Wake up Horatio

In the last scence of Act I, Hamlet tells Horatio, "There are more things between heaven and earth, than are dreamt in your philosophy Horatio," after Horatio says to Hamlet that it is not possible that a Ghost can come back and speak to you.

It is an interesting statement to make. Hamlet is a play and therefore fiction, but that friendly admonishion is something which i have been thinking about. Horatio is the scholar and he has all the 'facts' - he is the learnered man, the man of reason. In his universe Ghosts do not exist. However here we have a Ghost, not only just an apparition, but one which also interracts with the living. These are old wives tales and supserstitions. As a man of science he cannot entertain this thought - and YET - yet here it is.

This is the essence of phenomonology - to observe as closely as possible and then develop a hypothesis which can be tested. Is that ever possible?

The Ghost is real and it speaks to Hamlet - or is it? Everyone has seen the ghost - er, but not everyone...

Volumes have been written about the reality of the Ghost - why could Gertrude not see him, was his speaking really Hamlet's Oedipal complex write large... etc etc... however, i think whether the ghost is real or not misses the point - the point is that we must keep an open mind at all times about new possibilities but we must ALSO maintain our thinking capacities and not get carried away with things which we cannot be sure about.

So be open minded, but at the same time measure and weigh each thing.

Keep asking questions, keep seeking answers...

Keep making links. Keep using all your sesnes to inform your thinking and your feeling to being the willing into this world.

In the lecture series Christ and the Spiritual World and the Search for the Holy Grail, Steiner brings together human biography as well as cosmology.

Right at the end he concludes the lecture with a long and astonishing quote from Johannes Kepler, the father of modern astronomy. In it Kepler says, i have observed, after all this time that the Earth and the Universe are infused with life - with a spirit, with a consciousness that is so very human and we are really a reflection of the divine. The Earth's anatomy, mirrors our own, and in the Sun and the Zodiac, we find mirrored the image that we have when we speak of the Trinity.

Steiner then says the Holy Grail is where we are living now. To recognise that this is all living and sacred, to be aware of it - the story of Parsifal is our story - we are Parsifal, we need to be brave, to ask the right question at the right time - and in so doing become the worthy Guardian of the Grail.

Each and every one of us. So the Grail is real - very real - but it is also metaphorical. And Parsifal is also both metaphorical and real.

What did i think when i read all of this? I thought many things... Here i am being asked to entertain the idea, an idea which has been spoken to us over the ages, in each and every one of our mythic systems and our stories - apart from interestingly, our current version of so called science, that our universe IS alive, our universe IS sacred, our universe has a consciousness... it is true, not just some imagining of artists and native indigenous cultures.

And when i first began reading this i thought this is ridiculous - then i realised that all my life i have been looking for something which confirmed my deepest intuition that we do not live in a heartless horrible place - that there are beings which even though we cannot see, yet are there - and now here i am doing research into a system which say lets us use all our faculty to live in that awareness and whatever it means. Allow that possibility to be for just a moment, and what does that feel like?

It feels completely miraculous - that i am not alone, we are not alone doing this. We are ALL blessed beyond measure. Each and everything that we do counts. We all make a difference, never ever doubt that. This is rooted deep within our human birthright that each life is one which is important in its own right and in our own journey we honour the universe. There is a beauty, a truth to this life, we only need look to find it - there it is, hidden in plain sight once again... it is more than faith and belief, it is knowing, and knowing that goes deep inside, that we have always had, if only we would allow ourselves to do it.

To take this consciousness and enable it to give us courage.

At this moment then, at every moment, everything is possible.