanting any human contact, and many committed suicide. The doctors finally put a name to the condition—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He realized that his people were suffering from PTSD. His people, like the vets, did not want to remember the days of horror, when as many as eight out of ten people in the villages died in a matter of months. The survivors did not want to smell, hear, dream, or experience anything that would remind them of the horror. Vietnam vets did not want to remember, think, feel, smell, or hear of anything that would remind them of the horrors they experienced either, and so they worked at not feeling, which meant disconnecting from the heart and taking to addictions that altered the mind. One definition of an addiction is a “strategy to escape the present moment.” The present moment, however, is when one can listen to the heart without any mental interference.
Harold realized that he was carrying a legacy of spiritual sickness that his ancestors, survivors of times of horror, had to have had. The survivors had developed behaviors, attitudes, and feelings borne of those dark days and passed them along to the next generation, until it is here with them today. Harold put his realizations in a book called Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being. We need only to think of the wars and events of horror around the world that occurred in the past and are occurring today to realize that we all suffer from this spiritual sickness. Clearly, a majority of the world’s population has had or is experiencing traumas that affect them mentally, physically, and spiritually.
Yupik Elders say that this is the reverse society, or inside-out society, where we have reversed the laws for living. “Before, we used to teach how to live, now we teach how to make a living; we used to honor the Elders, now we honor being young; before we used to contemplate death in order to fully live and now we contemplate life; before we used to honor times of darkness and now we are afraid of it; before we used to teach how to be present in the heart, now we are in the mind; before the heart used to tell the mind what to do and now the mind tells the heart what to do.”
We contemplate the mystery of life in many ways, because we no longer contemplate the mystery of death—perhaps because of our subconscious fear of death. Death is the unknown, it may mean darkness, and it is mysterious. Perhaps we put our seniors in pioneer homes or assisted-care facilities, out of sight, out of mind, because we do not want the reminder that getting older means being nearer to death. Perhaps we light up our cities so much that we can no longer see the stars because the darkness is unknown and mysterious, reminding us of death. Perhaps we honor youth because being older means being closer to death.
The mind now tells the heart what to do. We are schooled from infancy through adulthood to think. It is a belief that human intelligence rests in the brain. When we attend school, we are taught what to think about, how to think, and what the correct answer is to a problem, all geared toward preparing a student to be productive in the economy. We are taught to give away our “authority” to the one in control, in this case, the teacher. One must obey the teacher and must receive the teachings from the teacher. This system is linear, from kindergarten through post-doctorate, and everything less than post-doctorate is considered “inferior” in some way. It is a way that has circumscribed out intelligence, where we are not allowed to think what we think but to obey those who tell us how we must think. And this way takes us out of the present moment into the past or the future. Wise people throughout the ages say that “the point of power is in the present moment.” Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment,” and to be alive in the present moment is a place of no thought.13 What takes us into the past or future and away from the present, according to the Elders, is hate, shame, guilt, remorse, anger, rage, jealousy, pride, and others, which take us into the past, and fear, which is only a projection into the future of something that has not happened yet. It is, according to the Elders, when time began. These are products of the mind.
We are so trapped in our minds that we do not consider how this has colored our world. There seems to be no other way to be, and this way has created the social, political, economic, and physical realities in the world. Einstein said something like “we can’t solve the problems with the same consciousness that created the problems,” and in the thinking of the Elders, this consciousness is the mind telling the heart what to do. Consider, for example, our thoughts about solutions to climate change: let’s convert our cars and trucks to hybrids. It will lessen the amount of CO2 we put into the air, right? So, we convert farmlands to growing corn for ethanol, exacerbating food shortages around the world and making foods more expensive because there are less food-producing farmlands. We do not consider what we are going to do with the batteries in electric cars when we are finished with them. The batteries are filled with exotic minerals that are toxic. If we do with them what we have done with our computers when thrown away, we might ship them to Thailand, or some other developing-world location, as garbage. The poor people of those countries, needing money for food, mine these modern-day marvels for parts that they can sell, poisoning themselves and the Earth.
And the military of any nation? It is easier to train individuals who are in the mind to kill because the individuals have separated from their hearts. Our national leaders talk openly about killing the enemy. What message does this send to our young ones? Remember, the Elders say that nothing is created outside until it is created inside first. When we separate from the heart, we separate from ourselves. It is easier, then, to separate from others. The mind only thinks about itself, and is about “me” and “mine,” so we compete in school, in athletics, in the economy and everywhere individualism is paramount. There are few opportunities to emphasize working for the good of the people through teamwork and cooperation.
Because we are separated from ourselves, we create things that are separated. Western science, called Cartesian-based science, is founded on the principle that we must have separation of the observed and the observer. This science is based on specialization, composed, for example, of the marine mammal, fish, land, water, and atmospheric disciplines. The systems encourage the specializations to the point that data cannot be correlated with other disciplines that may be connected. Most sciences are struggling to develop collaborations with other disciplines now that we know “everything is connected.” Interdisciplinary efforts are only in their fetal stages of development, and a long way from trans-disciplinary science, which will bring us closer to understanding how nature works. We don’t see that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in nature, because the parts act synergistically. Every discipline that we deal with in our society, be it social, political, economic, and biological is based on specialization. We can’t solve the problems with the same consciousness that created the problems.
The Elders ask, “What are we choosing to focus on? Are we choosing to focus on the ‘problem,’ or are we choosing to focus on the vision and dream we want to create in the world?” The Elders understand that what we choose to focus on becomes our reality. More organizations and people today are trying to create a more just and fair world and improving how we interact with nature than any time in human history, yet it seems the conditions are far worse than when they began. The same goes for efforts to stop suicides, murders, domestic violence, substance abuse, illnesses, and anything else that we feel is not good for humankind. Why? The answer, according to the Elders, is in the answer to their question.
We are choosing to focus on the problems. This may be difficult for people to understand, but we are focused on trying to stop something and are emotionally tied up in this focus rather than following a vision or a dream we may have. The Elders understand that a focus on the negative, no matter how well intended the person is, only compounds the problems. So, for example, a person or organization invests so much energy to stop the timber industry from cutting the trees to protect the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, they “win” the battle, take their credit, and move on to the next battle. The timber industry takes their licks and decides to move to Canada and clear-cut more trees than they ever had in the past. The challenge lies with the attitude that “we are in a battle” against this or that. The battle becomes the focus emotionally, and it is reactionary and not proactive. What we must do, according to these Elders, is emotionally detach from the issue, stop thinking it is a battle, then act. The action must not have an emotional edge. Doing it because you feel it is in harmony with the Earth, and without judgment of those who do otherwise, is not the main focus for action. The main focus must be on the vision, the dream of what we want the world to be. What are we choosing to focus on?
And then there are those who choose not to focus, because they feel powerless to affect real change they know is needed. Why do they feel powerless to do anything? According to the Elders, it is because we are all schooled in accepting someone else’s authority from the time we are born until we die. It discourages thinking on your own, outside the box. And, we are so immersed in hearing negative things that we have to shut it all out because it is too much—global climate change, destruction of the forests, extinction of animals, violence, pollution, injustice, the list goes on and on. We know them well. We may say, “Someone else is taking care of this” or “It is too big for me to make a dent in anything that matters,” or both. We say the first because we are indoctrinated into giving away our personal authority to others. We say the second because we forgot how to listen to our hearts. Our hearts will tell us what to do in any circumstance that matters to us, including what really matters. It never lies to us, but our minds lie and deceive us all the time. We must be able to distinguish what is only of the mind and what is of the heart. We are so used to having the mind tell us what to do that many of us cannot distinguish between the two. When we are “confused,” we know the mind is speaking to us, not the heart. The heart does not equivocate. When we are sure beyond a shadow of a doubt, we are likely listening to our hearts if we are present in the moment. The heart speaks to us when we are present. The messages become muted when the mind interferes.
Rita Blumenstein, a revered Yupik Elder, says that “we must unburden our hearts in order to think clearly.” She is speaking of listening to an unburdened heart to see the truths. And when we heal from the things taught by this reverse society, we can have a real discourse with others about issues of concern. And this discourse does not use the violence of attacking or putting someone on the defensive. It recognizes that everyone has his or her own truth, and that truth is equally valid as one’s own. After everyone has spoken in a council or meeting, a consensus about what needs to be done is reached. This way, they demonstrate being present and speaking their truth from the heart. It is a civilized way of the real human being. If we are to deal with any issue personally or otherwise, we would do well to emulate the Elders. To do otherwise means that we are stuck in the matrix that speaks only from the mind. And we all know where that has gotten us today. Rita Blumenstein also says, “We don’t do the world any favors by thinking small.” When we recover our “real human being–ness,” we will find our center to connect with all that is. When we do, we will know what to do personally and collectively.
And finally, the Hopi Elders say, “Seek not to fight evil, let goodness take its place.” This is profound wisdom in simplicity. Far too often we seek to “fight” evil, but as the Elders know, when we fight, we add to the atmosphere of negativity surrounding the evil. We may have temporary victories, which are satisfying to the ego, but we lose in the long run because the actions we take to solve something are based on fighting, ensuring the coming generations have the same battle in a different form. When we let “goodness take its place,” we are focused on the dream or vision. It is not in reaction to something, but proactive and positive. We do not acquiesce to the dictates of our egos, which like short-term victories that keep us in illusion. We fail to look at the multi-generational consequences of our actions and words when we do not look at what we have wrought by winning at any cost.
We are all capable of applying the lessons from the Elders. It only takes going into the heart and following what it says. Yes, it takes courage, but unless we do this, we cannot build, let alone live in, peace and harmony with self and with the rest of Creation.