Odysseus and King Arthur
Presented on: Thursday, January 8, 1981
Presented by: Roger Weir
The King and the Queen in the Quest
Presentation 1 of 12
Odysseus and King Arthur
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, January 8, 1981
Transcript:
The, the lecture series is quite an unusual lecture series. And I think you should, some of you are here for the first time. Others are recognized as having been along in this sort of a process before. I don't, I don't lecture in a form that leads to points of information. I don't try to reduce life down to manageable quotations and information depths that could be filed away. Rather I'm always trying to alert you to the material at hand in such a fashion that later on next week, next month, next year, in some other circumstance from this you will begin to piece together into a form or a shape a linking up of the reverberation of the kinds of basic insights that are presented here. And in this regard, this is a very unusual kind of an event. and I think, if you don't know the lecture format like this is a Victorian model of education. And in its genre, it's very effective. And with a certain style of rhetoric and information and presentation is very effective. But our minds and our feelings, our sensibilities are considerably different from that era in which this format was refined and honed and presented. So, I'm constantly to modify this situation. and as we go on further into this lecture series I will see if we can't take ourselves, for instance, from time to time down into the library, around the oak table and put some plants there for itself. Or if we need some candlelight. There are times and style in which perceptions of meaning are encouraged by environment. And that's very, very important to have.
The, the title of the series is The King and Queen in the Quest. And it's a difficulty for us I think to understand that usually the protagonist in spiritual development is either thought of in a masculine sense. Or in some neutral sense, which is an everyman. A rather sexless individual. But the point of this entire lecture series is that there is good reason in reality for there being men and women as a complementarity of the species which has a spiritual capacity at which we I'm sure all of us here are at least are alerted to. That we are not simply rational animals. That we are in fact a whole different quality of being. And though there is a very deep resounding reason why if there is that human nature has a masculine and a feminine. And thus, the king and the queen represent in their epitome the true nature of the man. And the true nature of the woman. And the fact that everyone, even children who still apply(?) know that kings and queens go together. That they make in their relationship a court, a castle, a kingdom. And the establishment and maintenance of those spheres of spiritual endeavoring are at the essential core of what we do every day. Whatever it is that we do, do. But it's only when we take some kind of prism. Like our minds and ability and spirit abstracted from our daily routine and brought together in some lecture series like this or some other form in a prism like this. That we can take the light of insight from the everyday and shine it out and show ourselves what that spectrum really looks like. And can see finally, at least in some glimpses, what it is that we are I think the phrase was all about. And it's quite interesting. I will go through the lecture series just so you have some idea. Because it's obviously there's, there are libraries of material on this and there is no one book that's sufficient. There are realms of material that we could bring in. And I was going to key off.
If you're warm, I know this is kind of warm in here. Please take off your coat.
But this, this lecture series will present the subject matter I think in a way in which you might not have ever addressed it before. And I think for, for those who have not been here before a little word of explanation on method. I will present material. Today we're going to take look at Odysseus and King Arthur. But also, we've already brought into play the idea that there is a quest, a spiritual path. There is a reason for man and woman in some kind of a non-polarity situation with them. All of these elements are rather like beads without a string.
I am taking the attitude and the tack that if you will only keep these referential ideas and points of information suspended. Don't try to link them together right away. Don't try to force them together right away. Don't look for some kind of a rational argument on my part linking them up tonight or Friday, the next week but rather keep them suspended as long as you can. This then instead of being some kind of a categorical arrangement is in fact what we could call a field of experience. And it's important to keep the quality of suspension in that. Because the mind is only a parallel to the spirit. And the minds order presupposes that it has already solved a situation and come to conclusion before it's right. And thus, keeping things suspended. Keeping a sense of patience. And later on, something will happen through this field of inquiry with the subject matter chosen.
Now Odysseus and King Arthur, and Penelope and Guinevere tonight and next Thursday night are styles and paradigms of kings and queens. And I might have chosen other kings or other queens. I thought of using Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, for instance. There are many. I chose these because they're rather romantic in the sense that there is a lot of iffyness about these eras and these characters. And that's what we need. We need something that isn't well defined.
These two lectures tonight and next week go together and form a vignette of the kind of process that's going on in the rest of the lectures.
The third lecture mythic cycles of initiation for kingship backtracks and goes into the origin of what it is to become a king. What it is to become a queen. There is information there which I think will probably be most of interest to you people here. For instance, one of the basic cycles and initiation is the reduction of the flesh of the body to its structural or formal nature. That is to the skeleton. And in all culture, there are ways of expressing this phenomenon of a person being reduced to their skeleton. In the old shamanic cultures in fact very often the robe worn by the Shaman, either a man or a woman equally. Either could be a shaman. The robe would have on the inside an outline of the skeleton. And when the robe is gathered it looks rather like an animal with the fringes and so forth. And yet when it's opened up it shows the basic architectural structure of the human body. the ribs, the bones, the skull and so forth. It is a part of this mythic cycle of initiation into kingship.
The following lecture on January 29th the Homeric return and the round table as world orders, I will try to illustrate that talk as much as possible. Those will be I think interesting.
And then we have two weeks in the center of the series that will be a little difficult because they deal with quote philosophy. And I'm choosing Plato out because he's the easiest philosopher to get close to. And I'm choosing two dialogues by Plato. one of which is very fun and very easy to understand. And one of which is so difficult that you never run across it even in graduate seminars at the best universities in the world. You never read The Parmenides. And if you ask why you're till no one understands it. So, we're going to not understand The Parmenides and deal with it anyway. That's the kind of courage we have.
I would recommend that if you have any access to Plato. You need to read The Symposium because it is just the easiest kind of a dialogue. It's a dinner at which Socrates is present. At which Aristophanes, the great comic poet of ancient Greece is present. A dozen or so Greeks are present. And they get drunk. And of course, the drunker they get the more they're interested in discussing only one question. How come there are men and women? And the topic runs to sex. And all these drunk sages of Greece give their private theories of why it is. And so, The Symposium is very easy to read. And incidentally that way it has been staged at various times through history. Once about 20 years ago Harvard University staged The Symposium. It plays as a play very well.
I would recommend though if you get a chance to take a look at Plato's Parmenides. In particular just skim read the first 10 or 15 pages or so. Just to get acquainted with the, the idea that even somebody 2,400 years ago would have been sophisticated enough to put his finger right on the problem that we really want to know the answer to. And not let go and still not answer it. And it's very interesting to see. And for those of you who are philosophic minded or intellectually careless enough to want to get into these kinds of waters. I think the P.R.S library, I checked today, there's a copy of a book by F.M. Cornford called Plato's Theory of Knowledge which deals with The Theaetetus which is a dialogue that's very close to The Parmenides. So, you might take a look at the Parmenides.
February 19th there is going to be a review by me of Manly Halls book The Holy Grail. Now he wrote a series of books called The Orders of the Quest and it is very much to his credit to have selected out stages of the quest. And to have not just described them but you have presented the essential qualities of those stages of the quest. And of course, his book on the Holy Grail I think will be of great interest to you. And as a matter of fact, the dialogue that, this diagram that I have on the other side. At the very center of this deals with the whole **inaudible word**. And these cycles. This is Arthurian. King Arthur is not at the center.
If you're able to, I would suggest that Manley's book on the on the Holy Grail is something that I would purchase. Mainly because that kind of information is spread out and little bits and pieces everywhere and rarely do you ever run across a nice comfortable box in which all your favorite things are collected. Everything you really would like to know. And it is that kind of a form.
In the following week after The Holy Grail, we'll have a whole evening on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I think will be the apex of mean for this lecture series. That is to say we're building up towards a point where you might have what James Joyce used to call an epiphany. Epiphany is the discovery that you understood it all along and refused to let yourself go. That you knew what that was and yet you tried to shy away from it and not let it occur to you. And low and behold there it is as familiar as your own hand. That is symbol of unity. And the five points of the star that might be a guiding star right there in your own hand. That's an epiphany.
And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight if you have absolutely no acquaintance whatsoever with this level of literature, I think you might find yourself a copy of that. Simply to look it over. And I will in the evening of February 26th style that for you in such a way that you could probably go to it any time after that with comfortability and intelligence, good sense and enjoy it. It was written about 600 years ago. We really don't know who the author was. The manuscript in the British Museum has simply signed at the top Hugo. We don't know who he was. But it is one of the most sophisticated products of the English language. Even 600 years ago there were people who knew how things were and how to express it. It's always quite amazing to us I think to discover that this is continuously so. Archaeology leads us to think now that even our ancestors maybe 25 or 30 thousand years ago already knew what they were doing. And just didn't have portable radios to broadcast it.
Following Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on the 5th of March is Thomas Taylor's version of Cupid and Psyche. And along with that I'm going to bring in Eric Newman's Amor and Psyche. Eric Newman of course is the great Jungian psychiatrist who was in Tel Aviv for a long time. And whose books include The Great Mother and The History of Consciousness. A number of great huge tomes. His Amor and Psyche is a very small book. And it is a modern presentation. Thomas Taylor of course the great English Platonist of about two hundred years ago. If you get interested in Taylor the P.R.S. vault downstairs has all the first editions of all of Thomas Taylor. And we can all buy a mansion if we have that to sell today. It's an enormous collection and worth a lot.
But his version of Cupid and Psyche and Newman's Amor and Psyche very interesting. Because it presents the motions of meaning behind the mask of femininity. And it's very difficult for that to be expressed in discursive terms. In terms of feelings. In terms of art form. It can be expressed great quite readily. I will bring in some slides, for instance, by of some paintings of Marc Chagall. And slides as Henry Borescope etcetera.
The complexities of femininity can be expressed in art. But the discursive language it's elusive. It almost doesn't exist. And there have been many generations in recent centuries who have thought that this is pie in the sky. But we'll see.
Cupid and Psyche and Amor and Psyche on March 5th. And then following that two weeks of returning back to the beginning of the lecture series. And on the 12th of March we will take spiritual quest guides, the first part, we'll take Athena and Merlin. Athena is a great Greek Goddess of wisdom, who's bright eyedness is a look which only a man like Odysseus can return. And Merlin that archetypal magas. The magician who can not only save his own life through wisdom as a child. You know he is threatened to be to be killed. There's a tower that King Bergen has built its own sinking. And all the court magicians say it needs the blood of a boy whose father is unknown to cement it. And Merlin is brought before the court he is threatened with death. And he calls out the court magicians and he tell them they have no vision. That they can't see into the ground. And anyone who can see any of the earth can see that there's a pool down there and that's why the building will not settle. And that further beyond that at the bottom of the pool are two hollow stones and in them are sleeping dragons. A red and a white dragon whose sleep guarantees the safety of the whole kingdom. And if they are woken everything would perish. And of course, they pervertedly in the legends drain, find the pool and drain the hollow stones. This is not only saving Merlin's life but showing the capacity. The Magus is not somebody who manipulates objects out here but whose vision makes transparent to the form, the central skeleton of the world. And will take Athena and Merlin.
And then the following week we'll come back to spiritual quest guides in the form of people who have exemplified to some extent this capacity, Plato and Manly Hall. These are quest guides in the form of persons like ourselves, who through their word make a mountain of experience for us to climb around down and explore. And get used to the idea that there is after all an intelligible landscape questing. We don't start and scratch. And we don't move in a chaos. There is in fact a lot known and a lot presented to us. And if we inform ourselves, we very quickly graduate from having just a few gathered nuts and berries in our pocket to having a very luxurious kind of a caravan of companions along the way. **inaudible 2-3 words** styling.
Then the end of the lecture series will be March 26th, the divine kingship and the questor. And I hope to make that celebration sort of a lecture. Manley's 80th birthday I think will fall just after March 19th. And so, on the 26th I will try to make that a real fine event something. I don't know just what I will add to it, but I will I will make it a joyous occasion. I will pull out my P.T. Barnum capacities to the fullest and see what I can do. I will not dance, and I will not sing. But I can find those who can.
So that's what the, that's what the lecture series turns out to be. And again, we're developing the information for it's a reign before ourselves the field of experience. Last lecture series I read a quotation from Dr. Stephan Tallman, who taught in England at Cambridge. And I think Princeton is publishing his book. It's called Essay on Human Understanding. It's a rewriting of John Locke's Treatises on Human Understanding. And he characterized for us that rationality is not being quick to categorize information into known cubbyhole. That rationality is the ability of the innate mind to address itself to unknown. And in a natural motion of inquiry discovery for itself a relational mean with the world and that situation. And that's what we're after. And if you have to think of the form rather than some really tight pattern think of this kind of figure eight is possible. Coming back, circling back, and each time we do we build up a sense of orientation. Before the mind makes sense out of that mythic level of language, we have to feel about it first. The bones have to know. They need to be informed. And this process of inquiry gives us a chance in durational time to build up an acquaintance before we make up our mind as to how we're going to think about something, we already have some feeling relationships about it.
And later on, that field of inquiry again with material I will present some synthesizing idea. The, the old high dose of **inaudible word**. The lightning that comes into a solution that precipitates some new form out. And hopefully it will be a form from your own background, your own capacity. And not just simply some kind of a Gestalt or idea or belief that somebody else is giving you. But rather will have been something that you and your making have cooperatively engendered.
Well we'll come back to this time and again. Be plenty of time for this.
Today it's Odysseus and King Arthur. And I think, I think we'll start with Arthur it's the most difficult. Arthur is by 1980 now recognized as having been a historical King around the early 6th century. The first reports of Arthur other than folklore and the region were due to this individual here, Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain. and for many, many, many generations Geoffrey of Monmouth was supposed to be the biggest liar in the world. And his quote history was the most scoffed at history. But unfortunately, archaeology has a way of confirming things like Geoffrey of Monmouth and things like Homer. and we slowly through the accumulation of archaeological fascicles and reports grudgingly drag ourselves back to read these childish fantasies as if well maybe after all. They might be a history.
And in Geoffrey of Monmouth he followed the old classic style of epic making of tracing the origins of everything back to the Trojan War. And has England settled by Brutus through the descendants of Aeneids. And thus, by long convolutions and complication King Arthur, Arthur of Britain has a connection going all the way back to this magical spiritual event. Which was a watershed in Western history, the Trojan War. And in The History of Kings of Britain there are seven parts and Arthur is at the very end. Part seven is Arthur of Britain. And if you read through here, you're very quickly astounded by the fact that he says next to nothing about everything that we know about Arthur. You don't find Sir Lancelot. You don't find a mention of the Grail. In fact, you find a four-line sentence that said oh by the way after such and such a battle he married Guinevere. And you say what? I put it down. Very interesting not at all what we would think. ?
So, the question is where do we combine our base image of King Arthur? The wonderful Excalibur wielding king whose iconography is known to all. Well it is, and this incidentally is my copy but the P.R.S. library has a copy of this. In 1895 we find a man writing the Arthurian epic comparative studies etc., etc. and it's very interesting because this is the first time in about three hundred years that a generation of English people were interested in Arthur. And this little book with the diagram on the other side, which I'll fill in for you later on, is like a landmark, a milestone of consciousness. That a symbolic archetype that had flourished wildly for hundreds of years in the consciousness of people. And then had been anesthetized by events, namely the great religious wars after the Elizabethan time and restoration and so forth. And the Industrial Revolution of course. woke it up. Broke the form. Broke the hypnotic trance that people had been in. And all of a sudden, things that had been of interest hundreds of years ago resurfaced. And the meaning of the capacity for these images to carry meaning resurfaced. And so, this book which was written at the beginning of that era. And next week I'll bring another book which was written at the close of this era. A book called From Ritual to Romance by Jesse L. Weston. It's the book that T.S. Eliot's read and inspired him to write the poem Wasteland. But it's about the Arthurian epic.
Between the writing of this book and Jesse Weston's book about 1910, 1911 we have a window through which we can see for the very first time the medieval origins of modern consciousness. Not just the fact that we can feel deep down inside the way medieval spiritual aspiration wanted to be. But we act as if everyone should know that. And of course, the great confirmation of that was the development later on, about twenty years after these books were written we find the people like Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud and the great psychoanalyst. The great anthropologist. Discovering for ourselves that in the course of human development, in the course of our evolution as a species and as a culture and so forth, there are patterns very much like this where we return back to a point. A focus, rather, where we have as human beings have been before. And adequately manifested. And thus must, almost as if the law of karma supplied in large forms as well as small, redo to completion something which had been partially attempted before. And we find this occurring again and again. Now just to give you some idea how far back this could go. The people are the 1890's rediscovering value and meaning at something which have been all the rage before Elizabethan English time. When you take a look at the Arthurian material at that time, they go all the way back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is about 500 years before then. And if you read Geoffrey, he goes back to the old epics that were somehow a thousand years or five hundred years before him. And if we take a look at what it was that Virgil was writing about in Rome, he's linking things back to Homer.
And so, we have a phenomenon, which has a name by the way. It's called the great chain of being. The great chain of being. that is to say we find these processes linking together through large time durations. Hundreds of years. So that it's not only a form of personal questing but it's a form of cultural or civilization questing. Whole civilizations. And in their motion to find contours of meaning, they find that they are constantly parallel to something that had been done before, forms that has been engendered before. And so, this feeling of Deja-vu on a grand scale from time to time. Almost as if we feel great sympathy with people who live in certain centuries that are very much like ours. For instance, the 20th century it's very much like a 13th century.
I hear in Hollywood that they're going to make a film of Marco Polo. It will be a smash hit. We feel very much like them. There isn't anybody in the room here who wouldn't love to go across Central Asia and have all of the adventures. Because we're very much like 13th century people. We are charmed by exquisite worldly individuals who become great mystics who develop tremendous insight, like Saint Francis of Assisi. The 13th century is, they're our kind of people.
And if we go further back, we find that there are great parallel between ourselves in the third century. That's the 3rd century also contain the kinds of events, the kinds of people that we feel simpatico with.
A hundred years ago the most ignored figure in Western thought would have been Plotinus. And yet you find near Plotinic ideas on rock posters as if it's the simplest thing in the world to understand. These kinds of transcendental montages of events and so forth. We have matured so that we have positioned ourselves somewhere on the great chain being, so that we find reverberations back through historical time and cultural events. So that we can learn from these groupings of people as if they were our contemporaries. And thus, whatever it was that they did all has forms of mean applying for us also.
Carl Jung, one of his most sophisticated books Mysterium Coniunctionis, which I have never finished reading and I don't expect I will ever be sophisticated enough to do. Time and time again stops writing the sophisticated psychoanalytic theory. This was written in the mid-fifties when he's a very old man. And he goes back to some kind of a medieval formulation saying this is what I mean. And that's the 13th century style of expression. Where the best that he and his sophistication could engender. Or he will choose example from Gnostic thought by the **inaudible 2 or so works ** subject etc.
So that following the great chain of being back, it seems to finally disappear into the mists of time. and the last lens that we have of a recognizable contour of meaning is in Homer. And it's very difficult to think of Homer as being ancient. it's difficult to think of The Odyssey being three thousand years old. it's, it's difficult to think that Odysseus as a historical figure who died somewhere about 3,200 years ago. And yet his motion in life appear to us to be of great images that happen to people all along through history. Has not been viewed in the same way. Has not really been the kind of hero and king and hero as we see him today. For instance, in Dante Odysseus is a cunning little thief. Dante was just a little bit before that kind of a character would have occurred to him as being as we're **inaudible 2-3 words**.
So that in the great chain of being trying to understand something like King Arthur and why it is that the Arthurian images appeal to us spiritually so much. We have to go back almost as if it were a reverberation in tandem. We have to go back to the figure of Odysseus. And in The Odyssey, I take it that you're all familiar somewhat with The Odyssey. In The Odyssey there are two great portions that interplay almost as if they were the two hands that were giving us the portion. And we have to balance the portion of meaning and entertainment between the two hands. The first hand is the first half of the epic. And the second hand is the second half. And the first half is all about the journeys of Odysseus. The mythological events. His experiences with Polyphemus. His experiences with Cersei Calypso. All of the classic tales that we've somehow heard in one over another. The second half of the Odyssey has nothing whatsoever to do with that. except that it assumed that in some way this is kind of a process has happened. That Odysseus has learned through these adventures how to see through to the essential form. Not only of himself as a shaman seeing through to his skeletal form. But he is able to size an event as large as a kingdom at stake and alone he must bring effect to health and fruition. And the second half of The Odyssey is how he does that. It is as Homer styles it homecoming. His homecoming.
Now in our time we, we use words like enlightenment or liberation or freedom or spiritual illumination. Homer used the term homecoming. And he meant it very much in the way in which we would mean liberation or enlightenment. That is to say, at one point near the middle of The Odyssey, Calypso offers eternity to Odysseus. Gives him a chance to become immortal. And Odysseus turns it down. Because that's kind of immortality has no purpose for him. It has no place. He is interested only in his homecoming. And the most lamentable thing that Odysseus can raise is that all of his companions have lost their homecoming. So that this issue of homecoming for Odysseus is most important. Just as later on and its reverberation, the idea of the fullness and wholeness of the round table is for Arthur.
And just to give you a little prelude...
END OF SIDE ONE
The round table not only has seats for all the Knights. And they're named. their names are on the seats. But there is a seat that is unoccupied. It is open. It is of such an important nature that it has a name. And its name is the Siege Perilous. And that open seat may not be sat in by anyone except the greatest Knight in the world. And no one ever sits in that seat. It remains open. And if a usurper who is not the greatest knight in the world were to sit in that seat they would perish by a most dire eternal punishment.
Well the whole idea of a round table. The whole idea of a form that has an opening is of course a spiritual symbol. It's the kind of thing that be find oh anywhere in the world. Sometimes you'll see in **inaudible word** a Sumi(?) painting where there will be a tremendously deep circle of ink. There will be a place there where the beginning and the ending of the stroke don't quite meet. That's it. Or if you see a Navajo rug with all these symbols and so forth. Someplace in that Navajo rug there is a thread that doesn't belong. They go and come the design off the edge of the rug. These are the same kind of phenomena that the siege perilous is in the round table.
And just so with Odysseus for his homecoming he may not be eternal. he has to be mortal. And the fulfillment of his mortality, and it's I think difficult for us to understand. It isn't just his manliness as a father to come back and reclaim his castle. Although that's part of it. It is not even the fact that he has a son, Telemachus who has grown up without a father. Who does not understand that the question is not whether you live or die but whether the rightful order is insisted upon. And that a king is he who maintains that order regardless of whether he lives or dies. And that this must be taught to his son. And it's a father's place to teach the son. And especially if one is a king and one's son is a prince; it is one's obligation to complete this training. it's not even that. The openness in The Odyssey is the look in the eye of the Goddess Athena. Her wisdom is an unearthly wisdom. She has no parentage. She is born from the head of Zeus fully-armed. She's not of this Earth. and Athena's wisdom, and she is the Goddess of wisdom, is the openness that permits the penetration of the world of things that they are. The penetration of that to the essential nuclear structure of meaning that's just a motion behind the realm of things.
That is in the world of space and time, we have material. We have things. Behind that there are no things, there are only motions. Movements. Relations. and it is Athena's glance her clear-eyed the vision that personifies wisdom, archetypally, that is operating here. Because when Odysseus returns, he has only one ally and that is Athena. And when his son discovers that his father has come back and is staying in a little mud hut with a couple of their old servants and is plotting to go into the court to fight the suitors. He...I just, I won't take time to read any of this to you, but he says how can we win? There are 105 suitors. And his father says but we have an ally. And he says what ally? And his father says we have an Athena. And Telemachus doesn't understand because he's still a child. And he says those are just fairy tales. And Odysseus says no those are not fairy tales. This, this is the, this is the truth. We are we are spiritual energies in motion and this whole world of form orders itself when we harmonize ourselves in that line. And it doesn't matter what the odds are. it makes no difference. It's irrelevant. All we need to do is put ourselves into the position. And the old Tibetan phrase, the clear light. When we move and have our movements in the modulation of clear light. In that openness, that spiritual open regard, the whole world responds to it as if someone were doing yoga right and everything orders itself. Just from one seed. One individual. One king in a Kingdom. And that's all a kingdom needs. Just one King. It has nothing to do with numbers. It has nothing to do with God. And this is the, this is the fullness that Odysseus must come back to. Because he is the only one who has obtained it and can pass it on.
The same way later on with King Arthur. Except that in Arthur there is a blur. A movement in the essence behind things that is a blur that he unwittingly participates in. Arthur of course was the son of Uther Pendragon and who was king. But when Pendragon was killed Arthur was raised by other people. And did not realize that his mother who still lived on. A very beautiful woman named Igraine. Who at one time had been the wife of the Duke of Cornwall and it's a very interesting story. The story of the Duke of Cornwall. Cornwall is very far away from where the Pendragons Court was. And Pendragon during one event had seen the wife of the Duke of Cornwall and was very covetous of her. **inaudible word** as the legends say the most beautiful woman in the land. And the Duke of Cornwall put her into the most obscure place in England. He put her into the castle of Tintagel. And Tintagel was a castle on a rock in the ocean off the farthest tip of England. Pendragon got into the castle because Merlin showed him how to change his shape and resemble the Duke of Cornwall. And from this liaison Arthur was born. And later on, when Cornwall died, the Duke of Cornwall died Igraine became Queen. Arthur was legitimized. But after his father died Igraine had another liaison and gave birth to a daughter. And Arthur never knew this. And decades later had a love affair with this woman who was technically his half-sister. And in these spiritual realms this is of course not simply a mis-alliance but is a fault. A flaw. And thus, Arthur tragically was unable to do what Odysseus had done. Was unable to hold the kingdom together. To give a full expression to the meaning of the King ordering the kingdom.
And thus, was born a sort of corollary to The Odyssey. And that is since Arthur has been unable because of this unwitting transgression in that life to complete his task, he will come again. He will have another time to come again and complete it. Because it isn't just a good idea this is the way the universe moves.
And so, part of the meaning and the mystique of Arthur as opposed to Odysseus, is that Arthur will return at some time in the future. And that Kingdom known as Camelot will be reestablished. And that ordering of the round table will be reinstated.
And so, we have with Odysseus and King Arthur two really distinct styles of King. Odysseus is that king who completes in his own self, in his own life the balanced fullness of his task. And Arthur is that one who leaves it undone and return it in another coming. Has to come back to complete it. And of course, we recognize in both of these styles of prototypes many other examples that would come to mind between Odysseus and Arthur.
I guess I see time has gone along. How about if we take a break here for about 10 or 15 minutes?
Well and I had hoped to present you some visual images of this. And I had it all set up and beautifully arranged. And they were dumped as I say about ten minutes before 8:00. And part of the expiate, expiation was my daughter who had done that showed up here with her teddy bear to show that there are no hard feelings. But I'm sure that that's true. Pretty lucky. So, I will I will bring those next time.
I think that visual images help us literally to grasp what it is we're trying to think about. The sense of vision is always a metaphor for us. And I like after a presentation of something that if someone will walk in off the street this would be pretty nebulous material. And I realized that it's quite a strain. I work this like all of you do. And our realm that has nothing whatsoever to do with this beautiful companionship that we have here. And I know that it's difficult to come from that and adjust. And I wanted to have some visual images.
I will try to give something here. There is a famous Japanese print by Ukiyo-e called Keyso Mountain and Snow. I have a print of it here in this book. I'll pass this around and you can have a look at it. it is a, it is a **inaudible word** style of the king. It's the perfect image of it. And it presents the King in the form of a mountain. Keyso Mountain in this case. It's a Japanese Ukiyo-e version of the King. And its a, just a way in which if our minds are thinking along a certain way and with a certain habitual pattern. It's wonderful to have somebody magician like pull off the table an image from way over here. So that we sort of nudge yourself out of this comfortable elusive way of thinking that does us a disservice. Because it sort of hypnotizes us into thinking, well this is what we're thinking, and this is the way we are going.
So, I introduce images like this, and I'd like to read a poem about that mountain in leu of having slides to show. We have an exhibit of Ukiyo-e by the way in the P.R.S. library. And here she is one of the great masters of that. This is a, this is a poem and I guess you can even leave this. I have a print of that maybe I'll bring it next week of Keyso mountain in the snow. But it is as far away as I could get from Odysseus and King Arthur and be right on the beam. So, I'm trying to add to your field of inquiry an image that is exactly right on but seemingly is at the other end of the world. Because we need to have those stretchings of perspective. If it's only in that kind of a motion that we really wake up.
It's a poem about that that print.
Solitude. Boundless implications of canyons. Secret ravines. Hidden waterfalls. Islands, in the trees in the snow in the night. Where the Hermit sits aside footed. Only a single scale of measurement applies. Only holes are useful, to point and to portion out the point he occupies in his peak. Only holes are useful. Looking past the trees, the snow, the night into that solitude. An island universe shines. Tirashega shines through. His keyso mountains and snow. His massive peak commands the winter night. Measures the death of the mindscape. Another prince. The Hermit and lets me be me in him.
This is the this is the image of the king. That the King in himself personifies the totality of an ordered and ordering of events. The process of life of birth to death. The various stages that we would go through. Childhood. Puberty. **inaudible word**. Householder. And old age. That human life unfolding constantly in this form has an ordering and that there is a timing and the season for each of the stages and phases. There are ways to transform from one phase to another to another and so forth. And because there is this reoccurrence on the natural realm, again and again. There is an order which is natural to the phenomena. And it is maintained by someone who knows. But who knows in a way that can be given out, taught, maintained, exchanged. And who can do that for everyone. That's the king. There are imposters. There are pretenders. But there is only one King. And he is it because he can do this. And he can do it today or tomorrow or any time at all because he is a king. And there's the special properties and qualities and has gone through a legitimate real initiation for real and can do it.
This is difficult to grasp because of our tendency to associated the King with authority. And the king has very little to do with authority in the sense that his object control behavior. He's not out for that. He's not out to control behavior. And authority wants to control because secretly behind that is **inaudible word or two** power.
Pretenders seek authority to control so that they might have power. But the king is doing something else, a process totally distinct and different from them. Instead of authority the king is working with aspiration. And aspiration would like us to seek or quest. And what is secretly behind that is meaning. The king is he who restores and maintains meaning. That everything from birth to childhood to householder to middle age and death. The whole process of life. Everyone's life all the time has a chance to have meaning. Discoverable, shareable, knowable meaning. And thus, the form in which the king always expresses his capacity is to encourage and to permit and to create conditions which sustain seeking and questing.
Those of you who were here in the last lecture series know that aspiration is a quality that's not single phase like authority. Authority is blind mask. Authority is like the ultimate polarity. It's the image of authority. Let's see the image of authority. The right way and the wrong way. **inaudible word or two** it's the right one. There's a yes and a no. There are no maybes. Authority, control, power polarizes by its nature the processes and objects of those purposes. All the time. Aspiration works with a complementation to inspiration. Whenever there is aspiration and a fire going out, there is also at the very same time the counter process of inspiration coming in. So, aspiration and inspiration work together. **inaudible few words** a better image so this kind of phenomena than the Chinese I-ching(?). Which fortunately is the same visual **inaudible few words**
The king encourages aspiration and thus also encourages inspiration. Encourages this movement of complementarity within people. And so, when a king, a true king, loses his touch or a pretender comes to the throne, this whole realm ceases to operate. Vanishes temporarily. And this surrogate comes into play and increasingly this leads to box canons. This leads to the death of the Kingdom. A state known as the frozen wasteland where everything is ruined, nothing can grow, and no one can mature. And there can be no interchange whatsoever.
So that when this form of kingship obtains the thing to look for is the return of the king. The real king. Not is someone to displace the authority at the top and to institute a new kind of authority. But to change the nature of the process to one from authority to aspiration. And the king in the quest is that capacity. Whether it's within an individual. Or within a time. Or within a civilization. There are even kings of civilization. For that figure to breathe rebirth and re-manifest itself and come into play. And when it is operating this whole scheme comes into play and the quest begins to happen. And instead of behaviors being controlled and by rules or codified or looked after by the power and manipulative ways, there are open ends. And seeking and questing goes on. And the nature of this kind of process that we already talk about. An individual begins to sense in themselves the capacity to do just what we're doing here in this course. Suspending the elements of life. The qualities of life. Ideas, images, feelings and so forth. suspending them and a free-form field of inquiry which we feel entirely mobile. Free to be mobile and move around in. And at sometimes when congealing forces of nature come into play there will be a selection. There will be a synthesis. There will be a coming together. Not on the basis of seeking power but on the basis of meaning manifesting itself.
Because the king and the idea of the kingdom and the idea of the quest implicitly understands that nature makes things and makes things happen. Not just naively nature is this one grand whole. But that's the process of the flow of reality is of such a character that it has its swirls and **inaudible word** and kind space that make plants happen. Make stars happen. Make species of plants happen. Make human being happen. That creation does in fact happen without anyone pulling the strings. And that instead of a puppet show we have life.
The king in the quest is that trigger in the masculine sense that allows that to happen. And makes the manifestation penetrate down into all the realms of life. And as it goes on more and more one can see, one can understand, one can literally feel the vibration of this process. And there is a definite intuition of the restoration of health and the reestablishing of procedures that make sense. And of an order which allows life to be, to develop. And this of course is the kind of distinction that requires a little bit of attentiveness to determine.
I think that we'll come back to this. And we'll bring this in next week from the feminine, the queen. The two queens, the pair of diamonds of the Queens in the quest are Penelope and Guinevere. And I think one thing may be to carry around. And image to carry around this week, remember Odysseus. Homer, Homer's Odysseus is a complete figure and of himself. Odysseus does win out. He does regain his kingdom. The great passage in The Odyssey Odysseus has been begging in its own hall. His own castle hall. And he has old robes on, and he dyed his hair grey. Decrepit. And the suitors have been making fun of this beggar. And Penelope has been told by a message that she has to set 12 ax heads in a row on the floor in this Great Hall. And to bring out Odysseus' great bow and a quiver of arrows. Full Quivers of arrows. And she announces to the drunken mob that she will at last relent and will marry he who can string the bow and shoot an arrow through the 12 ax heads. And of course, the suitors all try one after another. And kings and all the others. None of them are able to even string the bow. And the beggar goes over them takes the bow and fiddling with it puts his hands together an old yoga position and straining the bow. And then as he stands up the rats fall off. And he strung the bow once with his thumb. And its chord is like a musical note of doom that reverberates through the hall through the castle. And Homer wants us to know that this is it. This is what the King is. That the King and one flick of his thumb restores order to the entire kingdom. That the entire sequence of events then is inevitable. And of course, Homer has Odysseus lift one arrow in the quiver and with just a quick flick. Odysseus is a very great warrior. He just sends arrow after arrow through those ax heads. And of course, by the sheer panic in the hallway. But by that time the faithful servants have locked the suitors in. And Telemachus wild-eyed to see his father instead of trying to get the suitors out of the hall locking them in so they won't escape. And he reclaims the kingdom.
The woman who set that bow out. Who understands the ritual of the ax heads. And the clarity of the shot of the arrow. And the stringing of the bow. Her name also is the epitome of feminine balance. And that's what her name is Pe-nelo-pe. Every syllable shows that this is the ultimate balance. Even in her name. Pe-nelo-pe. And she is the natural complement to Odysseus. And it is because of her she cannot like Calypso offer to make Odysseus a God eternal and so forth. But she offers something else which Odysseus prizes even more. She offers for him a homecoming to the kingdom because she is a true Queen. She is regal and he by coming back and complimenting her he is a king, a true king. So Pe-nelo-pe.
And we'll look at her and we'll look at the beautiful Guinevere next time.
Thanks very kindly for coming out on one of these Los Angeles evenings. Thank you.
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