The Prince. A fairy-tale.

Sprung from the loins of Light, he is shadow-less, a singer, first-born of emptiness, waiting for a sign.He is Being, pure and untrammelled, a spark of the divine flame, a prince of conscious bliss.

From nowhere, a pale reflection suddenly appears, casting a haze upon him, creating a smoky backdrop of space-time for shadow and light to play at lovers, spinning worlds into being.

 Maya the inexplicable, great magic mistress, mother of infinite illusion, begins her spinning dance….drawing him like a moth to her flame. Hypnotised by her terrible beauty, the agony of desire fills him and he falls like a stone into the maelstrom of samsara…the fragmentation of unity and truth. His spark now hidden in a cloud of unknowing and delusion, he is lost in an unreal dream.

Thus begins the tale of tales, the birth of myth, the great adventure, the legend of a thousand lifetimes and a thousand worlds. 
Once upon a time: the lost prince, the fallen angel seeking his redemption, the prodigal son, the knight on the eternal quest….and so, the stories begin.

They carry him like a leaf on a storm through innumerable wombs and worlds beyond end in the dance of life and death and life again: and again and again. Tangled in the chains of  cause and effect, our prince is sucked into the nightmare, the tapestry of suffering, the cunning drama of a mind running wild. 
In the midst of this seemingly endless madness, this inevitable and fateful forgetting, can he find a way to remember who he truly is? Will he ever escape the enchantress and her wiles and find his way back home?

Fortunately, there are mysterious signs that appear upon his path, just when they are needed the most, and also guides who help him find his way: a talking animal, a kind spirit, an ancient tree, an old hermit, a bent crone, a sunny smiling child. They set him on the path to find true wisdom. 

At last, after many trials and tribulations, mistakes and wrong turnings, our hero finally finds the Master, who is the healer and magus and sage all rolled into one.
And the Master without points unerringly and emphatically to the Master within, turns the prince’s gaze steadfastly inwards instead of outwards, so that at last he can fathom his own mystery. Thus he finds his own true beginnings in the depths of himself, discovers once more the treasure that has never left him and that has always been the core of his being: his divine Self!

Like a diver emerging from the depths, he awakens to his own truth and emerges into the warm radiance of his true nature.

Is this, then, the grand enlightenment, the nirvana that is eternal and infinite joy?

Or is it all a dream in the mind of an author asleep on a park-bench at some cross-roads in a parallel universe?

Could it, perhaps, be both?