There was a Fine Young King. He was vigorous, strong, and a good man in every respect.
He loved to hunt, and one day he was hunting deer on horseback with his courtiers.
In Indian mythology, The Call of The Inner World, The Call of The Unconscious, is often portrayed as a deer that is tantalizingly close but eludes being caught.
The King and his courtiers were galloping along when the King saw a deer just out of bow-and-arrow range.
He veered off and began following it, but the miraculous deer kept just outside his range.
The King went plunging further and further into the forest, chasing the deer all day, so intent was he, in his masculine vigor, to catch this prized animal.
By late afternoon, the King was irretrievably lost, and the deer had vanished.
What a wonderful deer.
He gets you where you need to go and then leaves you.
The King was exhausted and rather frightened, as he was now separated from his courtiers.
Being a wise young man, he got off his horse and sat down.
If you don’t know What to Do,
sit quietly, until your wits come back.
Suddenly he heard a beautiful song. A maiden was singing as he had never heard before, and he fell in love with her very voice. He got up, began to walk toward the sound, and soon came upon her. The maiden was as lovely as her voice, and the King, overwhelmed by her beauty, instantly lost his heart to her.
He asked, “Are you married?” and the maiden said, “No.” The King said, “Will you be my queen?” and the maiden replied, “You must ask my father.” So he asked her to take him to her father, and she did.
The father, himself a wise man, was delighted at the prospect of having a king for a son-in-law, but he didn’t let his enthusiasm appear too obvious. So he said, “You may have my daughter as your wife under one condition. She must never see water.” If you replace the word water with the wordreality, you will understand this story easily. The King agreed, and the young couple married. But there was one problem—keeping the Queen from seeing water.
Avoiding Reality The King did his best to arrange for the Queen to see no water, but the task was more difficult than he anticipated. The palace was located right along the river that ran through the royal city. So the King ordered the royal laborers to build a brick wall alongside the river. Before he would take the Queen outdoors or up to the palace roof, he also had to be careful that there was no rain on the horizon. In fact, the King spent almost all his time arranging things so the Queen would not see water, and he did little else. The kingdom was going to seed, as he wasn’t per- forming most of his kingly duties.
Finally, one day, the courtiers cornered him and said, “You never meet with us. You’re not managing the kingdom.” And the King said, “I have no time. Go away.” The head courtier, seeing that the kingdom was in dire straits and that there was no use asking the King again, as he was out of his mind, went to the servants and asked, “How does the palace work? What do you do?” The servants told him, “We spend all our time making sure the Queen does not see water.”
What is this myth telling us? The King is in the throes of the forward-looking possibility, but his newfound love, who would fill his heart and bring him all the legitimate happiness in the world, has a condition laid upon her—that she must never be subjected to reality. Every love affair, every Stardust romance, carries this prohibition. It will work as long as you don’t subject it to reality, as long as it doesn’t come down to ordinary everydayness. If ordinary everydayness— water, in the symbolism of the story—ever douses this fallen-in-love quality, the feeling dis- solves instantly. That is the story of romantic love.
The head courtier came to the King and said, “Sire, let us make a garden on the rooftop. We can plant trees and beautiful plants and put a roof over it, so that even if it rains, there will be no difficulty. You and the Queen can spend time in the gar- den and be happy.” They did, and it was a success. Contact with Reality One day the courtier asked, “Sire, are you not thirsty for the sight of water?” And the King admitted, “I’m parched, but I don’t dare pursue my wish or the Queen will be in trouble.” So the courtier suggested, “Your Majesty, I can build a fountain in the middle of the garden and surround it with greenery so thick that the Queen will never see it. You can gaze upon the fountain in private and be refreshed.” It was done. The King went regularly to the fountain and he was pleased.
Then, one day, inevitably, the Queen happened upon the fountain. She was de- lighted for an instant, and then she vanished. Our idealism, our noble motives, our loftiest intuitions perish at their first contact with reality. The Queen disappeared, and the King was consumed with loneliness. Everything he wanted in the world, and he’d had a touch of it, was gone. He could not eat or drink. Nothing could assuage his loneliness.
The courtiers tried to cheer him up. They gave him the best of everything. But when someone is in the throes of that kind of loneliness, he is inconsolable. Noth- ing anyone can do, no possessions, no amount of money, fame, or entertainment can break through that loneliness. We have seen something that we are not yet able to encompass, and it is snatched away. This is the cruelest loneliness of all. The King was in the level of Hell that is frozen over, and no one knew what to do. It had never happened before, and they didn’t have a cure for it. Then one wise man observed that when the Queen vanished, a small frog had appeared in the roof garden beside the fountain. He didn’t know what it meant, but he had seen it. The King heard about the frog at the fountain and went up to the garden and smashed it flat with his own hands. Then he declared that all the frogs in the king- dom were to be killed. For weeks, peasants trudged toward the palace with sacks of dead frogs to collect their bounties. Thousands and thousands of frogs were killed, and the kingdom was spending all its time and energy killing frogs and carrying them to the royal palace. The King had all the frogs killed because he thought the frog was, in some way, responsible for the disappearance of his queen. That’s a strange symptom of loneliness. We self-perpetuate our loneliness, killing every frog we see.
Finally, one day, the Frog King came to see the King, and he said, “Your Majesty, you are about to exterminate my entire species. I am the father of your queen. She returned to the land of the frogs when you broke your vow.” The King listened. He liked the Frog King and made peace with him. As a result, the Frog King brought his daughter, the little frog by the fountain, back to life. Here was the Queen in all her splendor. The King embraced her and was happy again. And the Queen was no longer compelled to stay away from water. Transformation and Redemption This myth of the King and his Frog Queen is a story of transformation and redemp- tion. If you’re caught in the kind of loneliness that has no comfort and cannot be assuaged, and you can hear the wisdom of this story, it will help. This is how to get through the second kind of loneliness. If you have touched something of Heaven, something that was given to you miraculously but is not yet ready for contact with reality, when reality touches it—and inevitably it will—the dream will vanish and your loneliness will return worse than before. You must touch the inner world and learn to bear the sight of water without going to pieces. When you restore your connection to the unconscious, to spirit, your beloved will come back cured of her reality phobia.
Both the King and the Queen had learned to live without water, reality. But the King couldn’t stand it, or maybe it was the Queen who couldn’t stand it. No rela- tionship can survive unless it includes reality, water. Many fine, spiritually evolved people are at the tenuous stage where they’ve had a sublime vision, but if any water gets on it, it vanishes. The King on his heroic journey, and all heroes, are the ones who suffer most.
At some time in every relationship, every man or woman wonders: When did my partner turn into a frog? Whether you get through this crisis hinges on your ability to see the divine. At first, we fail. The King marries the Queen, and you might hope the story will end with them living happily ever after. But they can’t take it. Every marriage replays this scene, and the marriage can dissolve at this point. She turns into a frog. He turns into a boar. They are unable to sustain the heavenly vision that started it all. The frog needs water.
The bliss you experience at the beginning of your marriage is true, but you can- not stand it. If you hang on and go through the dry time— without water— the glory of your first meeting will return, less fragile this time. But you have to persist to be able to touch the bliss of Heaven andthe trials of ordinary life. The Nearness of God The third kind of loneliness is the most subtle and difficult. It is the loneliness of being dangerously close to God. The proximity of God is always registered first as extreme pain. To be near it yet unable to touch the thing you want most is unen- durable. A medieval proverb says, “The only cure for loneliness is aloneness.” In the Western world, loneliness has reached its peak. The old ways that used to protect us have worn thin. We’re at the point where the King has killed the frog, and we feel perpetual, incurable loneliness. When we’re in this kind of pain, we cry out to be freed from our suffering. But when our understanding deepens, we go off somewhere, sit still, and determine not to move until the dilemma is resolved. For some time, the journey is hellish. I don’t know whether it’s possible for us to get through this stage more quickly or if it is a set path we have to traverse at its own pace, not ours.
When we are able to move from solitude to vision, redemption takes place and loneliness vanishes—not because it gets filled, but because it was illusory in the first place. It could never be filled. A new kind of consciousness arises that does not find the immanence of God unendurable. There never was anywhere to go outwardly. But there is a lot to do inwardly. The change of consciousness that turns loneliness into solitude is genius. Each time the handless maiden comes to a crisis, she goes to the forest in solitude. This is especially powerful in a woman’s way. It is the feminine spirit. Solitude and Community As an intuitive introvert, I rarely feel lonely when I’m alone. When I was in my early twenties, I took a job in a lookout tower, fire-watching in the forest. I was alone on a mountain peak for four months, and I never felt lonely. Reality didn’t catch me there. I was not in danger of my Queen leaving me. But the moment I returned to civilization, loneliness descended on me like a landslide. How could I be so happy on the mountaintop and then rubbed so raw when I came back down? I didn’t want to live my whole life on a mountaintop—I’m not a hermit. I had to go back and forth, as the King did, until the visionary life could finally stand the impact of the water of reality. The Queen in me had to learn to withstand the water. It’s a process. I believe that everyone who has touched the realm of spirit has had to go through this antechamber.
If you’re honest and perceptive, you can tell the difference between regressive loneliness, the first kind, and the ineffable second and third types of loneliness, where you sense and then see what you cannot yet have. The second and third types of loneliness are nearly indistinguishable. If you can say exactly what you are lonely for, it will reveal a lot. Do you want to go back where you came from, to the good old days? Or have you seen a vision you can’t live without? They’re as different as backward and forward.
Dr. Jung said that every person who came into his consulting room was either twenty-one or forty-five, no matter their chronological age. The twenty-one-year-old is looking backward and must conquer it. The forty-five-year-old is being touched by something he cannot yet endure. These are the only two subjects of therapy.
Solitude
The Garden of Eden and the heavenly Jerusalem are the same place, depending on whether you are looking backward or forward. A person touched by loneliness is a holy person. He is caught in the development of individuation. Whether it’s a development or a regression depends on what he does with it. Loneliness can destroy you, or it can fire you up for a Dante-like journey through Hell and Purgatory to find paradise. St. John of the Cross called this the Dark Night of the Soul.
The worst suffering I’ve ever experienced has been loneliness, the kind that feels as though it has no cure, that nothing can touch it. One day, at the midpoint in my life—a little like Dante—I got so exhausted from it that I went into my bed- room, lay face down on my bed, and said, “I’m not going to move until this is re- solved.” I stayed a long time, and the loneliness did ease a little. Dante fell out of Hell, shimmied down the hairy leg of the Devil, went through the center of the world, and started up the other side, which was Purgatory. I felt better, but as soon as I got up and began to do anything, my loneliness returned. I made many round trips until gradually an indescribable quality began to suffuse my life, and lone- liness loosened its grip. Nothing outside changed. The change was entirely inside.
Thomas Merton wrote a beautiful treatise on solitude. He said that certain individuals are obliged to bear the solitude of God. Solitude is loneliness evolved to the next level of reality. He who is obliged to bear the solitude of God should not be asked to do anything else; it’s such a difficult task. For monastics, solitude was one of the early descriptions of God. If you can transform your loneliness into solitude, you’re one step away from the most precious of all experiences.
This is The Cure for Loneliness.
