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from 2 december 2001 blue vol II, # 14 edition |
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an interview with Laurens van der Post by Nancy Ryley
Laurens van der Post:
Well, the great Quest for the Grail, which transformed
the Middle Ages, was the discovery of the importance of the feminine. It was
a quest for wholeness; it was a profoundly religious quest. But in our
versions it was a quest which a knight did in service to his lady. It was
the wakening up of the feminine which brought the Medieval world out of its
darkness. It's a very, very great quest and it's very relevant to this day.
NR:
In the myth of the Quest for the Holy Grail, the hero Parsifal asks the
wounded fisher king the crucial question: "What ails thee?" Do we need to
look for the answer to this question in order to heal ourselves, and heal
the planet?
LvdP:
Of course, that's what we all must do. We must all do inside
ourselves, with our own imagery and our own spirit, what is told in this
great story of Arthur and his knights. We have to do a search for a Holy
Grail. But we have to do it in a contemporary way, not in an archaic way of
Knights riding through woods and rescuing people in distress. We've got to
rescue our own people in our own parts of ourselves which are in distress
and bring them into a common search which is the search for wholeness.
Wholeness means holy; they come from the same word originally. To make whole
was to heal, was to be whole, because in the beginning all sickness was
spiritual sickness. We didn't say illness was caused by a germ; illness was
a sickness of the spirit, even more, almost, than a sickness of the body. So
this search for wholeness is a profound symbolic presentation. All thought
in human beings comes to us, first of all, in imagery. Then we transform it
with words into what we call thought, and ideas, and concepts, and so on.
The Grail story is the telling in imagery of what we have to do: to search
for wholeness, to prevent the part from becoming the whole. It's the
greatest legend that the English-speaking world has, because the Grail is a
container. Grail is an old Proven word for a great vessel which was put on
the table at night and the whole family, the whole community, would
partake-eat-out of a common bowl. So this is for mankind a whole container
of spirit. It's like the milk of the cows, the milk of human kindness of the
cows. Compassion, love-it's all these things-and the Grail story tells that
you must partake of these things.
NR:
In the Grail legend, as I understand it, the sick king symbolizes
sterility of spirit which is so prevalent in our world today. Around the
castle the kingdom-or king's lands-have become a wasteland, which would seem
to mean that the king's spiritual state is being projected onto the natural
world around him. Is the myth showing us that as long as our collective
psychic wound remains untended the earth itself cannot be made whole again?
LvdP:
I think so, yes. In the symbolism of royalty, love plays a significant
role. And so we must start and discover our love of the Earth again. We have
got that love in us but we've just trampled on it; we've exploited it for
our own narrow egotistical needs, just for our comfort, purely for its
sensation values. We don't realize that if you love something it's not
really love unless you also serve it; you don't just exploit it. We don't
give back to the Earth what we take from it. We think it's an endless source
of taking and giving to us, instead of being a really loving partnership
between two. It implies caring and feeling for the other as you do about
yourself. So this is what we've got to come back to. I think it's the most
important thing in life. And once we start recovering the love for the
Earth, we'll discover our love for one another.
NR:
I wonder if people are unable to love the earth enough because they
haven't participated mystically in it; in other words, they haven't had a
religious experience in nature where they felt the sacredness of every part
of nature as the Bushman did. Most people today don't allow themselves that
experience.
LvdP:
I believe every human being starts with that reverence. It's
astonishing that here in the city, one of the few good things that have come
out about television are the nature programs. People in London lap them up;
they've never known it but they immediately say: "My God, this is what we've
been missing." These are the most popular things in television. The moment
the human being sees them, he realizes this-because the pattern is there
inside himself. And he says: "My God, how has this happened to us?" So we've
got it to start with as children-it's inside ourselves. But then we start
exploiting it and guilt and envy and greed move in. And if they rule the
human spirit there's no room for love or reverence left in it. Just look at
what we do to the earth every day. People have a feeling for nature but they
push it away. They can't look, really, at the Earth with love because
immediately they would have to change their ways, and they're so comfortable
in what they're doing. So we're stuck exploiting the earth for the moment,
until the earth turns and rounds on us, as she's about to do. And then we'll
really sit up. I don't know what we'll do when that happens because it's
coming near to that point.
NR:
What do you think is going to happen?
LvdP:
Well, I can't tell, but obviously we're going to run out of air to
breathe and water to drink, because the air is already polluted, the water
is poisoned, and the earth is being washed away and won't grow things. I had
some rain forest Indians here last year who said to me: "These storms that
people get, don't they see that Nature's telling them what she shall do to
them if they go on the way they do, cutting down our trees?" The evidence is
so plain of our wrongdoing, and when you do wrong, you can't love. We do
wrong to the earth. You can't do the wrong without giving up some of the
love.
NR:
Sir Laurens, you've tried hard to save the Bushman of South Africa from
extinction. Do you think that everything you're saying about our lack of
love for the earth applies to what we have done to our aboriginal peoples as
well?
NR:
Are you pessimistic about the possibility of reversing what you see as
wrong in our attitudes and values today?
LvdP:
No, I'm not pessimistic. But one's got to acknowledge what the area is
and what's wrong. You asked me what I feel, and I say we are the sources of
evil, of our own evils. We are, and until we face up to that fact we won't
get it right. But I think we are beginning to face up to it. I've heard that
somewhere in Canada at this moment, on Vancouver Island, they're cutting
down trees, and all sorts of people are going and lying in front of the
trees to try and protect them. Well, that's a good beginning, you know.
People know what's wrong. We don't need a wise man to tell us what's wrong.
The rain forest Indians I told you about said, "But why do you do this? Can't you see that the Great Spirit is going to come and he'll take you all away as you've taken all his things away?"
NR:
But we don't believe in the Great Spirit in our culture.
LvdP:
Well, yes, there you are; that's what we've been talking about. As
I've said to you, the problem is in the religious dimension. Our not
believing in the Great Spirit doesn't mean that He's not there. So that's
what's gone wrong. This neglect of religion, the area of the master pattern
as I call it, is completely excluded from the values of rational modern man.
I mean, the French Revolution officially declared that there was no God. The
monasteries were not allowed to come back to France until DeGaulle's day,
after the war. God was dethroned officially in Paris, and a goddess of
Reason was put in His place. So it tells you what's wrong. In Russia you
couldn't be a member of the Communist Party unless you were an atheist.
Well, that's collapsing now, and all these godless things are beginning to
crumble. Because what is wrong in Russia is a sickness of the soul, a mortal
illness of eighty years of a denial of the soul. And the soul is beginning
to rebel.
NR:
It would seem that nothing less than a revolution in our consciousness
about "what ails us" will help to heal our sick souls and re-connect us
again to the earth. But even if enough people are able to make the journey
into wholeness that you've been talking about, will it be in time to save
the planet, do you think?
LvdP:
I think so, yes, in the end. Fortunately the answer is not in the
hands of human beings only, because Creation will have something to say
about it. And when Creation pronounces judgment, that will be something
which even the Book of Revelation may not have properly foretold. It's
pretty grim, but it may be even be grimmer than that if we don't heed. So
there's a tremendous task in front of us. Finally, the answer is that unless
we turn to a full partnership with nature, we're in peril; we can be knocked
for a six at any moment. It's simple; it's really very simple. I mean, one
can't help sort of being in the role of the Old Testament prophets and so
on. They were always warning the Israelites and the Jews about what was
going to happen to them, and nobody listened. There's an immense amount of
warning going on in the world at the moment. But I think, in the end, we'll
win through.
NR:
You really do believe that, do you?
LvdP:
Yes, I do. If we can match our sense of obligation to life, if we can
match our sense of obligation to what we know, then we could add enormously
to what is going on in the cosmos. I think our role could be almost divine.
That is the challenge-to match our sense of what we owe life, of what we owe
the sources of our knowledge. If we match that, as I believe we must one
day, the role of the human race would be absolutely priceless.
- Nancy Ryley
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Nancy Ryley:
Sir Laurens, you have said that as a civilization, we no longer
have a myth to guide us and therefore our lives have no meaningful purpose.
But you have also said that the story, or myth, which would have the
greatest meaning and importance for men and women today-if we could live
it-is the Quest for the Holy Grail. Why do you say that?
LvdP:
Yes. Life in nature was far kinder to the Bushman, for instance, than
civilization was Our civilization has destroyed him. He did us no wrong;
he's never done us any wrong, but we destroyed him. Why? It's as I said: we
destroyed him because he's part of the earth-instead of loving him too. He
was part of that natural thing, and we just thought he had no right to be
around. We thought he was wicked if he saw a sheep and killed it, because
that was our property. Yet we were killing his animals all 'round him all
the time. It's plain as kindergarten stuff how wrong we are. We just make
excuses all the time, but it's so plain that the fault is in ourselves.
There are accidents and things of nature, one knows that. But the wrong,
what's being done now, and what is going to destroy us, is what's in
ourselves. We can't blame it on God, we can't blame it on nature; it's in us
and that's where the battle is, inside every human being.
An excerpt from Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on the Meaning of Environmental Illness" by Nancy Ryley. Interviews with Laurens van der Post, Marion Woodman, Ross Woodman, and Thomas Berry published by Quest Books $16.00 [ISBN 18006699425].