The Hidden Wisdom of Fairytales, Parables and Myths: Reflections on Self-Cultivation

By Allan W. Anderson

In Hidden Wisdom, Professor Anderson introduces the activity of self-transformation or self-cultivation through meditative reflections on so-called nonsense poetry and myth. Central to his thesis is the claim that, “without a willing change in attitude from fear to radical trust, and from reactive bewilderment to active attention no person can leave anxious worry behind and ‘cross over’ to tranquility.”

In the spirit of Don Quixote, Anderson contends, “that the road is better than the inn if for no other reason than that the sublime always looks ridiculous in the world of small talk and domestic ease. And yet it is precisely on the ground of the commonplace that every ideal must pitch and strike its tent or fail to own a habitation and a name.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664190009

Allan W. Anderson

Professor Emeritus Allan W. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Comparative Religion from Columbia University with Union Theological Seminary. He has published several articles on the I Ching and presented numerous papers at professional academic conferences on the nature of and interrelation between religion, spirituality and the oracular. He has also become well known for his series of 18 dialogues with Krishnamurti available on DVD and transcribed in A Wholly Different Way of Living.

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Allan W. Anderson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cover illustration: Tuvstarr and the Moose by John Bauer, courtesy of Floris Books, Edinburgh.

Front and back cover design with original art by Esperanza Zane.

Rev. date: 09/10/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

547746

To those incipient travelers who leave home in search of the wonders of the spirit.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

Editor’s Preface

Book I

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat: Plain Talk on Self Change

A Brief Synopsis of The Owl and The Pussy-Cat: Plain Talk on Self-Change

Introduction: To the Reader

The Self

The Marbo

The Mifflinger Sea

1. The Two Forests

2. The Tarn, or the Hyphen as Home

The Lost Loon

Hahna

3. Hearts and Crowns

First the Five

4. Horns and Halos: The Structure of Uncontrived Action

How the Pobbles Came to the Sea

Book II

Self-Awakening: The Myth of the Fall Revisited

Preface

Self-Awakening: The Myth of the Fall Revisited

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Contra-Sexuality and Self-Awakening

Appendix A: Leap the Elk and Little Princess Cottongrass

Appendix B: Self

Bibliography

About the Author

Abbreviations

Editor’s Preface

This is the fifth in a series of books by Professor Allan W. Anderson. With the apparent exception of Songs from the Mifflinger Sea and a little cove of Nonsense, which is a beautifully animated original collection of so-called nonsense poetry, all of Professor Anderson’s works are philosophical meditations on the knack of self-cultivation.

In this volume, we find Professor Anderson applying his gift for contemplative inquiry to poetry and myth. His is a unique relation to poetry, myth and parable. For Professor Anderson, the objects and events within these stories all lend themselves to an objective, transcendent meaning and are instruments of revelation into both the human condition and the divine – human relation.

We are deeply grateful to Esperanza Zane and Dr. Peter Gilboy for their invaluable assistance in bringing this project to fruition.

Bruce K. Hanson Ph.D.

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The Owl and the Pussycat¹

Edward Lear

I

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

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II

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-Tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

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III

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring? Said the Piggy, I will."

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

A Brief Synopsis of The Owl and The Pussy-Cat: Plain Talk on Self-Change

Despite the title, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (and Lear’s poem as a front piece), the effort in these essays is not toward explaining Edward Lear nor what he had in mind when composing nonsense. As pointed out in To the Reader, Thomas Byrom has already admirably attempted such a task. In his, Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear,² Byrom observes Lear was himself an original. And further, … the original, in leaving home and society behind, must be prepared to face the possibility that his separation will be permanent and – worse – that his search for the wonders of the spirit may be in vain. He must be ready to give up everything and trust that the absurdity of letting go of the absurd world around him will somehow show him a better way.

These essays are a reflection on that better way. They are intended as a spur to spiritual adventure.

In these essays, Anderson is pointing to spiritual activity through art. He provides several original so-called nonsense poems. But it is Helge Kjellin’s remarkable fairytale, Leap the Elk and Little Princess Cottongrass³ that provides the underlying source and structure for reflection throughout these essays.

The interpretation of fairytales has been a favorite occupation of especially Jungian depth psychologists – these essays are not from that perspective. The adventures of Little Princess Cottongrass and the elk are not meant to disclose the structure and complexities of human motivation, the proper province of psychology. The fairytale points to something much deeper. It contemplates the abiding mystery and structure of passage itself, the coming-to-be and passing away of each and every finite being. To this extent the fairytale is concerned with abiding traits of existence, but neither are these essays metaphysical abstractions. In fact, it is the case that while myth, fairytale and parable often contain sound metaphysical vision, these literary forms see reality under the aspect of event or activity, and event is essentially prior to intellectual reflection. It is the existential stance of the spiritual adventurer that these essays describe, informed by the teachings of Jesus and the Chinese sage Lao Tzu.

The significance for self-change of the coming, momentary standing and going of the elk in our fairytale is richly illuminated when contemplated against the two-fold teaching of Jesus. 1) The elk brings with him the opportunity and means for the little princess to become grown beyond the self-bondage of Dream Castle (unenlightened subjectivity) into the freedom of responsible and self-determining decision. This imminent end to her lower-level existence is contingent upon her 2) meeting well the unexpected on her journey with the elk, i.e., her circumstance, her neighbor. Two fundamental themes in the teachings of Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven (contemplated through the parable of the Prodigal Son) and the neighbor (contemplated through the parable of the Good Samaritan), imply precisely the circumstances our little princess finds herself in. She is in the middle between two claims. The first is from above and the second from her environment.

Chinese spirituality as expressed by Lao Tzu sheds further light on the opportunity for the little princess to grow in adequate self-relation. Chapter 3 of Lao-Tzu designates this activity wei-wu-wei. Most often this expression is translated non-action or inaction. This translation is misleading. The full expression wei-wu-wei links together something done, wei, which in doing, leaves something undone. Wu-wei.

The elk’s command to the princess to hold onto my horns, as he carries her out into the world, requires from her unconditional trust – trust without an imagined object. And so from the side of doing the princess must negate all that would distract her and so lead her to withhold trust. She must negate the possible refusal to allow timely action to flow through her. When contemplating wei-wu-wei from the side of non-doing we’re confronted with the basic question of attitude. The I Ching tells us that all that matters is that things should happen at the right time. (W/B, Hex 41, p. 591) The little princess must remain open to the timely demands of her own nature.

But the immanent demand of our own nature is always revealed within the context of our active engagement with our surround. Put crudely, no matter how attractive or threatening our circumstance, we must remain open to the necessity of the time as revealed to us by Tao. Without this open attitude we are left to our own contrivance. We are collapsed, as the Chinese say, into the mind prone to err, from which there is no possibility for tranquility and harmony.

Had our little princess perseveringly resolved not to let go of the elk’s horns she would have realized that things somehow happen by themselves, and simultaneously, that while she continued negating her refusal to allow timely action to flow through her, Providence was raising her into ever higher levels of being.

As Anderson summarizes: Now the view from below the sun (there is no new thing under the sun Eccl. 1:9, KJV) gives way to the view from the sun (behold, I make all things new Rev. 21:5, KJV). For the first time the future becomes unconditionally welcome and I journey in abiding surprise.

Introduction: To the Reader

The title, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat: Plain Talk on Self-Change, introduces the activity of self-transformation or self-cultivation through a number of little essays. Without a willing change in attitude from fear to radical trust, and from reactive bewilderment to active attention no person can leave anxious worry behind and cross over to tranquility.

This metaphor of crossing over is apt to mislead. It suggests that tranquility is a terminus toward which one moves after leaving anxiety behind. On the contrary, tranquility is nothing other than the end of anxious worry itself. Tranquility is one’s original condition. Remove anxiety, and tranquility re-emerges as the moon from behind a cloud. One does not try to become tranquil. It is enough just to leave off being anxious. This movement can be taught. Once having learned it by discovering the teacher within, I will never again need another. This is not to say that others can no longer lend me aid and comfort. Indeed, they remain an abiding, valuable and cherished resource, yet never again absolutely necessary for I shall have awakened from the sleep of self-bondage into the awareness of freedom.

Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussy-Cat is a masterpiece of nonsense and also a love poem. Such a combination in one literary stroke reveals not only his artistic genius but also a depth of symbolic wisdom rarely touched on in the annals of poetry. Here, I am using the word symbolic in a quite different sense from the way we usually employ it. Lear intends nothing else by his poem than the conscious madness of the poem itself. It would be an effrontery and an asinine pedantry to try converting the nonsensical into the common-sensical. And yet Lear raises nonsense into such a sublime plausibility that, as with the capers of gods and goddesses, we take it all in stride. Something so far out cannot but be in, and long before we know it we have joined the Owl and the Pussy-Cat and with them, hand in hand, on the edge of the sand we dance by the light of the moon – herself the patroness of nonsense.

Does Lear’s gift, his genius for a conscious madness express itself in a symbolism that evokes a latent spiritual sensibility? I think so. The following meditations are an effort to point to this sensibility and begin to observe its function. A mad consciousness (as opposed to a conscious madness) waits on an explanation of its underlying unconscious behavior that exhibits compulsion, obsession, neurosis and psychosis. Depth psychology refers these behaviors to a disordered relation to unconscious energies. Such behaviors are not, strictly speaking, consciously nonsensical. They make a mess of things precisely because they imitate badly, and sometimes lethally, actions which under different circumstances might be thought appropriate to their context. It is the hallmark of madness that it cannot see its own condition.

A conscious madness such as Lear’s sees not only its own condition but the contradictions inherent in consciousness itself. It sees also the contradictions within the ordinary life lived in the ordinary way.

My effort in these essays is not toward explaining Lear nor what he had in mind when composing nonsense. This has been admirably attempted by Thomas Byrom, Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear.⁴ Even here, though, Byrom is careful not to look for too specific answers to questions raised by Lear’s elusive detail. He observes that Lear was himself an original, half willing and half reluctant. He was also the inventor of originals, his ‘nonsenses,’ which often describe the punishment inflicted when an independently minded man dares to stand alone and test, with tiresome curiosity, the limits of ordinary understanding and tolerance. Further, "... that the original, in leaving home and society behind, must be prepared to face the possibility that his separation will be permanent and – worse – that his search for the wonders of the spirit may be in vain. He must be ready to give up everything and trust that the absurdity of letting go of the absurd world around him will somehow