The Holy Grail

The search for the Holy Grail is one of the most enduring spiritual legends and also the subject of one of my favourite films – Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As I understand the story , it was the cup which Jesus used at the Last Supper , but it has become a symbol for the spiritual search.

There is something inside , which pushes us to search for the intangible , which we feel is missing from us .We feel if we could just find it , we would then be complete . The outside world glitters with material wonders and we look to this to fill the hole . Money , relationships and addictions are some of the ' false idols ' we use , but even when these fail we keep on searching .

There is a mistaken idea behind all this searching . There is nothing to search for – Life is the Holy Grail .The world is fine and so is everything within it . Nothing needs changing or adding to – no part of Life is better than the other . You are what you have been searching for and so is everyone else . It may be hard to stomach but your worse enemy is the Holy Grail , even though as they say in Monty Python his mother is a hamster and his father smells of elderberries . You are the end of the search , believe it or not .

Sympathy for The Devil

I have been struggling with my inner Alf Garnett . Alf Garnett was the leading figure in the 1960s sitcom Til Death Do Us Part , who astounded the nation with his racist , mysoginistic and homophobic ways . He was seen as a bigot but was actually a bewildered man who could not cope with change and ranted against a world he did not recognize any more . Close to where I live , there is a Moslem mosque which causes all sorts of parking problems and when my driveway is blocked by one of the Mosque goers , I feel hate for moslems . When I am cut up by a woman driver , who are getting incredibly aggressive , I feel hate for women . When there is a gay guy in front of me ,holding me up in the supermarket I feel hate for gays . But then the guilt hits me – I shouldn't have these feelings .Society says so . The problem is that we all feel hate – the Moslem hates , women hate and gays hate , but we are supposed not to have these thoughts . We even have Thought Police now telling you what you can and cannot think . It won't work –these feelings cannot be denied and the more they are suppressed the worse the final outcome will be.

Sometimes I wish I was the Devil . He can do whatever he wants – if the Devil wants to smoke in a pub , womanise , swear , get drunk he will do it . But the best part is that he never gets punished . I think we can assume that God is ok with this as the Devil has being going since the beginning of time and nothing has been done about him . He appears to have total freedom – death, destruction , murder . Anything goes . He is guiltless and I feel jealous of this . Guilt is the most pernicious of our ' negative ' feelings .It stops us doing what we want to do and leads to repression and eventual frustration in ourselves and the world .The definition of guiltlessness would be innocence , but in our ' Alice in Wonderland ' world it is supposedly God who sees wrong but the Devil who is innocent .I do not believe in either a literal God or Devil .Our beliefs are topsy turvy – where guilt is good and innocence bad . It is Guilt where all the fear , anger and hate come from . Innocence is where Love comes from .

All Our Yesterdays

Everything that we experience through our bodies is the past . Any object that you see takes time to reach your senses through light waves – anything you hear is received by sound waves after a short period of time . This might only take a milli-second for our senses to receive this information , but it is still in the past when your brain decodes this information . This goes for all our senses . We are literally living in the past .

Nostalgia is the sentimental yearning for the past . We mythologise our childhoods and convince ourselves that life was so much better at such and such a time . Again , we are living in the past . Our whole world is in the past . We fantasize about the future , but when we get there it is the past we see .

Philosophers talk about living in the ' Now ' . It is only through our spiritual selves can we actually do this . Our body lives in linear time seeing a past and future , but when we live in the Now , it will push us to think about the future or the past . They do not actually exist . As the old saying goes : Tomorrow never comes . This is most important for our relationships to realise that we are seeing people as they were and not as they are at this moment . We see them through our past experiences and react accordingly . It is only in the present moment , will we be able to see people in their true light and it is only in the present moment will you be able to see your true self.

The Wicker Man

Over the weekend I re-watched the great film The Wicker Man , starring Christopher Lee , Edward Woodward and Britt Ekland . I last saw this sometime in the 1980's when I was not really interested in the religious subplot of the film , but just watched it as a straightforward thriller . On second viewing , it is the spiritual contrast between the Christian policeman and the Pagan inhabitants of the Scottish island which jumped out at me , even though it still remains the capacity to shock and the climax at the end , when the Wicker Man finally appears is still a classic scary movie moment.

For those who have not seen the film I will give a synopsis . A serious , deeply religious christian Scottish police sergeant , Neil Howie receives information that a young girl has gone missing on a remote Scottish island , in an anonymous letter . The sergeant flies to the island , Summerisle, to investigate .He shows a photograph of the missing girl to the locals , but they deny her existence . Howie starts noticing the islanders' bizarre customs and lifestyles with increasing incredulity and anger and eventually meets Lord Summerisle who explains that they are all practicing Pagans , who have rejected Christianity on the grounds that it didn't work . Whilst they practiced Christianity the islanders were forced to eke out a living , but since they forced out the Christian minister and followed a pagan lifestyle ( lots of sex and alcohol ) the island has become abundant and something of a paradise . Howie is deeply offended and accuses them of murdering the girl as part of a bizarre ritual to ensure a bountiful harvest , as the last one had failed .He then attempts to leave the island in order to report to the Chief constable of the West Highland constabulary , but finds that his plane has been sabotaged and he is unable to leave .

Attempting to save the girl , who he has now decided is alive , but is to be sacrificed on May 1^st he finds himself involved in a strange ceremony dressed as Punch .He finds the girl and tries to escape with her , but is drawn back to the islanders and Lord Summerisle who explains that the disappearance of the girl was just a ruse to lure the policeman to the island and that it was him they wanted , as it was their belief that his sacrifice due to his virginal and ' pure ' Christian life will appease their pagan gods and will ensure a good harvest for the island . He is then led to a huge Wicker Man and is duly burnt alive,reciting Psalm 23 , and the film then ends.

One senses that the film makers are firmly on the side of the pagan islanders and their lifestyle seems a hell of a lot more fun than the repressed policeman's life . If I had to choose between the two I would definitely go with the pagans , but without the human sacrifice , as having sex with a young Britt Ekland seems part of the deal . It is also interesting that the island needs no police , implying that repression leads to crime , a view that I concur with . But the two archetypes , Sacrifice and' Death and Rebirth ' are what chiefly interested me .

Firstly , Sacrifice –both the Paganism and Christianity depicted in the film are concerned with sacrifice . With the pagans it is more overt , with their rituals and actual human sacrifice , but with the policeman it is slightly different . In his Christianity he seems to have to give up a part of himself and live a life of deprivation without sex even though it is obvious that his inner stud is crying out for it and a singing , naked Britt Ekland banging on the walls of his hotel does not help matters much . The fact that the islanders seem to be having so much fun also accentuates his discomfort . But in both cases , it implies that God , in the case of Neil Howie and the Gods , with the Pagans , need something from us . Is this true ? – would omnipotent beings want our meagre belongings . This doesn't seem very likely to me and is in fact the projection of our negative ego , which is needy , onto God or the Gods and our view of sacrifice is just a reflection of ourselves . The very belief that the world is not abundant and that we have to give up something of us to a needy Universe is wrong , in my view , and actually causes the problems . The Universe wants to give to us- we are the ones who are trying to take .

The second theme in the film is Death and Rebirth .The pub in the film is called The Green Man , who is a figure who dies and then is reborn .He is often linked to the Green Knight who Sir Gawain fights in the Arthurian legends . Whatever limb Gawain cuts from the Green knight regrows and Gawain finds that he is indestructible . The pagans in the Wicker Man believed that by sacrificing the policeman , he would be reborn in the harvest and simply transform from one state of being to another and the policeman , himself , believed that he would be resurrected in Christ's arms , once he was dead . Actually , the story of Jesus' death is a Death/Rebirth tale so maybe Lord Summerisle and Neil Howie weren't so different after all. All this presupposes that death and birth are real and again I believe that we have got this wrong and that it is only our beliefs that make it so . The pagan's belief in the forces of the Sun and other natural forces for life are erroneous . It is only our bodies that need sustenance and we are not our bodies .

Anyway , I would highly recommend the film to anybody who has not yet seen it .The acting is great especially from Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee and the movie can be enjoyed on different levels . Britt Ekland isn't bad either !

Love and Hate

We have all fallen in love and we have all fallen out of love . Why do we do this-how can our feelings of intense love, within a short period of time, suddenly alter to hate ? What is the catalyst for this change . One minute we love someone and then the very next second we hate them .

Our ego has a very peculiar sense of Love . It is quite happy to love someone until the object of desire does something which it does not accept . This can be anything from something relatively minor such as not returning a telephone call to something more major , like adultery .The first action will probably result in feelings of frustration and the second in hate and can lead to a complete breakdown of a relationship, but both responses come from the same place . The ego only offers conditional love – it will only love as long as the conditions of the relationship are acceptable to it . As soon as these conditions are broken ,then its real feelings of hate begin to surface .

An example of the non- acceptance can be seen starkly in diseases like Anorexia . To sufferers of anorexia , their body has to conform to how they want it . Unfortunately , our bodies do not obey our rules . It gets fat , thin and goes bald – it ages , our bodies start to sag and our boobs are either too big or too small .Our non acceptance of this , leads to our hatred of the body . We want to control it , so that it meets our vision of beauty and we can love ourselves . But our body has its own agenda , which has nothing to do with body image , but our ego can not accept this and so Anorexia descends into a fight between the ego and its hatred of the body and the body itself , which needs food to function .

The second example of non acceptance I will use is adultery . Again , this comes down to control . We cannot bear the thought of our partner having sex with someone else . It is completely unacceptable to the ego and will normally bring up feelings of rage and hate . It is so normal in our society that in cases of murder , it can be called a ' crime of passion ' and the accused may receive a reduced sentence , compared to other forms of murder . But what we are really saying with non acceptance is that what someone has done is so bad that it is unforgiveable and that we will deny our love for that person . As I said before , our ego has a very peculiar sense of love . Love does not die , but to our ego it does .

Basically , non acceptance is hate and hate is non acceptance . Our society has created rules for what is right and what is wrong and it is these by which we judge each other . They are laws developed from hate and not surprisingly lead to hate , as the ego is Hate .But what it hates more than anything else is , to coin a phrase , unconditional love . Within us , live two emotions Love and Hate . One is real and the other is a figment of our imagination –it is our real selves that we are asked to accept , not the imposter .

The Long and Winding Road

But still they lead me back

To the long  winding road

You left me standing here

A long long time ago

Don't leave me waiting here

Lead me to your door

But still they lead me back

To the long  winding road

You left me standing here

A long long time ago

Don't leave me waiting here

Lead me to your door

I have just bought myself an MP3 player , which I can actually understand and use . This is absolutely amazing for a computerphobe such as myself . One of the first pieces of music I put onto it was The Beatles Number Ones album which consists of all their chart topping songs . The last song on the album is The Long and Winding Road , some of whose lyrics I have copied above.

The Long and Winding Road is a song about separation and our search for our ' missing part ' . We look to fill this empty space through various means , such as our relationships , physical addictions and work . But they never entirely work , as all of these things never last for ever and the vacuum re-emerges . In reality , this  separation does not exist - it is a figment of our imagination . It is our fear of Life , which continues this separation and causes all the problems that we see in this world . Life is not to be feared - it is not dangerous and threatening but our belief that it is  , makes it so . We cannot be killed or hurt in any way . As Shakespeare says there is ' Nothing either good or bad , but thinking makes it so . '

There is no ' Long and Winding Road ' . We are already home .

 

Just Whistle While You Work

"Just whistle while you work

And cheerfully together we can tidy up the place

So hum a merry tune

It won't take long when there's a song to help you get the pay"

 

I live close to a railway station and every day I see the commuters on their way to work and on their return . It is interesting to observe the exhausted nature of these individuals as they struggle to earn a crust . They look unhappy and full of stress , but there is something within which forces them to get up everyday at some ridiculous time to go and do whatever they do and which over a period of time , they learn to hate .

Why do we do this ? Obviously , our ' survival gene ' plays a large part in this , but there is another element in our personalities which makes us do this . ' Your not here to enjoy yourself , but to work ' is a phrase you may have heard whilst having a light hearted break in your day , but from my observations this is actually how a large percentage of the population view Life . Society looks in favour on those who are continually doing ' things ' . One of the most common put downs is ' You're lazy ' and we are told this from a very early part of our life, as though it was a crime to do what we want to do . In my country , Great Britain , kids are generally packed off to school at the age of five , at the very latest , and many children start a form of schooling at an earlier age to this . From then until you are sixteen or eighteen you stay in school and then , either , go straight to work or go onto Higher Education of some sort to learn even more .You will then remain in work until you are sixty five , when you are allowed to retire and receive your pension and again there is talk of increasing the retirement age up to seventy or seventy five . So basically , all the best years of your life are spent working at something that you would probably not have done if you had the choice . This is complete and utter madness .

You are not meant ' to do ' but to LIVE . The Meaning of Life is to Live . You cannot , but live . You are not going to die , but our Ego tells us that we will and we need to work . This a world of abundance , but we refuse to see it and live our lives complaining we do not have enough . This is , also, one of the Ego's little tricks . There is Enough . Life is Enough , but we believe otherwise . There must be something more , we say to ourselves , but this is all there is . Deep down we know this and it is more than satisfactory – it is brilliant and wonderful , but while we listen to our Ego's siren voices we will always be disappointed . Anyway , have a nice day at work .