Once there was a great King who was also humble and wise. He liked to see how the people lived and would occasionally slip out of the Palace in disguise to see what was going on in the kingdom. One day he rode his horse a long long way, across a wide and barren plain, till he came to the dwelling of a Poor Man. The disguised King knocked on the door and asked for food and lodging which the Poor Man gladly gave. In the morning the unsuspecting Poor Man sent the King on his way with the last of his provisions.
When the King returned to the Palace he sent a messenger to the Poor Man inviting him to visit but did not say why. The Poor Man quaked in his boots at the prospect. What could such a great King want with him? He searched his conscience several times wondering what fate awaited. Then he got dressed as warmly as he could, packed an apple core into his meager bundle and set off across the forbidding landscape. The winter wind bit at his weary bones, the frost nipped his nose and fingers and toes. The miles ate into his tired limbs and the freezing nights robbed his sleep.
Eventually he arrived at the Palace, exhausted, frightened and weak with hunger. The guard at the gate of the palace treated him roughly, set the Palace dogs on him and demanded payment to let him in but the Poor Man protested he had nothing to give.
‘Then, whatever the King gives you, I will have half’, threatened the guard and only let him pass once the Poor Man agreed. Outside the King’s antechamber stood another guard, just as mean and horrible. He too tried to shake the Poor Man down, demanding the other half of whatever he might receive from the King. The Poor Man was compelled to agree and was finally let in before the King who sat at the head of a vast table laden with food and lined each side with important looking men. A place had been set for the Poor Man and so he sat down.
Servants arrived with bowls of steaming soup and all the guests began to eat but no spoon had been given to the Poor Man and so he sat there feeling anxious, wondering what to do. It was all made worse by the King announcing, ‘ what wonderful soup, only donkeys don’t eat it.’ The Poor Man was loathed to be the donkey at the table but then he had the idea to cut the end off a loaf of bread and use the hollowed out crust as his spoon, announcing once he had finished his bowl, ‘and only donkeys don’t eat their spoon,’ whereupon he wolfed down the soupy crust.
There was a moment of terrible silence before the King burst out laughing and revealed who he was, saying that he had played a joke on the Poor Man to see if he was as wise as he was generous. ‘How can I reward you?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ said the Poor Man, ‘can I have fifty strokes of the cane? And would you be so kind as to give half of those to the guard at the gate and the other half to the guard at the antechamber door? I did promise….’ And so the guards got their just desserts and the Poor Man got to be mates with the King.
For centuries philosophers and theologians have been asking the question, ‘why do bad things happen to good people while the wicked seem to prosper?’
‘I was envious of the foolish when I saw the prosperity of the wicked for there are no bands in their death and their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men.’ Psalm 73
All kinds of erudite and sometimes contradictory explanations have been given ranging from God’s punishment to God’s loving instruction and back again. This is particularly difficult to ‘the faithful’ since they firmly believe God cares and is able to alleviate suffering, yet he does not.
“If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures happy, and if God were almighty, he would be able to do what he wished. [Ergo] God lacks goodness or power or both.” CS Lewis.
Theodicy, the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil is argued by Judaism’s Rabbi Kushner from the perspective that suffering is as a result of ‘the fall’ of man. So its all your own fault. In Christianity St Augustine agrees, though St Ireneas complicates it by arguing that humanity is imperfect and has to be given the opportunity to express freedom of choice…so still your own fault….though as a result of contemporary rather than historical sin.
These various versions of ‘you did it to yourself’, are recapitulated by much incipient psychoanalytic theory, particularly drive conflict theory (Freud 1905), which suggests it’s not what happens to a person that causes suffering but rather their failure to respond to it correctly. It seems rather ironic that Freud should hold religion in such contempt and yet use the same devices to explain the ubiquity of human suffering.
If we return to our story with the lens of Depth Psychology there emerges the possibility of a different explanation than those offered by either mono-theism or early psychoanalytic thinking. In Jung’s view the Self exists as an a priori fact of the psyche, unlike `Freud, but is also not necessarily ‘good’, unlike the church. The Self is something from which the ego must painfully differentiate in the first half of life and then to which it must painfully return.
Our story begins in what we could imagine as mid life where the ego, the Poor Man, has managed to establish itself as separate from the Self but is still struggling with the absence of meaning, the wintry wind swept plain. Though the Poor Man is kind he is not generative. Nothing grows around about and he is on his last resources, hence the need for the King, the Self, to pay him a visit and shake things up.
When the Poor Man receives the King’s summons he quakes with fear, he is about to be pulled out of the known if barren world of his cold and stony plain, off to an unknown fate beyond the compass of his imagination. Effectively, his reticence is a form of death anxiety. Life will never be the same again, whether the King rewards or executes him. His self construct will be teased apart one way or another, a known way of being, of self sufficiency, gone forever.
We find this motif throughout mythology. It is present in the story of Beowulf, in the Grail legends, and more recently in the Lord of the Rings…
”It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.
When you are thrown back on your own resources you may be unsure of future direction. Whilst apprehensively distrustful of former time worn and socially determined behaviors it may not be all that clear what might be more appropriate. It seems as though the personality has become less functional, less coherent, as though you are somehow going backwards, hesitant where previously certainty had lain, circumspect and uncertain after years of brash conviction. Moreover, there has grown a sneaking suspicion that your own very being is as yet unplumbed, that the ego is no longer the center of things, that something vast and unknown underpins what was previously the fixed immutability of Terra Cognita.
From such a vantage point suffering is the inevitable companion of a return to the Self, both in terms of the wrestling away from the fond and familiar and in terms of facing the unknown of that which transcends ego consciousness. The search for meaning which gives a context to suffering is paradoxically found beyond the borders of the known.
”Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.” Kahlil Gibran
Consciousness is thus faced with a cosmic dilemma, to find meaning it is necessary to journey towards that which would seem to dismember it.
Beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Rilke
The Poor Man struggles towards the Palace, the stony road beneath him, the scowling sky above, the cold wind at his back, the incomprehensible majesty of the King seizing his imagination in front. Finally, the bewildering vastness of the Palace towers before him, the robber guards rifling his pockets, demanding any last scrap, final vestiges of his former values.
These guards both demand the remnants of his former ego-centered life and act as impediments to his audience with the King. They are representatives of what Donald Kalsched would call ‘the self-care system’, defenses against ego and Self becoming..
‘an object of knowledge and perception by the other, which has a wounding or violating effect. [The encounter] is both desired and dreaded. From a distance it is the source of all yearning, but knocking at the door it is an object of terror.’ E Edinger.
Once he has gained entry the Poor Man’s trials are not over. He must drink his soup without a spoon in much the same way as the hero Siegfried was tasked with banal trials by the Giants in the Norse ‘Hall of the Mountain Kings’, who challenged him to drink a cup of wine, or blow out a candle, or pick up a cat, seemingly trivial assignments which, however, were not what they seemed. The wine was the sea and so could not be drained, the candle was the eternal flame which could not be extinguished and the cat was Old Mother Death, who could not be lifted. Likewise, the task of drinking the soup without a spoon so as not to be a donkey has metaphorical significance.
The braying donkey has long been a symbol of inflation. The story of ‘The Golden Ass’ recounts how the protagonist is turned into a donkey in the process of trying to wield magic. In Greek mythology King Midas is given asses ears in the wake of his inflated wish to turn everything to gold. In the story of Pinnochio, he and his pal Lampwick are turned into donkeys after their arrogant dismissal of Jimmy Cricket and offending the ancient gods of Pleasure Island.
So the soup test is a kind of Zen koan to do with inflation, rather necessary when the ego is brought before the Self. Invariably the ego either identifies with the Self making a donkey of itself or, in a negative inflation, denies all connection and projects the Self onto others instead. The Poor Man does neither, he finds a way to eat his soup with the hollowed crust, in other words by means of his own humble ordinariness. He then pulls the leg of the fine gentlemen gathered to whom it would have been so easy to give away all his power.
The King is delighted, the reward, a trouncing of the impediments to their relationship which might have sent the Poor Man back to his neurotic life on the barren plain. It seems that the Poor Man, in dealing with the Defenses of the Self has managed to put his suffering into some kind of greater context, his trials seem to have become meaningful since they are in the service of the Ego-Self axis wherein suffering ceases to be the gratuitous pain we so often take it to be and can be re-dignified as synonymous with growth.
‘It is possible that you dislike something and there is good in it for you, and it is possible that you like something and it has evil in it for you. God knows and you know not.” Qur’an (2:216)
The difference between ‘the good’ and ‘the wicked’ is more fundamental than the issue of morality. It has to do with the Principle of Relatedness. Where there are connections they can be broken, where there is value it can be lost, where there is intimacy it can be betrayed. All of this evokes suffering and yet it is precisely this orientation to the Other which finally redeems the Poor Man.
‘People are never helped in their suffering by what they think for themselves, but only by revelation of a wisdom greater than their own. It is this which lifts them out of their distress.’ C G Jung
The Poor Man suffers initially because he doesn’t have the whole picture and is trying to provide his own meaning. Then, as a result of answering the knock at the door, he suffers out of fear and trepidation of the unknown as his limited perspective become apparent. Next, and with greater sophistication, he suffers out of dedication to the King on his stony pilgrimage to the Palace. Finally, and with greatest refinement, he suffers in his efforts to enjoy the soup without becoming a donkey.
In the end his suffering all falls away because it is given meaning, dignity and context through the restoration of the ego-self axis, because it is experienced as part of life and growth rather than as punishment or the product of malevolent intent. From such a perspective, ‘the wicked’ are not experienced as better off or somehow as having gotten away with it because they are still stuck out on the barren plain trying to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, attached to self constructs which time and tide are continuously gnawing at, isolated, numb, bereft of purpose.
Though the Poor Man finds himself afraid and discomforted he also makes himself available to the King’s table, to the prospect of being nourished and comforted, to camaraderie, togetherness and reparation.
