No matter how far afield my fascinations take me, no matter how deep the rabbit hole I plunge down following some thread or other, I always end up returning to the Matter Of Britain, like my internal compass has a lock on it. Never fails.
I’ve been reading a lot of information about the Path of the Saints, Sant Mat or Surat Shabd yoga, but as always my eager mind returned to the Arthurian saga because that’s what it does. Several parallels have struck me and in fact, I am 99% certain that Taliesin (the 6th Century CE Bard and healer) was in fact an initiate into the Audible Life Stream. His poetry bears a remarkable similarity to Rumi’s in that regard, very mystic and near-incomprehensible – until you look at it as though he’s singing of the Sound Current, and then it makes total sense.
But that’s not what I’m ready to write about just yet.
Much of the Path of the Saints involves not creating Karma for yourself or anybody else, so that you can once and for all escape from this endless round of death and rebirth and move on to the next thing. The Masters’ primary task is the releasing of our Karma so we don’t have to do another round on the Wheel.
The core of the Arthurian stories are about redemption, healing, and restoring balance to the Sacred Land. The Fisher King is an excellent illustration of this. There are multiple versions of the story, but basically, Perceval is a youth who lives deep in a forest with his mother, a widow who’s husband and two oldest sons were killed in knightly activities. His mother resolved to keep him isolated from all that, but of course, destiny had other things in mind. One day a group of knights from Arthur’s court came questing through the woods, and he was off after them like a shot.
Eventually, he made it to the castle of the Fisher King, who had been wounded, some writers say in the thigh, some say through the scrotum, but all agree that it is a wound that will not heal, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. He is a Guardian of the Grail, but because he was wounded and he is so enfeebled, the lands around his castle have become waste land. Perceval goes to spend a night at the Grail Castle, and the Fisher King spends many hours talking with him. At one point, there is a procession through the hall where they are reclining, a youth carrying a spear which is dripping blood, a maiden carrying a golden cup which shines like the sun itself, and more maidens carrying a candelabra, the light of which pales in comparison to the glowing golden cup. The actual Grail, of course. Perceval, misinterpreting some instructions given him by a well-meaning relation, doesn’t ask about it at all, and the next morning he wakes up to find the castle deserted, his horse outside saddled and ready, and his armor laid out for him. He thinks it’s pretty odd, but sets off for Arthur’s court. Along the way he meets a girl who turns out to be his cousin, and she tells him he should have asked about the procession, because now the Fisher King can’t be healed, and it’s all his fault. After Perceval makes it to court, a woman called a Loathly Lady, or a Hideous Maiden, shows up to yell at him about it for a while. He sets off again to go make it right, but now he can’t find the castle at all, and falls deeper and deeper into despair. Eventually he manages to get there and ask the question, but it’s a long, twisty journey full of coincidence and travail, and it’s by sheer accident he finds himself back at the Grail Castle at all.
This story is at the core of the Arthurian material, and several of Perceval’s actions branch off into full blown stories of the consequences for those characters after he’s done his damage. He’s not stupid, or inept, or evil. He’s wounded, and he makes incredible mistakes because of it. His mother tried to force him into a life that didn’t fit, because they had already lost the other three men in the family. Fear and pain are at the root of the matter, making him misinterpret and misunderstand situations and instructions. He has to go through some stuff to get to the point where he can actually function in the world, before he can even think about being a catalyst for anyone’s healing. Once he grows up, figures it out, heals the King and gets the girl, every other storyline that he has punctured heals up as well.
Several versions of the tale involve an anti-Grail king, often the Fisher King’s brother, who is a cause of the King’s wound. The brother lives near the King, and is ravaging the country, killing, raping, stealing, terrorizing – but the King does nothing about it. Perceval (or Parzival or one of the other clones) blunders in and kills the brother in order to avenge somebody else’s death, and the King becomes extremely angry, saying, “He was mine to kill, not yours!” He goes rather mad, and chases Perceval around until Peceval stumbles into a room containing the holy relic of the spear that is dripping blood, and uses it to wound the King, thus creating even more disharmony in the Land.
This all ends up sounding very eye-for-an-eye, but the point for these pre-Christian narratives was, the wounded soul requires the blood of the one who did the wounding in order to be healed.
Yeah, think about that for a minute. When Perceval finally makes it back to the Grail Castle after growing up a bit, he is able to ask the ritual question, “Whom does the Grail serve?” to heal the Fisher King and restore the land. The blood that he shed during his quest to find the Grail Castle and set things right balanced the scales. When the time was right, and all parties were in the proper state of mind, healing happened, almost as if by magic.
That sounds a lot like Karma, doesn’t it? We don’t always know the consequences of our actions. We may be unaware of all the connections and nuances in a particular situation. We might blunder in like Perceval and take some wild and drastic action, thinking we’re 100% in the right, only to learn . . . things were a little more complicated than we thought. And suddenly, oops, there’s a big stinky pile of Karma all over the rug. And you can’t hide Karma.
The wildly twisting and turning, often dream-like nature of the Arthurian stories was a way of reminding folks to always think before acting, because if you shed blood, it’s your blood on the line. We’re all connected, somebody you meet at random could be involved in a storyline you don’t even know you’re in. Slow down, think before you react, and ask the question. “How are we connected?” There are well over 7 billion people on this rock, but I am constantly astonished at how many of my friends know each other without me being anywhere near the relationship. It often makes me laugh.
In a total reverse of that, for my 40th birthday party a dear friend helped me plan a remarkable evening, and I invited a bunch of folks. When everyone was assembled, I realized that nobody knew anybody else – at all. I found this to be unfathomable. They were my friends, how could they not know each other? (It actually turned out great; everybody had a good time and many friendships were formed that carry on to this day.)
The world does not revolve around me. Or you.
Life is going on, at this very moment, without your intervention or permission, creating all of those wonderful, wounderful opportunities for you to balance the scales and work through the piles of Karma you have left on carpets through the ages. It is also, at the same time, completely true that we create our own realities – but we don’t always know what we’re doing, and we make mistakes that have to be balanced out, so chaos happens and we get wounded; and although it often seems like it has come out of nowhere, it’s all what we have created. It may take thousands of cycles of life, millions even, to get it all balanced. Once you are aware of it, you can work harder not to create more, by being kind, humble, inquisitive, and not wrapped up completely in your own thing. Be aware of what you do, and treat strangers with kindness because you literally have no idea what role you may have played in their life five-thousand years ago. Maybe they have come to balance a wrong they did you, or to give you a chance to do the same. Kindness has got to be the baseline.
This idea has existed all over the world, throughout time and fashion, through the rise and fall of empires and religions. It has nothing to do with government or religion at all; it is way bigger than either of those things. This is how we get close to God, whatever you choose to call Her, Him or Them. Run over the dogma with your Karma and the poo will take care of itself.