August 7, 2009
- Whom Does The Grail Serve? -
New spambot:
8/2/09: Sure!
8/2/09: Wonderful!
8/3/09: What’s the platform number?
8/4/09: In short…
8/5/09: Fortunately…
8/5/09: Is there a bus to the castle?
Saved because there is no bus to the castle. A horse maybe, or else you have to walk, but no bus. Just go down the road, bear left, and cross the drawbridge.
(as way of explanation, I just finished this. Not really that good of a book, felt more like notes to a future talk, but a quick read and a simple/direct interpretation of the Fisher King / Grail myth)
Title taken from the West’s first (and possibly only) koan…
Actually, I’d never thought of that as a koan before, good one. To whom does it serve, and of what?
Comment by speedbird — August 10, 2009 @ 3:03 am
My point, I guess, is that Perceval’s (or however it’s spelled…) whole task is to simply ask the question. It is the King, or the Grail, or the court, or whoever that answers the question, and the answer is not so important. Similarly with koans, you can go before the teacher with the exact same answer as last person, and get turned away when they didn’t. The content of the answer is not as important as it is that the question is correctly asked.
It is the King’s job to provide the answer, not the knight’s.
And with Koans, it is the teacher’s job to judge whether the answer provided from the student shows that the question has been correctly asked.
Comment by Ian — August 10, 2009 @ 1:57 pm
some interesting reading on the Fisher King / Grail myth:
http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/grail/fisher/
Comment by Ian — August 10, 2009 @ 2:03 pm
Good link, thanx. I feel inspired to try and read the High History again…
This reminds me of Douglas Adams: a good hitch-hiker always knows where his towel is. Not to do anything with it, just to know where it /is/…
Comment by speedbird — August 12, 2009 @ 3:42 pm
Yeah, definitely.
It also brings to mind our early conversation on the scientific method. I don’t have a link at the moment, but it involved a book, a pad of paper, a pencil, a few long walks, and attention paid to the parts where something feels “wrong”, the jagged parts where there is a sense of something missing. I’d compared that to mediation, saying it was a similar process, but turned inward.
The whole part about “paying attention to the parts where something feels missing” is sort of what I mean by “knowing how to ask the question”. You watch the holes in things, and that’s how you learn what the correct question is. Then once you have the question, ideally the answer just comes to you.
Comment by Ian — August 12, 2009 @ 4:47 pm
> what the correct question is
Also Hitchhiker (of course)… the Deep Thought episode is possibly my favourite bit.
‘The answer,’
‘Yes!’
‘To the ultimate question,’
‘Yes…!’
‘Of Life, the Universe, and Everything,’
‘Yes…!’
‘Is…’
‘Yes…!!
‘You’re really /not/ going to like it.’
*
So there’s another link I’d never thought of, between the Grail question and scientific enquiry / meditation… big kudos.
I’ve wondered for a while if ‘knight’ and ‘night’ have the same root. That is, a ‘knight’ was someone who had entered into a state of benightedness, an acceptance of ignorance, in which they were then committed to seek the light of truth, understanding, whatever. Set out on a quest(ion).
*
I feel this approach can be turned back upon the computer itself, I just can’t quite feel the way yet. Got that feeling of something close by, though.
Comment by speedbird — August 13, 2009 @ 3:06 am
Wasn’t the other big thing in Hitchhiker’s that the answer was 37, but no one could remember the question? Same thing there again.
“Set out on a quest(ion).”
That’s awesome. :)
And yes, turning all this back on the computer…. Been having some thoughts myself along these lines. Reading a book by Krishnamurti (which, hey, is available free online, apparently). Maybe a post at some point. Not any time soon though. Real life is once again rising like a slow tidal wave…
Comment by Ian — August 14, 2009 @ 9:24 am
And actually, setting out on a quest(ion) is exactly what a computer CAN’T do. If the information isn’t there, it isn’t there. Yes or no, 1 or 0.
No wonder(ing) involved whatsoever.
Comment by Ian — August 14, 2009 @ 9:27 am
This is telling me something, I just don’t know what…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
Comment by speedbird — August 15, 2009 @ 4:39 pm
Infinite regression leads nowhere. You can follow forever. Phillip K Dick had something about this in his exegesis, about how searching in any direction always leads to the infinite. This is the nature of the world, and it is trying to tell you something. If you search, the search will go on forever. “The larger you build the bonfire, the greater the darkness you have yet to explore.” If you want an answer you can rest on, you won’t find it by searching…
Comment by Ian — August 15, 2009 @ 11:33 pm
Hm, yeah. But there is a shape that emerges from the infinite regression of Mandelbrot, that has a strange beauty, and of which the regressing machine is unaware.
Like, before Kepler, Copernicus said that the planets went round the sun. So the great astronomer Tycho Brahe worked out their paths as an infinite regression of circular ‘epicycles’, wheels within wheels. Kepler’s genius was to realise that the shape of the orbit was actually an ellipse. Newton, master of regression and infinitesimals, is just a footnote after that :-)
Comment by speedbird — August 18, 2009 @ 6:19 am
I think Einstein said that where science is exact, it’s not talking about the real world, and where it is talking about the real world, it cannot be exact…
Comment by Ian — August 23, 2009 @ 12:01 pm
So I’m reading the High History of the Holy Grail. And it suddenly strikes me that maybe this is actually talking about a /real/ historical Mystery tradition. The initiate-to-be is presented with Something, a kind of visual riddle; and instead of most traditions where the initiate is expected to learn Responses, in this case the initiate is actually expected to Initiate a dialogue with a question. Perceval is the heir-apparent to the Graal but is only the nephew of the Fisher King who runs the show and has been brought up in Hicksville and knows not the right thing to do, so he fails on his first attempt when the Graal (whatever that might be) appears to him. At which point the Fisher King throws a wobbly and ‘falls into languishment’ and presumably the whole Mystery tradition is in jeopardy. Which supports the king and the land &c &c. Gawain flunks it and Lancelot is a non-starter. It’s all about the initiaition of action, or the ability to do so…
(stop me if I’ve lost the plot…?)
Comment by speedbird — August 26, 2009 @ 4:13 pm
No plot lost there, that’s a good insight. Even if it’s not an actual initiate tradition, it could definitely serves as a metaphor for the proper functioning of one, for a method of bringing “life” back to “the wasted kingdom” (personally and/or socially).
I was having some thoughts yesterday about how the grail might be a stand-in for suffering in general. It’s the cup Christ drank from at the Last Supper, when he accepted his fate and handed his body and blood to his disciples, and it’s the cup that caught his blood when his side was punctured by the centurion on the cross. Also, I believe that during the night in the garden of Gethseme, Christ asked that “this cup” be taken from him. So the question becomes, who does the suffering serve? Why does the suffering, which is meant to indicate “something needs to be fixed”, not heal the king?
In Buddhism, “suffering” is the common english translation of “dukkha”, as in “all life is suffering”. But Trungpa Rinpoche translated dukkha as “anxiety”, in the Freudian “Civilization and It’s Discontents”, we’re all neurotic on some level, sense of “anxiety”. Wikipedia also offers my favorite translation of “dukkha”: a large potter’s wheel that would screech as it was spun around, and did not turn smoothly.
So why doesn’t our suffering make us better? Because we have yet to realize that the suffering is there to serve us, that in bringing conscious to suffering, we are healed. The grail serves the king, if it is but recognized that it should do so. That’s been my recent thoughts on the subject. Check my twitter feed for more. I’ve been working long hours lately and not had time to write much here, but I can post to twitter from my cellphone, so…
I like this too. I’ve noticed that in a few traditions I’m exploring (Zen and Shaolin Chi Kung) beginner instructions can be rather vague. It’s in asking yourself (and your instructor/teacher) what those instructions actually mean that you learn. And things are always able to be clarified further and further.
In the summary of the Grail legend I’ve read (linked to in this post), Perceval’s defining trait is that he refuses to take off the homespun cloth his mother made him and put on normal clothing. He fails at his first “Grail” attempt, goes back into the world, has adventures for several years, becomes a knight, finally learns how to wear grown up clothes, stumbles upon the “Grail” again one day, and solves the problem. So yeah, we all need to put away the things that serves us well in childhood, before we can really grapple with these kinds of things.
That’s what I like so much about this, it’s open to so many different interpretations, but it works so well in all of them.
I am hoping all this leads somewhere eventually, where I can start posting more regularly. Right now, life wants me nose-to-the-grindstone elsewhere, it seems. Perhaps that’ll open my eyes a bit more…
Comment by Ian — August 27, 2009 @ 8:33 am
> It’s the cup Christ drank from at the Last Supper
This fills in a blank in the riddle! In the version I’m reading, the Grail question always has two halves like faces of a coin. Whom does it serve? (1) Someone receives a kind of service from the Grail… who? (2) The Grail serves up someone like a plate. So it’s like the Buddhist in the burger bar: ‘make me one with everything’; i.e., make (of/for) me one with everything. So Christ drinks from the cup at the last supper, and proceeds to fill the cup with the draught He recommends we drink…
> The grail serves the king
Indeed!
> beginner instructions can be rather vague
Yes, that’s what I meant. So I’m imagining a situation in which there are /no/ spoken or written instructions for the initiate.
> The potters wheel cries out for a reason.
Nice…
Comment by speedbird — August 27, 2009 @ 9:15 am
Awesome. : )
Well, that would be life, wouldn’t it? ;)
Anyway, I am now off on a business trip, so internet connections will be spotty through Thursday. Peace out, and hopefully we can discuss this more when I get back.
Comment by Ian — August 27, 2009 @ 11:15 am
So apparently this is the number 2 result on google image search for Holy Grail. Weird…
At least, it is at this point in time.
Comment by Ian — March 12, 2010 @ 10:32 am
you may be interested in this grail site theholygrail.org.uk. the video has had good reviews “groundbreaking” happy questing!
Comment by alex — March 31, 2010 @ 6:26 am
Thanks for the link, but no advertising here, please.
Comment by Ian — March 31, 2010 @ 10:59 am