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kimberlysteeleThe Indian Chief known as Jack Fiddler lived in a time of scarcity. He was the leader of a tribe called the Sucker in what is now northwestern Ontario, Canada. Near the dawn of the 20th century, the fur trade had decimated the animal population of northwestern Ontario. Hunters and trappers exhausted the forests of their fauna. Trade fell off and people went hungry.
Wendigo became a regular infestation in the area -- that is to say people from Jack Fiddler's tribe and the surrounding tribes regularly went rogue and became insane cannibals living on the fringes. Fiddler, as the resident spiritual healer, reported that he had "defeated" fourteen Wendigos. When his own brother turned Wendigo after a trading expedition ended in starvation, Fiddler had no choice but to euthanize his own sibling. Canadian legislators pegged Fiddler as a mass murderer and put him on trial. Jack Fiddler briefly escaped captivity and hung himself on September 30, 1907.
In the old tales, the Wendigo could not be cured and transformed back into a human. In order to stop a Wendigo, a shaman like Jack Fiddler had to kill it. The Wendigo was like the zombie of modern myth: it was a parasite that could only be killed by eliminating the host. The Wendigo (nowadays labeled as a sufferer of the phenomenon known as Wendigo psychosis) was a material plane menace brought on by starvation's effects upon the brain.
Canadian prosecutors were quick to shunt off Jack Fiddler as the "real" enemy. The Wendigo went unchallenged. Consequently, Fiddler's Wendigos still continue to exist in the most literal sense: my little area of the Midwest spawned Henry Holmes, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer, just to name a few.
Another, less obvious form of Wendigo rides the back of entire populations. The Wendigo is more active than ever before, igniting the ill-conceived fury of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, chewing on the fragile psyches of the deranged men and boys who call themselves incels. Not every person the Wendigo infects is prone to monstrous behavior: there are compulsive shopping Wendigos and anime/manga Wendigos, home decorating Wendigos, political correctness Wendigos, and cleanliness Wendigos. The common element of all Wendigos is that they isolate and destroy their hosts.
Excalibur
The sword that kills the Wendigo is gratitude. The concept is simple, but that does not mean that it is easy. When all traces of ingratitude are rooted out, the Wendigo dies.
Of all of the ancient skills that modern people of the West have lost, the first and foremost is gratitude. Nobody knew in 1780 just how rich the common man would become because of petroleum wealth. There was no such thing as a poor and simultaneous overweight person when the USA was young. Such a concept wasn't conceivable.
If we were to hand out Ingrate Awards, the spoiled dauphins and princesses of Antifa and BLM would be first in line. The God complexes of BLM members know no bounds: not only do they seek to redistribute wealth (i.e. hand out the money stolen from people they don't like to people they do like), they hope to erase the complexity of history so that it cannot dare to reflect badly upon them. Antifa is a nearly identical group of spoiled, mostly college-educated crybabies who prefer to dress their brand of violence and looting in ninja thug costumes. Scratch the surface of a BLM/Antifa member and you have a colossal ingrate who dwells in a living hell of I WANT. Each one of them is a screaming, thinly-disguised inner child who sincerely believes the next tantrum will be strong enough to bring the longed-for Apocalypse.
We cannot force demon-obsessed, overgrown children to be grateful, and even if we could, the methods we would be obliged to use would make us just as awful as they have become. The only place we can start is ourselves.
Gratitude starts with small stuff. The process is slow but powerful, much like drops of water that eventually carve a river through a mountain range. There is always something to be grateful for, even in times of hardship (and right now, we are experiencing "interesting times" in the most Chinese curse form of the term) and famine. Back in my college days, I became intensely irritated at a professor of mine who happened to be a devout Christian. He wanted us to understand the story of Job. At the time, I thought of Job as a Stockholm Syndrome masochist who, like a battered woman, kept returning to his abuser. The Bible does a fine job of presenting God as a sadistic creep, and the whole "everybody came back to life and was happy in the end" conclusion of the story does little to ameliorate the depravity of its moral. The flaws in the story of Job obfuscated the idea of being stripped (and beaten) down to only one's purest love of the Creator.
Just as Job always found something to be grateful for, and in the end the only thing he had left to be grateful for was his love of his god, we mere mortals can find much to be grateful for, thus partaking in the sublimation that is gratitude. I have memories of a past life where I starved to death as a child. I don't think this is out of the ordinary in the slightest: we all have past lives and due to the nature of the world, we have all starved at least once. Gratitude is the graceful acceptance of limits. Sometimes the limits are an early death. The material plane is a brutal testing ground. You can choose the Luciferian bull in a china shop route and become a one man army against the predicament of it. Hulk smash! Conversely, you can try the other, subtler route and seek to understand why the material plane is the way it is.
When I first accepted that I have lived many lives, I had to come up against the notion that the poor, the deformed, and the unfortunate "deserve" their outcomes. The issue I take with religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism which would assign people their lots in life based on the castes into which they are reincarnated is that old chestnut of mine: I COULD BE WRONG. Just as it offends the crap out of me that some Christians assume theirs is the one and only true God and that everyone else is going to hell, the ignorance of some Hindus and Buddhists who shun slaughterhouse and funeral workers as Untouchable strikes me as equally abhorrent. I still believe I've lived a ton of lives -- I have memories of being a cat several times and a goose before making the human jump -- but I could be wrong, so it makes more sense to do as Martin Luther King Jr. advised and to judge my fellow man upon the content of his character.
Understanding the material plane is full of obstacles means the one way we can help ourselves is to do unto others. There is no better example of what not to do than BLM/Antifa. In this way, ingrates are helpful because they demonstrate what we should be doing by never doing it.
To cultivate gratitude, I have a few suggestions:
- Say thank you, not f**k you.
- Forgo a perk and give it to or share it with someone else.
- Clean or restore something, such as an item or a space, then thank the item or space for its gifts. If you want to get fancy, light a candle or burn incense in thanks, but it's the thought that counts.
- Let go of a spite. Look at an event in your past where you felt wronged, think of the person or circumstances that you felt caused it, and say "I forgive them and I let it go."
Solve et Coagula
Now let's look at the process of being grateful. It is possible to be grateful for being detained at a long stoplight. Let's say you are driving to work in your car and you end up at a lengthy stoplight. By invoking the spirit of gratitude instead of reacting like the typical commuter by getting pissy, you unleash two different virtues. One of these is patience. The other is the appreciation of one's situation: a working car, a job to which to commute, and functioning infrastructure are not things that a child soldier in Sierra Leone can boast of enjoying. This does not mean that your situation cannot be improved. Nevertheless, there is always room for gratitude and by invoking it, you attract more reasons to be grateful to yourself as gratitude begets gratitude.
At the same time, there are two negative emotions you can harness at the stoplight. The reason you won't act out in frustration by swearing or otherwise getting angry is because of certain negative traits in your personality. One is egotistical laziness: you don't care if you're late and nothing can make you care -- you are too important to fret about such trivia. Another is that you hate those fidgety, hair-trigger, power weekend types who tailgate other drivers because they are anxious to get to their next exercise in empty-headedness. The two negatives of your laziness and hatred bind together and become lessened as a result.
Generosity is sublimation. That's the secret of it. The more you give, the more you will get, and what you get back will always be in a far larger proportion to what you gave, though not necessarily in the same form. The most generous character of all, Jesus Christ, sublimated himself right into heaven. On the smaller scale, the most generous people are always the happiest because generosity has a way of taking over the soul.
The Wendigo cannot survive this form of onslaught. To defeat the Wendigo in others, we must become the anti-Wendigo. The Wendigo is always hungry. We take only what we need and are then happy, grateful, and full. The Wendigo wants to take what others have. We are content to make do with what we are given, even if that's next to nothing. The Wendigo is blind with desire and hate. We make every effort to unveil our desires and examine the roots of our hatreds.
The Wendigo is infectious but the remedy is lies within.
