The Direction of Intention

[continued from Enter The Castle]

In her book, Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach tells the story of a daughter holding vigil at her mother’s deathbed. The mother regained consciousness before dying and said, “You know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me.” And then she shook her head as if to say, “What a waste.”

The full Parcival tale is woven through The Seer.

The metaphor of the moment is the Holy Grail and, more specifically, the search for it. The search for the Grail is a metaphor for a search for the self – not the roles that we think we play, the purposes that we think we serve, and not the jobs that we do. Grail seekers deal with their ‘being’ and not their ‘doing.’ When the roles are dropped, the purposes stripped away, when the jobs are left behind – beyond all the masks and definitions and importance and interpretations, labels, judgments, and pursuits of perfection, the Grail castle awaits us all. It’s a paradox: the Grail castle is found in the ordinary, the everyday.

We rarely come to the castle because of our wholehearted attachment to The Wasteland (the other great metaphor in the Parcival tale).

Parcival goes on his quest to find the Grail castle because as a young knight, purely by accident, he bumbled into it. He was invited in. He was given the opportunity to speak his truth and at the crucial moment, he denied himself. Instead of truth he spoke what he thought was socially acceptable. He did what he thought he was supposed to do and not what he wanted to do. He played his role and was polite. And his punishment for denying himself was banishment from the castle. And, worse, the whole kingdom fell into famine and he was to blame. He was personally responsible for The Wasteland. So he went on a quest to find the castle and redeem himself.

He believed himself broken and in need of fixing. The harder he tried to prove his worth and regain his wholeness, the worse the Wasteland became. In today’s world he would have purchased a shelf of self-help books. He would have attended seminars and exercised his positive thinking. He would have clarified his purpose and conquered his fear on a ropes course. He might have earned his PhD, bought a BMW, been named ‘Best-in-Show,’ and lined his wall with trophies.

The important point is this: Parcival had no idea why he failed as a young knight. He did what he was taught to do and found himself in The Wasteland. So he began a quest to fix what was broken (he identified himself as broken). He was fighting a battle to redeem himself but had no idea what he was attempting to redeem. He could only regain access to the castle by ceasing to think that he was broken. It was only when he stopped looking for perfection that he experienced himself as perfect just as he was. As the hermit said to Parcival the moment the castle reappeared, “Boy, it’s been there all along.”

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Filed under: Metaphor, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: self knowledge, self worth, self-love, wholeness | 1 Comment »