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| Deganawida by Lucy Dupertuis |
Everywhere that Love’s ambassadors went they taught people how to live with
each other in harmony, and how to connect with the Divine Source of their
lives, so they could experience oneness with All-That-Is. In North
America, Deganawida, the Great Peacemaker, inspired unity among the people of
five nations that had once been enemies: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga,
Oneida, and Mohawk. Deganawida’s eloquent friend, Hiawatha, compared
the five nations to the five fingers of a hand: “. . . each one separate, individual
and independent, something this simple can topple [a] great tree when the
five fingers work together as one. When our five separate nations are working
together, we have great power. Let our five nations become the five-fingered
hand of the Great Spirit. Let us eradicate the Tree of War, the habits of
warfare, the ways of violence, not only from our nations, but from the
nations we will influence in the generations to come. Human hands serving the
purposes of the Great Spirit, given again to the purposes of peace, can
uproot even this greatest of all trees in the forest.” (Return of the Bird
Tribes, Ken Carey, p. 100)
The Tree of War was thus uprooted and replaced by the Tree of Peace. Hiawatha
taught the people that each of them was a leaf on the Great Spirit tree, and
he told them how meditation could connect them with the indwelling spirit of
the tree. “When we go within ourselves to touch the river of life that runs
at the heart of our innermost being, each one of us touches the same life
that flows within our sisters and brothers, even as the same sap flows
through all the leaves of the tree.” (Carey, p. 106) Hiawatha prophesied
that the tree would remain standing, and peace would reign in the land for
five centuries before the fear-based ways of the earth would return to topple
the tree and destroy the peace. Still, the seeds of peace would have been
planted in the hearts of the American people, just as they had been planted
by Krishna in India, and by Moses in Israel.
The angels of Love flew around the world, planting seeds in the minds of men
and women everywhere. Sometimes the seeds took root and sometimes they
settled into the depths of the subconscious from where they might
occasionally sprout in dreams but were usually ignored. The angels
found that the messages best understood by human minds were those that
required the student of life to imagine him or herself in another’s body.
This teaching only worked with those who were willing to use the imagination
that Love tucks into the mind of every person, giving him or her the means to
see beyond the limitations of a particular environment.
In Africa, the angels’ message became a proverb that was passed down from
parent to child in this way: “One who thinks about pinching a baby bird with
a pointed stick should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.” (African
Traditional Religions. Yoruba Proverb (Nigeria)) In India, where the
ancient faiths of Buddhism and Jainism grew alongside Hinduism, similar
versions of this lesson took root. Disciples of Gautama Buddha would
remember that “Comparing oneself to others in such terms as ‘Just as I am so
are they, just as they are so am I,’ he should neither kill nor cause others
to kill.” ( Sutta Nipata 705)
The Jains learned the angels’ Golden Rule as follows: “One who you think
should be hit is none else but you. One who you think should be governed is
none else but you. One who you think should be tortured is none else but you.
One who you think should be enslaved is none else but you. One who you think
should be killed is none else but you. A sage is ingenuous and leads his life
after comprehending the parity of the killed and the killer. Therefore,
neither does he cause violence to others nor does he make others do so.” (
Acarangasutra 5.101-2)
Love
rejoiced with the angels and other divine beings to see the concept of
oneness spreading around the world through this teaching. The people who
actually embraced this lesson and put it into everyday action were few in number,
but Love’s infinite wisdom included many other wonderful, life-expanding ways
to teach love and oneness to the children of the world.
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