(Don Quixote in his library, by Gustave Dore)
“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.”
A wonderful seer and counselor, a dear friend of mine, the Rev. Maia Chrystine Nartoomid recently shared with me a revelation she received. There is an actual bandwidth, she said, a frequency of sorts, which creates the matrix of this world – that “dull eye of custom” which most people call “reality.” This bandwidth depends on the semi-conscious cooperation of those millions who consent to live within the limits of that matrix. There are self-serving conscious forces which thrive on this bandwidth, and which strive to maintain it by various means, all aimed at keeping those consenting millions in a state of somnambulant half-life, stoked into a state of anxiety by a steady diet of fear from the corporate media, burdened by the carefully calibrated and nearly impossible to repay debts of easy credit and sinful interest rates, taking what comfort they can in superficial pleasures while struggling to enjoy authentic human love and family despite the necessity for working two or three jobs to make ends meet, and dimly aware that there seems to be an unseen network of hidden forces which control and benefit from this fog through which they stumble.
Yet the fog lifts on occasion. We walk out the door on the way to the car, to the commute, to the job, to the waiting stress, and happen to glance up at the sky – and it happens to be glorious. The morning sun has risen to an angle of warmth, and the grass is greening with spring. We may allow ourselves a deep breath of fresh air, may hear and actually notice the notes of a bird trilling from a nearby thicket. For a moment we step out of the fog. For a moment life itself is joy enough, the mystery of the color blue as we look up is enough to allow us a moment of untainted wonder and gratitude.
We have stepped outside the bandwidth.
Whether we know it or not, she said to me, if enough of us step outside that bandwidth, the world can truly transform – and with a speed and a healing power beyond our dreams. Because the world is, in fact, daily created anew according to the predominant consciousness of the human collective.
If there is a central mission to the restoration of Chivalry, it is this: to help and encourage that critical number of souls to wake up, to raise their vibration above that bandwidth of dull fear, so that one by one enough of us awaken to tip the delicate balance, to reclaim our divine freedom, that simple glory, and that comforting family dynamic which could unite humanity – and which is so energetically smothered by those forces which keep us in the fog.
A key factor, my wise friend informed me, is that this bandwidth is actually quite narrow. This is, she said, the hidden vulnerability of the dark faction. We surrendered our freedom to them, yes, but it would only require a fairly small shift in the frequency to shatter its dominion over us, and to transform and heal our wounded planet and our suffering family.
In my own quirky personal legend, humanity needs Alonso Quijana to rise from his deathbed and become again the incarnation of his personal legend. Alonso Quijana, the dying country squire of La Mancha, must re-awaken Don Quixote, must shake off jaded disillusionment and the grief of broken dreams, call to his faithful squire and his adored fair lady, Dulcinea, seize his lance, mount old Rozinante and answer “the trumpets of glory.”
Not many teenage boys are granted the chance to realize a golden dream as quickly and as completely as I did, when at the age of seventeen I was cast as Don Quixote/Cervantes in “Man of La Mancha,” opposite the brilliant Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Aldonza (who would go on to a brilliant Oscar-nominated film and stage career, earning a Tony Award nomination in playing this same role on Broadway in a revival some years later). I had lived and breathed the dream of playing this role for some years and had the good fortune to attend Oak Park-River Forest High School near Chicago, which boasted one of the finest drama departments in America at that time. The production was a remarkable one, and featured another future star, my genius-level good friend, Dan Castellaneta, who would go on to create one of the most indelible characters in American culture as Homer in “The Simpsons.”
(17-year-old Michael Dunn onstage with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Oak Park, Illinois)
It is easy now to regard “The Impossible Dream” as a trite paean to an antiquated Code, and to regard what was then a ground-breaking and brilliant musical as “that old piece.”
But that will not make Don Quixote go away.
In the final scene of the play – staged as a play within a play by the prisoners in the Inquisition’s dungeons in Seville, Spain – Alonso Quijana is indeed on his deathbed, having given up his mad dreams of life as a knight errant after his confrontation with the “Knight of the Mirrors” (his son-in-law, Dr. Carrasco, in disguise), who shows him his own image in a polished shield – not that of a gallant “destroyer of evil,” but merely a deranged old man, scrawny and ragged, pursuing a ludicrous quest to live by a Code of Honor which the materialistic march of history has left in the dustbin.
He tells Quixote, in effect, “the evil giant you pretend to slay is merely a windmill. Your gallant steed is a broken nag. Your faithful squire is a stupid peasant. Your “golden helmet” is the discarded basin of a barber. Your fair lady, Dulcinea, is a slut of a tavern wench whose real name is Aldonza. Everything you believe in is a lie. Your ‘personal legend’ is a laughable farce.”
This is the dull tune droned in our ears by the low buzz of that ensnaring bandwidth of the “half-life” of modern slavery.
But the prisoners don’t like this ending.
So the imprisoned Cervantes desperately improvises a different denouement – the return of Dulcinea.
The tavern wench Aldonza finds her way to the old man’s deathbed and pleads with him to remember her. His vision of her as the fair Dulcinea haunts her, and she cannot go back to her old life. Only in his eyes did she see reflected the image of her soul – and she begs him to restore that glory. But he does not know her.
“You looked at me – and everything was different. And you called me by another name.”
She sings to him his own anthem of devotion to his Lady Fair. “Dulcinea…once you found a girl and called her Dulcinea…won’t you bring me back the bright and shining glory? Of Dulcinea…”
And the Knight awakens.
“This is not seemly, my lady! On thy knees…to me!”
“My lord, you’re not well!”
“Not well! What is illness to the body of a knight errant! What matter wounds? For each time he falls he shall arise again – and woe to the wicked! Sancho! My armor! My sword!”
I make no apologies for the fact that I cannot, even now, decades later, listen to this without tears. There are dreams we should never surrender, and places in the heart which must always remain tender. As Dr. King reminded us, most people die at age 25 – we just don’t bury them until they’re 80.
In the 1970’s, when I played the role, the perfect timing I dreamed of never quite came together in that final scene – the tempo of the music never quite jelled with Mary’s exquisite sense of timing, and it was always just shy of my dreams of perfection.
Some 30 years later, in the midst of my quixotic struggle to actually restore a legendary Order of Chivalry, I was stuck in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway, and idly searched on my smart phone for something to listen to. An intuitive whim prompted a search for “Dulcinea Reprise – Man of La Mancha.” I had heard this final scene from the original 1965 cast album a thousand times but had not heard it in many years – so I decided to let it inspire me one more time.
The freeway was at a virtual standstill, so I was able to simply sit there and listen. But something was different. For it was not the 1965 original which had queued up on my I-Phone. The voice was hauntingly familiar.
(Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Maid Marian in “Robin Hood”)
It was Mary. This brilliant talent who embodied Dulcinea for me at age 16 was now a mature world-class performer – and this was the Broadway revival. And the scene unfolded in heartbreakingly perfect timing as her shimmering soprano went through my soul…and a middle-aged man sat in his Honda Civic on the ramp to the 405 with tears streaming down his face. A man who, so strangely and laughably, was now fully engaged in nothing less than a full-on quest to revive the Code of Chivalry and accomplish the lineal restoration of the Knights Templar in order to create a new international court of human rights.
(Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Aldonza on Broadway, with Brian Stokes Mitchell as Cervantes/Quixote)
That final scene is an uncannily perfect reflection of the magic alchemy of the spirit of Chivalry. For the masculine within us, the questing knight brandishing his sacred sword, can be beaten down by the harsh bleak world, and can even be persuaded by the dull hum of the matrix that his dreams of glory are merely pathetic delusions. He can be dictating his own final testament of defeat – “with one foot in the stirrup, and the agony of death already upon me”…when one last chance of redemption arises. The divine feminine aspect of his being awakens, and pleads with him to remember the shining chance, the divine ideal still alive in her heart – and to restore her to her own glory, to her own soul, to her own true name.
“When you spoke the name, an angel seemed to whisper…Dulcinea.”
And so, at the last moment, the old man awakens. He reclaims Don Quixote and restores Dulcinea. They rise in joy, call to his faithful squire, and sing of new adventures, new glories. But the strain is too much for the old heart, and even in the exhilaration of hearing “the trumpets of glory” the final stroke falls, and he dies in her arms.
The tavern wench, Aldonza, is left to realize, “A man died. He was a good man. But I did not know him.” As Sancho grieves for his master, she tells him, “Don Quixote is not dead. Believe, Sancho. Believe!”
He falters, unsure, and asks, “Aldonza?...”
And her answer tells the whole tale.
“My name is Dulcinea.”
So when you choose to live your personal legend, you blithely dare to incur the laughter of the world. As for me, I do indeed use a sacred sword and touch the shoulders of newly elevated Dames and Knights, and sing the ancient hymn “Non Nobis, Domine.” In our little-known and little-promoted Johannine Templar Order, we do indeed pray to be guided to face our own shadows and see ourselves as fallible but joyful servants. We openly strive to live by the code of honor, to speak truth, to seek justice, to protect the defenseless against tyranny. We don’t claim to be “the only Templars” - we simply to our best to live by the Code.
(The Consecrated Sword of the Johannine Templars in Crestone, Colorado)
The initiation of Templars is evolving to meet the 21st century. Some things can be taught, but others can only be experienced in the soul. Introspection, inner healing, meditation, and training in the ancient Templar sciences of sacred geometry and the right use of the holy power of the ley lines are all necessary to the Sacred Activist in the Templar lineage. But the transforming experience of initiation is an intimate and unique matter – between you and the Goddess, between you and the Holy Breath of the name of Allah, between you and sweet Jesus, between you and the Impersonal Light of Source. By whatever name or aspect Spirit calls you, that experience is waiting for you alone on your own brilliantly unique path.
You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say.