(More writing by Alex Caldon can be found in his book The Quest For Truth; On Finding the Grail, which is released through the website www.thequestfortruth.co.uk.  FREE copies of the book may be obtained from there for certain people, making the Holy Grail truly available to all, just as legend states.  Happy Questing....)

Imagine.

You’re back from a shopping trip in the dusty, sweating city.  Your legs ache, you’d have a cup of tea, but the tea bags are in your bag and you left it on the bus.  You make do with water.  The grime sticks to your salty skin as you try to get some comfort on the old sofa.  This is the reality of your life.  Only Thursday, so another drab day tomorrow in a workplace with double its recommended quota of irritating people.  You don’t want to answer the phone when it rings as you fear you may have to tell a friend their partner is cheating on them.  You know it’s going to be traumatic but it seems to be the right thing to do.  Where’s the respite?  Much of our lives leave something to be desired – or at least it may seem that way.

For a change of scene, you want to get away.  This is your real life – this is it – your reality.  There are options for escapism – drugs, travel, sex, adrenaline, television.  That, at present, is your chosen path – chosen subconsciously maybe, but it’s what your routine has become.   The cat has peed in the kitchen, screaming love child, rent late, two weeks in Majorca, sex on the same bed, not as much as you’d like, fill the oil in the car, next door’s barbeque smells good, more wine, sick, flu, mother makes you feel guilty, lazing in the sun to the sound of petrol mowers, unfulfilled dreams, why didn’t your partner thank you when you spent so long travelling to see them?

You go for a walk down a country lane.

The post man seems a bit weird and you make sure he doesn’t look at your kids; your eldest child hid a knife in their coat sleeve - where is that going?

You stop by a large barn.

Last week a colleague put an arm round you.  You’re in a stable relationship, but it felt good, you want to have your cake and eat it, but you know it’s wrong.

The barn door is open in the warming sun.  You feel happier escaping to a rural idyll.

When you were at college, you took beta-blockers for nerves, they worked a bit, you made the grade, it looked good at the time, so where is that glorious career, why are you still in this dead end office?

You enter the barn, it’s full of nice-feeling old agricultural hand-tools.  The scene is lovely and different, but you are still on Earth – it didn’t take long to get here from home – you are still in reality.  You look in a cardboard box.  You see a cup.

Sweat, dirt, fumes, grease, muggers, radios, diesel, cans, carpets, haircuts, lies, love, death, mind-games, television, on and  on goes the stuff of life…on and on…

When you touch the cup, the barn you’re in ignites in gold light, and the cup levitates before you.  It is the Holy Grail.  In a glory of fiery beauty, it rotates slowly in the air, while a divine chorus of angels and strings spins your head – round and round and round till you lose consciousness…

What if it actually happened?

Imagine it.

Really imagine it.  Imagine the clash of reality and the Grail.  It’s pretty much impossible to get across in words how that could actually feel.

What would it be like to have that actually happen to you?  Forget legends and stuff.  Out of the blue, the myth you heard about and dismissed as such, is now a reality. 

! ! ! ! BANG ! ! ! !  Your mind is going to change.  How would you feel?  Try a thought experiment.  How would you actually feel?  It depends on your personality perhaps.  What sequence of events would be kicked off if you actually stumbled across the Holy Grail?  A thief might feel different to a nun – not that subscribing to a religion automatically means you’re a good person.  Your initial answer might be “excitement!”  Then what?  What do you do with the Holy Grail?  Take it to a museum?  But it’s more than just a relic; it actually has some mystical power to change things.  Use its power for good?  Would it look good on your shelf?  Show it off to your friends to gain kudos?  Would you be seduced by its power and allow your moral code to be destroyed?  Would you have the inner strength to turn it to good use?   Will you carry it home or hand it to the owner of the barn?  If you take it, it’s stealing – but what if the barn owner is a crook – can you entrust that power to someone you don’t know – what would happen then?  If it was used for good it might save lives and eliminate suffering, if you let it fall into the wrong hands, that benefit could be turned to evil.  All of a sudden your nice little real-life has become a great big mad situation.

And there’s more to it than that.  Can you trust your best friends?  If you tell one – what’s your motive for telling – to gain kudos?  You felt you must tell someone – but what if they tell another and another until inevitably one morning you open your front door and in rush a whole planet’s worth of TV cameras and journalists bursting in to root through your kitchen cupboards for a gold chalice?

And there’s still more to it than that.  You are a normal person.  You are the wrong person for this to happen to!  You were born in suburbia; you live in the same town where you were born.  You’ve just found the Holy-Bloody-Grail!  This isn’t right.  It should have happened to somebody more important, surely?  Paranoia creeps in.  You have the biggest secret on the planet.  You can go into a room on your own and say out loud “I have the biggest secret on the planet.”  But you can’t say it to anyone else.  Not even a psychiatrist.  You’re kind of up the creek without a means of propulsion.  It’s a natural part of human nature that when we experience something significant we feel the need to “download” that information to someone else – it’s nature’s way of keeping us sane by touching base with another person.  In olden days when we all communicated more it would be with friends or family or clergy, wise elders and so on.  Now we’re isolated by television, work and modern life, we sometimes use counsellors.  But you can’t do that with this problem: it’s too big.  You’re in something of a tight spot.  Even if you tell a qualified psychiatrist, who will have heard many way out things, there’s a pretty strong chance they’ll pretend to listen, whilst at the same time planning which is the best medication to put you on!  Oh (as they say) dear.  So where’s your rock to keep you sane?

A psychiatrist might describe the effect as like plugging a radio into an overhead power line.  It doesn’t do your radio much good – it’s information overload.  You discover that the Holy Grail fits neatly into your life in the same way that a Sherman tank fits neatly inside a lemon soufflé.

What does it mean to find the Holy Grail?  Some people view it as a physical relic; literally the chalice which Christ drank from at the last supper.  The Arthurian knights saw it as something more spiritual – something which could only be found by those who have a pure spirit.  As such, a spiritual grail could be seen as a reward.  But you can’t find it if you seek a reward – if you seek a reward, you are not pure.  Maybe it’s like Nirvana, or complete contentment perhaps.  Are there still people on Earth on the same quest as the Arthurian knights?  Yes, there are.  What are their experiences like in their search for the Holy Grail?  We will meet a few in our Quest for Truth…

The Grail has been lost for some thousand years, but it is very real.  Read on for more insights, here on my hubs, or in my book.  Happy Questing...