Once upon a time there was a King who looked just like a pig. His skin was rough and thick like a pig. He smelled like a pig, he grunted like a pig and he ate like a pig.
When the time came for the Pig King to marry it wasn’t easy to find suitable brides. Eventually a mother of three girls came forward and suggested a match with her eldest. The king was ecstatic and when his bride arrived he leapt up and down and nuzzled her and got some really good swill on her expensive dress. She was so offended she shoved him off and that night the Pig King overheard her plotting to get rid of him..
‘What am to do with this foul beast? This very night, when he lies in his first sleep, I will kill him’…
and so the Pig King did her in with his sharp trotters.
The second daughter fares the same. The third daughter is different. When the king approaches her and makes her clothes all dirty she responds with affection and humor. In fact she spreads her robe on the ground inviting the Pig King to lie on it. She doesn’t care about the mud and so she is still alive by morning.
The new Queen continues to tolerate the Pig King’s behavior, even inquiring into his majesty’s health and wanting to have conversation. One night, once the Pig King trusts her, he tells her that he has a secret. When she asks him what it is, the pigskin suddenly falls to the floor and a handsome man steps out…
The transformative power of sympathy is something you find over and again in fairy tales. Sympathy is from the Greek, meaning literally ‘feeling-with’, succinctly put by the Buddhist expression, ‘we are all alone, together,’ a paradox of me and not-me which evokes new possibilities and unforseen transitions.
Sympathy is different from empathy. Empathy is a willingness to see the world from someone else’s point of view without taking on their feelings. Sympathy throws itself in, participating in the experience like the alchemist who knows he is part of his own experiment. This shared reality of allowing oneself to be affected by another is a prerequisite of transformation. The Queen has to value the Pig King for what he is and when she does so he recovers his humanity.
In ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the Beast is transformed when Beauty mourns the prospect of his death. In ‘The Frog Prince’, the frog wants a kiss from the Princess in exchange for returning her golden ball. At first she is reluctant, until she hears his story. She is so moved that she sheds a tear and gives him a spontaneous kiss which removes the spell. In ‘The Twelve Swans’, the princess must weave stinging nettles by hand to make jackets which will restore her swan brothers to their human form. The affliction is redeemed by the willingness of another to suffer with their situation.
In his commentary on ‘Inner Truth’, hexagram 61 of the ‘I Ching’, or ‘Book of Changes’, Wilhelm writes..
”In dealing with persons as intractable as a pig or a fish the whole secret of success depends on finding the right way of approach. One must first rid oneself of all prejudice and, so to speak, let the psyche of the other person act upon you without restraint. Then you will succeed.” R. Wilhelm.
Sympathy is something we normally think of as happening between people but sympathy for others is predicated on the capacity to be comfortable with your own foibles, which is why we feel reassured by people who can laugh at themselves and give face to their own shortcomings. They are bound to be as lenient with you too.
Outwardly, transformation of intractable relationships occurs by proactively being willing to walk a mile in an other’s shoes and suffering not only the blisters involved but also the deprivation of your own comforting prejudices. Inwardly, sympathy for shadow aspects of oneself, willingness to listen and be affected, transforms these contents into allies. Without sympathy for them, there is no growth. The third bride of the Pig King transforms her situation by accepting her husband’s eternal breaches of etiquette, which is just a fancy word for ways-of-doing-things-I-take-for-granted. She allows herself to be invaded, dirtied and muzzled. She can do this without being shamed because she knows being a pig is what pigs do. She has the generosity of spirit to let him be what he is. Perhaps the best love you can have is to be accepted warts and all.
‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. ” ~C.G. Jung, CW 10, p. 163
We all have difficult and clumsy aspects of ourselves. How we address them will determine whether they develop, like the Pig King’s growing trust for his third bride, or whether they will undermine and attack the ego in retaliation for being rejected. The Pig King’s two former wives are both killed for trying to get rid of him. When we combat ‘negativity,’ it has this same quality of plotting against the Pig King with similar consequences, blood on the carpet by morning.
The wish to be free of the problem is the problem. Being angry at the Pig King for his gauche behavior constitutes a conditional way of relating to the world and justifies the provisional life you are bound to lead whilst waiting for the Universe to get its act together and furnish you with the life you feel you are supposed to have.
This refusal to co-exist with the dark and clumsy reflects a regressive conviction that some mistake must have been made with the life you were issued, all of which will be rectified as soon as God pulls his finger out and double checks His paper work.
Such a belief is rooted in narcissistic omnipotence. It entrenches inner conflict. Maybe anxiety is what you get when a gap opens up between what you are and the ideal you are trying to panel beat yourself into, the kind of anxiety anyone might feel in the presence of someone who wants company but fakes what they are bringing to the encounter.
Much New Age political correctness is run through with this anxiety. People are trying so hard to be nice their shadows get thick as ink. Often their niceness feels layered on or synthetic, the spiritual values espoused are like a tinkling brook which may slake your thirst for a bit but doesn’t comfort the soul.
Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
If you are to address the fascist menace in politics, the growing collective movement towards autocracy defined by it’s intolerance of others, then you’d do well to begin at home with the prejudices held against the undeveloped or shamed figures of your inner world, which show their faces when you show them yours.
Its not an easy process. The Queen has to endure a great deal of being discomfited by the Pig King who effectively robs her of all her usual points of reference and compels her from the ease of how-life-aught-to-be into the chaotic moment. She accepts this and reaps its rewards by having the right attitude. When the Queen mother asks her how she manages to cope with the Pig King she replies, ‘with three wisdoms. One, it is folly to search for what cannot be found. Two, discover from your own experience and not what you have been told. Three, hold fast to enduring value.’
Western culture is run through with searching for what cannot be found. It cannot be found because it is not out there. What we are all secretly searching for is ‘in-between’, a certain quality of ‘I-Thou’ relatedness which facilitates change and growth by finding value in people and situations as they are. This involves sacrificing the privilege of knowing what to think from turning to your neighbor, symbolized by the new Queen offering up her expensive cape to be muddied. She relies on her own instincts and finds meaning in the antics of the uncouth Pig King, like a zen master coaxing potential from others by valuing what is authentic over what is supposedly proper or ‘good’.