Once upon a time there lived yet another wise King and Queen.  They had a beautiful family of young children and lived in a land where the conditions for farming were good, with arable land and sufficient water for the crops most of the time.  Not too far from their kingdom economic hubs were starting to develop.

The daily life of the royal family was healthy.  The King managed the lands and the staff, dealt with the buyers of produce to establish what exactly they wanted and what the market rates were.  He tried to plant what was required by the members of his community within the constraints of the actual climatic and soil conditions.  He did all he could to find the right seeds for the products that he wanted to grow and made sure that they were of the highest quality.  He considered the amount of labour and effort required to allow the seeds to yield the best harvest possible so as to be able to supply the products at the most reasonable rates to those needing them.  He also wanted his staff to experience the correctness of proper planning and that through this, their efforts were not in vain.  He wanted them to learn as much as possible.

The King also shared all he could with his children, all of whom he loved dearly.  When they were little he simply took them with him on his errands and let them experience the tone and mood of things.  He knew that he was feeding something in them that they needed for their own inner certainty and balance going forward in life.  As they grew up, he taught them to care for, groom and ride the horses.  He allowed them to fall, be trodden on and nipped by the horses as is the reality when dealing with horses.  Later, some of the children wanted to take part in gymkhanas.  They had watched as the Queen took part in these and were taken in by her strength and agility, her determination and courage.  They wanted to be like her.  So the King shared the real life he lived with the children, subtly and gently.  They walked the fields with him hearing the comments that he made and felt warm and comfortable in his presence.  Sometimes, however, the King faced difficult situations with people.  The challenges of nature he could only feel as blows or blessings of destiny, but the challenges he faced with people wanting things for nothing, or thieves or carelessness, he had to be very wary of.  The children did not like being near him when he was faced with these circumstances.  He called these people those in search of make believe.

The children were shown beauty wherever it appeared by both the King and the Queen.  The beauty of nature from sunsets, to clear running streams of water, to a crab showing its pincers, to the flight of large birds and the busyness of the small ones.  Deeds of kindness and courage were drawn to the children for their own consciousness by the King and the Queen.  Their souls were fed with the stubborn reality of facts, beauty and possibility.  The latter was portrayed in discussions over the regular dinner times when they were all together and situations were discussed about school happenings for example.  The King and Queen were very particular in pointing out to the children that there may be reasons or circumstances that had led to the teacher doing what they did.  Often, after pointing these things out, the children would laugh at themselves and see that there was another reality that their limited experience had prevented them from seeing or understanding.  The children needed the King and Queen for these situations.

The Queen played her part in keeping rhythms in the household, organising healthy food and creating a holy environment with her care and dedication to the festivals.  The Queen wanted the children to see beauty, feel holiness and experience love in the home.  She knew that the world of make believe could be more easily found with one sided views on things than if the children were able to see it holistically, from many sides.  The queen knew that ‘it is not what her children did not know that was going to be a problem, but rather what they did know that was not so’.  She knew that if she could show them that there was always a broader view, another angle from which to look at things, that they would be more inclined to fix their view and not be lured onto the path to the world of make believe.

As time progressed and the kingdom lived on with ever shifting realities of what was farmed and who the customers were, the King and the Queen were always learning and guiding their subordinates and children as best they could while dealing with the blows of destiny and the ever changing influences developing around the kingdom.  They themselves were continuously being tempted to open the door to the land of make believe.  Reality was harsh but it kept them from the door of the land of make believe.  They learned things the hard way but valued this even though their subordinates struggled to see this as a reality.  They were partially in the world of make believe and saw the comforts of the royal family as unfair.

In the areas over the hills near where the great river flowed into the sea, the economic activities were starting to mushroom.  People were leaving the farming areas to go in search of the material possessions offered through the possibility of earning higher wages.  They left their health, their connection to the earth, their community for the attractions of the city.  The King and Queen, as is necessary for those that wish to stay away from the world of make believe, wanted to broaden their understanding of the world and went to visit the city.  They prepared for the trip in great detail.  The King had the horse cart carefully checked in the barn, the axle, the springs, the grease, the leather leads and poles.  The Queen carefully packed their bedding and clothes.  The King took the cart for short trips to get the cart horses prepared and familiar for such a long trip.  Just before they were ready to depart, the King sent two of his most reliable men on ahead to make sure that the road was passable and that there was water and accommodation as planned for the King and the Queen and their support staff.  The King and the Queen were apprehensive but needed to find out what was going on in the world in order to be able to deal with the challenges that were starting to affect their kingdom.  The day of their departure dawned and the King took from a small stash of gold coins, a few, enough to cover the expenses that he would need to incur for this venture.  It seemed a lot for him to take from the small stash.  He wanted to keep them for the possible bad times of his kingdom, but also wanted to know the truth about the new activities in the city nearby.  The journey began with the Queen knowing that she was needed to support the King with her courage and strength as guardians of their kingdom.  The children were left to the care of the elders of the Kingdom.

As they approached the city after a long day of travel, the horses were sweating and tired, they met the advanced riders who guided them to their Inn.  Here they were welcomed by a man with a grumpy attitude who demanded their money immediately.  He could not recognise their humanity.  He placed his value in the gold that they did or did not have.  This was his only measure of the meeting with the King and the Queen.  They, however, felt that this was not reality and wondered where the Innkeeper was on the road to make believe?  The next day, the royal party travelled on horseback into the city leaving their cart behind at the Inn.  They planned to return that night again to the sour Innkeeper.  They had decided to visit a school in the city to see what it was that the children were being taught.  The kind headmaster of the school took them around showing them the mathematics, science and sports curriculum and the facilities, explaining that all that the factory owners wanted was people that got good marks in these subjects.  Science and mathematics took up one third of all academic time, languages, history and geography the other two thirds.  Sports were about winning the game at all costs.  Cheating was part of this if it could go undetected.  When the Queen asked about farming, religion and human development, the headmaster dropped his head in a kind of forlorn way and said that the emphasis had changed.  He went on to talk about the changes in society within the city.  Parents worked and children were not guided and cared for.  They were unsupervised. They were sent to boarding school.  They had access to alcohol, cigarettes and drugs to which the Queen had to ask what the latter two were.  The headmaster was a mine of information and understood more about the world of make believe than the King did.  He had also come from the rural areas and a caring, wise, objective and real life.  He identified this reality in the King and the Queen and realised that they still needed to understand the world of make believe that the city was making a reality.  He went on to explain the deeper sides of this world of make believe. He described how more and more people could only believe something if they saw it. They had no more wonder about a wisdom that they still had to discover.  They knew everything about one thing and this was enough – they were closer to the world of make believe than others.  Then there were those whose hearts were even dimmer.  They judged everyone else as being unworthy. They sought out people who were just as cynical as themselves to be around.  They became so sure that what they believed was the absolute truth that they developed a blindness to any other possibility.  They made everyone else around them into enemies.  The possibility of the world that the King and Queen came from was not a remote possibility to these make believers who are so far advanced in their quest for make believe.  Every now and then, one of these people within a prejudice group would see into the state that they were in and want to return to a warmer world of more reality.  The chief make believers would keep them away from going to mix with learners, musicians, artists, artisans and so on.  They would convince them of the bad ‘out there’ and suggest that a bit more effort to be self-sufficient was all that was required for happiness to return.  They knew quietly, the advanced make believers that they would lose their own position of power if they let others find reality and warmth by mixing with healthy people.  They saw themselves as healthy and found solace in negativity, sex, blame, hate, isolation, drugs, technology and alcohol.

By this stage of their day the King and Queen were feeling shattered and dirty.  They were horrified at how far and how deep the world of make believe could go. They could clearly see the dangers and were grateful and appreciative of the control of himself that the headmaster demonstrated.  They could see that he had developed the strength to know the world of make believe and yet not sink into it.  The time had come to thank him, be sincerely grateful to him and to leave for home.  They could see the challenges that faced them in their kingdom. 

And so, they returned to overnight at the Inn with the sour Innkeeper with much more compassion and understanding and left the next morning early with a deep feeling of commitment to showing their kingdom the beautiful side of humanity even more strongly.  They could not prevent people from finding the world of make believe, even their children, but they could find ways to show the world of reality, despite its very harsh trials, tribulations and blows of destiny.  They could do this by giving real skills, real experience and care to their subordinates. They knew that they must encourage clarity, objectivity, love, compassion, openness and selflessness.  They were committed to this, to the humanity in their children and staff.  It would not change all they thought and did within their kingdom, it would only mean that they would be more focused on sharing the reality of true humanity as opposed to the world of make believe and the slide into irrelevance that the world of make believe led to.

The kingdom continued to live in reality to greater or lesser extents.  This depended on how well the King and the Queen were able to nurture their own humanity and share it with those more likely to be tempted by the world of make believe.  The Princes and Princesses grew and took over this striving to a greater or lesser extent and everyone learnt.