By Raphael Awen

King Arthur’s knights were ever drawn to escape the mundane, the everydayness of their lives. 

These sensitive and hungry souls had grown to despair of the emptiness of their culture, and their lives within that culture. 

They sought an escape into deeper meaning and purpose and an outer form of nobility and purpose to answer an inner unfelt loss of connection with their own nobility. God forbid that they should live out their days without a conscious quest to fill their sails. 

Is a monk of any stripe really any different? Or a renunciant – one who gives up something lesser for the attainment of something higher? What about the man seeking to make himself ‘independently wealthy’ – having no need of anyone or anything, or the hedonist pursuing every pleasure that men may come to know? The hedonist and the renunciant share a common hunger for something truly comforting.

So common to men of any background is the seeking of purpose and power within that purpose. Men are fleeing meaninglessness. Men will readily settle into a career or a family role because it stems this aching pain and discomfort coming from not knowing and feeling who they really are at a deeper level. 

Men who are not in touch with these deeper needs, the ones that really drive them, are then easily manipulated by agendas too numerous to mention – be they of the highest spiritual orders or the lowest callings known to men. Wouldn’t most of us trade in control or our sovereignty in exchange for comfort?

Men want more than anything to feel good about themselves, and if that means dedicating one’s life to helping others in order to feel good about themselves, then so be it, as long as it promises that they will get to feel good about themselves in the end.

The problem however comes in the constant delay of that promise – the futureness of it. ‘I’m so noble, I can delay my gratification of this need till later, in service of others.’ Men slip into settling for any kind of lessening of their pain of their disconnect from actually knowing and feeling their worth and their meaning, having long ago settled that they are not meant to ever know or actually live from a place of their worth, their value and true comfort. 

True embodied worth, that flows from within, that doesn’t rely on any outer circumstance or creed, that you can feel, that can colour your moments with the deepest creativity and engagement has long been written off as a dream, a myth. We are only left with a kind of nobility that makes the best of a really hopeless situation.

These kinds of dedicated happy campers, god bless them, are everywhere. Each of them with their alms begging bag extended before them. ‘Bestow upon me some spare change of worth and acknowledgment for the choices I have made and the example I am willing to be, during such a time of unprecedented loss’.

This all hits so close to home for me. At fourteen, I recall feeling so bored of being bored, longing to find freedom in anything that promised relief. The Christianity of my family heritage felt so compromised and lacking in passion, that I broke away into something much more engaging with a much higher bar of commitment and dedication. As a man to be, I needed to set my sail with a worthy quest to navigate the sea of meaninglessness that was all too real on every side, at every turn. 

It has taken a number of decades this life, and in numerous lifetimes beyond this one, to get to the place where I can feel that the true holy grail quest; from which flows every grail quest; from which flows every draft of any purpose ever imagined or set sail into; is actually about realizing the value and worth that lives inside, that has always lived inside, that awaits our choice and discovery. I can say I am truly coming to know and feel this worth and have my own experiential emerging felt reality of this kind of aliveness. I also feel the invitation for this to be the magic of an ongoing process, rather than some quest-ending instant gratification of these god given and god being kind of needs.

Only a man in growing touch with this inner worth has hopes of being enough for a woman, for a career, for a calling, for a quest, for belonging to a true circle of men who live in shared resonance with one another.

Having landed here in Glastonbury, England, a ‘fortnight’ ago, I am especially feeling King Arthur as a Metasoul brother wanting to digest and feel together with me the dissonance that still lives in men, especially in the men of the highest attainments, whether of spiritual or material pursuits. He says, ‘We got hoodwinked into thinking that if we chose nobility, duty and obligation, we would be guaranteed to find the deepest fulfillment, only to come full circle, after a long time spent in the desert in that lease of consciousness, and patterned brotherhood, having attained many things that felt so meaningful at the time, only to find out that we were ever still searching for the true holy grail, which was hiding all that time in plain sight, and yet for most, still remains hidden.’

The problem now comes in when feeling how to embrace such an inner quest without needing to enroll men into it for the purpose of feeling better about ourselves. Men must choose this for themselves, in their own time of sacred awakening, when the clock has run out of the necessary time spent in these previous domains – all of which are equally sacred and necessary to the inhabitation of the quest now arising. It can’t and won’t arise until it does.

I’m returning today and plan to return many times to the burial site and tomb of King Arthur here in Glastonbury inside of the Abbey ruins to feel this great cycle of death and rebirth that all men and mankind must grow into and go through. The once great Abbey that was the wealthiest in all of England, that held so much power and purpose in its many iterations over many centuries, by and for men of so many stripes, is seen to be coming from a worldview of domination, both of oneself and of others. Men of meaning and influence had to be in exchange with this centre of power to be granted lease and influence among men. Now, it sits in ruin as a 3D tourist attraction for tourists to scratch their heads in bewilderment at how and what such a thing was really about. 

I feel Arthur saying that he knows all too well now, what such a thing was all about – It was about the willingness of men and women to pool unimaginable resources into a patched together harmonious flow that promised this deliverance from meaninglessness. It was ultimately and humbly to serve as a bad example, of what couldn’t ultimately work, for the real needs of sacred human men and women, even as it shone a bright light and moved us in powerful new directions that were necessary and needed to bring us to this current flow of consciousness that is now arising – finding true worth and meaning that can only be found within, as Yeshua said, ‘where moth and rust does not corrupt, and where thieves cannot break in and steal.’ Domination itself as a way of life is in its sacred death and rebirth phase and we who are feeling it are the Ambassadors and the Death and Rebirth Doulas that are holding space for this sacred shift, along with its attendant new way of being. 

This is the true kingdoms and queendoms of heaven on earth that we are invited now to explore, to choose as deeply as we can in any and all moments, that thread meaning and deep purpose into the very fabric of your life as you currently know it. This is the true grail quest that we are invited to embrace, that gives purpose, direction, guidance, meaning and empowerment to all of life.

Much love, and wishing you deep strides on your sacred grail quest.

Raphael Awen

soulfullheart.org/sessions 

I work one on one with men in session space and the SoulFullHeart process to assist in this kind of personal awakening. If this calls to you, I’d like to hear from you. I’ll send you a few questions and a guided meditation for you to undertake to find us a starting place together and we can go from there in a way that is tailored to your needs and life. More info is here: soufullheart.org/sessions.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life.  Visit soulfullheart.org for more information about sessions, events, videos, etc.