David's Blog

Prem Rawat likes to tell the story of the two wolves.

"In a village far away, a boy was puzzled by the behaviour of the villagers and went to the chief and asked if he could ask a him a question. The chief said "go ahead, what's on your mind?". The boy said, he was puzzled because he'd observed that some of the people sometimes did good things and sometimes the same people did bad things. So how come? The chief explained, that everybody had a good wolf and a bad wolf inside them, so sometimes they did good things and sometimes they did bad things. The boy thought about this and then asked the chief "so which wolf wins?". The chief simply replied: "the one you feed wins". 

And that is what makes us human. But we always have a choice as to which wolf we feed - but only if we think first. We are so used to our negative feelings having the upper hand that we react to situations mostly without thought.

So what are the characteristics of the two wolves inside us? I've made a short list to illustrate this:

All of this is inside every human being. All the strengths we need to fight the internal war against ignorance. And how much of it do we use in our everyday life? Don't we give all that positive stuff up as soon as something which doesn't fit our ideas happens?

I'm sure you can expand this list. The point is, that we have all these characteristics, but which one do we choose when we act? Which one dominates us? Which comes easiest into play? It takes effort not to give into the bad wolf's characteristics, but with practice, we can overcome our learnt behaviour.

But starving the bad wolf won't feed the good wolf. The good wolf only grows strong when it's fed.

Food for thought!