Meditation today raised the question “Whom does the grail serve?”
This last few weeks has been difficult. It is still difficult. I am melancholy, in a deep dark hole. I am sick and can’t seem to get well. Everything suddenly seems gray, unexciting, uninspiring and difficult. Perhaps it is no coincidence that tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of my Father’s passing.
In my mind, I saw my Father and I understood his great joy at my birth. His love for me his eldest child and I guess the child he really hadn’t wanted. But, somehow, my birth became a moment of significance in his life and how he celebrated Fatherhood! Becoming a father changed him fundamentally and I think, gave him meaning. My brothers will agree that he was the archetypal Father figure that in later life became our friend. He gave unselfishly of himself for his boys and he enjoyed every moment of it.
In thinking of this I couldn’t help think of my current demise. What gave my life meaning in the same way that children did for my Father? I love my kids and hope I am a good Dad but I can’t say that they have been the central anchor of my life in the way that we were for our Father. I couldn’t and cannot yet answer that question. But that is when the voice in my head asked the question about the Grail.
Suddenly, I understood that I am in the shadow phase again. From where I am everything in my reality looks gloomy and why wouldn’t it? I make my own reality. I determined to work my way out of this hole again step by step, little by little. It’s all about acceptance you see. I have never learned not to fight. It’s funny, but it’s all in Inner Journeys.
When you enter the pool, the surface is absolutely calm but your body movement causes ripples and activities on the surface. The more you thrash around the more the waves and ripples grow in intensity and knock you off track. The more you fight the more ripples and waves and the harder it gets. Go with the flow, align yourself with the will of the Creator and minimize the waves (Inner Journeys: Explorations of the Soul, p.87)
And then there was Asteroth’s advice…”Stop struggling and listen. Attune to your inner self, become who you truly are and stop struggling“(p.85)
You know, I thought to myself, I am doing this to myself – AGAIN!
Somewhere inside me there is an aspect of self that seems to want to self-destruct. He and the Shadow work very hard to bring me down and I am so stupid as to forget what I have learned and let them do it. I am a Fool and not the Fool I want to be because, honestly, I want to be the Fool as depicted in the Tarot. I want to be foolish, laugh at myself and relax. Not take things so seriously. Accept.
The answer again was provided by Asteroth…
Today, Asteroth told me write about love.
I asked for more detail and she said ‘love as acceptance’. I didn’t need anymore words because the words themselves conveyed the entirety of the suggestion. This is a difficult concept to explain but it seemed as if the words themselves conveyed the feeling and understanding of love as acceptance. It’s as if the words are only a key to a packet of understanding which opens up and engulfs me.
What those words conveyed to me was along the lines that when we are told to ‘love one another’, we are told to accept one another for what we are and what we have the potential to be. It’s a surrendering of one’s own ego and viewpoint. A letting go of our own conditioning and biases allows us to see our fellow humans simply as they truly are. In itself, this is an act of magic since it involves first changing ourselves in order to see more clearly – to see the divine spark in each and every person.
Part of our problem in trying to love one another, perhaps the entire problem, is that we have a habit of projecting ourselves onto those around us. When we interact with someone and dislike them it’s really because in that person we see the reflection of something we dislike or fear about ourselves. We constantly measure others by projecting ourselves onto them. Our ego doesn’t allow us to see this for what it really is – after all, I am an individual, separate, and by the way, I am surely superior. My views, my beliefs and my conditioning are used to synthesize and process my view of the other person and I find them wanting in some way. Indeed, I may violently disagree with them and set them up as my ‘enemy’. However, if I truly know myself, understand myself, and see myself for what I really am then it surely becomes clear to me that I am a child of light, imperfect but evolving with life’s lessons to a higher place in that eternal process of evolution.
If I know myself then I recognize my ego for what it truly is and I place it to one side and tell it that I, the real me, I am in charge here! If I can learn to accept myself through self-knowing and coming to terms with who and what I really am then I learn to love myself. In learning to love myself I am able to love others through acceptance of what they are and where they are at in their own journey. Acceptance is a process of letting go and as we let go we no longer feel the need to struggle. We forgive ourselves and we forgive others and we learn how to truly love. It is only when we truly know and love ourselves that we really gain the right and ability to guide others knowing how to help and correct without damaging that person’s self-worth and progress. Otherwise, any act may be based on something less than love, it may be based on our distorted perspective of ourselves.
Indeed, love is acceptance.
(p 58-9, Inner Journeys)
Funnily enough, the mechanisms suggested by Asteroth to learn how to do all of this are in the Exercises in the new book The Mystical Hexagram and indeed are enshrined in that symbol.
Who does the Grail serve? Well, shouldn’t that be me?