Ideas of superiority, delusions of grandeur and megalomania probably emerged with the first consciousness of man that his racial group was different from others. Wherever we meet the superiority theories, in antiquity or modern times, they are all extraordinarily alike. They constitute the faith of the unenlightened, maintained, of course, by the stupidity of the many and cunning of the few.
-Franz Boas
Anthropologist
We have to articulate what we mean by change, define what we perceive as essential to our way of life. We have to refuse to accept blindly other’s perceptions of progress.
-Patricia Locke
Lakota Indian
Young white kids come to me, New Age kids, and oh god, I love them, but sometimes they are a handful. They come to me and say, “Oh, Janet, please, please, you got to help me. I’ve got to get back to nature.” I say, “Do you need a laxative, or what?” That’s crazy, how can you get back to nature? We are nature! We are a part of nature, we are part of this earth, we are a part of everything that lives. We are a part of you and me and this air that connects us all together. There is no esoteric chant or mantra or anything that’s going to give these New Agers instant spiritualization. “Give me a pill, give me a chant, I need to be spiritual, right now!” I say you have to learn to be a human being first. If you don’t know how to be a human being, you’ll never be spiritual.
-Janet McCloud
Tulalip tribe, Washington state
Sophie Scholl was a german revolutionary, member of the White Rose Resistance Group. They fought non-violently against Hitler and the Nazi regime. They kept alive the flames of truth and justice in Germany at a time when dissent was impossible, and very few people were standing up against the oppressive forces of Nazi Germany. She was convicted, along with her brother hans, of high treason for distributing anti-war leaflets.
The presiding judge was Roland Freisler, chief justice of the people’s court of the German Reich. He and the other accusers could not understand what had happened to these german youths. They had all come from German families. They all had attended German Schools. They had been members of the Hitler youth. How could they turn out to be traitors? What had twisted and warped their minds? Sophie Scholl shocked everyone in the room by remarking, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just do not dare express themselves as we did.” She was sentenced to death along with the other members and executed by guillotine. Her revolutionary spirit lives on and her words have inspired millions to stand up for what is right and stand up for what they believe in. Today she is celebrated as one of Germany’s greatest heroes.
Illustration by Zen Pencil.
The Human has been possessed by a creative urge since very ancient times. Forever impelled to experiment and explore, it is as if he senses something within him which he must extract and examine so that, seeing it, he will know something of his own personality.
-Ivar Lissner
Ethnologist
In the Mayan Language, we say, “In laakech,” which means “I am you,” and we are answered with the words “A laaken,” which means “You are me.” This is our salutation to one another.
David Burgos
Mayan Indian, Muna, Yucatan
A turkey was chatting with a bull. “I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree,” sighed the turkey, “but I haven’t got the energy.” “Well, why don’t you nibble on some of my droppings?” replied the bull. They’re packed with nutrients.” The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree. The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch. Finally after a fourth night, the turkey was proudly perched at the top of the tree. He was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot him out of the tree.
Moral of the story: Bull shit might get you to the top, but it won’t keep you there.
Source: (found the story online but couldn’t locate its original writer. I’ll attribute it to the Internet.)
You have to be genuinely talented to become one of the best at whatever you chose to do. Cheating, lying and deceiving might get you to the top but in time you are sure to fall. Fictitious success will crumble and disappear. I believe that the truth always prevails, no matter how longs it may take. The only way for sustained and prolonged success comes from hard, dedicated, brilliant, and patient work. Be the very best that you can be.
One afternoon during a visit to a neighboring village we observed a most unusual practice: a group of about fifty young women (and some of their children) had formed a circle around a single older woman. They were dressing the happy woman in colorful beads and cloth and singing to her. They paraded her through the village, chanting a beautiful chorus to her… After a few more songs and cheers and a brief dance form the delighted older woman, the group quietly disbanded and all went back to their respective huts, their soft laughter trailing as they slowly disappeared. When we inquired about this ceremony, we were told that from time to time the young and middle-aged women of the village select and older woman who is single or widowed and pay her a special tribute by decorating her in bright colors, parading her throughout the villages, and singing songs to her that say she is still beautiful and still loved by the people of the village. These compassionate, so-called primitive people seemed in many ways so much more advanced than many of their counterparts in the United States.
-S. Allen Counter
I Sought My Brother, On the Bush-African-Americans in the interior of Surinam
South America
Consumerist Culture is destroying our planet but we drone on, mindlessly consuming at an ever increasing rate. The consumer bug has bit us, spreading its poison throughout, sickening our minds and our societies. We are the Zombie apocalypse and we don’t want face that harsh reality. We need to wake up from this madness, Don’t be a zombie. Some of us are slowly waking up, and as we do we have to work to wake up others out of their slumber. We need to face the realities of our world head on if we want to change them, and to do this we need to be fully awake.
Many people have no faith in our generation. They call us slackers, they call us stupid. They say we are the Zombie apocalypse. Our generation grew up submerged in consumerism. The television was a welcomed intruder in our homes. We were brainwashed by advertisement and the “main stream” culture since the day we came out of the womb. We grew thinking this is just how life was. We have grown up but we are still treated like children, kept happy with new toys and offered cheap thrills.. The perfect slaves to the machine, rejoicing in our captivity. And as content slaves we would praise our captors, we would lock ourselves in the cages of our own making. work these monotonous jobs, jobs we hate, in order to buy useless shit we don’t need and spend our weekends intoxicated to forget about our weeks. They had us looking for happiness in all the wrong places. A void was created within us and we were told to fill our emptiness with material things and our pain was numbed by the effects of drugs and alcohol. But we are not Zombies, we are not machines, we are not all asleep. Some within my generation are fully awake beings whose spirit burns ferociously and graciously, shining its light everywhere. We Are Gonna Change The World. More and more of us are waking up and seeing the bars to our cages and realizing that we built our own prisons and we hold ourselves captive. But we hold the keys to open the doors to our cages and we refuse to be treated like puppets. When speaking of the human condition Ogrin, Quinn, and Sy from the signs of times, argue that “The task of the puppet masters is made all the more easy by providing the populace with a means by which they can enslave their own minds, and perhaps even their souls. The greatest tyranny is not the one forced onto a people, but rather one that the people implement and enforce themselves due to their illusions and addictions…. In essence, we each impose our own internal network of interrelated addictions that keeps us enslaved and blind to the reality around us. It can be quite a vicious circle, indeed. Somehow, we must find a way out.”
There are powerful forces who want to control us, who want us all to be the same, who want us to be quiet, to be passive, to be permissive. They see us as insignificant little people and they speak to us and say, “You worry about your little life, occupy yourself with the little things and let us run the big things, it’s way too complex for you little people to understand, we know what we’re doing. Everything will be okay. Please don’t rattle the cage, you bother the other animals”. But everything is not going to be okay, not unless we do something about it. Those who rattle the cage are labeled as misfits and rebels without a cause. They are the lost ones, looked at as strange, weird and made to feel like they don’t fit in. But not all those who wonder are lost. The incentives to stay “in line”, to stay quiet and tranquil, are many. Especially for those of us in the first, second, and third world, who are well off. We are promised comfort, security, and cheap thrills. But to some these things won’t suffice. Some sense that there is something wrong with our world, something that cannot and will not be ignored, something that needs to be changed. They say every man has a price tag but i like to believe that some people refuse to put a price on the value of their souls. It’s the people who ignore these empty benefits and want to be “different” who will fight against those who want us to be the same and actively create the work they want to live in.
Some of us simply do not care about having the newest piece of technology, we don’t care about 3-D television, google glasses, I-glasses, or the new i-phone nineteen. We understand that some new pieces of technology can be great tools and have amazing uses, but they are never a means to happiness. We understand that they are dead inanimate objects and we don’t look to build relationships with these material things. Instead we are looking for real, honest, meaningful relationships with people, with nature, and with ourselves. Some manage to break free from a superficial lifestyle and form their own realities, walk their own paths, and chase those things which truly matter to them. It is they, the dream seekers, who are showing the world that our generation has a lot more to offer, showing that we can be the living and breathing personification of change. But we can’t depend on them to lead us, the world needs all of us to come to our own enlightenment and awaking. We need a lot more of awake people if we want to make meaningful and fundamental structural changes to the world we live in. We all have to become the leaders of our lives. We have to find our inner qualities, develop our hidden talents and struggle to build ourselves up. We each need to blossom in our own ways. It’s not enough to simply have dreams, we all have to be active dream seekers. To become a dream seeker you have to actively seek your dreams. You have to become your dream, live it, and breathe it. Soak it in and let it become a part of you. Image it, define it, design it, build a picture in your head of what it is you truly and deeply want to get out of this life and then start to move yourself towards that image. Fly towards your dream. If you can’t fly then run towards it. If you can’t run then walk. If you stumble and fall then crawl if you have to. Do it any way you can, but always keep moving forward. Make sure you are slowly inching your way towards what it is that you want, day in and day out. With patience and perseverance we can accomplish anything. Like always, keep growing in the light direction and make your light shine onto others so they to can wake up and grow.
JZ
He looked upon us as sophisticated children — smart but not wise. We knew many things and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true. His were the qualities of character that last forever. He was kind; he had courage and self-restraint, and though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart. His soul was that of a child, his mind that of a philosopher.
-Dr. S. T. Pope
Ishi’s closest friend, in Ishi: Last of the Yahi tribe
corimagua 