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As a kid, I often looked up at the stars, wondering what they would be like, how big their galaxies would be, what kinds of planets would orbit them, and what was to be found behind the ones that were visible to us. Yet, as an almost inevitable part of the human predicament, I also succumbed to losing my sense of wonder as I grew into adulthood. I became rigid in my thinking, feeling, and doing, and wanted nothing more than to know the answer to every problem before it arose; anything to keep the spectre of not knowing, which harbours the threat of failing, at bay.

That changed when my running around in circles became painfully apparent. For at some point it seemed as though I only knew about four or five people in the world, whom I incessantly seemed to run into, in similar situations, though under different names and in different times and places. I began to wonder about why that was so, and why this state of affairs caused so much distress and suffering. And I began to wonder: “Is this it? Is this running around in circles what life is all about?”

The short answer is: Yes. But we have to add a few words to that answer, namely: Yes, running around in circles is exactly what it’s all about…in the physical world. What we commonly call the ‘real’ world.

In the physical world, everything continuously moves around in cycles. To name a few: in Nature there’s the moon cycle, the day/night cycle, the menstrual cycle, the seasonal cycle, the life/death cycle. In Culture there’s the time cycle, the chaos/order cycle, the war/peace cycle, the work/play cycle. In an individual there’s the agitation/equanimity cycle, the waking/sleeping cycle, the sick/healthy cycle, the eating/pooping cycle. Like sunshine and rain, they unfailingly change into each other’s opposite, without fail, ad infinitum.

Now, as long as we’re still mesmerized by the life game, the material game that plays out in the ‘real’ world, we love being in pursuit of all the delights that life has to offer. We indulge in gastronomical journeys, search for knowledge, wealth and riches, immerse in sexual delights, enjoy bossing over others, and so on. In this realm we are confronted with the inescapable fact that we endlessly exchange moments of intense delight with moments of intense suffering, and at some point most of us begin to cling to the former and create aversion against the latter. Usually, that merely brings the exact opposite effect than what we desire. Have that happen long enough, and there’s a good chance one ends up in the same place and asking the same questions as I did.

From that position we can move into two directions: the destructive or the creative.

In the first case, we can become overwhelmed with our inability to escape our suffering, which breeds anxiety. We then become liable to all kinds of addictions in order to numb ourselves from a reality we don’t want to experience, yet seem unable to escape from. From there it is not uncommon to move into depression or other mental or physical illnesses, and suicide is often regarded as a last resort to overcome one’s pain and suffering.

When taking the creative direction, on the other hand, there is ignited a curiosity to find out the cause of suffering. A childlike sense of wonder - and a sense of humor - takes hold of us when we realize how little control we actually have over our own thoughts, feelings, and acts, and we go on a quest to find out how that being called ‘I’ actually works. But where can we start?

Besides the obvious answer of Here and Now; for me, books became one of the prime resources, and a genre that immediately drew my attention consisted of the myths, folklore, and fairy tales that we know from all over the world. For they are entertaining stories, to be sure, but they spoke to me much more in a psychological way. They are full of our all too human irrational, naive, unpredictable, emotional, and evil behaviours, steeped in sin, and full of exactly those good intentions with which the road to hell is said to be paved. Yet, what makes them stand out is that they don’t speak to us intellectually, but viscerally, and in that way they lay bare the hidden workings of that vast abysmal darkness in ourselves: our subconscious. They paint a much more holistic picture of what we are than is to be found in the average psychology textbook, and are for that reason a vastly richer and vivifying treasure trove for understanding human nature and its predicament; not least because they talk to us almost exclusively through the use of symbolisms.

In the myth of Lancelot of the Lake, for instance, this infamous and adulterous knight of King Arthur’s Round Table has miraculous powers which enable him to superhuman achievements in battle.[1] Yet as brave as he is on the battlefield, he can’t overcome his forbidden love and longing for Queen Guinevere. Both these traits, however, can be traced back to the fact that he is reared in a miraculous, inhuman land under waves. Because even though he was born from human parents, he was quickly carried away and reared by the Lady of the Lake; the same who bestowed on King Arthur Excalibur, the magic sword.

The mythical realm of the lake is a symbol for elemental sheer life force, where he was fostered until he was eighteen. Moreover, he was fostered by fairies and elves — not humans. The result was that he became a knight with superhuman physical powers, but also a human being incapable of resisting his primal instincts and urges, having lacked the necessary human fostering in his formative years. Therefore, like an apple tree cannot but grow apples, Lancelot similarly couldn’t but love and long for the Queen as soon as he was overcome by infatuation. His life played out in the reams of the first three chakra’s because he lacked the faculties to ascend further, which is to say that he was unable to reflect upon himself, and thereby get to know himself - necessary traits to develop into a fully human being.

The human condition puts us simultaneously in two realms: the material and the spiritual, by means of our mind. We are creatures endowed with physical and mental faculties, body and mind, and with the latter we have been given the questionable gift of cognition. Questionable, because that’s exactly the trait that can make us suffer when we make it the captain of our ship. Our cognition is a wonderful servant, but a lousy boss.

We can’t be anything else than what we are. But if we don’t know who, or what, we are, we will forever be a pawn of circumstances; reacting on every whim, without reflection or regard for the consequences of our actions. We are then unconscious of the net of misfortune we’re weaving for ourselves, which is beautifully depicted in the Arabian Nights story of Abu Kasem’s Slippers.[2]

Abu Kasem was the biggest miser and money-grubber known to the Bazaar in Bagdad. Everyone regarded his slippers as the visible sign of his unpalatable greed, seeing that he was rich and tried to hide that fact. No one wanted to be caught dead in them, being so shingled with bits and pieces, and they finally became a byword on the tongues of the populace. As Heinrich Zimmer states: “Anybody wishing a term to express the preposterous would bring them in.”

The story begins right after Abu has made a smart business deal. However, instead of celebrating that in the usual way by treating business friends to a dinner, he treats himself to a rare visit in the baths. Afterwards, by some touch of fate, he cannot find his slippers when he wants to get dressed. In their place is a pair of wonderful new slippers and he actually believes these are meant for him. Happy with this good fortune he leaves the baths, not knowing that the slippers actually belong to a high Bagdad judge, who, upon leaving the baths, finds the dreadfully well-known slippers of the miser in the place of his. When, thereupon, the judge’s slippers are found in Abu Kasem’s possession, and being well aware of the misers reputation and wealth, he had to pay a considerable amount to stay out from the clutches of the law. But at least he got his beloved slippers back.

Being very sad, and mad at his slippers, he throws them out the window in a fit of frenzy. That marks the beginning of a series of miraculous events, where his slippers keep returning to him, at the cost of ever higher fines due to all kinds of misfortune they cause himself and others, until he finally loses his complete fortune.

The symbolism here goes much deeper than the mere observation that greed is a bad advisor. Yes, greed was indeed the motivation for his conscious actions. But unconsciously he was simultaneously weaving a pattern that would lead to his undoing. Because as much as the events with the slippers appear completely random and fantastic at first sight, upon closer inspection they turn out to be the one and only string of events that could have possibly happened.

Life happens by virtue of equilibrium between opposite forces and when the teeter-totter leans too much to one side, life will balance itself out by starting to heavily lean toward the other side. Abu’s one-sided approach of keeping everything for himself while sharing nothing with others, despite having more than enough to share, makes him first rich, and then poor. His lack of self-awareness causes the delusion of believing that the new slippers in the bath were actually meant for him, and stems from utter faith in his own cleverness in business. But if we disregard Nature’s force and tendency toward equilibrium, as he did, and act in blind faith on our cognition alone, at some point Nature will not be disregarded any longer. We will then be confronted with a load of misfortune as Abu experienced with his slippers; misfortune which could have been prevented if only he had been aware of the balancing forces of Nature and the multiple dimensions we humans inhabit.

You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.

However, as much as the gift of cognition turned out to be a drag for Abu Kasem, by contrast it became the salvation for the King in the story of The King and The Corpse.[3]

For ten years, a benevolent King was visited daily by a holy beggar ascetic. And every day the holy man would offer the King a fruit, after which he left without so much as a word. The King would accept the gift and heedlessly pass it on to his treasurer, who tossed it as heedlessly through an open window into the treasure chamber. Then, one day a monkey escaped its dwellings and sat on the throne next to the King. When the beggar ascetic had offered his daily fruit, The King playfully offered it to the monkey who peeled it open. And lo and behold, there was a shiny jewel inside the fruit.

Cover of the book The King and The Corpse by Heinrich Zimmer. Edit: author.

The King was astounded and it turned out that within a big pile of rotten fruit, many jewels were found in the treasure chamber. Not being avid for riches, he offered the whole pile to his treasurer. His curiosity had nevertheless been aroused, so when the holy man stood before him the next day, he refused to accept the offer unless the beggar ascetic would speak, who, in return, stated that he wished an interview in private. There he disclosed his wish, which was for the King to assist him in an enterprise of magic, on the night of the next new moon. The King was to come to the great funeral ground, where the dead of the city were cremated and the criminals hanged.

The King arrived at the agreed time at the ghastly graveyard. As he approached the dreadful place, he was greeted with howling of many ghouls and spectres, but he fearlessly continued. He found the sorcerer drawing a magic circle into the ground, and learned that he wanted the King to go to the other end of the graveyard to fetch a hanged man, and bring him back. So the King went on his way to cross the ghoul infested place.

When he found the hanged man, he climbed the tree and cut the rope with his sword. When the corpse fell it let out a moan, as if it was hurt, and it appeared that it was inhabited by a ghost. As the King approached it began to laugh. No sooner had the King asked: “What are you laughing at?” and the corpse flew back and was hanging again on the tree. The King went back up, cut it loose, but now without speaking, picked it up and started to walk. Yet the spectre began talking to the King: “Oh King, let me shorten the way for you with a tale.” When the King didn’t answer, the spirit told its story.

The tale turned out to be a riddle, and the King was ordered to speak if he thought he knew the answer or else his head would explode. So, after the first riddle, the King thought he knew the answer, and in order to prevent his head from exploding, he spoke out. No sooner had he spoken or the corpse flew back to its hanging posture on the tree. The King went back and cut the corpse loose, picked it up, and the ghost came with another riddle. Again, the King had to answer if he thought he’d solved it, or lose his head. And, again, the corpse flew back as soon as the King had spoken.

The King was able to answer twenty-three riddles, so there was a lot of going to and fro in this place of the dead; not the most pleasant of enterprises. Yet the twenty-fourth riddle was a koan, a riddle that is impossible to answer by logical thinking or deduction. As hard as the King tried, he couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. And his silence (or: awe) was exactly the prerequisite for the ghost to let the King move on and inform him of the real motives of the sorcerer, which were far from benign.

“Are we wiser in silence than in the perspicacity of our talk?”[4]

With the instructions of the ghost, the King was able to kill the sorcerer. And when he did, jubilation arose from all around, for one of the motives of the apparent holy man was to enslave and enchant the whole realm of spectres, ghouls, demons, and ghosts. The King thereby obtained many worldly and spiritual powers, and when asked about his wish as compensation for his toil during this strangest of all the nights he had ever known, it was that the stories of the 24 riddle tales, together with the tale of this night itself, should be made known over the earth and available for all people.

Immediately after the King uttered his last word, Shiva appeared before him, thanked him, and lifted the veil of ignorance that had been concealing from his consciousness the immortal essence of his human life. Thus the King returned transformed and full of knowledge.

Also here we see an example of you’ve made your bed, now lie in it. By heedlessly accepting the fruits and rather naively buying into the benign appearance of the sorcerer, he was pledging to pay a debt without knowing it, which turned out to become endlessly carrying a corpse around a gruesome place during a night that seemed to last forever. His one-sidedness constituted of a rather inflated self-confidence, combined with an almost childlike naivety which prevented him to see through the sorcerer’s disguise. He was hitherto ignorant and unaware of the dark forces of life.

Yet in contrast to Abu Kasem, this King completely surrendered to the ‘irrational’ life forces as they presented themselves in the form of the spectre in the corpse. He didn’t try to outwit or one-up, but graciously accepted every challenge that was put before him, without becoming frustrated or impatient. Exactly that opened the door to the illumination he eventually received when Shiva lifted for him the veil of ignorance. He experienced first-hand the existence and workings of the light and dark forces, within and without, and that they have to balance each other in order for life to continue. But by lifting the veil of ignorance, he now also knows, by experience, that he is the cosmic energy out of which everything arises and into which everything passes away. In the human realm there is birth and death, and good and evil, but these are absent in the realm of the cosmic energy. Gifted with the wisdom which enables him to roam simultaneously in the material and the spiritual realms, he is now fit for the difficult task of ruling his Kingdom.

Without having experienced the workings of both the light and dark forces within ourselves, we not only live a one-sided life, but we’re unfit to grow and develop as human beings. Like Lancelot and Abu Kasem, we are trapped in the realms of the first three chakra’s, running forever in a self-made treadmill. The more unaware we are of our own defects (i.e. do not know ourselves), the more arduous our ordeals will be once they present themselves. Yet, what the story of the King and the corpse reveals, is that when we dare to put our trust and faith in forces outside of ourselves when the moment calls for it, we not only prevail, but have stepped on the path to become released from the cycle of birth and death, which essentially means the end of suffering.

A beautiful characteristic of mythical and folklore stories is that because of their symbolism, they can function like oracles. They move along with time and since life is continuous and omnipresent change, so the symbolisms of the stories change as well, which enables the reader to read into them what he or she needs at that particular moment. That is because their symbolism is not bound by time or place, but carries within it universal truths and revelations that speak to us as human beings, not as citizens or parents or police officers.

One of these truths is that without reconciliation of the light and dark forces within ourselves, we will forever be blindly running around in circles. The King in the story with the corpse reconciled them, but Abu Kasem and Lancelot were unable to do so; the former due to ignorance, the latter due to inability.

Other truths that we might know intellectually, but have a hard time experiencing for ourselves, are, for instance, the facts that all existence is continuous and everlasting change, and that life can only exist through the conflict of opposites (which creates balance). Both points are beautifully symbolised in the Hindu myth Kālikā Purāna, which contains a creation story that appears to be closer to our human experience than, say, the one that is written down in the book of Genesis. According to this myth: “Creation proceeds by surprises, involuntary acts, and abrupt reversals. The creation of the world is not an accomplished work, but a process continuing throughout the course of history, refashioning the universe without ease, and pressing it on, every moment afresh. Like the human body, the cosmos is in part built up anew every night, every day; by a process of unending regeneration it remains alive. But the manner of its growth is by abrupt occurrences, crises, surprising events, and even mortifying accidents. Everything is forever going wrong, and yet, that is precisely the circumstance by which the miraculous development comes to pass.”[5]

Illustration of *Brahma — Vishnu — Shiva* from entremitosyleyendas.com

In this myth, all the actors, actresses, and things that the universe is made up of, whether divine or human, first emerge and take shape in Brahmā’s deep subconscious as thoughts. Like most of our own thoughts, they arise involuntarily, but unlike ours, they manifest themselves right then and there as tangible apparitions before his eyes. Then, as the story unfolds, alliances are formed and broken, and chaos is followed by order, which, as soon as order seems to become established, is necessarily followed again by chaos, and so on.

This is a much more human picture than a perfect being with a perfect plan (which wasn’t that perfect after all, since du moment He thought he was done, it all starts to fall apart; but isn’t that the true revelation of Genesis?). In the Kālikā Purāna, the joke is that all the characters are equally caught by the tricks of the world play (the goddess Māyā), and the story is hardly underway when they all become trapped in their own paradoxical ways. Gee, where have we experienced that before?

So, to conclude, these stories hold healing power because they all point to the truth that real peace, real freedom, can only be found within ourselves. Right before he left his body behind, the Buddha said: “Be your own refuge.” By that he meant for us to see and accept that we are both Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf, Snow White and The Evil Queen, Abu Kasem and his slippers, the King and the evil sorcerer, rationality and irrationality, culture and nature, matter and spirit. And in that way myths and fairy tales not only illumine the truth of existence through the conflict of opposites, but that as soon as one opposite is destroyed, the other one immediately ceases to exist as well (e.g. breathing in and breathing out).

Yet, at the same time they point to another truth, which says that as soon as we bravely face, accept, and embrace the dark powers within ourselves, we emerge from the abyss liberated from our demons. We can then fully enjoy pleasant moments when they happen without wasting energy by clinging to them, and fully accept unpleasant moments without wasting energy on resisting them. We do not have to worry anymore about what to do in certain situations, because we now have complete faith in our spontaneous ability to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right place. That insight, to me, is the highest boon that these stories offer. And they do that by means of enabling us to marvel, yet again, as children - but now combined with all the experiences of an adult.

Jolly reading,
Erik

Note and References:

[1] From Zimmer, Heinrich (1956). The King And The Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil. Four Romances From The Cycle Of King Arthur. Princeton University Press. (Edited by Joseph Campbell)

[2] From Zimmer, Heinrich (1956). The King And The Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil. Abu Kasem’s Slippers. Princeton University Press.

[3] From Zimmer, Heinrich (1956). The King And The Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil. The King and The Corpse. Princeton University Press.

[4] Ibid.

[5] From Zimmer, Heinrich (1956). The King And The Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil. Four Episodes From The Romance Of The Goddess. Princeton University Press.

PS. It goes without saying that much more profound symbolisms and meanings can be found in the stories than we have touched upon in this article. These, and many more, can be found in the book The King and The Corpse, written by Indologist and linguist Heinrich Zimmer, and edited by the master of mythology, Joseph Campbell (who was a student of Zimmer).

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