Musings with cancer

The Sword in the Stone…

I’ve been thinking a bit about transformation and change lately. The other night a thought sprung into my slightly muddied mind. I had been pondering about the impending chemotherapy in a week’s time and of what will happen inside me.

A sudden vision of the duel in T.H.White’s ‘The Sword and the Stone’ popped into my conscious mind. The duel is between Merlin and Madame Mimm, he the mentor of the young and still unaware Arthur and she the Wicked Sorceress, a child stealing and thoroughly un-nice person out to eat the young boy.

The duel is all about power and the ability to change quickly, adapting to the present situation.
They metamorphose into different creatures, she a cat, he becomes a dog, each one besting the other.

It is a battle of wills and of inspiration because eventually Merlin becomes a microscopic bacterium and infects her while she is in the form of a dragon, her most powerful and intimidating form.

Very David and Goliath, if you like the biblical metaphor; because of course Merlin has won. By being very small and very clever he won the day and Arthur’s freedom.

The whole book is about the metamorphoses of a boy into a King; the journey from servant to master.

Each stage of his teaching he is ‘shape shifted’ into different animals so he may experience the world the way it is for each on in its own habitat walking a mile in the shoes of each one. Every lesson is a story and every story has wisdom dressed in metaphor.
Because he is so young perhaps, the boy accepts the magic quite happily and with each successive transformation the donning of the ‘shape’ becomes easier. The lessons are more accessible as the procedure gets into the muscle of the boy.

Eventually all the lessons will have a muscle memory, so that when the King requires an answer to a problem the muscle will flex and release the energy of the boy’s memory for that problem.

Accumulative knowledge is something we do not notice. We become good at something – it gets into the muscle of our memory and becomes an automatic process, available at our finger tips without so much as a thought process to prove itself.

It is strategy, and it is what we learn from conception onwards.

These days though sometimes we forget that we can do amazing things. Sometimes we will be reminded and if we are open enough to the idea of there being a muscle there to flex, then sometimes we will remind ourselves how to deal with the Madam Mimm’s of our lives.

We can shift our consciousness to become small and to enter within our selves and fight the dis – ease inside with all the magic we can muster.
We are learning machines; we just have to be taught a different lesson sometimes.

We all know something we do not know we know yet (Milton Erickson) and we need to be reminded occasionally.

Who knows, with the right learning and the flexing of the right muscle maybe we too can pull a sword from a stone.

To help someone pull a sword from their stone go to the just giving page and help us to help Macmillan cancer support.

Even Indiana Jones recognises the need for space

Just in case anyone was wondering the line in Indiana Jones is in Erickson hypnotic language and is used in therapy to get you to do just that - get out of this space and into the space inbetween - this is where change occurs. Because it seems so nonsensical your conscious mind takes it and bounces it off a couple of walls until the unconscious mind picks it up and takes it and you where it should go - into the realms of possibility and suspense of disbelief.

It is also a metaphor for the Quantum field. Which is what all the scientists are arguing about mainly because it proves magic happens in that place - the space between the spaces. It alludes to the many worlds theory - I would recommend reading The Universe Next Door by Marcus Chown or google things like Otto Schroedinger (nasty experiment to prove a premis) then go look at Down the rabbit hole.
All from the search of the Quantum in the Universe - all scientific - all about being two places at once and the 'What if?' train of thought - which is what we need at this time in the world - like What if we stopped being arrogant, selfish, whingeing , me first, I want what you have GIVE IT TO ME NOW OR ELSE little shits, how many wars would that stop from being started - how may lives would it save if we taught not bigotry but a sense of responsibility for our choices? How much happier would we be?