Iron John Chapter 13. Turning a single hair into Gold. Day two at the Golden Pond.
Iron John Chapter 13 Day two at the pond. When a single hair turns to Gold
The Masculine way. Differentiation
We have spoken about the three levels within stories. The three levels of stories we could also call three levels of Ego.
- The personal
- The communal
- The collective
The Feminine way, everybody, everywhere, all of the time.
The Great Mother archetype We have experienced the reality of the great mother archetype in all its glory and fecundity, creativity and communities. Our finger is Golden, we know and understand what that means. We dipped our hands into the magical waters. The magical waters recognized us and granted us her boon; our hands are now golden. Golden for what we can bring into the world of the true, the beautiful and the good.
See Eric Neumann book on “The great mother”
Our second lesson is about the personal. To learn about who and what I am and how I relate to the world.
Remember who we are, we are all princes of a divine King and Queen. The Wildman is her chosen tutor and we are being trained for Kingship. Part of that training is to come to understand that sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of an individual. Sometimes the needs of an individual outweigh the needs of the many; and we need the wisdom to know the difference between them. To know the importance of a single hair, a single person, or a single anything else in our Kingdom and, to not allow Identity politics and equality of outcome (so popular today) to defile that clear understanding.
The Narrative: “What has happened to the well?” “Nothing, nothing,” he answered, and held his finger behind his back, that the man might not see it. But he said, “Thou hast dipped thy finger into the water, this time it may pass, but take care thou dost not again let anything go in.”
The mentoring moment.
Notice the language of the wild man, he didn’t criticize the boy or shame him. He simply stated the truth. Something went into the pond and something came out. Sit beside the pond again and see what you can achieve, understand what defilement means on the second day.
I know this is a little obscure and perhaps even manipulative of the story. However, we are dealing with metaphor. The story has suffered many critical rewrites trying to make the story a moral teaching instead of a shamanic or soul one. So, let’s step around the criticisms and judgments and see what the story will now reveal.
The narrative: Behold, the gold well is as bright and clear as crystal, thou shalt sit beside it, and take care that nothing falls into it, or it will be polluted. I will come every evening to see if thou hast obeyed my order.”
By daybreak, the boy was already sitting by the well and watching it. His finger hurt him again and he passed it over his head, and then unhappily a hair fell down into the well. He took it quickly out, but it was already quite gilded.
An image of the four Masculine archetypes. Lover, Warrior, King, Magician. Note the women in the image they are expressing Masculine energy, as we all can. Men can also express Feminine energy. In the storytelling tradition, Masculine and Feminine are energies from the other world and express themselves through us all in this world. Masculine and Feminine by definition cannot be toxic, neither can the Patricharche. The patricharche is a collection of fathers. However, when these fathers are in the service of the status quo they can be unbelievably cruel, and toxic these are men whos Ego’s have been captured by the status quo. The ultimate state capture.
It is pointless to blame men for the violence in our society when the real culprit is the loss of soul, driven out by the status quo. The antidote to violence is more soul. This is why we are at the Golden Pond to discover our full Soul potential and bring it to the world.
The wild man our Mentor says Its time for the second lesson at the pond “Don’t let anything defile it.” There are a few tasks we must do:
- Don’t let anything fall into the pond and defile it. Solo work, Warrior work.
- Find out what a single hair represents, and don’t let anything defile the importance of what a single hair means. It means in part exploring the four Masculine archetypes. Warrior, Lover King, and Magician work.
- It also means discovering “I” I statements, M.K.P. understands about I statements.
- When I say “I” what am I referring to?
- What are “I” statements and why are they important.
- What is solo work?
- Shadow work. “His finger hurt him again (his wound and his shadow) and he passed it over his head, and then unhappily a hair fell down into the well. He took it quickly out, but it was already quite gilded.
- How is all of this connected to a single hair and the second lesson?
So where to start? Where we left off in the previous chapter.
The missing father and the missing Masculine.
From James Hillman “The Rag & bone shop of the heart.”
The missing father is not your or my personal father. He is the absent father of our culture, the viable Senex The elder who provides not daily bread but spirit through meaning and order. The missing father is the dead god who offered a focus for spiritual things. Without this focus, we turn to dreams and oracles, rather than to prayer, code, tradition, and ritual. When mother replaces father, magic substitutes for logos, and son-priests contaminate the Pure spirit.
Unable to go backward to revive the dead father of tradition, we go downward into the mothers of the collective unconscious, seeking an all-embracing comprehension. We ask for help in getting through the narrow straits without harm; the son wants invulnerability. Grant us protection, foreknowledge; cherish us. Our prayer is to the night for a dream, for a love, for understanding, to a little rite, or exercise for a moment of wisdom. Above all, we want assurance through a vision beforehand that it will all come out all right.
Without the father, we lose also that capacity which the Church recognised as “discrimination of the spirits”: The ability to know a call when we hear one and to discriminate between the voices.
The mother encourages her son: go ahead, embrace it all. For her, all equals everything.
The father’s instruction, on the contrary, is: all equals nothing – unless the all be precisely discriminated.
What is a single hair among a head full of hair? It is a hair “precisely discriminated.”
Hopefully, we begin to get a sense of the importance of the Single hair…a single whatever it is
When we say “I” I refer to my own unique identity. At this level I am not the same as you, you and I are separate and quite different. It would be better to say I am quite different from you. I am owning my unique identity and experience. I am claiming for myself the validity of my experience. The hallmark of a strong Ego. When using other pronouns besides I, the risk is projection, “They did this” , “we do that,” there is an immediate jump up one level to the community level or to the collective level. When that happens the individual ceases to be accountable because we can hide behind the “We”.
It takes a lot of will power to stay with “I did” or “I didn’t do”.
Once again, the three levels of Ego are:
- The personal. Solo work, work we can only do alone see next chapter “When a whole head of hair turns to Gold”
- The communal. We, they, them, us, ours.
- The collective. Everybody everywhere all the time.
In this time at the pond we are being asked to stay in the personal, solo work in the I symbolised by a single hair. The next trick is to get that single hair to turn to the gold of our Kingship.
The other benefit of the “I” statement is that by claiming my experience, my own shadows and projections begin to reveal themselves. To be King, we need to be aware of our own shadows. Unrecognised shadows can possess us and rob us of our objectivity. Unrecognised shadows can cause havoc in our lives.
So, what is Shadow? Shadow is a Jungian concept and is best explained by its context. To use Robert Bly’s idea again we come into this world a 360-degree person. We bring gifts and experiences of other worlds and other states of being. We bring all of that with us when we are born into the Planet earth mystery school; a survival course for the Soul. As set out in chapters 01 and 03.
Survival. In order to be loved and accepted by initially our parents, then peers, then the education system, and the business world we end up with about 10% of what we came with. Where did the rest go? It doesn’t die it goes into (shadow) and waits for our Ego to come and collect it. Or as the stories say, the cut off parts goes and live in the dark forest, slowly regressing.
The dark forest: In another way the story has already told us what happens. Where the split-off parts go. The Old king hungered for his missing bits of soul, He thought he could eat it at his table and so sent hunters into the forest to bring him back something Wild. The hunters went to the forest and found their own missing parts and never returned to the Castle Quo. Why would they? Perhaps they considered it a lucky escape and found their own Wildman of the heart. Perhaps they did come back and were so transformed by their experience that nobody recognised them. Like the young man who left the rural village and, went to the big city. Where he begged and scraped until he became a Doctor. Fifteen years later with his city wife, and the city car, he goes home. Hardly anybody would recognise him with the exception of his close family. It’s hard for the villagers to see him in his new context, so far removed from theirs.
This darkening of the forest is the place of Shadow as a metaphor. And so the forest became a dangerous place for the Status Quo.( see chapter??)
Cracking open the egg of the Ego. Soul on the other hand is waiting somewhat impatiently for us to come back to the forest and for the Ego to redeem the cut-off bits. The idea of an egg and redemption is celebrated at Easter in the Christian tradition. Richard Bach the author of “Jonathan Livingstone seagull,” wrote a book about this called “Running from Safety”. As a forty-something-year-old man he went back to his 7-year-old self; back to the forest if you will, and discovered that his 7-year-old self was now hostile towards him and wanted to kill him with a machine gun. It took quite a bit of negotiation for the two to come together again. We see this in the stories of:
- The Pin or Maiden Tzar
- The Frog bride
- Snow White and Seven Dwarfs.
- Briar rose.
Cracking open the egg of the Ego through:
- (unconscious initiation.)
- And cracking open the egg of the Ego through I statements. (conscious initiation.)
“I” groups and “I” statements. In exploring what a single hair means for those familiar with M.K.P. after an NWTA weekend training “New Warrior Training Adventure” weekend. There is an opportunity to integrate the experience of the weekend into our everyday life. This is called the PIT cycle (Primary integration cycle.)
Fellowship of the Quest: Like all good quests; quests are best started with a group as in “The Fellowship of the Ring”. In “The Lord of the Rings Series”. The members of the fellowship can support each other and give each other encouragement. Like the geese in a flock who honk to each other to encourage each other on their journey. In these groups where confidentiality is a given, and we begin to understand each other’s demons, we can do our own work. The tools to speak to machine gun-wielding seven-year-olds as a metaphor, are also shared.
That single hair and “I” statements. I statements are about differentiation. One single thing amongst many. The Masculine way.
When we say “I” we are claiming and taking responsibility for our actions both good and bad. As we begin to do this, our approach to the machine gun-wielding child is easier; the child will now at least listen to us. Like every betrayal, trust is slow to build and “takes time and a certain difficult repentance”
However, we need a confidential safe place to practice this at first.
I am not a mechanism. By D.H.Lawrence
It is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,
that I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self and the wounds to the soul take a long,
long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long and difficult repentance, the realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing of oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
Time to rebuild the trust, however once done, it is stronger than before as we admit our own weaknesses, remain humble and accepting of our mistakes, admitting them to ourselves and then voicing them so that they stay in the light.
Withdrawal of projections. Another advantage of I statement is the withdrew of projections. Projection is also best understood in its context, here is a little story that shows us how and what projection is.
A farmer was ploughing his field and was almost finished when the plough hit a rock and broke. Wanting to get to planting without delay the farmer saw the plough was not repairable without going on a long journey to town. Ok what to do? Ah. His neighbour has a plough. Maybe he would lend it to me. So, off he set to his neighbour’s house, quite a drive. On the way, he’s thinking, what if he won’t lend it to me? Hmm. Maybe he would hire it to me, Ok that would be ok. I’d pay R 100 to borrow it, what if he wants R 200? No that ok I’d pay R200, By the time he gets to his neighbour he is very angry, having worked himself up to a R 1000 for the plough. He knocked on the door. His neighbour answers with a smile. The farmer in his fantasy anger snaps at his bewildered neighbour “If you think I’m going to pay R 2000 to borrow your fucken’ plough you’ve got another thing coming!”
Our projections create our reality. Like the farmer, we create our own reality through our belief systems. If we believe all women are bad drivers and we see any woman driving, we will find something bad in their driving. If we believe all men are bastards and we watch men, eventually they will do something to deserve the label bastard. And so the projection is fulfilled and reinforced against any evidence to the contrary.
When we have covered this ground, our understanding of the individual will bless us with a single Golden hair. Knowledge of the importance of “I” and the single individual.
The Narrative: “Thou hast let a hair fall into the well,” said he. “I will allow thee to watch by it once more, but if this happens for the third time then the well is polluted, and thou canst no longer remain with me.”
Continued on day three. Chapter 14