The Little Prince

By

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Summary

The book starts with the little prince on his own planet, this is the symbol for the new born child, who is, a child of the universe. The little prince, is, the inner child of the narrator, our proof for this is that he knows the answer to the question, that the drawing of the hat is actually a snake who has eaten an elephant. Eventually each being needs to go out from it’s bubble of security, and discover more and more the world about us. The prince leaves his planet, and meets archetypes of the grown up world, each is floating around on their own little planet, disconnected to the rest of the universe.

Finally he lands on earth where he meets the narrator, who has crashed his plane in the desert.

The narrators inner child has come through the journey of innocence, to the age of reason where he now asks perpetual questions. He has also become disillusioned and scared by the detached and cynical nature of the adult world.

Some sort of trauma that has happened in the narrators life around this period of integration with the wider world has been left unattended at the sub conscious level, psychological and/or emotion. As a cause of this/these events, the narrator in later life has ‘crashed’. Finds himself in the desert, emotionally/psychologically, and now needs to reconnect with his inner child, to heal the wound from this past time period.

The book

The narrator begins with a discussion on the nature of grown-ups and their inability to perceive “important things”. As a test to determine if a grown-up is as enlightened as a child, he shows them a picture depicting a snake which has eaten an elephant. The grown-ups always reply that the picture depicts a hat, and so he knows to only talk of “reasonable” things to them, rather than the fanciful.

This first part of the book is showing us that we are talking about something that is not connected to the rational, or ‘mental’,‘grown-up’ mind, the main concept behind this story is about connecting with something more innate, intuitive, something that is bred out of us as we assimilate ourselves into the ‘grown up’ world.

The narrator becomes an aircraft pilot, and one day, his plane crashes in the Sahara, far from civilisation. The narrator has an eight-day supply of water and must fix his aeroplane. Here, he is unexpectedly greeted by a young boy nicknamed “the little prince.” The prince has golden hair, a loveable laugh, and will repeat questions until they are answered.

The prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep. The narrator first shows him the picture of the elephant inside the snake, which, to the narrator’s surprise, the prince interprets correctly.

The narrators plane has crashed he is in a state of urgency, on rationed supplies of food and water, in the middle of the desert. Thirst, hunger, and the blazing sun. Under these type of conditions, we can easily enter into altered states of consciousness, have hallucinations, see mirages etc. But most significantly the protagonist has come face to face with his own mortality. Having just survived a plane crash he may feel he is lucky to still be alive, and he will also be aware that his chances of survival in the desert are low. This gives us a heady mix, the knowledge that he could have just died, and a sense that we may not survive the current situation.

Such times will often instigate deep self reflection. The fact that the little prince appears now and interprets the drawing of the elephant eaten by the snake, correctly, suggests that the narrator has reconnected with his ‘inner child’, or the ‘inner self’ that sees the simplicity of the world without complex mental interpretations.

After three failed attempts at drawing a sheep, the frustrated narrator draws a simple crate, claiming the sheep is inside. The prince exclaims that this was exactly the drawing he wanted.

Here, the pilot has failed ‘once again’ to attain the expected standard, at least by grown up standards, but suddenly he finds that the voice of the inner child is less complex and is delighted with the drawing.

The judging higher standard of the adult mind, the narrators, but when we connect at a deeper level of consciousness, we can ‘see’, that things are perfect, just as they are, the mind of the Petite Prince.

The fact that he had to do the drawing three times could be an allusion to what I call, the ‘rule of three’.

If we catch ourselves caught up in mental proliferation, in that moment we come back to a centered awareness. Conscious that we are caught up in thoughts, in that moment, we are ‘with’ the reality of the moment. After a period of time, usually quite short, the mind will chime in again. It can be anything, but it is usually a subtler layer of mental thoughts.

“What should I do now?”

“Is this the rule of three?”

The mind is simply not in it’s comfort zone unless it is directing things. We can pick up the old thought chain we have just come out of, or it could be a new dialogue that catches our attention.

As soon as we re-enter into another ‘mind-stream’, if we ‘see it’ quick enough, we can come straight out of it, if we can do this three times on a row consecutively, than we can shift into a deeper layer of consciousness, where the mind is more settled, and less likely to distract us, at least, for the next immediate passage of time.

The narrator tries three times to draw a sheep, but each time it is rejected by the Petite Prince, then the last drawing which is something from ‘left-field’, is accepted. To convert to Judaism, the person must come to the Rabbi three times. On the first two occassions the rabbi must refuse. Only if the person ‘comes back’ (to awareness) for a third time will the Rabbi accept the request to become Jewish. In terms of the practise of the ‘rule of three’ we don’t become ‘Jewish’ we enter into a deeper layer of conscious awareness.

Over the course of eight days in the desert, while the narrator attempts to repair his plane, the prince recounts his life story. He begins describing his tiny home planet: in effect, a house-sized asteroid known as “B 612” on Earth. The asteroid’s most prominent features are three minuscule volcanoes (two active, and one dormant or extinct) and a variety of plants.

Coming more directly to the ‘Powers of 9’ the Petite Prince can represent the ‘spiritual position’ of being the king over his personal domain, the king over his sphere. The image of the Prince standing on his planet is also of the practitioner that has transcended the sphere. This is Shiva who dances upon his mini-me, or Vishnu who surfs upon the cosmic serpent, floating in the infinite ocean of unmanifest existence.²

The Petite Prince in one sense is like Vishnu, he is surfing his little asteroid, his kingdom, and he is also the phallus symbol coming out of the oval feminine symbol. The difference between the two, at least at the beginning of the story, is the Prince represents the natural innocence of childlike awareness, while Vishnu has totally overcome his tendency to become caught up in the thinking mind, he is truly free and liberated.

The home asteroid of the Prince is ‘B 612’, those who have read ‘Powers’ will know that this particular breakdown of the 9 is especially important (6+1+2 = 9).

In this case, the 6 which represents universal energy, love, kundalini, is the first number, the most prevalent in the level of consciousness at the time of birth, or early innocence. The 1, the sense of oneness, and unity comes next, while the sense of duality, the 2, is the last number. This is the last element of consciousness to form, but the first we need to transcend in the awakened state, which can be represented by the number 9,216. So, the 216 is the exact opposite from the ‘innate’ or condition of innocence represented by the number 612.

On his planet there are three volcanoes, two active and one dormant. The three volcanoes will represent the trinity, while the dormant one, will represent the third eye. The third eye is naturally more open in young children, but is then said to ‘calcify’ and close over as we grow up. A significant part of ‘rebirthing’ is the opening of the third eye.

Already in the first few chapters the numbers 3 and 6 have been popping up regularly, the three volcanoes, the three attempts to draw the sheep, the narrator made the decision to become a pilot at six years of age, and is writing down this story exactly six years after it had happened. We also learn that the asteroid was first identified by an astronomer in 1909, although this total year has a root number of 1 we still get the ‘09’ component, and it was only recognised ‘officially’ in 1920, which has the root number 3 and gives us the 3/9 balance.

The prince describes his earlier days cleaning the volcanoes and weeding unwanted seeds and sprigs that infest his planet’s soil; in particular, pulling out baobab trees that are constantly on the verge of overrunning the surface. If the baobabs are not rooted out the moment they are recognised, its roots can have a catastrophic effect on the tiny planet. Therefore, the prince wants a sheep to eat the undesirable plants, but worries it will also eat plants with thorns.

The concept of the enormous baobab tree growing on such a small planet can give us the image of the roots tearing it apart. In the book he talks about other people who have not paid attention to small Baobab trees growing which later destroyed the planet. In spiritual/psychological terms the baobab is a big mental complex, a giant in biblical terminology, a thought chain, that, if we let it take seed in our psyche it can be overwhelming and tear any semblance of mental balance apart.

The prince tells of his love for a vain and silly rose that began growing on the asteroid’s surface some time ago. The rose is given to pretension, exaggerating ailments to gain attention and have the prince care for her. The prince says he nourished the rose and tended to her, making a screen and glass globe to protect her from the cold and wind, watering her, and keeping off the caterpillars.

Although the prince fell in love with the rose, he also began to feel that she was taking advantage of him, and he resolved to leave the planet to explore the rest of the universe. Upon their goodbyes, the rose is serious and apologises that she failed to show she loved him, saying that they had both been silly. She wishes him well and turns down his desire to leave her in the glass globe, saying she will protect herself. The prince laments that he did not understand how to love his rose while he was with her and should have listened to her kind actions, rather than her vain words.

The narrator gets caught up in material concerns, trying to fix his plane, and gets angry with the Prince who is still asking questions about sheep. I’m not sure whether we can align the young princes questioning innocence with the more spacious space of present mind awareness. But we see the conflict between materialistic and the more simplistic states of mind. When the narrator realises his ‘mistake’, he re-connects with the Prince, and he then opens up and tells him about his ‘love-story’ with the rose. The rose may also be connected to the rose cross, the symbol of the Rosicrucian order, a mystical school that Saint-Exupéry may well have been connected to.

Leaving his planet is possibly also the loss of childhood innocence and the calcification of the third eye. He had known a simple sweet love with his rose, but there is still the lure of discovering other aspects outside of his planet. At a certain point in our development we need to explore the worlds of others in order to better understand our own world.

The prince has since visited six other planets, each of which was inhabited by a single, irrational, narrow-minded adult, each meant to critique an element of society. They include:

• A king with no subjects, who only issues orders that can be followed, such as commanding the sun to set at sunset.
• A narcissistic man who only wants the praise which comes from admiration and being the most-admirable person on his otherwise uninhabited planet.
• A drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of drinking.
• A businessman who is blind to the beauty of the stars and instead endlessly counts and catalogues them in order to “own” them all (critiquing materialism).
• A lamplighter on a planet so small, a full day lasts a minute. He wastes his life blindly following orders to extinguish and relight the lamp-post every 30 seconds to correspond with his planet’s day and night.
• An elderly geographer who has never been anywhere, or seen any of the things he records, providing a caricature of specialisation in the contemporary world.

It is the geographer who tells the prince that his rose is an ephemeral being, which is not recorded, and recommends that the prince next visit the planet Earth. The visit to Earth begins with a deeply pessimistic appraisal of humanity. The six absurd people the prince encountered earlier comprise, according to the narrator, just about the entire adult world.

Again the 6 comes back, as the number of planets that the prince visits after leaving his own and before coming to earth. The planet of the lamplighter had 1,440 sunsets each day (1+4+4+0 = 9). 144 is another powerful breakdown of the 9 and can be found in a lot of spiritual literature including the bible.

The last planet he visits is asteroid number 330 also a root number of 6, and the 33 is also a particular spiritual number, age of Jesus at the time of crucifixion, and 33 vertebrae in the spine.

Since the prince landed in a desert, he believed that Earth was uninhabited.

When we first come into a space of self awareness, after a short time, we can have the sense of being in a barren space. This is Neo who comes out of the Matrix and into the dank, bland world of the space craft he now finds himself on. The Petite Prince is in the desert.

He then met a yellow snake that claimed to have the power to return him to his home, if he ever wished to return.

The snake represents kundalini energy, it is only through this connection and the opening of the heart chakra that we can come into the awakened state, that we can come back ‘home’. Surfing our sphere, with full consciousness. At this stage the practitioner has had a taste of the rising kundalini, but is not able to rest deeply into that space yet. I also like that the middle two letters of home give us the Om, the Hindu chant that aligns/harmonizes our internal vibration with the universal energy.

The prince next met a desert flower, who told him that she had only seen a handful of men in this part of the world and that they had no roots, letting the wind blow them around and living hard lives. After climbing the highest mountain he had ever seen, the prince hoped to see the whole of Earth, thus finding the people; however, he saw only the enormous, desolate landscape. When the prince called out, his echo answered him, which he interpreted as the voice of a boring person who only repeats what another says.

The result of this connection to kundalini is the meeting with the desert flower, that gives him an insight into the human nature, how we are blown about by the constant machinations of the mind. We have no deep base of understanding, we have lost, ‘that’ sense that we are a part of the entirety of the natural world. This insight also sees him shift into deeper states of consciousness, represented by him climbing the highest mountain he has ever seen. Being at the pinnacle of the mountain is a reference to the opening of the third eye. Still the heart is not open. The landscape remains desolate, and the mental sheath takes hold again, dialogue sprouts up again. In meditation we can also catch the ego-mind when it starts to repeat cyclical thoughts. This is an insight into the nature of being caught up in mentation.

The prince encountered a whole row of rosebushes, becoming downcast at having once thought that his own rose was unique and thinking his rose had lied about being unique. He began to feel that he was not a great prince at all, as his planet contained only three tiny volcanoes and a flower that he now thought of as common. He laid down on the grass and wept, until a fox came along.

The illusion held by ego-mind, that we are something special, at certain moments during the spiritual journey can be crushed. We can be opened up to our own folly, our smallness or insignificance. There are numerous rose flowers out there, or souls of other beings, that are equally as beautiful as ours. The sense of being that special one must be shed. This is the moment that the prince breaks down and cries.

The fox desired to be tamed and taught the prince how to tame him. By being tamed, something goes from being ordinary and just like all the others to being special and unique. There are drawbacks since the connection can lead to sadness and longing when apart.

From the fox, the prince learns that his rose was indeed unique and special because she was the object of the prince’s love and time; he had “tamed” her, and now she was more precious than all of the roses he had seen in the garden. Upon their sad departing, the fox imparts a secret: important things can only be seen with the heart, not the eyes.

The meeting with the fox, will be symbolic of the meeting with our monkey mind. The catching sight of the zen bull, the mind the mental sheath. The reason he cannot go ‘home’ yet, or we can not stay with the experience of the open chakra column, which entails the opening of the heart chakra, the promise of the encounter with the snake, is because of the constant proliferations of ego-mind. Now the prince finally ‘sees’ this. In order to fulfil his ‘sense of lack’, the need to make friends, he must first tame this aspect of himself. The ego is never in the present moment, always in the past, the future, or lost in fantasies. As we learn to tame this aspect of the mental sheath, we learn to come more and more into the present moment. Here we are able to sense our rightful place in the midst of the natural world, at peace with our manifestation as an individual, in the midst of something that is totally universal. In terms of the numbers 612, this is mastering the concepts behind the 1 and 2.

The fox imparts a ‘secret’ meaning that this is knowledge of a mystical nature, only accessed from the ‘inner search’. “Important things can only be seen with the heart, not the eyes.” this is the maturing of the heart-mind connection, which gives a new way of seeing the world about us.

The prince finally met two people from Earth:

• A railway switchman who told him how passengers constantly rushed from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they were and not knowing what they were after; only the children among them ever bothered to look out the windows.
• A merchant who talked to the prince about his product, a pill that eliminated the need to drink for a week, saving people 53 minutes.

From this perspective we are able to look at the world about us with greater clarity. Compared to the inner work (letting go of the egoic mind, the connection to the oneness, and the opening of the heart), when we look out into the world of adults we see a lot of folly. People searching in all the wrong places for the sense of inner fulfilment they lack.

Back in the present moment, it is the eighth day after the narrator’s plane crash and the narrator and the prince are dying of thirst. The prince has become visibly morose and saddened over his recollections and longs to return home and see his flower.

This clarity of inner vision brings us back into the present moment.

The prince finds a well, saving them.

The well, in biblical terms is usually a chakra, in this case the deep well that springs from within is the opening of the chakra column, and a full opening of the heart chakra. They searched for the well by walking through the night, thirsty and once again the narrator senses his closeness to death. In this moment he realises the beauty all about him in the desert.

I’ve always loved the desert. You sit down on a sand dune. You see nothing. You hear nothing. And yet something shines, something sings in that silence…

We need to sit and listen to the sounds of silence, then we find the well. The path to awakening is not linear, as we shift through different phases of realisation, we move back and forth between the ego and deeper states of awareness.

The narrator later finds the prince talking to the snake, discussing his return home and his desire to see his rose again, who, he worries, has been left to fend for herself. The prince bids an emotional farewell to the narrator and states that if it looks as though he has died, it is only because his body was too heavy to take with him to his planet. The prince warns the narrator not to watch him leave, as it will upset him. The narrator, realising what will happen, refuses to leave the prince’s side. The prince consoles the narrator by saying that he only need look at the stars to think of the prince’s loveable laughter, and that it will seem as if all the stars are laughing. The prince then walks away from the narrator and allows the snake to bite him, soundlessly falling down.

When we enter into consciousness with the universal oneness, the prince and the Narrator are here deeply united, (the narrator catches the little prince in his arms as he comes down from a wall). There can also arise a sense that this state is not something we can rest in indefinitely. Indeed, the very clinging to this space is the first step away, and back to egoic tendencies. But now that the connection has been made, now that this wisdom has been received, we can look up to the stars, we can allow energy to rise up to the third eye, and remake that connection, at any moment, that we have the awareness to do so.

“I was surprised by suddenly understanding that mysterious radiance of the sands. When I was a little boy I lived in an old house, and there was a legend that a treasure was buried in it somewhere. Of course, no one was ever able to find the treasure, perhaps no one even searched. But it cast a spell over the whole house.”

In the awakened state even the mundane, the desert sands, become radiant. Dysfunctional since he was a little boy, the ‘old house’ was constructed around an outdated philosophy (power, money, fame/gain, materialism etc.). The real treasure has now been found, and the ‘house’, his being, is once again at peace with itself.

“I’m glad you found what was the matter with your engine. Now you’ll be able to fly again…”

The next morning, the narrator is unable to find the prince’s body. He finally manages to repair his aeroplane and leave the desert. It is left up to the reader to determine if the prince returned home or died. The story ends with a drawing of the landscape where the prince and the narrator met and where the snake took the prince’s corporeal life. The narrator requests to be immediately contacted by anyone in that area encountering a small person with golden curls who refuses to answer any questions.

The Little Prince was from planet B612, in the ‘Powers of 9’, the 612 represents the first level of ‘manifest’ creation. On the individual level, it’s that time, when the newborn who is naturally connected to the ‘all’ starts to find it’s boundaries and ‘labels’ for the physical world about them. It is also the time when we can start to become disillusioned, and form habit patterns that protect us from the perceived harsher realities of the material world.

Later in life we may find ourselves in the ‘desert’, struggling to find meaning in life’s journey. When we become still inside, we will once again rediscover these voices. Voices of insecurity and doubts, patterns of protection, and our needs for security and love. In the moments when we are genuinely able to hear, to be with those needs, we can experience moments of transformation. We can have compassion, for ourselves, and others, understanding, insight and wisdom. The heart can open fully to our experience, and the vibrational energy, the kundalini, like the snake, raises up and fills our being, vanquishing any trace of our inner child. We are awake, we can fly out of the desert.

‘The next morning’, is the 9^th day, and we are into the final and 27^th chapter of the book (2+7 = 9), and 27 is the number of the ego-mind. The narrator, now understanding his relationship to the little prince, now learns the majesty of listening to the stars, the universal vibration.

1Book resume from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince

2See ‘Powers’ Chapters ‘Snakes and Ladders’ through till ‘United States of Awareness’.