“To have a discerning mind, believe only that which one has experienced oneself.”
—Solange Claustres, Becoming Conscious
In a riddle from Central Asia the protagonist is a traveler returning home with three beings in his care. He has to convey a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage to their destination without any of them coming to harm. The difficulty lies in the nature of each. Given the slightest opportunity, the goat will eat the cabbage, and the wolf will slaughter the goat (the cabbage, for its part, means no harm to anyone).
All goes well until the entourage must cross a river on a raft large enough for only the traveler and one of his charges. This presents him with a dilemma for he must leave two unattended while he ferries a third across the river, or, alternately leave two on the other side when he returns for the third. Inevitably, it seems, one of his wards will be destroyed.
Our traveler ponders the dilemma. He sits by the riverbank watching the flow and observing his companions. He makes a fire, boils water, sips tea, and finally sleeps. He wakes before dawn and the solution comes.
He understands that progress does not proceed in one direction only. He sees that he must make use of an apparently retrograde movement to succeed. In order to go forward he must also be willing to go backward.
What is his solution?
This riddle is an allegory. There is a genius in its design because the effort to see the solution may lead to an understanding of the wisdom it contains.
As you have read this far you probably should stop and take a few moments to solve the riddle. Having solved it, perhaps even ponder its meaning.
Please take what follows with skepticism, as it is the product of my own pondering and experience, and you may see something different.
The wolf, the goat, and the cabbage are aspects of my own nature. With this triadic lens I see an intellect and its resident ego, a heart and its spectrum of emotions, and a body with its instincts, impulses, and appetites. Each has a role within the whole conveyance, and each has its own perceptions, associations, and intelligence.
I see that without a commanding awareness these three parts are often at odds with each other. My mind is eager to eviscerate my heart. It second guesses my intuitions, rationalizes sensitivity, asserts logic when feeling is needed. The wolf of the intellect makes apparently reasonable decisions that oftentimes lack appreciation for what is truly important.
I see the domination of feeling by the intellect playing out on the macrocosmic scale of humanity. It leads to ignorance of whole systems, unnecessary and destructive technology, abstraction of value, ruthless domination of the weak by the strong. When the intellect strays from its useful role as analyst and counselor and instead becomes an authoritarian despot, it becomes a killer of conscience.
The emotions subsume the instincts by occupation with passions of survival, with fear and anger, when survival is not presently at issue. The emotional center inexorably consumes the imperative responsibilities of the instinctive brain generating fight-or-flight conflagrations when none are required.
In assuming the adrenalized postures of the instinctive part, the emotions are prevented from conducting native qualities of feeling. These are emotions we consider rare and rarified, like joy, awe, gratitude, hope, and even love, but should be the mainstay of our emotional life.
In the life of humanity the effect of emotions feeding on instincts appears as a generalized perpetual state of anxiety and fear. The collective atmosphere is infused with a looming sense of doom. Power possessors are adept at capitalizing on this proclivity for imbalance, and they continuously present terrifying images of characters they call terrorists, despots, climate emergency, thermonuclear destruction—the list is endless, and endlessly recycled.
How would I be if the three beings in my care, the intellect, the emotions, and the instincts were able to work within the rails of their design and purpose? How would I be if the parts of my instrument were free from the need to usurp each other’s power and come into a concerted harmony? How may they be reconciled, so each is free to work with its own native energy, and do its work unencumbered by the specter of being devoured by a colleague?
In its solution the allegory suggests a practical means of working to understand how the three parts of every human nature may exist in harmony; and how their coexistence may be in service to the larger project of becoming, of returning home.
These are my insights into the allegory. What are yours?
This article appears in November 2024.
