The healing of the Earth and the healing of the human spirit has become one and the same thing.
JONATHAN PORRITT IN SAVE THE EARTH

Our journey through the body and psyche of man begins at the heart. The heart is the centre of the body. It is the seat of the soul. A man whose heart is wounded, becomes inflexible. His energy no longer flows. He loses contact with his core and lacks purpose in life. He loses connection with the world and with the people around him and hides behind the walls of his bulwark. If this situation continues for a long time, it can result in a deep crisis, which can express itself in divorce, illness, a heart attack or a crisis of conscience such as the well-known midlife crisis. One of the best-known stories in mythology that demonstrates this situation is the story of Percival and the Fisher King. It goes like this:

The boy Percival is brought up by his mother. His father, a knight, has been killed in battle. His mother avoids telling him anything about his father, frightened that he will choose the same path, and that she will lose him. She brings him up in the woods, far away from the court. But one day, Percival sees a group of knights riding through the forest. His heart is set aflame at the sight of these powerful men on horseback. He rushes home to share his news. His mother is deeply saddened and warns her son of the danger, but nothing will stop him: he wants to become a knight and travel to the court of King Arthur. All she can do is advise her son to always wear a white shirt. At the end of a long day's journey, Percival meets an old fisherman who beckons him to follow. They travel through arid wasteland until they eventually come to a castle surrounded by a moat. They cross the moat and the drawbridge closes behind them. Percival is invited to a feast in the castle. He meets the king, who is very ill. It is the Fisher King. He can neither die nor be healed: he has been wounded in the testicles with a lance. Heavenly food and drink are served during the feast. Percival sees the Holy Grail from which the heavenliness flows. He forgets to ask the essential question, the question the fisherman had advised him to: "Whom does the Grail serve?" When Percival wakes up the next day, the castle has vanished and he is left with the vision of the previous evening.

On his way to Arthur's court, Percival also meets the red knight, one of King Arthur's archenemies. A duel takes place, and Percival pierces the red knight's eye with his lance. The red knight is dead. Percival puts on the red knight's clothes over his white shirt.

After many detours, Percival reaches Arthur's court and because of his heroic deeds, he is made a knight. At the end of his life, he sees the Holy Grail for a second time. This time he manages to ask the question and so the wounded Fisher King is healed and fertility returns to his land.

The story of Percival contains many other adventures, but in this chapter, we will concentrate on the role of the wounded Fisher King, and of the young hero whose life is coloured by the search for the Holy Grail. Every man has these two archetypes of the wounded king and the young hero within him. As soon as we become aware of our 'wound', the hero in us awakens and begins his long quest. The search for the Grail runs parallel to the inner path we must follow to attain the life-giving water. The journey is like peeling an onion to reach the core of the soul.

THE KING IS WOUNDED

In the story it soon becomes clear that the Fisher King is not suffering from a physical wound. His incurable illness is a kind of paralysis of the soul and soul-water is needed to heal the wound. Until then the king –and the country- will remain unwell, and there isn't a doctor who can do anything about it. If we transpose this scene onto today's world, we can see that many men are wounded Fisher Kings. They cannot live, nor can they die. They find themselves in a deadlock in their work, their responsibilities, their marriage or their ambition. They do their work, but it is as if they have lost their dreams and cannot find purpose. They fight their way through their existence, but they lack appetite.

Today we see the paralysis in the father who has not known what to say to his children for years, in the man who no longer dares take the initiative within his relationship, in the manager who will not take any risks but hires someone else to make difficult decisions for him, or in the leader who is too scared to make decisions - as we saw in the behaviour of the European leaders in the wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq. We stand by and watch. It is fear of failure that paralyses these men, and it can go on for years. They don't know whether to turn left or right, are scared of making a bad choice, scared they will do something wrong. They often feel guilty –whether they are aware of it or not- about earlier mistakes, and dare not step up to the mark. They are paralysed.

The wounded king is also reflected in the deadly dullness of officialdom and bureaucracy, in an overly thorough use of rules, in exaggerated etiquette and obligations that kill the spontaneity of the heart. It is the dreariness of politics, where authenticity often gives way to words and debate. It is the grey faces of people who go to work in the morning, where joy in the new day is hard to find. The Grail is missing and a thick grey blanket covers life. We cannot live, but neither can we die.

Most men devote their lives to what is expected of them: a career, money, success: expectations that are burdens rather than desires. Because of the white shirt their mothers have given them, men won't break out of these patterns, even if they loathe what they do. Very few men have the courage and ability to follow their hearts. Words such as authority and responsibility are always linked to external factors: someone else's authority instead of inner authority, and responsibility to our boss, wife, children or society instead of responsibility to ourselves. We are scared that if we do what we truly want, everything will go wrong, we will end up in the gutter, our wife will leave us. We have become afraid of our own spontaneity, vitality and authenticity. We have got used to behaving as we are supposed to, as we have behaved for years, instead of looking for what we ourselves want. We have strayed so far that most of the time we do not even know what we want in our hearts. We may not dream bigger than about money or sex, enough free time or a new car. But in the meantime nothing changes and the dreams remain dreams. We do not know how to make our dreams come true. We struggle on, without the desired effect. We are not satisfied, even if we become very rich and have lots of sex. It is as if we carry a big black hole around with us that cannot be filled. We have forgotten the key that opens the door to liberation on a deeper level: a liberation that brings us real peace, a deep inner peace with ourselves, with our partner and with the world around us. This is the beginning of the quest of the ring, the search for the Grail, the cup that will let our heart blossom again, that will heal the king and make the land fertile. We are waiting for the hero, that part of us that is prepared to take risks and defy the dangers awaiting us on the path of inner development.

THE NAÏVE HERO

Many heroic tales begin with the young hero leaving the parental home to set out on a journey. He has a holy task or a dream to carry him forward and he burns his bridges as he goes. In tarot, the card system from medieval times, this young and naïve hero is symbolised by 'the fool'. The archetype of the fool stands for the beginning of every process. We have a clean slate and do not know what will happen. Here we see the strength of innocence and naïvety. If we knew everything before we started we would not set out at all. Pablo Picasso writes: 'All paths are open, and what will be found is unknown. It is a risky undertaking, a holy adventure. The uncertainty of such hazardous enterprises can only be taken on by those who know they are safe, even in insecure circumstances, who find themselves in uncertainty and without guidance, who in darkness surrender themselves to an invisible star and let themselves be led by a higher purpose, instead of choosing the objectives from within the limitations of being human.'

Percival is the prototype of the young and naïve hero. He is inexperienced, and yet it is his soul's naïve strength that ensures that the adventure turns out well and the Grail is found. The young Percival is dazzled by the shining beauty of the knights' weaponry. He knows instinctively that this is his destiny. He is still under the influence of his mother, by whom he has been brought up, and who has tried to keep him ignorant of the outside world. She tries to keep him small because she is frightened that he may grow up to be like his father and follow in his footsteps.

Every mother and every son will recognise themselves in this story; the mother worries that her son will leave her and will turn out just like his father. 'You're just like your father' she will say, pointing a proverbial finger at him. She will do all she can to keep her sweet little boy far from the world of men. It is a rough and dangerous world, where violence rules or where high ideals are fought over. The man she once fell in love with has perished in the strife. This is true for most mothers in our times: the man they loved is no longer there. Instead, she has been left with a spouse who has long since lost his heroism and chivalry, or with a tyrant who cannot control his aggression and abuses his power. She will complain about her husband in presence of her son and tell him what a clumsy oaf his father is. When feminism arose, it looked as if complaining about men would become the acceptable thing to do. Men were enthusiastically criticised. With the rise of emancipation, women's magazines wrote about the ideal man, but real men paled in comparison. 'You get used to everything, except to men.'

By giving him a white shirt, the mother tries to keep the son pure and innocent. But his developmental path will lead him precisely towards impurity. The hero must learn about all aspects of life in order to comprehend it in all its brutality and beauty. Then, he will eventually able to look at the Holy Grail or destroy the ring. If he fails to meet the shadow, he will remain naïve and cause much damage through his ignorance and naïvety.

Sometimes men realise late in life that they have always worn the white shirt. They did what was expected of them, and believed in their innocence. They are like Oedipus in Greek mythology, who did not know that he'd killed his own father and that he was married to his mother. He was bent on punishing the culprit until the blind clairvoyant Tiresias showed him the tragedy of his fate: he was the murderer. Once he leaned the horrific truth, he gauged out his own eyes and wandered the world for the rest of his life.

It takes us a long time to face our own blind spots. They are usually crystal clear to others, but remain invisible to ourselves. If we are not initiated into the darker side of life, and over-identify with the innocence of the hero, we will unconsciously cause damage.

A contemporary example of the white shirt is the white collar, or the tight and spotless white shirt businessmen wear. They work in the outside world and are often not aware of what is going on in the darker corners of their subconscious. Because of this, businesses sometimes appear to lack conscience; they are still wearing their white shirts and are not aware of the pollution they cause or their negative role in developing countries. They are focused on profit and their positive effect on employment and they don't see their own shadow.

Another example is the leader who declares war on another country, in holy belief that the other is the enemy and deserves to be destroyed. We in the West have made first the Russians and later the Muslims into a collective enemy. Sacred belief often goes hand in hand with naïvety and black and white thinking. A crisis is often necessary to see the painful truth for what it is. I once gave a training session at a congress in Ural, Russia on the theme of Man/Woman. Once the men and women were separated, the women's group brought up the topic of abortion. It transpired that a Russian woman had on average 13 abortions over her lifetime. The women were furious about this, and when they re-joined the men and talked about it, their reaction was incomprehension. No one had ever told them that an abortion is problematic for a woman. They were still wearing their white shirt and were genuinely naïve about the harm that was being done within their families.

In order to lose his innocence, a son will have to leave his mother and her world to go in search of the missing image of his father. That is the path of initiation, which is often mentioned in stories and myths. Without making this journey, a man may well be happy and satisfied with what comes his way, but deep within him the unknown will keep calling, no matter how solid his defences, or how many insurance policies he takes out, or how thick the walls are that he builds around his heart. Life will continue to knock at his door.

Everyone will hear the call of the subconscious one day, when an incident, a crisis or an unexplainable event urges us to set off on a journey. A journey we have never made before, an inner one. It does not matter if we are young or old, at a certain moment we have to leave the parental home. We need to separate ourselves from the protective environment that was our whole world until that moment. We will have to leave the safe and familiar views we have grown up with behind, and step into the unknown.

THE GRAIL CASTLE

In Percival's story the call to an inner journey is represented by the vision of the Grail Castle. The description of the Grail Castle has strong similarities to the epiphysis. The epiphysis, or pineal gland, is found in the middle of the brain and performs the function of the inner eye. It is the organ responsible for insight, visions and clairvoyance. We know that this part of the brain stem is fully developed at birth, and unlike most other parts of the brain, barely grows.

This organ awakens in Percival, but disappears again just as quickly. When he wakes up the next day, the castle has disappeared without a trace. The visit to the Grail Castle is no more than a memory, only a vague impression remains of what was a clear vision the night before. We experience the Grail Castle as a mystical peak moment in our youth, but pay little attention to it at the time. We lose contact with the magical world and only come back to it later in life. It is a heightened state of awareness, the mystical unification that many mystics have written about and that we occasionally catch a glimpse of when we are in love or in deep meditation and feel connected to the other or to the world around us. Moments where we merge with what is around us and realise that we are, in essence, one with all of creation.

To Percival, his visit to the Grail Castle is such a mystical experience. The Grail Castle is his access to mythological reality. It is the world of the subconscious, the dream world of the soul. In the Grail Castle he sees images and visions that will stay with him for the rest of his life.

The gateway to the subconscious plays a role in many mythical stories. It is a rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, which Alice tumbles into as she chases after a rabbit. Once inside the hole, she encounters a world that is nothing like the ordinary world, but offers her puzzles and lessons about life. In the well-known American fairy tale The Wizard of Oz, the main character Dorothy is swept away from Kansas by a hurricane and taken to the land of Oz. Unlike her ordinary and rather boring life on a farm in Kansas, where she has to deal with problems any teenager may face, she finds herself in a world of colours, fairies and dwarves, witches and a magician who may be able to show her the way back home. At the end of all these stories the protagonist returns to the familiar world. Alice awakes from a dream. Dorothy gets back to the farm in Kansas by clicking the heels of her red shoes together three times. The story is over, but with one difference: the hero or heroine has learned some essential life-lessons, which help him or her to deal with problems in daily life.

In the Celtic tradition the 'Otherworld' or 'Anwynn' refers to a mythological reality. It is the invisible world that lies just beyond the ordinary world. Myth and ritual are gateways to this mythological reality. The lid of the holy well in Glastonbury –the magical island Avalon that King Arthur was brought to when he was dying- bears an image that symbolises these two worlds. It shows two circles overlapping in the middle. One circle represents the daily reality and the other the mythological reality or 'Otherworld'. Avalon was seen as one of the gateways to this other world, a magical place where the dividing line between the two worlds was thin as a veil. There are magical and powerful places all over the world. In ancient cultures rituals were performed in these places. In the western world, churches were often built on such grounds. In her novel The Mists of Avalon, Marion Bradley describes how the knowledge of the passage between the two worlds fades with the wane of matriarchy and the rise of Christendom. The magical world drifts further and further away from the ordinary world until it has completely disappeared in the mist of the subconscious. The elven world, Middle Earth, is close to fading away. The Elves are leaving for the grey harbours and their world, where the soul is tangible in every word and tree, is slipping out of memory. The Elven wood Lorien is one of the last places in Middle Earth where the Fairy world and the tangible world still touch.

In the Never Ending Story Michael Ende describes the necessity of keeping the link between the two worlds alive. If the link is broken and no one can travel between the two anymore, both worlds will die. It is the process of a person losing his dreams, his desires and his lust for life, and dying inside.

We can see that a long process of demythologizing has taken place in the world at the level of society. With the development of intellect and reason we have lost enchantment, the ability to make wishes and to dream. This means we have cut ourselves off from an essential part of human existence: the creative strength of thought, the power of the wish, the enchantment of story, and the magic of myth. If we want to survive, we will have to allow ourselves to be tempted to step back into the magical world. 'You have to put yourself in the path of the Gods, and that takes courage', the mentor says to young Merlin The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart.

In Native American culture young men went on a Vision Quest as a part of their initiation. That meant that they spent several days on their own in nature, often without food, and waited until the Great Spirit spoke to them. They understood their role on earth through the vision that they received, and were ready to fulfil their task. The most important part of the initiation from boy to man may well be finding clarity around this role. What we can contribute to the great variety of life becomes clear, and that adds purpose and meaning to life. We aren't here for nothing. Each of us has a specific task, a path, and the challenges and lessons that go with it. But we have mostly forgotten that task. We do lots of things, create all kinds of things, go to work every day, save for our pension and so on, but we have lost the meaning of life. Not only that, but we have lost our pleasure in life. We lose our joy in life when we don't know why we are here. We let ourselves be dragged along by the masses while dying inside. In mythological terms, the king is wounded and his land is barren. He has been wounded in his thigh –or as in Wolfram van Eschenbach's version, his testicles- and the only thing that can cure him is the Holy Grail's water of life or the destruction of the ring.

THE KING AND THE WATER OF LIFE

A tale that has a lot of similarity with the story of the Fisher King is the fairy tale The King and the Water of Life. This story is also about a king who is incurably sick. No doctor in the land can cure him. The only thing that can save him is the goblet with the water of life. His three sons set off, one by one, in search of the water of life. The first two sons ignore the advice given by a dwarf they meet on the way, and get stuck in a crevice. The third son listens to the dwarf's advice and eventually manages to obtain the water of life. He frees his brothers and brings the water of life to his father who is healed. Sometimes mythological truth shines directly through 'real' life, resulting in an amazing mix of myth and reality. This happens when we place this story over that of the Dutch Royal Family. Our previous 'king' –although he was called prince, not king- was incurably sick; no doctor in the country could cure him. He also had three sons. The same symptoms of 'paralysis' affected Prince Claus –the person I am referring to- as they did the Fisher King. He lived, but his life forces were gone and nothing could cure him. In his case too, it was clear it was not so much a physical sickness, as a sickness of the soul. It seemed as if his life energy was blocked. The spear of fate had hit and wounded him. Neither medicine nor intellectual analysis helped. The only thing that can help in such a situation is the water of life, but how do we find it?

THE WOUNDED FISHER KING

The Fisher King in the story of Percival is incurably ill. He cannot die, nor can he live. The land around him is arid and infertile. In Celtic and Egyptian traditions, the king was seen as the embodiment of the land. If all was well with the king, then all was well with the country and vice versa. On a mythological level, this can be interpreted in two ways. Seen figuratively, the king embodies the consciousness of his people. Because of his archetypal position, he is the carrier of the collective consciousness. He is the personification of the health and pride of a people, but also of what is supressed in a nation. Just as a child plays out the supressed sides of a parent, a king often represents the supressed sides of his people. Public figures such as Prince Claus, Princess Diana and Nelson Mandela all have had to carry the weight of their archetypal role.

The same situation arises in the business world: employees and managers are expected to be positive. They are supposed to only show their sunny side and hide their shadow side. The payback is often absence from work due to sickness or stress, buried problems and sabotage. So-called 'negative energy' such as not wanting to do something, being angry, having had enough, pain and sorrow, not seeing the purpose of something, conflicts within the team or differences of opinion over the direction to take, lose their negative effect if they are given space. But if they are not allowed to exist they nestle down in the subconscious and work away there until they are heard.

One can also interpret the king as the embodiment of the land in a literal way. There is a relationship between nature, the environment and the state of the king. The idea that the king and his land are one comes from agrarian cultures. At the time of the Osiris cult in Egypt it was thought that if the monarch flourished, the country would be fertile and prosper. Early Celtic sources tell us that once a year the king and queen would make love outdoors to nurture the fertility of the land and ensure a good harvest. These stories show the relationship between the consciousness of the king and the state of nature. The king as archetype carries nature, he articulates the voice of the earth and the people.

A second link is made between the king and the land in the myth of the Grail. It is the connection between the infertility of the land and the puncturing of the king's testicles, as described in Wolfram von Eschenbach's version. His fertility resides in his testicles: a man's seed. This is reflected in a worrying contemporary development: semen quality and fertility are decreasing. We haven't realised yet that in damaging the environment we are hurting ourselves and threatening our essence: our masculinity. We can find our fertility in connection to the earth, not only in procreation but also in our deeds. Because a man's testicles not only stand for his fertility, but also for his decisiveness: a man with balls. In our hunger for progress and prosperity we have lost our connection to the earth. We have climbed higher and higher, become technically more ingenious, we keep building taller skyscrapers, we are exploring the universe, but we have lost our connection to nature and our inner nature.

'We have strayed far from the invisible', wrote Princess Irene in her first book Dialogue with Nature. 'In actual fact this means that we have lost respect for the essence of things. The mechanical world has replaced wonder. We are orphans, separated from the magical power that lives in everything. We are not connected anymore. Not to the endless stories and experiences within objects, not to the forces of nature, not to each other nor each other's cultures, not to the elements, Mother Earth, the plant world, natural things, the spirit world, not to the animals'. Stories about nature's ailing health are becoming more frequent and more acute. Sick trees, animal species becoming extinct, poisoned ground, polluted air. The desert increases by 60,000km2 every year, while every year we lose an area of rainforest as big as Europe. That is a football field per minute.

When forced to sell his land, the Native American chief Seattle from the Dwamisch tribe said in an address to the white population: 'When all the animals have gone, humans will die of a great loneliness. What happens to the animals will soon happen to people. Everything is connected. What happens to the earth happens to the earth's children. We are a part of the earth, the earth is a part of us.'

We need to reconnect with the earth in order to heal and be whole. As long as we continue to strive for more and better, we won't be aware of the wound we carry around with us. Our heart is closed and the king is wounded. The time has come for all knights to go in search of the Grail.

THE RED KNIGHT

Before Percival can find the Grail he has to go into battle with the red knight. Who is the red knight? He is interpreted in a special way in the film The Fisher King with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges. We see a professor who has been paralysed by a traumatic event: he has lost his memory, doesn't know who he is and eventually ends up homeless and sleeping rough. He is a mortally wounded fisher king. Over the years he has got used to being homeless, but he is troubled by constant visions of being pursued by a red knight. When the red knight eventually attacks him, it becomes clear who he is: he is symbolic for the traumatic experience in his past. His wife was shot in the head in a shoot-out in a café while he was standing just in front of her. The red knight is symbolic for an event that was so destructive and extreme that we could not deal with it at the time, so we had to exclude it. We were able to survive because we excluded it, but in doing so we lost our Grail or life-energy.

We see the same traumatic paralysis in soldiers who come back form a warzone. They have seen things that have caused a sort of short circuit in their spirit. Their heart is closed forever in fear of the immeasurable pain and sorrow that they carry and cannot face. Their spirit has been broken and they use drink or drugs to try to forget the ghosts of the past, or -if none of that helps- by committing suicide in a final attempt to escape their torment. More soldiers took their own lives after the Vietnam War than died during it. Those young men's internal landscapes must have become utter wastelands, impossible to continue to live in.

I spoke to an Afghanistan veteran in Russia who told me: 'How can I ever relate to my wife and daughter in a normal way again? Laughing and playing with them, holding them, and being a father for my child: I can't do that any more, ever. That's broken. That is why I drink with my associates. If I can, I want to back to the war as soon as possible, maybe as a mercenary. War is the only world that I still know.' The red knight follows him day and night, in his dreams and in his imagination, making his daily reality unbearable.

Behind the ignorance and the naïvety of the hero lies the abhorrent truth of the red knight. The red knight will take on a different form for each of us. It does not always have to be as easily assignable as war or rape: sometimes subtler tragedies take place that we don't remember later, because we have carefully banished them from our minds. But the pain and sorrow that we carry in our bodies is often indescribable, without us realising it. These repressed feelings often manifest themselves at a time of crisis, but dreams or physical symptoms can help us access this unknown world in ourselves too. The crucial question in this adventure is: 'Who does the Grail serve?' Does the Grail serve our own desire, our own craving for fulfilment, our ego's need for power and rule? Or does the Grail serve the higher purpose that transcends the interests of the fighting parties, that offers a way out of the dilemma? This is an invitation to total surrender, not to the enemy or our ego, but to God. The choice is for each of us to make.