ARANI SERIES
Spark 51
Monday, January 28, 2019
ARE WE GOOD OR BAD?
An angel and a demon both reside in us
An old Cherokee1 told his grandson, “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside all of us. One is Evil. It is jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, and ego. The second is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.” The boy thought about it and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old man quietly replied, “The one you feed.” [Well-known story, author unknown]
If you hear Prof. Sapolsky2 of Stanford University, you will know that this “feeding” might have taken place in not only the past few days or some years but during tens of thousands of years! We the human beings have evolved over the millennia, and parts of our brain like the amygdala have been conditioned by unbelievable amounts of influences and impressions. We have inherited both violence and compassion, for example, from countless generations of our ancestors3.
All religions talk about the need for developing virtue and shunning vice. A whole chapter in the Bhagavad Geetā4 is devoted to elaborating on the characteristics represented by the ‘two wolves. Shri Krishna lists attributes like fearlessness, ‘purity of mind’, ‘engagement in study and practice’ etc. as “divine estate5” and declares behavioral patterns like hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, (destructive) anger, and harshness as “demoniac estate6”.
Both of the above two sets of qualities are in every one of us in different proportions or ratios at the time of birth itself. Strong likes and dislikes reside in individual souls at the time of creation itself, says Geetā7. That points to bias and prejudice in our mindsets, with which we began our journey long ago! Vedānta asks us not to bother about their genesis but to focus on reducing them and, eventually, rising above them. Reduction in forms of bias constitutes “purification of mind” (chitta–shuddhi) and rising above all prejudice is nothing short of enlightenment (moksha).
All of us are a mixture of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Both the wolves certainly reside within us. Starving the evil wolf and feeding the good one is, therefore, what our spiritual practice is all about! Opportunities come our way every day to do this sādhanā. May we stay alert and take the opportunities!
Swami Chidananda
Notes:
1 The Cherokee are one of the indigenous people of certain areas in today’s USA like (parts of) the two Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia.
2 See YouTube – TED talks “The biology of our best and worst selves” by Robert Sapolsky.
3 This is the view of modern science which perhaps can be synthesized with the ‘karma’ theory of Hinduism.
4 Chapter 16 – daiva-āsura-sampad-vibhāga-yoga
5 Verse 16.1
6 Verse 16.4
7 Verse 7.27