Two Wolves: A Cherokee Teaching

An elderly Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life...

He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me, it is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.

One wolf is evil -- he is fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, competition, superiority, and ego.

The other is good---he is joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too."

They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied: "The one you feed".





Ten Rules for Being Human

by Cherie Carter-Scott

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, "life."
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work."
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There's no part of life that doesn't contain its lessons. If you're alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better a place than "here." When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here."
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life's questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.

William Butler Yeats: In dreams begins responsibility.

William Wordsworth: Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.
Bill Watterson : I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night.
Dale Turner: Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, thereare still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waitingto be born.
Henry David Thoreau: If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau: Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Ralph Lauren: I don't design clothes, I design dreams.

Carl G. Jung : Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Joseph Campbell: Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Alfred Lord Tennyson : Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

M. C. Escher : I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

Unknown: Sometimes on the way to our dreams, we get lost and find an even better one

American Indian Proverb: All dreams spin out from the same web.


Albert Einstein : Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

the night: Dance is the hidden language of the soul.

Dylan Thomas: Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.

Leonardo DaVinci: It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

American Indian Proverb: In death, I am born.

John Dean: An answer is always a form of death. [Which is one reason artists hate explaining their work to people.]

"When you stare into an abyss for a long time,
the abyss also stares into you" Friedrich Nietzsche, which remnids me of Meister Eckhart's wonderful: "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." lets read some Eckhart. The names are a few of the people these teachings remind me of at the moment.


A just person is one who is conformed and transformed into justice. [John]

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment. [Josh]

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice. [molly]

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. [mike]

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. [Lauren]

The more we have the less we own. [eli]

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence. [kelly]
What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love. [jesus]
What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.[avalokiteshvara, mahasatvabodhisatva]
When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order. [grandbetty]
Words derive their power from the original word. [sam]
You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion. [Dalai Lama]
Every creature is a word of God. [kat]


And this one "Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity." [gandhi]