Mêtis & The Inner Cyclops

Odysseus in Polyphemus' Cave (Jacob Jordaens, 1635)

Following the thread of the previous posts, we delve  now into the famous, terrifying and humorous passage in the Book IX of Homer´s Oddyssey, where the sly Odysseus finds himself trapped with his crew inside a cave, where a Cyclops, one-eyed giant, starts devouring them mercilessly. And before we examine its meaning, let´s refresh it briefly:

We made a pleasant meal of wild goat, then next day I left everyone else behind and took my own crew over to the mainland. The first thing we saw was a big cave overlooking the beach. Inside were milking pens for goats and big cheeses aging on racks.

My men were for making off with the cheeses and the lambs that we found in the cave, but I wanted to see what manner of being made this his lair.

When the Cyclops –Polyphemus was his name– came home that afternoon, he blotted out the light in the doorway. He was as tall and rugged as an alp. One huge eye glared out of the center of his forehead.

He didn't see us at first, but went about his business. The first thing he did was drag a huge boulder into the mouth of the cave. Twenty teams of horses couldn't have budged it. Then he milked his ewes, separating out the curds and setting the whey aside to drink with his dinner. It was when he stoked his fire for the meal that he saw us.

'Who are you?' asked a voice like thunder.

'We are Greeks, blown off course on our way home from Troy,' I explained. 'We assume you'll extend hospitality or suffer the wrath of Zeus, protector of guests.'

'Zeus? We Cyclopes are stronger than Zeus. I'll show you hospitality.'

With that he snatched up two of my men and bashed their brains out on the floor. Then he ate them raw, picking them apart and poking them in his mouth, bones and guts and all.

We cried aloud to Zeus, for all the good it did our comrades. The Cyclops washed them down with great slurps of milk, smacked his lips in satisfaction and went to sleep. My hand was on my sword, eager to stab some vital spot. But I realized that only he could unstopper the mouth of the cave.

We passed a miserable night and then watched the Cyclops make breakfast of two more of our companions. When he went out to pasture his flock, he pulled the boulder closed behind him.

It was up to me to make a plan. I found a tree trunk that the Cyclops intended for a walking stick. We cut off a six-foot section, skinned it, put a sharp point on one end and hardened it in the fire. Then we hid it under a pile of manure.

When the Cyclops came home and made his usual meal, I spoke to him. 'Cyclops, you might as well take some of our liquor to savor with your barbarous feast.'

I'd brought along a skin of wine that we'd been given as a gift. It was so strong that we usually diluted it in water twenty to one. The Cyclops tossed it back and then demanded more.

'I like you, Greek,' he said. 'I'm going to do you a favor. What's your name?'

'My name is Nobody,' I told him. [1]

It turned out that the favor he intended was to eat me last. But when the wine had knocked him out, I put my plan into effect. Heating the end of the pole until it was glowing red, we ran it toward the Cyclops like a battering ram, aiming it for his eye and driving it deep. The thing sizzled like hot metal dropped in water while I twisted it like an auger.

Polyphemus came awake with a roar, tore the spike from his eye and began groping for us in his blindness. His screams of frustration and rage brought the neighboring Cyclopes to the mouth of the cave.

'What is it, brother?' they called inside. 'Is someone harming you?'

'It's Nobody!' bellowed Polyphemus.

'Then for the love of Poseidon pipe down in there!'

They went away, and Polyphemus heaved the boulder aside and spent the night by the open door, hoping we'd be stupid enough to try to sneak past him. Getting past him was the problem alright, but by morning I'd worked out a solution...

What does the "one eyed" Cyclops represents in ourselves? Aren´t there within us selfish impulses, mono-directional views, that devour all divine trace in our hearts, thwarting every possibility of evolving, of escaping the sublunar spheres? 

And what about Odysseus and his trickery?

To make the subject even more interesting, we may have a look at something Peter Kingsley unveils nicely in the work Reality: 

In front of the monster, he  introduces himself as Outis: Nobody. [...]

This is the point where the real  jokes begin –as Homer draws out through word-play after word-play all the ambiguities stretching from Outis through ou tis and mê tis, which in Greek are alternative forms for nobody, to mêtis.

As Odysseus laughingly comments about the episode, well after the events have taken place, it was his mêtis that allowed him to blind the monster because it allowed him to be nobody: ou tis, mê tis. 

(...)  from the time of the Odyssey onwards, mêtis would always be associated in the minds of Greeks with this particular episode; with this notorious play on words ou tis and mê tis. (Ibid p. 226)

Unconditioned Meditation – Part III

Many are the Oriental terms that in the West would be translated as “meditation”. We already saw a few and keep now searching for a deeper understanding of what “unconditioned meditation” might be. 

Certainly, in the East there are brilliant visions. Nevertheless, one does not need to look towards the Orient to find jewels. It is nowadays of paramount importance to connect with something that was lost, or should we say, remained dormant in the West, until the right time. 

Westerners should remember that a living Wisdom was once strongly present in Ancient Greece. Not the classical Greece of Plato and Aristotle, but an older one, covered by mists of confusion. 

By means of poems and riddles wise men of Hellas passed down an ancestral tradition whose central root is the flowering of a mindful Intelligence that unveils a stillness and infinite purity, a vastness behind the veil of moving forms. 

And given the allegoric nature of ancient thinking, such a gift of Intelligence was personified by Mêtis, goddess of counsel, craft and slyness, which propitiates the birth of Athena (Intelligence), from the head of Zeus, with as represented in the picture below.

Today this seem to us a complicated pagan riddle. Yet the research of Peter Kingsley came to shed light on it, showing how teachers like Empedocles were already hinting at the fact that the Mind of Light –personified as Mêtis, goddess of counsel– is the only way of living lucidly through the great Deception [1].



The key message of such an ancient Greek tradition is that never delusion makes more sense than when Mêtis is active. 

But let's avoid simplistic definitions of Mêtis and Mind –which, by the way, neurologists naïvely reduce to a brain function, without realizing that the brain cannot perceive itself. 

The mind discovered the structure of the atom, so the mind is more subtle than the atom –Ramana Maharshi.

And Intelligence is more subtle than the thinking mind, for it can unveil all its trickery.

In Empedocles poems it simply manifests as a divine intelligence that grows like a tree or a flower, feeding on the completeness of the present moment. Echoing his own words:

For humans, 

mêtis grows 

in relation to what is present [2] 

In this ancestral teaching, one does not despise the senses, as if they were the source of sinful delusions; on the contrary, the five senses are a gate leading to the intelligence or common sense that links them all, carrying one beyond distorted imagination.

Yet, warnings were also given, for the art of light-intelligence is not a path to be considered too lightly. She has its own power and can't be manipulated. A great paradox is that one can´t simply “decide” to contact such Light or “try to practice the art of intelligence" , for that is precisely a road of self-deception. Light is spontaneous, choiceless, or it is not at all.

There is only one thing in our hands, and that is attention to everything perceptible in the mind and senses: breath, heart pulse, sounds, the act of listening itself...letting mindful Intelligence work through oneself, unmasking hidden memories, emotions, impulses, false perceptions, not unlike insightful watchfulness of the Buddha.

It can emerge when we watch a feeling, listen to the wind, notice a sudden insight or a drop of water with all our heart, leaving the chatty mind behind.

And this act of allowing and illumining is really a high form of loving service, since it frees us and others from suffering.

We don´t even have to look for a specific location; all places are good for “giving up” and listening-feeling.  All perceptions are actually necessary bring light upon them.

Light-Intelligence adapts itself constantly to the ever-changing circumstances of life, making use of everything at hand to see through delusion, leading our steps, without being asked or even noticed. 

Life is full of coincidences and traumas which are but “hints” to discover the presence of invisible Light. 

In this sense, meditation can be seen as “measuring”  all perceptions on the unconditioned and invisible background of the Light of the Soul, the point that connects us to everything and the One. 

After all, the emerging and apparently disconnected objects of our experience are simply ripples on the serene ocean of Being. 

Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form 

(Sutra of the Heart)

Finding stillness through movement is indeed another quality of true Light, but that is something one can´t pursue directly. The art of Light requires looking at oneself first. 

With attention one can see all the personal experiences that mould the limited views of life, but it is Light what connects them to a much larger background, the infinite land of what we really are. 

In the presence of invisible Light, our falls, our moments of frustation and sorrow, suddenly become meaningful threads in the tapestry of Reality. 

All this appears simple and beautiful. However, the human mind has become so conditioned by self-conconcted fantasies that it is extremely hard for it to feel the simplicity of a deeper nature for long. 

We make all too complex. And most of the time it is because we don´t remember we are far more than thinking heads, or simply because “we try too hard” to attain something that, by its own nature, is ungraspable and belongs to what we never ceassed to be.

As we see, Light represents many qualities at once: counsel, prudence, right attitude, lucid vision...

And its power is even more needed in these days where everything is mixed up and undiscerned, even spirituality. 

Fortunately, all end meets its beginning. Our civilization was born with the Art of Mindfulness, and now, amidst its decadence, a reconnection is demanded in true listeners that have the courage to step out of an uncivilised social mass. 

Despite modern thinking is no longer allegoric and symbolic, much can still be learned from myths about these teachings. For example, it is not a coincidence that Odysseus was deemed to be skillful in mêtis.  But we leave that for the next post.

To go deeper into this art, it might be useful the ancient practice of incubation, about which you have an article here:

Incubation, a Western form of meditation, published on Abril 6 2009:

http://themusicofwisdom.blogspot.com.es/2009/04/incubation-western-form-of-meditation.html

Copyright 2013 ©

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[1] Reality is a nice book where Peter Kingsley has reflected deeply on this issue

[2] Ibid, p.512. More verses of Empedocles can be found in the section Sacred Poetry.