Joining a monastery was one of the least intelligent things I ever did, primarily because I made that decision for the wrong reasons. I was not running to meet God, I was running away from life. I wanted to warm the misery of my isolation and loneliness, but instead I jumped into a more severe form of just that. Of course, I was not alone in doing this. I have to confess that most of the monastics I have known are more motivated by escape than by devotion. I think the monastic form was often valid in the medieval world, but I have rarely seen a modern person making a valid life out of that form. The solitary life (the word monk derives from mono, meaning alone) is correct for a small percentage of people in every age, but the form varies from one age to another. Solitude in the modern world was—for me—to be lived in the midst of ordinary life, not sequestered away from life, burl had to learn and relearn this lesson.
In joining an organization, I did precisely what Dr. Jung warned me never to do, but I was intensely lonely again and wanted badly to belong somewhere. I knew in my head that it was my destiny to lead a solitary life, but I did not yet have the strength for it.
I selected a monastery in Michigan and arrived there for an initial three-week stay; this provided a time for the monastics and me to size one another up. At the end of those three weeks I understood at some level that this was entirely the wrong thing for me to be doing, but I couldn’t think of what else to do with myself, so I stayed. The demand to gather some kind of community around me to replace what I had lost was more powerful than my insight. As I look back on it now, this time was in some ways my midlife crisis; I was forty years of age.
An agreement was worked out by which I would be allowed to live in the monastery while also serving as a counselor to the monks and novices there and the many guests. This arrangement took a lot of weight off the abbot, who had an endless stream of people coming to him with problems and difficulties of various kinds. There were about a dozen novices coming and going, beginners who were trying out what it was like to live a secluded life away from the world.
The monastery was built next to a small lake on what had once been a farm. To complement the old farmhouse, the monks had built a chapel and a guest house. They no longer worked the land other than to keep a garden; guests were their chief crop. The schedule was a noble one, and it pleased me to arise before dawn to thank God, but I quickly learned that these customs did not take me closer to the Golden World. When I was leaving Los Angeles to go to the monastery, a Jewish friend had challenged me, “Robert, how do you think you can talk to God in a monastery? You don’t know Hebrew.” Neither did I possess a medieval mentality, and this proved to be the gulf between the monastic way—essentially a medieval way—and me.
In many ways, living a monastic life should have been a step toward the Golden World. When a novice takes his final vows, there is a ritual in the monastery that celebrates his funeral. He lies down near the altar, they put a ten-foot-by-ten-foot black cloth over him, and his fellow monks recite a funeral mass. Then they take the cloth off, and he changes from novice clothing to a monk’s robes. It is a death of sorts, as when it is done properly the monk must die to the ordinary world. This is noble language, and it might have touched me very deeply and contributed to my interior solitude. But there was so much hypocrisy in the system at the monastery that no ceremony could cut through it. One can be a legitimate monk only by being a true medieval or by being a deeply conscious modern person. I am sorry to say that there are few of either in our society.
My therapeutic work at the monastery was exciting, fulfilling the potential that Toni Sussman had envisioned for me years earlier in London with her dream of marrying the insights of modern psychology with the traditions of the church. My patients were protected in a safe environment with few of the material pressures of the outside world, however they still suffered the ills of modern life, that is, they faced inner conflicts. Each summer twenty young novices came as part of a vocational program, and by May I was placed in charge of them. I did my best to teach them what I knew about religious experience, and we also worked together to create a sense of community. Everyone accepted different kinds of manual labor—I was a baker and dishwasher—and we did our best to make every part of the day a prayerful, here-and-now experience.
I soon learned, however, that there was a distinct social hierarchy, even in a monastery. The abbot was a tired man who seemed to have given up on creating anything of worth or dignity. He went through the motions of his station but delegated much of his authority. The second-in-command, an elderly Englishman, was bitter, and he made life miserable for everyone whenever the abbot was gone. He ruled with a cold brutality and, I was soon to learn, sad hypocrisy. I had not been in the monastery for long before I learned that almost no one was safe from the hypocrisy of a system that had lost its validity and no longer spoke to the present time. After I voiced dissent, I was placed on an invisible blacklist. For example, one of my great joys was baking hot bread and serving it to the novices in the afternoon. It was not long before this assignment was taken away from me. A few more months went by, and it was decided to deny me the vocational teaching program for the young novices. It was explained to the novices that they were not to speak to me since they now had to learn to be true monks; they were told that hot bread and honey on baking days was not part of a monk’s regimen. None of the novices stayed on that year or for many years to come. I believe if the monastery could have addressed the universal loneliness (not solitude, for that is the basis of monasticism) of its novices and offered them a valid form of relationship, they might have stayed.
By this time I realized fully that my dreamed-for community was not to be; in fact, I had never felt so lonely in my entire life.
In some ways I enjoyed the monastic life; the monastery was a perfect place to provide counseling with a religious orientation, which was my ideal. In theory, a monastic life should provide the ideal balance between the Golden World and the earthly world. I felt that many of the men who came for retreats as part of the summer programs were sincere seekers who were honestly looking for ways to serve God. The order and the tranquillity of the environment worked wonders for many of our guests. But those who stayed for very long soon were caught up in the system. The political intrigues and vendettas were degrading. One night I had a dream that told me it was time to leave. It went as follows:
I am in the crypt, the basement of the monastery, and the four great arches that support the A-frame church above are standing on four great pillars. A gorilla is chained to each of the pillars. Three of the gorillas are dead, and the fourth one is dying. End of dream.
It didn’t take any great insight for me to see that the instinctive animal life within me was in great peril. When I awoke from this dream the issue was settled, and I left the monastery very soon afterward.
In some ways, my life has been a search for a monastic life that is appropriate for the modern world. In running away to a monastery set up in the medieval form, I learned firsthand what I should have already known—that consciousness cannot go backward, it can only go forward. My consciousness was far too differentiated to reunite with the Golden World without profound inner transformation. If someone has been driven from the Garden of Eden, he or she may never return to that paradise—no matter how strong the yearning—but may go ahead through the process of redemption to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Many people use the energy of their nostalgia for paradise trying to get back to a previous state of grace, back to childhood. This is not possible, and people are wiser to use their energy to progress to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Regression is deadly; progression wins one’s soul.
The modern world engages in a terrible heresy in assuming that everyone is born like a blank page, assuming that the experiences of life form our character. That is half true. The other half is that each person is born with a mythology built in. This personal myth determines much of our experience of life, and it is extremely important for a person to discover and understand his or her fate. Life is easier if we cooperate with that myth rather than continually pull against it. In my own life, when I decided to honor my introversion and strong feeling function, life began to flow with much greater ease. It was only after living in India during my fifties and being among others of a similar temperament that I gained insight and courage enough so that I could come back to America and live an introverted, feeling life without continually bearing a sense of inadequacy.
Much of my own mythology, the myth that was incorporated in me at the beginning of my being, seems to be related to the archetypal image of a monk. If I had lived in the medieval world, I most certainly would have been a monk. Although I no longer live in a monastery, wear curious clothing, or take on the other clichés of monasticism, my life very much corresponds with the pattern. I have worked out a way to live this myth in modern form. Some friends have called me a mystic, a title that I don’t object to. Mysticism is a hallowed tradition in the religious life, and there have always been people with the job of tending the border between the two worlds. Here again, words fail me. I speak and write of two worlds, when in fact the two are one. To everyday consciousness, however, there is a veil between the Golden World and the earthly world. In all my experiences of the divine realm, I have always maintained the sense that I existed—I didn’t just merge into the Golden World. It takes an observer to experience the existence of heaven.
Apparently, one must separate from God so that there is an objective standpoint from which we can observe. In my own homespun theology, I believe that perhaps God wanted human eyes in order to be able to see the splendor of the Golden World. If so, then it’s our business to be the eyes and ears, to see and hear the splendor or God, but it requires that we stand apart from God. To be a discrete observer necessitates that one is separated from what one is observing. That is the alienation of a human life. One is reminded of the Zen comment on the intermediate stage of development when “rivers were no longer rivers and mountains were no longer mountains.”
That sense of being separated is the ego. In arriving at adulthood we all have built an ego structure, a separate sense of “I,” but it is precisely that distance from all else that makes us feel so lonely and alienated. One then must find a way to restore the unity with God, to worship. This is the Zen stage when “rivers are again rivers and mountains are again mountains.”
It is our human duty to witness, the splendor of God, which is my sense of worship. What makes all of this so difficult is that our duties are in conflict. These principal duties are to separate from oneness (the childhood paradise), develop an ego, and live a cultural life; and then to reunite with the oneness of God. Generally the early part of one’s life is taken up with the necessary distancing from God: learning about the cultural requirements of the society in which one lives, leaving the house of the parents, developing one’s independence and sense of personal self. There is a constant pull back to the sense of unity from which we came, and in Jungian psychology that is called the mother complex. There is a regressive pull in each of us to quit this business of winning independence, to escape the painful human process of becoming a distinct, separate personality. Physical suicide is the ultimate expression of the mother complex, but it takes many other forms, such as the use of drugs and alcohol or mindless consumption of food or material goods. When people come to my consulting room with a drug problem, I tell them that they are addressing the right problem but in the wrong way. They are trying to go back to a paradise when they need to go forward to a paradise.
We must separate from God before we can reunite with God. We must create a useful life, learning the customs of the society in which we live. You cannot put back together again that which has never been adequately differentiated. Consciousness must separate before it can reunite. Many of the spiritual communes, monasteries, and spiritual practices in this country are nothing but institutionalized mother complexes, with selfishness and ego regression running rampant in the name of spirituality.
It is a legitimate question to ask just how far one really needs to push this differentiation before one can legitimately seek to reunite. That is an individual matter. A very simple person may not be differentiated to any great degree, and I have seen this among the traditional peasants who live in the small villages of India; they have the right to put things back together again without a great deal of differentiation. But educated Westerners go much further in developing their consciousness, becoming so split that it is difficult to become whole again. The cultural laws of Western society encourage us to get as separate, as specialized, as unique as we can get. To get a good job, today you must have a college education, and a professional degree or a Ph.D. is better still. We are trained to become more and more specialized. Then on Sunday at church we are advised to merge ourselves with God. It’s no wonder we’ve become a neurotic society; the wonder is that we are not all schizophrenic!
Once we have built a strong ego, we must then link it back to the matrix from which it has grown. Differentiation of consciousness is only one-half of our life journey. But to say, “I want an experience of God” is a total oxymoron; if there is an “I” seeking an experience, that is precisely the problem, since an “I” that sees itself as separate from God is the cause of suffering in one’s life. There’s a Christian proverb that says he who searches for God insults God, because a search implies that God is separate. Zen Buddhism also is very articulate about this, stating that the very motivation for satori or enlightenment is suspect. You find the kingdom, not by seeking, but only by grace. Seeking after the splendor of God is a highly egocentric and fragmenting thing to do. I now understand that the most profound religious life is found by being in the world yet in each moment doing our best to align ourselves with heaven, with the will of God. However, I was still learning this when I tried to find the answers in a monastery.
When I went to the monastery I had sold most of my possessions and had spent much of my savings sending Helen’s two boys to school in England. When it became clear that I had to leave, I wasn’t sure where to go. I did have a friend who ran a prisoner rehabilitation program at a hundred-acre farm only a few miles down the road from the monastery. The farm had been a failure, and the prisoner rehabilitation project had lost its funding and been closed down. At the time, the property was sitting vacant, and I knew that they needed someone to serve as caretaker and to safeguard the property. I immediately called my friend and volunteered for the job. I was loaned the farm on the spot, so I packed my bags, bid farewell to the monastery, and walked down the road to my next adventure.
When I arrived at the farmhouse, I found quite a mess. Various charities had donated items, and the house had stacks of canned goods and bags of grain piled up in the kitchen. There were twelve bedrooms in the old farmhouse, and for the first week I did nothing but clean up the mess that had been left behind. I arrived the day before Thanksgiving with five dollars in my pocket, a pretty thin padding between oneself and the cold world. I decided that I would try it for a week, and if after that time I had more than five dollars I would stay. Some friends came by and created a fine Thanksgiving dinner; they encouraged me to live at the farm. Slender threads were at work again.
It didn’t take long for word to get out about my new address. I had a small therapy practice built up at the monastery, and many of the people who had been going to see me there now drove down the road for therapy sessions at the farmhouse. I hadn’t charged for my work when I was living at the monastery, but now I needed an income, so I devised the sugar bowl method of payment. I simply set out a sugar bowl and asked my patients to make whatever contribution they could.
I struggled along for the first month, and soon after I had the place cleaned up, people started asking me if they could come to the house for weekend retreats. Before I realized what was happening, I was running a therapy practice and a weekend retreat center. I was creating my own version of a monastic life in which I lived close to the Golden World, with long stretches of time in solitude, but also with access to a community of like-minded individuals.
The next summer some volunteers helped me repaint the interior, and someone donated aluminum siding for the exterior walls. I was having a great time, and I began to believe that perhaps I had stumbled into a real, viable way of life. But when I tried to buy the farm, the archdiocese that owned it refused to sell. It made no sense to invest my own money continuing to repair the old buildings, so eventually I determined that I should move on. But I had created the blueprint in my mind for a new kind of program—a retreat center that combined psychotherapy with monastic life. The next step was to make that dream a reality.
While I was living in the Midwest, an Episcopal priest from Minneapolis started an analysis with me during a retreat. The experience was so powerful for him that he suggested that I travel to Minneapolis for one week of every month to provide counseling hours for parishioners and to lecture for his church. This worked very well for some time. One day in Minneapolis I was walking down a street, ten blocks or so from the church where I worked, when suddenly I heard a demand from heaven. I didn’t exactly hear words, as from a voice in the clouds, but the following command came into my head: “Now make up your mind: either everything in the world is the body and blood of Christ, or nothing is. Make up your mind.”
That was such a shock that I still recall the angle of the sunshine, the color of the trees, the type of cars driving by on the street—it was a terrible/wonderful moment. I knew the answer immediately, but I didn’t know what to do about it. If I said that nothing is the body and blood of Christ, I would die immediately from a lack of meaning in my life. Life is not possible without meaning. You can live for thirty days without food, for three days without water, for three minutes without air, but you can only live three seconds without meaning. Therefore, it was clear that Christ must be everything. But how could I live that truth? It seemed too big to take in. I have been struggling since with the implication of that sudden vision.
A few months after I began lecturing in Minneapolis, I had a similar offer to affiliate with a church in California. I decided to move there and commute back and forth to Minneapolis once a month. This seemed like the perfect arrangement. Everything went well in Minneapolis, but the program in my new California setting was not well founded. I found I had made another blunder and had gotten myself into a situation where I did not belong. It has taken the most stringent efforts of fate to keep me away from my hunger for a personal sense of belonging to a community.
It was at this time that another great dream again pointed the direction for my life.
A very great lighthouse is being built on the coast of England. It is almost finished but is not functioning yet. It has been placed some distance inland so that there will be enough height so that the light from the house will go far out to sea, almost infinitely far out.
It is a traditional, tall, and circular lighthouse, with glass on the top and a spiral staircase on the inside to ascend to the top. Though it is not yet finished, it is already a pilgrimage place, and great numbers of people come to see this monument. I am there alone, dreadfully lonely. I spend three or four hours in a long but orderly queue waiting for access to the structure, with the line of people slowly winding in a serpentine path up to the base of the lighthouse. Eventually I begin to ascend the spiral stairway inside, one revolution after another. Every time I make a new revolution I understand something more. I gradually learn that the lighthouse is nearly finished, and I discover that the source of the light is going to be a dead body lying in a sarcophagus.
The body of the holy man, like a relic, is to be the source of the light. The last revolution to get to the top is outside the body of the lighthouse; it is perfectly safe, as there is an iron railing and iron steps, but it is at a terrifying height, and I can see through the weblike metal steps all the way to the ground below. Now the most astonishing bit of information is revealed to me. I find that it is to be my body that will be in the lighthouse when it is functioning!
When I make the last revolution, I walk into a chamber at the top with a stone sarcophagus. It is empty. I realize that this entire project is under the control of a cold, stainless steel man with no humanness or kindness in his personality. He is all business. He recognizes me and says, “Aha, you’re here. You are no good to us until you are dead, but since you are here, let’s see if we got the sarcophagus in the right shape.”
I then lie down in the sarcophagus. It fits perfectly, so he orders me out, saying, “Get down out of here now. You’re no good to us yet.”
So I go back down the winding stairs. I don’t remember the descent, but when I arrive at the bottom, it is nearly dark and raining. I walk away crying, thinking that they will make so much fuss over me when I am dead but they don’t give a damn about me while I am alive. Then I walk off in the rain feeling miserable. End of dream.
Dreams are strange things, and big ones like this difficult to relate to. I shudder at the word interpretation, because it is audacious to try to interpret a dream like this, but I must relate to it somehow; I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. One way of putting it into perspective is to observe that many dreams are compensatory. If one’s personal life is too far in a particular direction, one will have a series of dreams in the opposite direction to bring balance to the personality. This dream occurred during a lonely, isolated, and desolate time in my life. I thought that my vision of the lighthouse tower was going to lead to great success, but then it also failed. The dream accentuates to almost a ridiculous degree the opposite that I needed to bring my life back into balance: I needed to be reminded that the great worth of a person is most evident from a less personal viewpoint. Everything is exaggerated in this dream: my life was not so lonely as the dream depicted, nor was my vision of “shedding light” by creating a new kind of religious retreat so glorious as the dream portrayed. The dream and my life were seeking a balance, my conscious and unconscious trying to work out a middle path.
In addition to being compensatory, the dream also seems to be a treatise on the fact that someone of my temperament and closeness to the collective unconscious is most useful when dead; when I am alive, the dream points out, I am scarcely worth feeding or keeping alive. There was a certain bitterness in me at the time of this dream, a feeling that the world did not appreciate me. That resentment would diminish over the coming years, and, in fact, I was just on the verge of gaining more worldly success than I ever thought possible.
Aside from personal issues, the dream can also be looked at from another perspective. If one takes the word dead in a metaphorical sense, and not as the physical death of one’s body, then it can be seen that one is useful on the face of the earth and has a far-reaching effect if one will consent to an impersonal manner of life. This is the depth of the Grail Castle question, Whom does the Grail serve? If one answers this question by saying the Grail serves oneself, one is caught in a personal view of one’s own meaning; if one answers, the Grail serves the Grail King (God) then one is capable of seeing more than one’s own limited ego. The dream seems to be saying, “Do your work, follow your duty, then you will have an effect upon the world. Your life, work, and suffering are not without meaning.” But the personal dimensions of one’s life are as small and unremarkable as the dream seems to suggest. I am there at the lighthouse alone. I see all this magnificence and gain information, but it is no solace to my personal life. I am as alone as ever, but one can’t be lonely unless there is a vision of sublime relatedness to accentuate the aloneness. In a personal sense I may not be worth much, but in an impersonal sense I may be contributing something of great value to the collective unconscious. This is my general view of such a dream.
Within a few days after having this dream, and only six months after moving back to California, I met John Sanford, the rector of Saint Paul’s Church in San Diego. John, who is an Episcopal priest and also a certified Jungian analyst, was very excited by my efforts to create a new form of monastic life that combined psychology and religion. He offered me my own office at his church, a steady stream of patients, and an appreciative and understanding ear. So in 1967, in my midforties, I moved south to the San Diego area, where I have lived ever since.
My first joint venture with Saint Paul’s in San Diego was to take part in a Wednesday night adult education program; this was so well received that it eventually became its own organization, the San Diego Friends of Jung. Soon I was doing well enough to purchase a small house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It only had three guest rooms, but it was my humble version of a retreat center. I presented my lectures as well as exploring other myths and stories and drew out their psychological lessons for modern people.
Here again, I seemed to be finding a version of monasticism that would work for me. Joining an existing monastery had ended in failure, which I should have known from the advice Dr. Jung had once given me. Monasteries that still try to adhere to the medieval model provide community but not a set of personal relationships. As I developed my work at Saint Paul’s in San Diego, I developed good friends, people who valued me highly, while I continued to live my own version of monasticism. I was searching for a balance.
IT WAS AT SAINT PAUL’S in San Diego that I developed my lectures on Parsifal and the Grail legend. My first book, He, grew out of a series of four lectures that I presented at Saint Paul’s. John Sanford had it recorded and asked the church secretary to type up a transcript. John then tidied it up a bit and sent the manuscript off to a small publisher of religious-oriented books in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, before I even knew what he had done. Surprising to all, they accepted the book and agreed to publish a few thousand copies. Before I knew what was happening, Harper & Row, one of the world’s largest publishers, became interested and purchased the rights to my book. Apparently they saw potential, and when the reprinted version was distributed it began selling in great numbers. He is now translated into thirteen languages and can be found in bookstores around the world.
At the time I wrote the book, I had wandered into the Grail Castle once, having seen the Golden World at the age of sixteen; (one might say that my hospital experience at age eleven was the first experience of the Golden World. But at sixteen I had the first chance of experiencing it consciously), at that time I was dazzled out of my wits and could not contain the experience. I was taking a writer’s liberty when I wrote in He that we all get a second chance in the Grail Castle. This was based on hope and theory but was not yet my own experience.
The story of Parsifal is, in many ways, the story of my life. The Arthurian legends were part of my childhood, and I knew the Parsifal story from a young age. I was drawn to it long before I heard Emma Jung lecture on the Grail myth during my training in Zurich, although her interpretation of the book immediately intrigued me. The story kept popping up in my life in unexpected ways. While I was studying in Zurich I rented a room in the top floor of a house from a kindly couple. They would invite me down once a week for tea and a visit. One day they announced that they simply couldn’t call me Robert anymore because it just didn’t fit my personality. Instead, they wanted to call me Parsifal. I thought that was a bit odd, but I accepted their wish as some Swiss idiosyncrasy. A few weeks later, when Mrs. Jung began her lecture on the Parsifal story, I learned that the name Parsifal means “innocent fool.” When I learned that, I went back to the next tea party, thinking I would impress my hosts.
“I bet you don’t know what Parsifal means,” I said proudly. “It originally meant an innocent fool.”
“Oh, yes, we knew that,” I was told.
That took some of the wind out of my sails, and once again the Parsifal story seemed to be my story.
At the start of this myth, Parsifal is a simple, naive young man who lives with his widowed mother. Her name is Heart Sorrow. One day the adolescent Parsifal sees five knights riding by on horseback. Dazzled by them, he dashes off to tell his mother that he has seen five gods and wants to leave home to join them. His mother weeps at the loss of her son but gives him her blessing and sends him off wearing homespun garments. Parsifal never finds the five knights, but he does have many adventures. One day he finds his way to the great castle of Gournamond, who trains him to be a knight and gives him a special instruction: if he ever reaches the Grail Castle he must ask, “Whom does the Grail serve?”
After much travel and adventure, Parsifal meets a solitary man fishing from his boat. The fisherman invites Parsifal to stay the night in his humble abode, which is to be found by the following directions: “Go down the road a little way, turn left, cross the drawbridge, and you will find my house.” When Parsifal reaches this house, he finds himself in the Grail Castle, in which is kept the Holy Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper. The Fisher King has been severely wounded and is too ill to live yet is not able to die. He is called the Fisher King because he was wounded early in his life in an incident that involved a fish. While wandering in the forest, the young king had reached a camp that was empty except for a spit on which a salmon was roasting. Being hungry, he took a piece of salmon but burned his fingers badly. To assuage the pain, he put his fingers into his mouth and tasted a bit of the salmon. At that moment he had a taste of something that he could never forget, a taste of the Christ nature (the fish is one of the many symbols of Christ). But its effect on him was a wounding, not yet a revelation. The wound was in his thigh, meaning that his suffering was in his creative or generating capacity. His virility and strength were severely wounded. As a result, from that time onward the king had to be carried on a litter, though he gains a little respite from his suffering when he is fishing.
It is this Fisher King who presides over the castle that Parsifal has wandered into. It is also the castle where the Grail is kept, but the power of the Grail does the Fisher King no good. He cannot touch the Holy Grail despite its being so near. As the king suffers, so does his kingdom. The entire country is in desolation. The king and the kingdom cannot be healed until an innocent fool enters the castle and asks the right question: “Whom does the Grail serve?”
As Parsifal enters the castle, the drawbridge strikes the back hooves of his horse as it closes shut. He is met by four pages who bathe him and lead him into a banquet room filled with four hundred knights and ladies. A grand procession is taking place, and Parsifal sees the Holy Grail and a sword that drips blood. He is so astounded by this experience that he forgets to ask the crucial question, and the next morning he finds that the Holy Grail, the Fisher King, the people, and the castle have all disappeared.
It takes many years for Parsifal to find his way back to the Grail Castle though he searches and searches for it. When he does find it again, he immediately sees that the Fisher King is still suffering. This time Parsifal asks the question “Whom does the Grail serve?” and the answer is given: “The Grail serves the Grail King.” We learn that the Fisher King is only the lord of the castle while the Grail King lives in unseen eternity in the center of the castle. When Parsifal learns the difference between these two interior parts of the human psyche, the Fisher King is healed and the kingdom can once again be productive and peaceful.
This story is not only about a personal quest, it is also about the evolution of consciousness for all humankind. The Grail Castle, which brings the greatest joy that a human being is capable of, is that visionary, mystical, interior world that is always just down the road. It is never very far away. But it must be earned. It isn’t just what you do in life, but the attitude by which you live. This is epitomized in the question “Whom does the Grail serve?” Each modern person must ask himself or herself this question. Is your life just about serving the ego? Is it about how much money you can get in the bank? Or does it serve something deeper and more enduring? “What’s in it for me?” is the approach that many modern people take to any activity. That serves the ego. But the understanding that is crucial in the Grail Castle is that the Grail must serve God, that which is greater than “I.”
It is painful to live at the end of an era, as we do now; everything seems so tenuous and uncertain. It must have been much the same in the twelfth century, when the Grail story was being told and recorded. There were stirrings and undercurrents of a new age, but all people saw around them was disintegration, old experiments gone awry. I feel that a major psychological burden for modern people is an overwhelming sense of loss, yet we are not quite sure of what we have lost. I see many people puzzling over this. In our culture, we see people tearing things down, but we don’t see anything really new. This is true in politics, in the arts, and across our culture. It is a time of transition, and the great legend of Parsifal is an important story for such a time.
WHEN MY BOOK He unexpectedly became popular, I soon found that I was working harder than I had worked in years, preparing new lectures, seeing many—eventually too many—patients in my growing practice. Soon my publisher was asking for a second book, then a third, and my career as an author and lecturer took off. I hardly knew what to do with this unexpected success.
As a result of my increasingly full schedule, I was no longer sitting down at my computer to do my own active imagination and to dialogue with my inner self. A busy winter passed filled with appointments, and it wasn’t until the following June that I could find time to go to the desert and catch up on my inner life. My plan was to meditate as intensely as I had been working for the previous six months. After two days of adhering to a strict and austere schedule, I had still another informative dream.
I have gone to a high place, a campground in the mountains. I am with friends who tell me there is a wonderful view on up ahead. “You should see it,” they marvel “What an inspiration!” I listen, but I also know that I could never walk that far.
But as is often the case with dreams, the scene shifts suddenly and illogically, and I find myself in this high place all alone; it is indeed a magnificent spot, like the edge of the Grand Canyon with a one-hundred-mile vista. I look around and notice that there is a man-made building with a flat roof built right on the edge of the canyon. Projecting out from this odd little building—right over the abyss—is a diving board. I am so inspired by the beauty of the vista that I walk over to the board, lay down on my belly, and wriggle my way out to the edge of the diving board. Then I crawl out a bit more so that my head is actually looking over the very edge of the board. I am thrilled, but soon I get dizzy from the height.
After a few minutes of this ecstatic view, I decide it is time to go back, but when I try to wriggle my way back to the building I find that I am paralyzed and cannot move a muscle. First I freeze, then I try going forward one inch more in hopes that doing so might break my paralysis. I can move forward, but not back. Now I really begin to panic. I lie there breathing heavily, gripping the sides of the diving board with sweating palms. With all the willpower I can muster, I order my muscles to wriggle me back. They moved ever so slightly, a fraction of an inch at a time, until I am back off the board and standing safely in the building. I scurry back down the mountain to the camp where everyone else is waiting. Someone sees me coming and says, “Oh, so you’ve been up there to the lookout; isn’t it great.”
“Yeah, real great,” I reply.
The next morning I thought about this dream, and I could see the folly in what I was trying to accomplish at the desert house. I had become inflated with the success of my work and was in danger of a fall. I had been doing far too much and ignoring my inner life. I went to the desert thinking I was going to make up for six months’ worth of too-muchness by a week of intense meditation. The dream told me straightforwardly that I could not find my balance by going from one extreme to another, it was just going to make me dizzy and in grave danger of a mortal fall. It’s like eating too much and then fasting; it just makes you sick. Once again the wisdom of a dream came to my rescue, reminding me that I had to find a balance each day.