The Way of the Wolf, Part 2—The Credulity of Humans and the Honesty of Wolves

The Way of the Wolf, Part 2—The Credulity of Humans and the Honesty of Wolves

Part 6 in the Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

Listen here: https://dangerouswisdom.org/podcast

Or subscribe via your preferred podcast directory here: https://dangerous-wisdom.captivate.fm/listen

Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow of gratitude and reverence to Sophia.

Last time we began contemplating the Way of the Wolf. If you didn’t listen to the fist part of this contemplation, it might be better to go back and start there. In this episode we will consider the credulity of humans and the honesty of wolves, and we will draw closer to the secret of how we can enter into the Way of the Wolf, to experience the wisdom and the magic wolves and other wild beings can put us in touch with.

For all my horse friends out there, this secret is part of the Way of the Horse too. We could just as easily be talking about horses here. Wolves and horses have their own unique magic, but they also have a lot of overlap. What would wolf wisdom be if it didn’t resonate and overlap significantly with horse wisdom? Wisdom means wisdom.

For the world to evolve, we must cultivate those qualities of mind its evolution depends on. Horses, wolves, and other spiritual keystone species can help us do that—especially if we let the holistic education of the wisdom traditions support us.

In our last episode, we considered wolves as a spiritual keystone species. We have considered the horse as a spiritual keystone species, and we can learn a lot from both Wolf and Horse as archetypal currents in the soul. The Wolf is part of the mandala of the Dangerous Wisdom curriculum, and the Wolf becomes part of the life of anyone who learns that curriculum.

We reflected on several passages from a wonderful book called, The Philosopher and the Wolf. The subtitle is, “Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness”. That gives you a good sense of the philosophical content.

We left off with the suggestion that touches on something we all sense, an idea as old as Philosophy: That the story of The Matrix somehow conveys an important truth, and that in some way we live like sheep, or like potentially wild beings who have gotten trapped in a cage, a cage of domestication and conquest consciousness.

The essence of Wolf spirit comes across in how real wolves face their cage, how wildness faces the attitude of manipulation and control that so characterizes a certain style of human consciousness.

Recall that, during the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone, the researchers worried that the wild Canadian wolves might try heading back to Canada. So for several weeks they kept them in massive cages referred to as “acclimation pens”. Most of those wolves accepted the situation. Wolves are willing to practice some patience.

But three of them smelled human manipulation and control. Their wildness sought to teach us all a lesson. One of those wolves jumped high enough to grab onto an overhanging section of a fence that was 10 feet up. He then curled his body around that overhang and escaped.

He wouldn’t leave his friend behind though. After he got out, he dug back in from the outside. That’s loyalty.

As they sought a way out, those three wolves chewed on the chain-link fence looking for any possible weakness. That ruined their teeth.

Doug Smith, the lead wolf researcher at Yellowstone told Carl Safina he thought they were doomed because of those teeth. But as the researchers observed those wolves in their life after their wild escape, no one could tell there was anything wrong with them.

Now in fact, the wolves didn’t need the ruin their teeth. But they were willing to. And, perhaps even more importantly, they didn’t let their damaged teeth stop them. They kept on going like nothing actually bad had happened to them.

That’s perhaps the most important total lesson: That everything about these wolves teaches us that we never have to give up, that there is something unbreakable in us, and that every life situation is workable. They embody a particular kind of wisdom called the wisdom of equality. That wisdom reveals to us that each being, each moment, and each situation has a fundamental goodness and workability—even if our mind so often covers that over.

As Jospeh Campbell put it so well: Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction in consciousness. Our limited consciousness is the only cage we’re ever really in. That’s the message of Plato and Buddha too, a message we see portrayed in film, The Matrix.

We ended our contemplation with a question: Would we rather be sheep, or would we rather be wolves? That’s a silly question in some ways. But let’s be clear that it has nothing to do with becoming violent and aggressive. In some ways, it has to do with the opposite.

Recall what Mark Rowlands wrote in his book. He wrote, “I am concerned with the stories we tell to distinguish ourselves not from each other but from other animals: the stories we tell about what makes us human.”

We have this lie in our culture of the big bad wolf, or the wolf as evil. But wolves aren’t evil. They are capable of as much dignity and nobility as we are. Moreover, they can inspire and teach dignity and nobility in us.

Indigenous cultures know this. In his book, Rowlands shares a story from indigenous culture. He credits this story to the Haudenosaunee. I’ll tell it the way I heard it, which is a little different from the way he tells it.

In this story, the people need to move their village. They have a long discussion about where to move, because the Haudenosaunee had an actual democracy. Many Indigenous people function on the basis of consensus rather than compulsion, and they don’t believe you should force people to do things. So everyone got together to debate.

They arrived at a final decision and began all the necessary preparations to move. As they prepared to leave, a young man returned home from a journey. He had missed all the discussion, and he asked what everyone had decided. When he found out where they planned to move, he said that it would not do, because they had chosen a place sacred to Wolf.

He went to the elders and explained the situation. They said, “Well, the decision has been made. Wolf will have to accept it.”

So, the whole village moved. But soon after they settled in, trouble began to emerge. The hunters found game scarce, and they began to realize the wolves were actively chasing game away. When they did get lucky and have a successful hunt, wolves would come into the village and steal the meat. Then the wolves began to terrorize the children.

So the people gathered in council again. The leaders asked, “What shall we do?” One of the people said, “We could kill all the wolves.” But an elder spoke up and said, “We might try to do that. Maybe the wolves would win in that battle. However, maybe we would win. If so—What would we become? What kind of people would we become if we killed all the wolves?”

And so the people agreed that they would have to choose another place to live.

After that experience, in all their future discussions, they began their deliberations by asking, “Who will speak for Wolf?”

In relation to this story, it seems important to emphasize something different about hearing that story in the context of the dominant culture. In the dominant culture, this story should bring out the nature of conquest consciousness itself, and it should prompt us to ask what we have become, and what we might become instead.

That’s what this story points to when the people ask the question, What would we become? For us, that question has to do with conquest consciousness.

And we have to recognize that conquest consciousness tells one story at a conscious level while something else is going on at a deeper level. That means we can’t believe the conscious level story. Rowlands raises this issue in the first passage we considered in part 1, this issue of our willingness to engage in self-deception, and to let our stories maintain and perpetuate our self-deceptions.

What’s the conscious level story in relation to wolves? That the wolves are the problem—that the wolves are dangerous, and therefore we’re allowed to kill them.

And one of the easy ways we know that this story lies to us relates to the fact that the giant redwoods in California weren’t dangerous. They didn’t pose a threat to us. But we almost wiped them out. We killed 95% of them, and more will die.

All the birds who filled the sky once upon a time here on Turtle Island, they weren’t a threat to us. A bunch of pigeons weren’t a threat to us. There were so many birds in the sky in North America that their migrations would temporarily block out the sun. And we killed them—made entire species extinct.

There were so many salmon in the rivers that you could hear the salmon runs two miles away. You couldn’t put a boat in the water. And we killed them. They weren’t a threat.

So, the idea that we kill something and try to exterminate it because it’s a threat, that’s a lie.

We’re the problem. But we can’t confront that, so we tell stories about the big bad wolf. It’s part of our general practice of spiritual materialism. As Rowlands put it in his book, “If I wanted a one-sentence definition of human beings, this would do: humans are the animals that believe the stories they tell about themselves. Humans are credulous animals.”

By “credulous” he means we’re experts at self-deception, masters of spiritual materialism.

Rowlands thinks wolves embody the exact opposite of this tendency. Wolves have culture. They have stories in an important sense. As Rowlands puts it: “A wolf talks with his body . . . They can talk. And what’s more, we can understand them. What they cannot do is lie. And that is why they have no place in a civilized society. A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think we are better than them.”

But that is also a big part of why we are the problem.

We know this—we know we’re the problem simply by looking at the state of the world. And also because the indigenous people here on Turtle Island, they lived everywhere, and they lived with the wolves.

That’s what this Indigenous story tells us. This story tells us that it’s perfectly possible to live with wolves, to make that sensible decision.

We get indoctrinated with the story that it’s impossible—we can’t live with wolves. The wolves will eat your children, and they’ll eat all your food, and every wolf kills 5 elk per day, and they will kill all our livestock too. We get so freaked out by these lies.

Why do we get freaked out if a wolf kills a sheep or two? Well, because we live in this cage. We live in this matrix where a rancher or farmer can’t make a living. And the system is so ridiculous because, of course, we already subsidize the grazing animals.

I’m not saying farmers have it easy, but we’re already helping out. That tells us something is wrong with how we do things. So many big corporations get involved, and most of these grazing leases go to massive corporations, which then funnel substandard, corporatized and industrialized flesh into the fast-food industry.

In this context, the small rancher has a lot to lose, and the greedy corporations hate losing anything at all, and all the regular folk are stressed and on edge, so people get more than a little upset if a wolf comes along and takes some food.

And we’ve got a whole situation to ask about there—why we’ve enslaved so many beings, and whether or not that’s actually okay. Because we have enslaved so many cows, sheep, goats, and so on, and we just keep all these animals for slaughter, a lot of it under inhumane conditions.

Again, we can leave out the small ranchers. Even so, it’s a very tricky thing to contemplate. I’m not saying we’re going to get rid of animal husbandry, as we like to call it, but it is an interesting question.

But the larger question has to do with conquest consciousness, this style of consciousness that we are all indoctrinated into. If you’re listening to this, you’re related enough to the dominant culture that you speak English, and you are in it.

It’s hard to be anywhere on the planet where we’re not involved in it in some way, because conquest consciousness has affected the entire world, and it has infected, in one way or another, most people.

Some people maybe somehow escaped some more severe infection. Some people may have gotten infected and are starting to get better. They’re trying to get themselves well.

And these are all possibilities, of course. But most of us are infected. And we can’t then see the full nature of the infection because once it affects you, it changes your perception.

It changes your consciousness. It changes everything about your experience.

And you have to be able to begin to see the unconscious dimensions. Remember: The wolf shines a light into that darkness. The wolf can help us see the ways in which conquest consciousness appears again and again and again.

The style of consciousness that wants to exterminate the wolves is the same style of consciousness that dammed up all the rivers, and almost exterminated the redwood trees, and may yet exterminate the redwood trees directly or indirectly.

And it’s the same style of consciousness that has put plastic, heavy metals, and forever chemicals in our bodies. Almost all of us have got pollution and toxins, in our bodies, in our bones, in our organs. It’s the same style of consciousness at work.

That same style of consciousness gets us into things that make us very uncomfortable to think about. There too, we have lots of rationalizations and conscious stories that don’t give us the full picture—like all the travel we do.

We get on an airplane, we go over to Thailand, and it’s nothing—it’s a matter of a few hours.

We treat the world like we can do whatever we want. And not that the whole planet is our home, but that the whole planet is our playground and our garbage can.

Some of us don’t want to see that that’s part of the matrix—that our desire for so much travel comes as part of the matrix, the cage we’re in, our desire to go to all these different places, and the ways doing so ends up wrecking the ecologies we all depend on.

Recently, someone was talking about the famous wildebeest migration. All the wildebeest came to the river, where they migrate every year. Every year they cross this river.

And what happened?

They came to the river and stood for hours, without crossing. Why would they stand there for hours, unable to cross the river?

Because there was a whole line of cars on the other side of the river—hundreds of human beings in cars—and the wildebeests were looking across the river, and they saw all these cars, and they didn’t know what to make of it.

Finally somebody among the wildebeests decided to go upriver and cross there. And the other wildebeests began to follow suit.

But then what happened? Well, all the human beings heard that the wildebeests had moved and they all started up their cars and decided to drive up it so they could see it and get their Instagram photos.

It’s an entertainment to us. As we tell the story, we say, “It’s amazing,” and we think we’re in touch with the wonder of the world. There we can see how spiritual materialism takes over even our sense of reverence. We believe the stories we tell about ourselves.

A truer story is that we live disconnected from Nature, we degrade the wilderness where we live, then we get on a plane and fly thousands of miles to visit Nature somewhere else, and the whole trip and our whole way of life further degrades Nature in the process. But we can’t see this clearly from within our cage. From within the cage, it seems like a deeply meaningful vacation.

Social media is part of the cage too, part of the matrix, part of this same style of consciousness. And we believe too many of the social media stories—we believe the whole tall tale of social media itself.

We’re all trying to make a living—desperately—so we need to have followers, and we need to have this, and we have to take this picture of ourselves, and that picture of ourselves, so everybody can see our curated life, sitting in our car while the African wildebeests or the American bison try to cross the river.

It’s a bizarre situation. We want to be paid just to be who we are. Think of the incoherence in that. We can’t put spiritual and ecological reality into the economic system that functions in total opposition to that reality.

Wolves don’t live like this, and it’s not clear anybody should. It’s not clear that we can survive if we don’t get more sensible. Wolves live where they live, and they take care of that place. They become part of that place. They make that place, and they let that place make them. And they don’t try to get paid for being what they are. They just are what they are.

With Wolf 21 in mind, with the basic dignity of all wolves in mind, with the basic dignity of all humans in mind, and with the basic dignity of the wild and all sentient beings in mind, let’s go back to that passage from Aldo Leopold. Let’s consider it together with a spacious mind.

Thinking Like a Mountain

A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.

Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land. It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.

My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all Other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

That’s the passage. We asked, What is the hidden meaning of the wolf and the mountain? What is the hidden meaning of our own life? And how can we approach the hidden meaning of our life by listening to the howl of a wolf and learning to think like a mountain?

And here we have asked how the thinking of the wolf illuminates the thinking of mountains, how the thinking of mountains illuminates the thinking of wolves, and how the thinking of mountains and wolves illuminates our own soul and the soul of the world.

What is the nature of thinking, and what is the thinking of Nature? How can wolves and mountains teach us to think better, live better, love better?

These are questions of ecological and spiritual thinking. That thinking arises as the ecologies we depend on, and we do not have the perspective of a mountain or a wolf when it comes to these ecologies.

To go a little further into the thinking of mountains we can consider an excerpt from an essay that I can make available online for you. Part of what I want to do with this contemplation involves putting part of this essay in dialogue with the passage from Aldo Leopold. This excerpt introduces us to a U.S. citizen who entered into thinking like a mountain in a spirit of wisdom, love, beauty, compassion, grace, and courage that any of us can cultivate.

We do need some advanced training, but this passage shows we mostly need heart, we mostly need a sense of compassion, and an openness to the wisdom manifesting all around us. We can’t delude ourselves into imagining we can go into the mountains and suddenly become enlightened. But we also shouldn’t delude ourselves into failing to notice how Nature presences wisdom, love, and beauty at every moment. The teachings of the wisdom traditions exist in the wildness of our world, and they abide in the heart of all beings.

One day, I can read the whole essay if you like. I think it would take about 2 or 3 hours, though you can read it silently much faster than that. Let me know if you’d like a recording of it. If I get enough requests, I might do it.

The essay includes several passages from an essay by the philosopher Dōgen, and it has to do with the thinking of Nature, including mountains.

Here’s the excerpt:

When our sensing is alive and alove, what we sense is alive and alove.

Wisdom is what works—what actually functions as love and beauty. Wisdom is so intensely practical that we get freaked out when we even vaguely begin to sense this.

Why? Because it means that every single thing we do, every thought, every word, every action, must become spiritual and in many cases even sacred in order to become practical, concrete, optimally effective, and just plain realistic. Everything we do matters—and that can feel heavy to the ego.

Consider the plain realism of Larry Gibson, an Appalachian philosopher living in coal country. He expresses the heart of the matter with directness and elegance. Larry comes from West Virginia. His family moved to Ohio when he was a child (his dad got hurt in the mines and couldn’t work there). Larry obtained no more than a high school education, and he worked at General Motors until he had to retire on disability. He returned to West Virginia and, discovering the terrible destruction there, took a stand for life, for love, for the wisdom and beauty of the mountains and waters. The comments not in quotations come from Chris Hedges.

“Livin’ here as a boy I wasn’t any different than anybody else,” he says: “First time I knew I was poor was when I went to Cleveland and went to school. They taught me I was poor. I traded all this for a strip of green I saw when I was walkin’ the street. An’ I was poor? How ya gonna get a piece of green grass between the sidewalk and the street, and they gonna tell me I’m poor? I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world, with nature. I could walk through the forest. I could hear the animals. I could hear the woods talk to me. Everywhere I looked there was life. I could pick my own apples or cucumbers. I could eat the berries and pawpaws. I loved pawpaws. And the gooseberries. Now there is no life there. Only dust.

“I had a pigeon and when I’d come out of the house, no matter where I went he flew over my head or sat on my shoulder. I had a hawk I named Fred. I had a bobcat and a three-legged fox that got caught in a trap. I wouldn’t trade that childhood for all the fancy fire trucks and toys the other kids had. I didn’t see a TV till I was thirteen. Didn’t talk on a phone till I was fourteen. There was crawdads in the streams down at the bottom of the mountain. I could pick them out with my toes. Now nothing lives in the water. It stinks. Nothing lives on the land.”

By the time he returned as a middle-aged man, the land of his boyhood was barely recognizable. His family’s 500 acres had shrunk to 50. Coal companies, whose old claims to mineral rights underground, many of them deeded by ancestors who could not read or write, gave them rights to seize the land. The spine of the Appalachian Mountains is being obliterated to gouge out the seams of black coal. The constant, daily explosions at the edge of his property— which in one typical week in West Virginia equals the cumulative power of the blast over Hiroshima—rains showers of rocks down on his property.

“I expect to lose my life to it, I guess,” he says about his defiance. “I expect, somebody scared, you know, somebody who normally wouldn’t do anything wrong, seeing me up here by myself. Because of my belief and my stand. And the fact that they may lose a job. And they got a baby on the way and one at home. They may lose their job, and they had a couple beers that day maybe. You know. And they see me. I’m hit, I’m hit, you know. Scared people make dangerous people. They act without thinkin’. An’ the industry uses people like that.

“But if I stop fightin’ for it, they’ll take it,” he says. “Do you know what it’s like to hear a mountain get blowed up? A mountain is a live vessel, man; it’s life itself. You walk through the woods here and you’re gonna hear the critters moving, scampering around, that’s what a mountain is. Try to imagine what it would be like for a mountain when it’s getting blowed up, fifteen times a day, blowed up, every day, what that mountain must feel like as far as pain, as life.

ow?” (from Sacco and Hedges: 2012

This is as good as any philosophizing one hears today, and far better than much of what comes out of the academy. To me, it gives moving testament to the everyday, ordinary-extraordinary LoveWisdom that abides in all our hearts, and in all our lands, even if we have yet to get in touch with it. this is the inherent clarity of the soul.

Dōgen’s essay continues, echoing the spirit of Larry Gibson’s experience:

“Although we say that mountains belong to the country, actually they belong to those who love them. When the mountains love those they belong to, the wise and virtuous inevitably enter the mountains. And when sages and wise ones live in the mountains, because the mountains belong to them, trees and rocks flourish and abound, and the birds and beasts take on a supernatural excellence. this is because the sages and wise ones have covered them with their virtue. We should realize that the mountains actually take delight in wise ones, actually take delight in sages.”

The mountains of West Virginia, what remains of them, surely take delight in Larry Gibson and others like him. They can delight in all of us. The mountains can delight in our art—in the stillness-and-movement of our lives together, the brushstrokes of mind, heart, body, world, and Cosmos, the coloring of our relationality, the dance of our lives, the creations of every moment, as well as the works of art we make for each other, for sentient beings, for the sacred Earth and the vast community of life.

The mountains stand naked in their stillness and flow naked in their dancing, except for the virtue we cover them in, the virtue they already are. We are naked except for the virtue mountains cover us in, the virtue we already are. If we did nothing else but care for each other and care for the conditions of life that support us all, then all sentient beings and all of sentient being would delight in us, and we would realize our true virtue. We would all have jobs, for there is plenty to accomplish. And we would all have purpose, for there is plenty to be and to presence.

Dōgen writes: “We should understand that the mountains are not within the limits of the human realm or the limits of the heavens above. They are not to be viewed with the calculations of human thought.”

To take care of each other, to delight in each other and take care of the conditions of life, we would have to let go of all our calculating. That’s frightening for us, because we have gotten hooked on calculative thinking. But calculative thinking is not living thinking—which is non-thinking—the thinking of Nature, the non-thinking of our original mind. Living thinking is thinking with life, thinking as Nature’s functioning. It is the original thinking of mountains and waters. It is our true thinking—Sophia thinking, wisdom thinking—which, again, we may better refer to as non-thinking. This does not mean we get rid of “critical thinking,” but that we practice and realize it.

That’s the end of the excerpt. We need to go a little further into the issues it raises, so that it can lead us into the heart of the LoveWisdom of the Wolf.

I’d like to do that right now, but I recognize that podcast episodes can seem intimidating once they get past an hour or so. And we’ve earned a break on our journey anyway. I want us to try and hold in mind the whole mandala of this episode and the next one, so I will release the next one at the same time as this one.

As you breathe between these two contemplations, do your best to hold all these things in your heart and mind, and if you have questions send them in through dangerouswisdom.org. We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.