The Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant. He will put me in a place where I shall be better off than in this world.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the belief that ignorance is not a reason for suffering and that there is a higher purpose or place for individuals beyond this life.
Red Cloud's quote emphasizes the idea that ignorance should not lead to suffering, suggesting that the Great Spirit (or a higher power) understands our limitations and will provide us with a better place or state of being than what we experience in our current world. It underscores a philosophy of compassion and the belief in a benevolent guiding force that accommodates human flaws and seeks to offer improvement or redemption.
In practice
In a speech about resilience, one might say, 'As Red Cloud reminds us, the Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant.'
I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.
When I was a young man, I was poor. In a war with other nations, I was in eighty-seven fights. There I received my name and was made Chief of my nation. But now I am old and am for peace.
We were told that they wished merely to pass through our country. . . to seek for gold in the far west . . . Yet before the ashes of the council are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. . . . His presence here is . . . an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be allowed for corn?
Look at me. I was a warrior on this land where the sun rises, now I come from where the sun sets. Whose voice was first surrounded on this land - the red people with bows and arrows. The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I can't see it.
From silly devotions and from sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us.
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often loses himself.
To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.
We've got a thing called the 'tall poppy syndrome' in New Zealand, where if anyone is doing really well, it's quite common to try and bring them down - like, cut them down and say, 'You've been to the moon? So what? I mean, plenty of people have been to the moon.'
We begin from the recognition that all beings cherish happiness and do not want suffering. It then becomes both morally wrong and pragmatically unwise to pursue only one's own happiness oblivious to the feelings and aspirations of all others who surround us as members of the same human family. The wiser course is to think of others when pursuing our own happiness.
By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. Itβs the same true story, even when it isnβt.
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