A naive king gets lost in the dark, slumberous forest. As night falls a hairy dwarf appears on the path ahead and offers to show him the way out for the price of his favorite daughter, whom he must deliver in eight days. The king readily agrees thinking the little fellow could be no great threat to him, despite his bristling beard. He will simply renege on his promise once out of danger..
The king emerges from the forest in a trice and immediately forgets the dwarf who is now way behind him and can surely do nothing even as he calls out faintly, ‘see you in eight days, oh great king..’ The days slip by. The king becomes more and more distracted, eventually blurting out what happened to his daughters, including the salient detail that the youngest has been forfeit, even though the dwarf has no chance of ever really claiming his prize, right?
Between them they devise a cunning plan. On the appointed day a goose girl is dressed up in royal robes and made to wait on the castle steps having been told to go with who ever should come to collect her. A fox appears and tells the goose girl to sit upon his tail, whereupon he carries her swiftly into the forest. There he stops, asking her to get down and louse him, which she happily does. This shows she is no Princess and so the fox returns her, calling over the castle walls that the real Princess must be ready and waiting by the same time next day.
This time a shepherdess is dressed up and similarly made to wait for the fox who whisks her away on his tail until they’re out of sight when he asks her to get down and louse him with the same result. The fox is angry by now and returns the shepherdess, calling some dire warnings over the castle wall if the Princess herself is not presented the next day.
The Princess, being brave and wanting no harm to come to her father, persuades him to let her be sacrificed as agreed and so she dresses in readiness for the fox who tells her to sit upon his tail till they are out of sight before asking to be loused once more. She refuses and so the fox knows that this time she is the real Princess. He takes her to a little house in the woods where she is to sleep that night. ‘In the morning,’ says he, ‘three doves will fly into the garden. You must catch the middle one and cut off its head. Do exactly as I say’, he adds, by way of warning.
The Princess does precisely as she is told. She catches the middle dove and cuts its head clean off. In a flash a handsome Prince is suddenly stood before her. He explains that a spell had been placed upon him turning him into the dwarf, a spell which could only be broken by one who respected his wishes. They get married and the Prince/Dwarf inherits both crown and kingdom from the now dispossessed and humiliated king who thought he could outsmart an aggrieved dwarf in his own back yard. .
Sun Tzu (544-496C), a Chinese general and author of ‘The Art of War’ advises his reader never to underestimate the enemy.
‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.’
– Sun Tzu
One of my favorite stories from the days of colonial Rhodesia, where I was raised, concerns the way in which the fourteen year bush war for independence was finally won. The belief of colonial powers in the inferiority of the indigenous population was what finally defeated them. This was not simply because they underestimated the military strength and resolve of the enemy but because they lacked the imagination required to attribute the locals with either strategy or cunning.
African intelligence agents could then get un-vetted jobs as ‘kitchen-boys’ at the Rhodesian high command where they spied upon their employers as they served them. Much of the information which lead to victory came from the careless talk of pompous colonial generals and politicians incapable of the belief that their black waiters and drivers could possibly understand let alone co-ordinate the valuable snippets gleaned from their ‘superiors’. So they had to learn equality the hard way.
Whilst Sun Tzu’s treatise is a military manual, it contains much that is useful in ordinary life, predicated on a single, simple principle; under all circumstances treat the other as an equal.
Anything remotely related to ‘first and only’, is doomed to failure. It contains the seeds of its own undoing. The refusal to attribute others with any intelligence or culture means you no longer know what is going on around you. The resulting paranoia will be the least of your concerns.
The essence of such fundamentalism is that there is only one way of interpreting the world. This mono-mentality may comfort in the short term but it entails long term costs that are inestimable. The reason is that everything else must be hived off and projected into the world where it becomes a dragon which must be defeated not once or twice but over and over again until life itself becomes one massive battleground.
The cultural expression of this has been a thousand years of crusades and persecution, against Islam/women/minorities in the outer world; against the devil and his ilk on the inner. These days we may not subscribe to explicit religious sentiment, believing we are free of all that old mumbo-jumbo. In fact we are still as dominated by it in the form of a mono-theism of consciousness which might have shed its ecclesiastical robes but still has us in its grip.
Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower.
The intolerance of others, constellated as the idees fixee of monotheism, are not limited to folk out-there-in-the-world. It is equally dismissive in its underestimation of the Other within, to the Ground of Being. It’s attitude is ‘the psyche is what I know of it’. It scoffs at the thought that there is anything left to discover, any frontiers of the soul as yet unexplored, as though the unconscious were at best a bin in the basement, the prejudicial conviction that we are simply masters of our own house.
Unfortunately, as the king in our story discovers, development does not stop with becoming a proficient member of society. Aspects of the collective psyche which prefigure consciousness are liable to intrude into life whether we believe in them or not, as part of growth itself. We think we know what our inner worlds are made of and feel offended at the prospect of losing our way, more offended still to find such terra incognita peopled with figures and forces beyond conscious control.
I had a terrifying dream last night. I was walking up the lane and saw a huge Yeti like creature sitting on the side of the road waiting for me. I backed away in fear but then he got up and came towards me. He was about twelve feet tall, maybe fifteen, covered in long matted hair with a ‘necklace’ of slightly paler dreadlocks. His face was not human, more like an orangutang but with great intelligence in his eyes. I yelled and made gestures to keep him away but it was no use. Then I broke a branch from a tree and tried to fend him off but my efforts were to no avail. I was completely defenseless. He could have torn me limb from limb without any trouble at all. I lay down and curled up in a fetal ball, waiting for death. Then he picked me up, like you might a kitten, and began to bound across the countryside with me clasped to his shoulder, delirious with terror.
Getting acquainted with such forces involves the ego becoming deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche and embarking on a ‘night-sea journey’ an experience of isolation, loneliness, and despair that the king is determined to prevent. He wants the story to continue to be about him which he cannot do except by making an enemy of the Dwarf who is then likely to have an axe to grind in addition to insisting on their bargain.
These mythologems will have their way. The dwarf returns time and again, refusing to be fobbed off by imitation, growing vengeful at the kings inflated efforts to deceive.
”Many who do not comprehend the significance of these new states of mind look upon them as abnormal fantasies and vagaries. Alarmed at the possibility of metal imbalance they strive to combat them in various ways, making frantic efforts to re-attach themselves to the ‘reality’ of ordinary life.’ R Assagioli.
The king tries to claw his old life back by a series of lesser sacrifices justifying this counterfeit as being in the interests of the state. His old life continues for a while as it was, though now it is imbued with a feeling of inauthenticity, of being anxiously fake, even though nothing outward seems to have changed.
Existentialist Viktor Frankl coined the term ‘Ur-anxiety’ to describe something peculiar to modern consciousness,. This is the anxiety of groundlessness, which manifests as feelings of alienation, of not belonging, of having no context. Our monotheism of consciousness involves paradoxical emancipation from the gods which then robs life of meaning and replaces it with vague ‘Ur’ fears.
Ur anxiety is well named. It comes from the story of Gilgamesh, the first great king of Ur in ancient Sumer, whose severance from the gods had to be mediated by the wild man of the forest, Enkidu. It is only by taking Enkidu seriously in both combat and friendship that Gilgamesh can evolve. Only by acknowledging and coming to terms with the objective reality of those which live beyond the castle walls does the king grow in wisdom.
‘Psychological monotheism tends to regard difference and diversity as irreconcilable opposites and reduces all psychological life to moral issues, providing the justification for all types of action and violence against whatever seems ‘outside,’ a prescribed idea of ‘unity’. D Latifa
This can have a profound and immediate affect on daily life in so far as you begin to divide your emotional life up into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feelings, for ever pursuing one or avoiding the other in an orgy of attachment with all its concomitant suffering. Such insistence on uniformity and life having to look a particular way before you’ll let yourself live it, is just a shade away from being a delusional disorder and the author of much misery.
Conversely, the Princess has learned to take the rough with the smooth and treats the Fox Prince respectfully. Her willingness to take him seriously is what redeems the situation. She evolves, not by heroic action or great cleverness, but by being able to bend with the times in co-operation with the other.
( story adapted from Grimm’s ‘Hurleburlebutz’.)
