To be king therefore is to hear silence. Silence is wisdom. ‘Silence,’ said the great sage Sankara, ‘silence is the proclamation of the Absolute.’ If you stray away from your silence, you can always go back to it, with the help of reason, reason that ‘feminine’ gift to lonely man to find himself back. It’s the gift of woman’s compassion that gave back sense to man. If the world were only peopled by men, by silence, you can see there can be no world. Why should there be a world at all, one may ask. The answer is, Why not? Why not silence shape words, the king marry his queen, which may be the woman or the kingdom (just as he had married the high priest in the beginning)—all is marriage where necessary duality is shown to be non-dual. Colonel House was the masculine principle, and Wilson, the kingdom, the queen. Wilson thought he ruled in his own name. He had forgotten the knowledge from which he drew his substance. Unable to function in duality, Wilson was paralysed, and died a miserable man. And that is how all empires, all kingdoms end. When Napoleon forgot the Pope which should have crowned him emperor, he did so on his own, he had his Waterloo, and his St Hèlène. Nobody has power except it be from Truth. From Truth flows compassionate reason which pulls you inside yourself, always the woman says, the kingdom says, the world says, go back to your fire, your potency, and there you are fire, the masculine principle, divine because you are impersonal. But men, forgetful of this compassionate reason, make her a slut, and drag her through the shouting and violent populace, who only know she is not Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette was a foolish woman,10 but to drag her through the streets of Paris in shameful hue, did not bring peace. The populace did not remember in their anger and sorrow, they had cried, they wanted Marie Antoinette back, back from her Versailles. You do not make a slut of Marie Antoinette. The only way to bring reason back to Marie Antoinette is to push her, make her king, a virile king. If the king had turned to the true Rome within himself—to the Roma nobili, of the medieval hymns—like Napoleon tried to do for a short while, Louis XVI might yet have saved France. De Gaulle came and tried to bring Marie Antoinette back to her husband. In the process De Gaulle crowned himself king.

Therein lies the source of all disaster. For unless you are shadowless you never can be king.

IX