Three brothers set out into the world to seek their fortune. The two older ones are arrogant and mean. They shame the youngest for not yet having a trade and try to make him stay home. The boy reasons to himself that there must be some luck in this venture, for where else is it to come from?
So he tags along,
‘and went forth as though the whole world was his.’ Grimm’s
In the neighboring country a Princess has announced she will marry any man who can answer her riddle.
‘I have two types of hair on my head, what color is it?’
The two older brothers with understandings so fine they could be threaded on a needle, decide to have a go.
err, black and white… like salt and pepper.
err, um, red and brown… like my Dad’s jacket….
You just know they are both wrong. Then the youngest steps boldly forward, announcing….
‘The Princess has a hair of silver and one of gold upon her head…’
for what else could grace a Princess, right?
At which the Princess nearly passes out because that is indeed her secret, though she recovers quickly saying he must spend a night in the dungeon with a ravenous bear before their wedding, hoping he’ll be promptly eaten up.
The boy is delighted.
‘Boldly ventured is half won,’ he says. The guards drag him down, down, down endless stone steps to the deepest dungeon and throw him in. The bear leaps to his feet slavering at the prospect of dinner but the boy sits quietly, speaking softly…
‘as if he had no anxiety in the world,’ ibid
He begins to crack some nuts he has in his pocket. The bear thinks some nuts might make a tasty hors d’ouvre and asks for a few. The boy craftily gives him pebbles and while the bear is trying in vain to open them he pulls out a fiddle from under his coat and begins to play something softly to himself.
The bear is so taken by the music he begins to dance. Then he asks if he might have a go himself though his claws are awful long for fiddling, so the boy kindly offers to put his paws in a vice so as to trim them but suddenly grew very tired and lay down to sleep since he had such a long day ahead of him tomorrow….
What is this boy’s secret? How does he make his way through the world so easily?
There is a clue at the beginning of the story. He doesn’t have a trade. Metaphorically, he is still open to life’s possibilities. He hasn’t boxed himself in with fine opinions. The older brothers have already decided who they are and what the world is made of so they cannot really think on their feet. Their amassed understandings have cost them their spontaneity, their authenticity and most of all their charity. And so their answers are wrong before they are even out of their mouths.
This anxious need to identify oneself without equivocation is endemic in our society. If you go out to dinner or to a party everyone asks each another, ‘what do you do?’ It’s sacrilege to hesitate despite the impact that identifying with this transient role has on Being, whose wisdom is then reduced to a pile of facts you might spend your life heaping up like autumn leaves.
The boy has yet to be seduced into trading in his soul for some flashy yet static persona, as fine and worthy as it might be. When he speaks, he still does so from the lap of the Great Mother and so his confidence and intuition remain intact.
The older lads feel that they, like Kipling, have had to put aside the archaic childlike things of life now that they are men and so have truncated psychic life. The younger one still has a sense of continuity with the world which informs his intuitive response to the Princess’ riddle.
Fortune favors the brave because the brave have placed their trust in something greater than themselves. They are sufficiently connected to the well springs of life to be guided by them. Our hero’s response to the riddle is as much in stepping-boldly-forth as it is in any verbal cleverness.
The answer to the Zen koan is in the meter, the tone, the cadence of the words rather than in the words themselves. When the master says, ‘those who have ears, let them hear!’ he’s not referring to the words involved but to the way in which they are uttered.
A Zen master has two pupils. He asks one, ‘what is the secret of life?’ ‘The flames in the fire,’ replies the novice. ‘Very good’, says the master turning to the second, ‘What is the secret of life?’ ‘The flames in the fire, master’, replies the second. ‘Dunderhead!’ responds the master.
Our hero’s unadorned tone rings like a bell. He has refrained from narrowing himself down and so he can bend with whatever the Universe presents him. With the Princess he is forward and bold. With the bear he is soft and quiet. His absent minded nibbling on the nuts and quietly playing music to himself creates sufficient space to safely engage this dangerous aspect of the unconscious.
Not having to be this or that means life can be entered into without conditions. It interrupts the compulsive heaping up of knowledge leaves which will keep blowing around the garden at the slightest breeze.
Like the older brothers we Westerners have become excessively sophisticated. We know everything about nothing and so cannot respond to the riddles of life. Sophistication always has an axe to grind, a point to prove. It rests too much upon others as guarantors of existence which makes life conditional. It’s like driving around in the same gear without reference to the road. This creates isolation, drains authenticity, stymies joy and meaning…
and fucks up your engine.
I met an acquaintance in the woods at dusk. He is a man who shakes sophistication from his sleeves, always keen to impress upon others the great bunch of things he is certain about. The moon was rising, huge and pendulous through winter’s trees. I exclaimed out loud how beautiful it was to which he replied, ‘You are so lucky to live on the hill, not like me in the stupid village.’
It took me a while to digest what he had said. Apart from the obvious, which was that we were in neither his home nor mine, what he seemed to be communicating was that he simply couldn’t connect with the moment and had to thrust forward any excuse he could find, even a ridiculous one, to justify it. Though, by implication, I could see the moon from where I was housed, but he could not. His sophistication had alienated him from life’s simple joys and left him feeling like a victim.
Here was a man so decided in his convictions, so certain of being gobbled up by the bear that it had obliged him without delay. Despite his sophistication he was neurotic and miserable, unable to entertain simple pleasures or see the beauty of life, even when it rose up on its hind legs in front of him.
Much of our rapacious consumption has to do with the bottomless pit we open up in ourselves when we identify with the topmost levels of the psyche. When our own primal depths remain unacknowledged, they swallow us up.
What constitutes confidence needs to be re-imagined. It cannot be in either our accomplishments or our noble intentions, in the amassing of things or the heaping up of information. Its not about ‘more’ of anything, but about reconnecting with something we mostly see fit to disdain, what connects us to one another, to the planet, to the Ground of Being.
