THE QUEST OF THE HOLY GRAIL  Lecture Four: The Meaning of the Quest   "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita..." Dante begins; "When I had journeyed half of our life's way I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was, that savage forest, dense and difficult, which even in recall renews my fear:  so bitter that death is hardly more severe!" And, of course, for Dante the way out of the forest of lost direction is an interior way leading through the heart of the earth. (Compare the V.I.T.R.I.O.L Visit the interior of the earth and, by rectification, reveal the hidden stone--of the alchemists) and beyond that to the Mount of Purgation and the way that leads among the stars.   In any case as we read of Dante's forest, or of the situation of the Grail, we should have, if we are reading with spiritual sensitivity, that odd experience--like that of the boy Balthazar who discovers, in Ende's Never-ending Story, that he is himself a character in the book he is reading...that we are reading the story of our own life.    If in the Grail story the inner kingdom is separated from the outer, Logres from Britain, and the Grail is lost to the Table of Logres, and the ruler of the inner land is himself sick with a suffering which shadows his land, it is also true--as we must now realize if we are to proceed--that our inner life is separated from our outer and both lie under the shadow of this separation. If the Grail stories tell of Broceliande, the Forest Sauvage, through which one must pass and in which--as in Dante's "shadowed forest"--no way is clear, so also we all know, or have known or will know, the experience of having lost our way in life and of seeing the world around us as, perhaps, a forest of symbols to which we have no key of interpretation.   "Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the upper as the lower, then you shall enter the Kingdom." Gospel of Thomas: 22. In these words the Lord defines an inner journey, which precisely reflects the knight's goal of restoring the land of Logres and attaining the vision of the Grail. Let us note parenthetically that the Gospel of Thomas, while not included in the New Testament, contains (and is perhaps the source of) many verses that are in the Four Gospels, and therefore is at an entirely higher degree of reliability, in relation to what Jesus actually said, than are the other apocryphal gospels-- most of which are simply works of speculation and written much later. Jesus said, “Be wanderers." The Gospel of Thomas: 42. A quest is a journey in which the inner and outer worlds are brought together and organized around a goal. If we know a little Kabbalah we are acquainted with the doctrine of the "four worlds" and are aware that the significance of things changes, as they are perceived at different levels. At the level, or world, of Assiah only actions may be seen, not causes, and so the philosophy of materialism may be said to accurately describe the world from the point of view of Assiah. This is the shadowed forest where one sees no connections between things and the way is lost. "The lower an individual's spiritual attainment, the more divided one feels from the rest of existence... However, the Kabbalists stress, "... as we begin to achieve higher states of awareness, we will increasingly see the unity among the apparently haphazard events around us." Hoffman, The Way of Splendor   The role of the symbols of the quest is, then, that they serve as the framework around which one can re-organize one's perception of world. For the Chinese an object of quest was the hidden palace of Hsi Wang Mu, which was located somewhere beyond the northern and western mountains beside the "Lake of Gems."    This quest is still further developed by the Tibetans as the quest for the hidden land of Shambhala. At the center of this land in a park are reserved the supreme mandalas of the Kalacakra and it is said of these mystic patterns "just seeing them bestows the supreme attainment." Therefore the devotee organizes his life around the journey to Shambala which it said can he accomplished in three ways: geographically, which is said to be the hardest--though there were many guidebooks, they were not (as might be expected) entirely clear; by meditation or, as it were, astral projection, or finally by dreams of the hidden kingdom. If Shambhala is visualized as a hidden kingdom in Central Asia, it also represents a hidden region of the mind.    As Edwin Bernbaum says,” We have lost the innocence that enabled us to see the world directly... we have to go forward to a new and wiser innocence that combines the wonder of a child with the wisdom of a sage. Our interpretation of the guidebooks to Shambhala suggests that we can do this by living our lives as journeys toward a deeper awareness of ourselves and the world around us..."   I. The Way to Shambhala   A more literary form of the quest is the description, in The Conference of the Birds by the Sufi poet Farid ud Din Attar, of the spiritual life as a journey across seven symbolic valleys in search of a king known as the Simurgh. Now the Grail Quest is in one way completely unique and in another way it is similar to all other spiritual quests. The similarity lies in that, as with the other quests, the follower of the way is, by his concentration on the object of the quest and its symbols, freed from the mundane world of "dead" materialism, and brought into a higher experience of the world where he can begin to see the connectedness of things and the operation of Providence.   In the Grail stories there appears on page after page the word "adventure" which represents this experience, "Perceval thou hast conquered...enter this ship and go wheresoever adventure leads thee..." "My sons, depart from here and go where adventure leads you...” P.M. Matarasso puts it, "in a general way adventure represents the random unpredictable element in life to this the Quest adds a further dimension...the adventure is above all God working and manifesting Himself in the physical world...there runs through the stories like an unbroken thread the idea of providential guidance which man can either accept, refuse, or simply fail to see." The Perlesvaus takes this concept so far as to say that when a questing knight has passed through an area, and experienced the adventures it has to offer, the land itself--its topography, castles, dangers and so on--is changed so that at his return the knight will find it different and will, therefore, provide different adventures.    And it may be said, in general, that as we stop living on the surface of reality, and begin to see the possibility of "adventure", we find more and more the appearance of meaningful pattern and coincidence marking the way. On the other hand, of course, one may fall below, as it were, the mundane reality into the paranoid's world of negative connection--a diminished, rather than enhanced reality.   It is perhaps symptomatic of our times that this falling away from reality is generally accepted as an object of study, while the rising to a higher organization of reality is ignored or dismissed--however it is with this that we are concerned. In many of the Grail stories an asking of a question is crucial, as we shall see, to the achievement of the quest. John Matthews relates that nicely to the condition of everyone on this way; "Thus a great part of the task for the Grail Seeker is to look within at the reality behind the world of appearances and to bring that reality out into the open. Thus as when the question is asked by the seeker and the wounds of king and land are healed, we must be able to stand in the Waste Land and question what we appear to see--the words 'quest' and 'question' are here synonymous."   And we may also add that the movement upward towards the roots of the worlds brings us to the place where we can participate in the healing of things, as the Grail stories show, So Rabbi Luzzato says, "the Highest Wisdom perceives and knows what is best to rectify all creation," and the regard that their meditation on "unification" helps to knit together the worlds. And of course there is similar teaching in the tradition and, indeed, in the general tradition. Thus far, we repeat, the Grail Quest is similar, or at least analogous, to other spiritual quests. Where it is unique is that it is not just a story, or inspiring myth, but is rooted in the overwhelming reality of the Eucharist as we showed and shall later develop further. In this reality is not only the promise but also the achievement of the union of the inner and outer worlds, of that which is above with that which is below.    All quest stories whatsoever tend towards this one thing, the Grail, which was also an actual cup on an actual table. The Grail story, then, is the central quest of all because it is true on all levels of reality from the most dense to the most subtle. However, before delving deeper into these considerations, we shall return to the Grail stories and meet their central characters. Back to Top Previous Lecture Next Lecture