Quotes from the Hallowed Treasures Saga

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Hallowed Treasures Saga, Quotes

The Ghost of Loss by Geillis Saille

Kirkus Reviews said, “Because Eluned loves books, bookworms will be abundantly rewarded throughout the tale, with frequent references to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, T.S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and more. Welsh mythology heavily influences the princess’ story and world, so fans of Lloyd Alexander’s classic Chronicles of Prydain series should find much to enjoy here.”

To make the Princess Eluned’s love of literature even more real, I added some writers and poets who were contemporaneous to her time frame. I also began each book in the Hallowed Treasures Saga with a quote as well as adding quotes to the title page for each Part of the saga.

From The Path to Misery:

“And for a long time yet, led by some wondrous power, I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown b anyone.” ~~Nicolai Gogol, Dead Souls

PROLOGUE
The quote from the prologue is taken from a book written by one of Eluned’s favorite authors. She has re-reads this book while at King Arawn’s Castle Pwyll in Prythew, Kingdom of Annewven.

“The most difficult path to tread is the way that leads to one’s own soul.” ~~Geillis Saille, The Ghost of Loss

PART ONE

“Let us, then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.”
~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Call her moonchild
Dancing in the shallow of a river
Lonely moonchild
Dreaming in the shadow of a willow.

Talking to the trees of a cobweb strange
Sleeping on the steps of a fountain
Waving silver wands to the night-birds song
Waiting for the sun on the mountain.”
~~King Crimson, Moonchild from In The Court of the Crimson King

PART TWO

“From there to here, from here to there,
Funny things are everywhere.”
~~Dr. Suess, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

“The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun.
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournament’s begun.
The purple piper plays his tune.
The choir softly sing:
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue.
For the court of the crimson king.”
~~King Crimson, The Court of the Crimson King from In the Court of the Crimson King

PART THREE

“We travel, some of us forever,
to see other states, other lives, other souls.”
~~Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

“Sailing on the wind
In a milk white gown
Dropping circle stones on a sundial
Playing hide and seek
With the ghosts of dawn
Waiting for a smile from a sun child.”
~~King Crimson, Moonchild from In the Court of the Crimson King

The Divine Presence by Schlomo

From In Lonely Exile:

“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
~~T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

PART THREE CONTINUED

While in Prythew, in Book I, Eluned buys Yona a volume of poetry by the poet Schlomo. In Book II, Yona brings the book along with her on the Quest.

“Fire descends in the night,
Lightning and thunder quicken the darkness,
A dream takes root as I sleep.”
~~Schlomo, The Divine Presence

“This is my Quest to follow that star,
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far,
To fight for the right without question of pause,
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause!”
~~Joe Darion, The Man of LaMancha

PART IV

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams–
this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness–and
maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
~~Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Deep into that darkness peering,
long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
ever dared to dream before.”
~~Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

The Gunslinger’s Troth by Delevan Aden

From Death’s Dark Shadows

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
~~Albert Einstein

PART V

The first quote is taken from Eluned’s favorite romance novel. It is one of the books she found hidden in a secret compartment in the window seat of her tower bedroom. The books belonged to her great-grandmother, Queen Fuchsia, who abandoned her husband and child to pursue her dream of acting. The book is mentioned in both In Lonely Exile and Death’s Dark Shadows.

“Honey, you ain’t never gonna find peace in this world lookin’ down the barrel of a gun.”
~~Delevan Aden, The Gunslinger’s Troth

“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
~~Henry Miller

PART VI

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
~~Lao Tzu

“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
~~Julian of Norwich

Which quote is your favorite?

As I am currently finishing Death’s Dark Shadows, I don’t yet have the quotes for what will be PART VII. BUT, The Path to Misery and In Lonely Exile, can both be purchased through your local bookstore or at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, both in paperback or on Kindle or Nook.

AMAZON:

The Path to Misery: Book I in the Hallowed Treasures Saga

In Lonely Exile: Book II in the Hallowed Treasures Saga on Kindle

or in paperback here: In Lonely Exile

Barnes & Noble:

The Path to Misery: Book I in the Hallowed Treasures Saga

In Lonely Exile: Book II in the Hallowed Treasures Saga

 

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Transformation: The Conclusion

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Carl Jung, Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson

Rocinante

Presently the evidence of four-dimensional consciousness is not some form of perfection but rather the ability to tap in to that psychological space when needed

From the two-dimensional Don Quixote to the three-dimensional Hamlet, in which most of us reside, we can finally try to find our way to the fourth-dimension embodied by Faust.

“Almost all of us in Western society are Hamlets,” Robert A. Johnson writes. “Compulsory eduction, our social structure, the dictates of our lifestyle have obliterated the two-dimensional man from American life.”

We only experience that second dimension for a brief time in adolescence. So, how does man survive the Hamlet dilemma?

According to Johnson, the more intelligent he is, the more profound will be his suffering. But, there are two avenues of solace: We can maintain a bit of primitive behavior in our lives such as jogging, camping, or gardening. We can even, Johnson says, “have an array of adolescent equipment, including that which is most dear to every man’s heart, his car (every car should be named Rocinante).”

The second avenue of solace is much darker–vandalism, gang behavior and other types of juvenile delinquency, including drug and alcohol abuse.

“It is a bitter indictment of some of our attitudes that the only ‘juice’ left for many of our youth is in destructive behavior,” he says.

Inevitably, though, there will come a time in adulthood when you no longer find joy in things like jogging or gardening, and the full distress experienced by Hamlet begins to well up inside you. We have, Johnson says, created many terms for this–midlife crisis, identity crisis, the seven-year itch, the Big Four-Zero, and so on.

Saint John of the Cross says that this period, the “Dark Night of the Soul,” can last anywhere from seven weeks, months, years up to 21 years, depending on when you wake up to the next level of consciousness.

“When the dark night begins to lift,” Johnson writes, one morning there is an unaccountable touch of joy in the air. It is the tiniest trickle of energy, light, and hope, but enough to keep you alive.”

This, he says, is the first contact with the four-dimensional consciousness. “Something of the subtle inner world becomes your center of gravity: poetry, music, a new perceptiveness when you are jogging, a blossoming of philosophic inquiry, a new religious understanding.”

Johnson says that “Enlightenment” is never total or permanent in this lifetime.

“Presently the evidence of four-dimensional consciousness is not some form of perfection but rather the ability to tap in to that psychological space when needed,” he writes.

Humans have the ability to incorporate new things in to their being. For example, we didn’t learn to perceive the color, blue, until about 2,000 years ago; we had to learn how to read silently, also learned within the past 2,000 years; and we didn’t learn to hear the harmonic structure, as opposed to the melodic line, until around the 15th or 16th century.

“Is it consistent to say that a new faculty,” he writes, “four-dimensional consciousness, as we lamely describe it, is only now appearing for ordinary men and women in our new human evolution?”

This would make that faculty extremely rare and fragile when it does appear, and very easily lost.

Johnson closes the book writing, “Dr. Jung spent his old age writing about and contemplating this new evolution of man, the progression from incompleteness to wholeness, from three to four. It is time for all of us to do the same.”

Faust–The Shadow

Tags

Robert A. Johnson, Self-actualization, Shadow Work

To recap, because it has been a couple of weeks: Don Quixote, as the simple man, enjoys his secure relationship to life until he realizes, near death, that it has all been a fantasy. Hamlet, the 3-dimensional man, is worried, anxious, driven, and deeply unhappy. As he dies, he realizes that had he faced his problems, his shadows, he might have ended life differently.

Faust, which is basically a thinly disguised autobiography by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is about the enlightenment of the the three-dimensional man. Hamlet refused to deal with his shadow or the dark side of his life. Faust, on the other hand, chooses to interact with his shadow, in this case represented by Mephistopheles, until they both have been redeemed.

A lá the Book of Job, Faust begins with a wager between God and The Devil. The Devil wishes to divert Faust from “the path that is true and fit.” God maintains that that “Faust will not succumb to your temptations. He will stay true.” The Devil thinks not.

We find Faust, at the beginning of the book, despairing because he has reached the pinnacle of his success, and finds himself alone and his life meaningless.

“Goethe once commented,” Robert A. Johnson writes, “that if a man raises his head to the stars, then the clouds play with his feet. When one’s ‘reality function–the ‘feet-on-the-ground’ ability–is threatened, an encounter with the dark side, Mephistopheles, is the corrective.”

Faust has always feared that he would reach this point, and had kept, in the back of his desk drawer, a vial of poison, to end the pain of loneliness and meaninglessness. Having explored discipline and self-consciousness only to find them a dead end, Johnson says, Faust must make the next step in his evolution.

“This exploration is absolutely essential in one’s evolution,” Johnson writes, “and the man who has not trodden that road is not eligible for the moment of despair that is also the moment of redemption and enlightenment.”

This is the “Dark Night of the Soul,” the experience of the intelligent man who has reached the goal of modern consciousness. Johnson says only the best men reach this point.

“Lesser men take refuge in guilt at their inadequacy, or blame their environment, or find yet another set of windmills to vanquish,” he writes, “anything but face the terror of seeing that three-dimensional consciousness is not bearable, no matter how finely developed it is.”

Once the ego-centered man realizes his failure, he can go on to redeem that failure. A genius might find the process inspirational, Johnson says, but for most of us who reach this point, it is pure torture. But, if you can reach this point, and it doesn’t break your life, you may wrestle with your shadows and find redemption.

Next Week: Faust–The Black Poodle

Hamlet

Johnson calls Hamlet the darkest chapter in his book. “Don Quixote,” he says, “with his roots deep in instinct and faith, is the man of courage who redeems anything that befalls him. In Hamlet, we find a man of tragedy, he who makes chaos and failure of everything he touches.”

The opposite of Don Quixote in nearly every respect, Johnson says Hamlet is the “most  profound example in all of literature of the divided man.”

To understand Hamlet, Johnson explains, is to gain insight into the emptiness and loneliness of modern existential life. As a three-dimensional man, Hamlet has neither roots in the instinctive world nor is his head yet in the heavens where he might gain enlightenment.

Modern man, in general, is at a point where he must heal the paradox of masculine and feminine,doing and being.

As Lao-tse said, “He who understand the masculine and keeps to the feminine shall become the whole world’s channel. Eternal virtue shall not part from him and he shall return to the state of an infant.”

Johnson says that Hamlet only touches this design state before making division and tragedy, rather than paradox and synthesis, of it. Because time and again, in refusing to act and make a choice, Hamlet loses the value of both.

Hamlet’s troubles begin with the murder of his father by his uncle who then marries Hamlet’s mother. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him to take revenge and thus begins the internal debate–to kill the uncle and take his rightful place as king or decide that enough blood has been shed and be at peace with what has happened.

Instead he does as Emily Dickinson put it,”wavered for us all.” Vacillation in one of the characteristics of the three-dimensional man.

“A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward,” Hamlet thinks. He can see that together the four parts make for wholeness, but only three parts function for him. He cannot listen to his internal wisdom.

“There is no peace in such a man,” Johnson says. “He knows too much to be simple, but not enough to be whole.”

Because Hamlet’s need to act and his abhorrence of violence are in conflict, he descends into depression and madness, and out of this comes the most famous soliloquy in literature:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh in heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream–ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Johnson explains that this is the despair that causes conflict in every three-dimensional man–while he cannot live, he dare not die. He then begins to torture everyone around him, especially those who love him, and he makes life unbearable for himself.

As Tolstoy wrote, “He was suffering the anguish men suffer when they persist in undertaking a task impossible for them–not from inherent difficulties, but from its incompatibility with their own nature.”

When challenged about what he is doing, Hamlet cries, “Words, words, words.” It is the cry of the three-dimensional man who is so caught up in words he cannot act.

Literary critic R.H. Blyth describes it this way: “This ‘words, words, words’ has a deeply tragic meaning in the play. It is, in fact, the secret of Hamlet’s character, the cause of the tragedy. Hamlet is the Zen-less man, whose energy, like a mouse in a wheel, goes round and round inside him and issues, not in action, but in talking.”

As Johnson says, “It is a characteristic of complex man, caught between functioning by instinct and acting by enlightenment, that he often destroys everything feminine within his grasp. . . . All feminine elements wither in the face of the three-dimensional consciousness.”

Next Week: The Poisoned Rapier

The Adventures

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza set out to search for Dulcinea and experience a number of adventures. While these adventures will seem like failures to a three-dimensional, complex man, to the two-dimensional man there is always a reason because the fantasy is his inner reality.

The most famous of Don Quixote’s exploits is his battle with the windmills. It is truly amazing, when you think about it, how many of our sayings and even how we look at life have come about through fiction. In this case, we say someone is “tilting at windmills” when they are engaged in behavior that is clearly out of the realm of reality.

So, despite the fact that Sancho Panza tries to warn him that he is about to battle windmills, Don Quixote sees only giants. When he loses the battle and is thrown from his horse, the giants become windmills through the magic of Quixote’s nemesis Freston. Don Quixote is more upset about the loss of his lance than his defeat.

Tilting at windmills today, according to Johnson, may be no more than dealing with unresolved psychological dynamics, but it is still a very real part of life. This is why it is so easy to empathize with Quixote, Johnson says, “he is our selves served up to us in palpable form.”

He sees and hears what he wants to see and hear—a shepherd’s horn becomes a page announcing his arrival; prostitutes become ladies; pub food, a sumptuous feast. Don Quixote’s inner reality is so strong that it translates to the outside world. You can see this today most particularly in children who feel certain they are the thing they want to be—the ballerina, the super hero, etc. And, admittedly, there are even the few adults who have not made the transition to three-dimensional man and still live in a fantasy world.

At the end of the book, Don Quixote lies dying having failed in his search to find Dulcinea. Quixote finally makes the transition to three-dimensional man while Sancho Panza reverses his normal position and tries to talk Don Quixote into setting forth on another quest. In a sense, the true journey of knighthood and chivalry they have taken was to draw the ego and shadow sides together, Johnson explains. Cervantes doesn’t dwell on it, but Johnson says we will see that shadow/ego split intensified in Faust and Mephistopheles. And Hamlet, he says, will spend the last moments of his life in the next higher stage of consciousness—four-dimensional man.

Interestingly, Cervantes and Shakespeare lived during the same time period and both died on the same day—April 23, 1616. Don Quixote was published in 1605, Hamlet in 1603 or 1604.

“It is as if,” Johnson says, “the two men stood back to back, Cervantes looking backward and Shakespeare looking forward.”

Cervantes was illuminating the medieval consciousness that was ending in Europe while Shakespeare looked forward to the modern man who was to come.

“Cervantes spoke of the childhood of Western man,” Johnson writes, “man who had not yet suffered the shock of being expelled from the Garden of Eden. No better description of the two-dimensional man can be found.”

Next Week: Hamlet

Don Quixote

The two-dimensional man.

According to Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, Don Quixote is a “near-perfect representation of two-dimensional man—the simple peasant man.”

For those unfamiliar with the tale, Miguel Cervantes, when he was in his 50s in the early 17^th century, wrote the novel while living in squalor in a single room. Other than having written Don Quixote, Cervantes lived what could essentially be called a failed life. He lost an arm in battle, was captured and served a slave to the Moors for five years, he couldn’t hold down a job once he returned to Spain, he fathered an illegitimate child, married a girl of 19 when he was 50 and then left her to live in poverty while writing Don Quixote.

And while the book was wildly popular, he never made much money off it and died soon after writing a second volume, which wasn’t quite as good. The main character of the book, Don Alonso, has read so many books on chivalry by the time he is 50 years old that he decides to set off on a romantic quest of his own. Don Quixote (essentially Sir Codpiece as he names himself for the piece of armor that covers the thighs and genitals) genuinely believes that his impossible dream will come true.

He hires a squire, Sancho Panza (Mr. Paunch) who is indeed the opposite, perhaps the shadow of Don Quixote—short, fat and practical, and ruled by his appetite. According to Johnson, this is a common pair—from the Bible’s Jacob and Esau and David and Jonathon to today’s Mutt and Jeff or Abbot and Costello or any buddy cop pairing. They are ego and shadow—the parts of us that are opposite yet inseparable.

Johnson quotes W.H. Auden on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, including: “Don Quixote needs Sancho Panza as the one creature about whom he has no illusions but loves as he is; Sancho Panza needs Don Quixote as the one constant loyalty in his life which is independent of feeling. Take away Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is so nearly pure flesh, immediacy of feeling, so nearly without will that he becomes a hedonist pagan who rejects everything but matter. Take away Sancho Panza, on the other hand, and Don Quixote is so nearly pure spirit that he becomes a Manichee who rejects matter and feeling and nothing but an egotistic will.”

Don Quixote purchases an old horse, Rocinante (she-whom-one-follows) and they set off on their adventure to find Dulcinea, the sweetness of life, whom even the Don admits might not exist though he will give his life for her. Needless to say, they never find her. Dulcinea exists only in the heart of the searcher, which Johnson says is all that matters to the two-dimensional man.

“The two-dimensional man lives constantly in the realm of fantasy and imagination,” Johnson says. “They are the Garden of Eden, perfection, total reliability.” But, fantasy and imagination don’t translate to the outer world.

“Don Quixote is creating poetry, not reality,” says Johnson. “Heaven, love, idealism, hope, justice, chivalry, eternity—all are inner realities as palpable and real as any outer realities our world holds in such high esteem. Don Quixote’s optimism ruins everything around him. . . . He loses every time he relies on his sword; it is ‘pure spirit disguised as fantasy,’ as Thomas Mann once wrote. This is the vision of two-dimensional man and is the stuff of nostalgia and fantasy for every three-dimensional man.”

Next Week: The Adventures