What Is Spirituality without the Supernatural

In the first two stanzas of his song, All Along the Watchtower, Bob Dylan portrays a place where “business men drink my wine, plow men dig my earth.”  In the third stanza, however, we find ourselves in very different place -- at a watchtower, with a princess in the wilds.

In the first two stanzas we are in the secular world of common, earthly affairs.  It is male, the earth is tamed, the dimension is horizontal like the plowed field.  In the third stanza we have been transposed to a world more female, wild, and vertical like the watchtower.  The difference between the stanzas is akin to the difference between the male, heroic world of the Iliad, and the wild world of the Odyssey with its many goddesses and the watching, waiting Penelope.  To put it shortly, in the third stanza we have moved from the secular sphere to a different sphere – which we can tentatively label a transcendent sphere.

The journey to the watchtower, in Dylan’s song, brings to mind the Grail Quest in the Arthurian tales.  There we also have a separation of space between two spheres, but what a strange space it is.  The knights, realizing that there is neither path nor direction that can get you to the Grail Castle, simply ride into the wilderness and turn themselves over to forces beyond reason or will to guide them.  We are given a spatial metaphor, but at the same time we are being told not to trust it.

Taking the spatial metaphor as literal is simply a misunderstanding, though a very common one.  We know how to journey through space and time -- we are prepared for that, even if it is through dangerous territory.   But a journey like that of the Grail Knights or of Odysseus, where we must forsake our own powers and give ourselves to powers beyond our ego, is much more frightening.  The powers, like spiritual transformation itself, are of the mind, nothing supernatural is required.  But it does not belong to “our” psychological power.  From the point of view of the ego, these energies are outside of it.  They are unconscious. 

If you, my reader, are content to stay in the land of commerce, this blog is not for them.  If you, Dylan’s Joker and Thief, feel in your bones that there is more, that hopefully you will find something here of value. I can say anything here that aids anyone’s quest, then I have fulfilled my purpose.

Finally, we will take from Dylan’s song a motto for this blog: “Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”