Navigating Liminal Times with Mythic Widom: Michael Meade
===
Michael Reiley: Welcome back to the show. This is Michael Riley. Before we begin today's episode. I want to take a moment to say. That if you'd like to support this podcast and the mission of Science and Nonduality, please consider becoming a sand member. In addition to supporting this podcast. And the production of films, like the wisdom of trauma. And we're olive trees weep. And also our monthly community gatherings. You'll gain access to our sand member library with hundreds of videos from Sans 15 year history of conferences, webinars, and courses. Visit science and non-duality dot com slash join. Or find a link in the show notes. Today, I'm in conversation with renowned storyteller. And scholar of mythology, anthropology and psychology, Michael Meade. Here's the author of many books, including "The Genius Myth", "Fate and Destiny", "Why the World Doesn't End" and "The Water of Life". He is also the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, a nonprofit organization that initiates innovative projects and unifying events that support and educate at-risk youth refugees, combat veterans and communities in need. And this episode, we discuss the recent us elections, why agents of chaos and political authoritarians rise to power in these times of cultural and environmental collapse, the importance of finding your authentic self, hearing the call of your own genius, And Michael shares, many mythological stories, giving meaning and inspiration in these dark and confusing times. All today on the Sounds of SAND podcast presented by Science and Nonduality.
Okay. I'm here with Michael Meade for the Sounds of SAND podcast. Thanks for being back with the SAND community.
Michael Meade: Great to be with you, Michael.
Michael Reiley: It's been a few years since you've connected with SAND. I know you've spoken at a few of the conferences and have done some online webinars and things. I think you did something with Gail Brenner. Maybe that was the last. Yeah. Yeah. A lot has changed since then, but a lot hasn't really changed.
So as we're speaking two weeks since the U S election just curious what's present for you these days and what are you working with?
Michael Meade: So I followed the election pretty closely and with a fair amount of anxiety and eventually sorrow because it's this continual move to the extreme right. And from my perspective, it's not simply political at all. In other words, it isn't just Democrats versus Republicans or liberals versus Conservatives.
It's really being alive in a world where nature is unraveling at the same time that culture is in upheaval. And so people are overwhelmed by the rapidity of change that happens in both nature and culture. And that leads to a sense of overwhelm and then you get in the middle of a kind of a vulnerable situation on a collective level, you get people who come in and take advantage of it by adding more chaos and driving up the levels of fear, which I think was the basic campaign on the part of Donald Trump. And so because this is happening all around the world, not just in the United States, that is to say, in the last two years, no incumbent in any country having an election was reelected, and it's because everybody thinks it's really going wrong, and then the strongman types come in and say, we can fix it.
They provide a false sense of security. And a false claim of certainty because they don't know what to do either. And so for me, I was at least hoping that people would hold on to dignity and hold on to the idea of individual freedom and the right of women to make decisions about their own body and the things that, underpin meaningful democracy.
And that didn't happen. So I think it puts us in a very vulnerable situation where those who do not have a deep interest in equality and democracy are giddy or inflated. And are about to do much more harm on both levels, that is say cancelling meaningful environmental plans and cancelling more of people's rights.
And I think we've been in a dark time, but now we're going into a darker period yet.
So this kind of dual unraveling of culture and. And environment, let's say or nature is yeah, like the current administration that's going to be coming in are undermining both of those and in a kind of arrogant way almost Yeah no, and no contemporary institutions are capable of dealing with the issues. The rapidity of change that's happening with the storms in nature growing bigger and bigger literally, and then with the storms in culture getting stronger and stronger the institutions can't change that fast.
The nature of institutions is to tend towards stability. And by institutions, political parties. The education system the economic systems, everything subject now to rapid change, if not chaos. And so it leaves people in a deepening sense of uncertainty, and uncertainty turns out to be a very big energy for driving people's interests.
Uncertainty is a much bigger issue than most people realize. Because uncertainty will drive people into extremes of emotion, but it will also drive people into so much fear that they will choose the wrong thing in hopes that someone's going to fix it for them. And then the other thing I would say about when uncertainty gets more intense and the outside institutions can't handle what's happening, we're thrown back on ourselves.
That is to say, when we can't find stability in the outside world, the only place to turn to is the inside world, and the majority of people in the culture don't know the inside world, and most modern people don't have a deep sense of their own inner meaning or their own uniqueness. The modern world claims that everything is accidental, that the whole universe is accidental, which makes every person an accidental being, and unless a person has somehow discovered that's not true, people become not just afraid that things are going wrong, but that they're going to be accidental.
I don't know overwhelmed. So they're going to be dismissed or annihilated. And that makes very bad judgment.
Michael Reiley: It seems like our habit in our culture, when we're feeling that overwhelm and that, you That confusion and chaos is to look at our phones, which are like these portals of confusion and chaos. Let me look, on the news site and let me try to make sense of what's happening today. And the engineers of these things purposely make them confusing and chaotic.
So you're sucked further and further into the vortex.
Michael Meade: Nice connection. So because I work on mythology and depth psychology, and so in myths. In traditions throughout the world before modern times, it's almost universally understood that a person has two levels at least of the self. And the first level is the little self or the ego self, which always pretends it knows what it's doing, but is secretly terrified.
And then the deeper self that actually knows why the person is here. And so in a sense, you could say in a culture where identity is superficial or identity is outsourced, people think that they're a member of a political party or they're a member of an age group or they're a member of a nation.
That's their identity. So when that stuff is rattling, they think they've lost their identity. But in the meantime, you pointed something interesting out. So what do people do? They turn to their personal device. They turn to their phone as if that's their companion. And that's a substitute for the real companion, which is the deep self or soul.
And so the connection to the internet, which is horizontal, is not helpful when you need greater heights and greater depth in order to sustain your existence. And so I like that idea that people are turning to the substitute for connection instead of finding the deep inner connection, which is really what we're going to have to do.
That culture, society doesn't change because people make an agreement. Not at the level that's being called for now, because what's being called for is not simply change, it's transformation. We are in the midst of a radical transformation on Earth, which means a transit from one form or one way of being to another.
And I think so mythologically this has happened before. The world as people are seeing it comes to an end. And that isn't the end, it's the end of that world vision, that world view, and then another one starts, a new vision comes into people, and we're at the end with some people claiming, no, we can go back and fix ourselves, and yet we're not yet in the next world where we can see how we could reconnect culture to nature.
In anthropology, that's called the liminal space, where betwixt and between, and we're going to be there for a while and so one other way to talk about it is it's the middle step of a rite of passage. First step is separation, which is happening all over now. People are divided and polarized, they're separated from each other, economically in extreme, but also politically in extreme.
even religiously in extreme. That's the first step, so that's already happening. And the second step is being betwixt and between, which feels like death, but it also brings us closer to renewal. And then the third step is a return with a sense of a kind of conscious community. So you could say we're headed for the third step, but we're in the middle now, like in a collective rite of passage.
Michael Reiley: And so you're looking at it through this lens of. Mythology, it feels to me like it's a zooming out because again, with talking about media and culture, it's everything's zooming in and the news cycles are so quick. And, we think about four year election cycles, but what you're talking about is a much larger, like when you said, we could be in this liminal space, it could be for who knows, decades or hundreds of years,
Michael Meade: we don't know. If you go back to ancient India, and they have said we're in the Kali Yuga, which means dark time. Literally, that's what it means, dark time. Kali is darkness. And but they say it's eons, it's a very long period of time. I don't know if that's true. To me, in mythology, you don't have to be mathematically accurate.
It's more like the sense of things. But, all right, so here's a antidote. So I look for antidotes. The illness right now is tremendous uncertainty rapidly increasing levels of fear of being manipulated by people that want to claim a lot of power deep insecurity leading to withdrawal, isolation, and depression.
Those kind of things are the illnesses, let's say. So what's the antidotes? And one of them is understanding that in the bigger frame, in the mythological, cosmological level of things everything dies and is reborn. The core mystery of the world is life, death, renewal, or life, death, rebirth. And that happens.
A forest goes through that continuously. It's a natural thing. But the cosmos goes through it. Stars are born and they die. And then there's another star or another reshaping of that element of the cosmos. And humans go through that too. People actually, most people, if you ask them have you ever had your life unravel?
Yes, and yet you reweave your life out of elements left over from the, the collapse. So that's now an important understanding to have that in the middle of a liminal uncertainty. Is a chance to rediscover the underlying mystery of life, which is life, death and renewal. If we take that to heart, then what that means is letting go of things that don't have life in them.
That would be a part of it. That's part of the liminal phase of initiation. It's also part of the mystery of understanding how life renews. We let go of things that are like, more like corpses. than living companions. And then critical place is being willing and able to be in the condition of not knowing. Cause actually no one does know. the people claiming this is how we'll fix it, that's false stuff. Because no one knows, because it's moving so fast, and we've never seen this iteration, this complexity of cultural and natural things. And so there's a lot of old myths that say, in the middle of things, you stop and recognize, I don't know.
And not knowing is the step before learning or knowing. If we can't admit we don't know, then we can't learn what is really trying to reach us. And so not knowing is a important philosophical, psychological. Understanding and then the kind of companion of that is the new visions or the visions needed to reimagine life on earth with is more balance are trying to come for us to us.
Knowledge is pouring through the universe all the time and what we need is methods to slow it down so that we can actually catch knowledge that's trying to arrive. In an individual person's life, when their life breaks down and it seems like everything has fallen apart, they're actually closer to a weakening than they've ever been.
If I can admit, I just don't know now. Everything I used to know doesn't work. I'm afraid, but I'm not afraid to admit I don't know. Now there's a kind of a submission in that, a surrender. That makes it possible for big dreams, new visions, suddenly revealed ideas to come to the person.
And that's what we need both individually and then collectively. And just to add one thing, so the culture doesn't change because everybody agrees to change. It changes one soul at a time. And when enough people go through a meaningful transformation or go through condition where they say, Hey, I'm terrified at certain levels, I have no idea what to do, I can't see the way forward, and then something starts to come, then those people become the people that contribute to the change that needs to happen collectively.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Beautiful. Taking all that in. I saw that even with the election, as soon as Kamala Harris lost, you saw the next day everyone on YouTube and everywhere had, they had the answer. This is why she lost. This is why she lost. We couldn't stay in the uncertainty of.
Why did she lose? What happened? What happened to sanity? We're so quick to rush to to the solutions. And I wonder blame. And the
the blame. Yeah,
Michael Meade: Which usually is where it all drops then, and now vision is lost. Because it was run into a loop that leads to just traumatic sense of blame.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. And it seems that one mythological. model that's very much alive in our culture is the story of the hero. And I think this may be playing into this, what you're talking about, the strong man, and if we look at our movies that are out now, they're all heroes, superhero movies. It's like the singular strong individual, usually a male that will save the day.
Is that part of the crisis that we're going through now is this obsession with the hero?
Michael Meade: It's totally part of the crisis. It's also part of what needs to be left behind. But in case anybody was missing it, you get Donald Trump. I'm the only one that can fix this. Now he's got a co president in Elon Musk I should own everything and decide everything. And then they're dragging like Matt Gaetz into it, who is he's like the villain side of the superhero story, but he's gonna be in it too.
And then they all go to some arena. to watch a cage battle whatever it is, the kind of fighting thing. They're all there together watching these two guys, who each is considered by someone to be the toughest guy in the world, they're all there watching that. This is the move they make as a potential cabinet is to go watch a cage fight.
It's like the exaggeration of the superhero thing. As long as I've been alive, there's only been one myth that has. made any penetration into the modern culture, which is the myth of the hero. And it's a great myth. But unfortunately it's the only myth right now. And unfortunately, Joseph Campbell happened to describe it as the mono myth, meaning it is the only myth.
And of course, myth by its nature is multiple. There can't be an only myth. Every, even the the Christian Bible has two versions of creation. Myth is multiple. And so I wrote a book called "The Genius Myth", and what I was trying to do is suggest that we could replace the hero's myth, or keep it where it's appropriate, but don't have it be in charge, because it is too masculine, and its tone is too outer directed in its attitude, and it leads to things like superheroes, which is just taken over, like Hollywood and people's imagination.
We don't need heroics. found in each person. We need genius. So genius is a Western word or a Latin word, which literally means the spirit that's already there. It means when a person is born, a genius is born with them. And a genius can be a talent. It can involve talents and it can involve certain kinds of some people have a genius for or seeing things and other people have a genius for empathically helping others.
There's no end to the number of geniuses and the combination of talents and gifts inside a person is always unique. And a person, the person, The best myth for a modern person, I think, is to realize that we're in a story in which we're expected to find our own inner gifts and our own style of living and giving those gifts.
And then if that was the understanding rather than heroics, then no one has to be heroic. And everyone male, female, in between, it doesn't matter, everyone would have a unique inner genius that is their companion, that is a much better companion than the cell phone or the smartphone. It's much smarter than a smartphone, because it's smart enough to know why the person is alive.
And so once you get the sense that everybody has a genius, then it's easy to realize everybody has a calling in life. And once people find their calling they don't have to heroically go saving people. They just have to creatively become themselves. And that not doesn't just give them a sense of fulfillment.
It actually helps other people. And when enough people live in tune with their genius, then genius in its multiple iterations will transform the world.
Michael Reiley: Beautiful. Yeah, that, that feels like such an authentic way to be in this time of chaos is to just get quiet and to discover your own genius.
Michael Meade: Well, a nice choice of words, because another antidote to the inauthentic. Because what's being presented politically is inauthentic. And what's being presented technologically is not authentic, and AI is the height of inauthenticity, and it's so bold that it calls itself artificial. And artificial, the opposite of the artificial is the authentic.
And the natural inner response to an inauthentic world is to become authentic. And once a person realizes there is something in them that is unique, a genius quality that is meaningful to them and others, it's possible then to ground oneself in the depth of one's own soul and begin to act more authentically.
The word authentic is Greek, and the beginning of it, ortho, is what gives us author. As if to say there's an authorizing dynamic inside ourselves and then entikos means of the essence, from the essence. And so when we act from our essence, we actually are authorizing and authoring our own lives. And that's an antidote to living in a world where truth has been canceled and the inauthentic has been championed.
Michael Reiley: Nice. So there's two, two threads here, which I think could be interesting to follow. The one is about authentic intelligence with AI, but the first I wanted to ask about is this idea of hearing the call, like finding what your genius is. And it would seem that it can be difficult to find your genius as it relates to your family, the needs of your family and your community, to not do something which feels self indulgent,
Michael Meade: so there's a small problem. that's been around for a while. And mythologically, I'll go to this little African myth. It's the most condensed version I've found, of understanding the nature of the soul, and why the authentic sense of self and soul can be at odds with one's family and one's community.
And it's, it starts this story like any great myth starts in the other world. And so there's a small world, small problem that modern people think there's one world. And so when someone takes power and starts manipulating that daily world, they think that's the whole world. But all cultures understood, and all artists understand and all visionaries understand, there's another world.
And the Irish call it the other world. And they say we're one step away from it all the time. And the other world is the source of everything that exists in this world. So the other world is eternal and timeless, and it's endlessly creative. So in that other world is where the tree of life is. And and on the branches of the tree of life is where the souls are sitting before they are born into this world.
And so the souls are having their own kind of visionary experience, watching the daily world and seeing what's going on. It's their form of entertainment, and then what happens is an individual soul sees something so interesting and intriguing it decides, I'm going to go, I'm going to that world.
Because I want to live and have that experience. And so then the soul departs from the world tree. And as soon as it departs, the spirit comes, joins the soul and says, here's what this life you're going to, is going to be about. Here's the, here are the themes, here's the shape or the dynamic of that life.
And then the spirit says, actually, it's really interesting to me also, I'll go with you. So now the soul. Informed by the spirit, which has become its companion and in a sense, a guardian angel too. The two of them are headed now for the daily world, or they're gonna go be born in someone's womb and then they enter a garden and they come upon this beautifully beautiful tree and the soul that just left the tree of life 'cause oh, I have to embrace this tree.
It's so beautiful. And as soon as this soul embraces the tree, it forgets. what caused it to come to life, and it forgets what the Spirit told it about the nature of the life it was going to live, and then it's born.
.
Michael Meade: So everybody is born through a separation from the eternal, and every beginning is also a forgetting.
because the soul has forgotten why it's coming into the world, and then it's born into a family that can't figure out why it came into the world. The family has its own issues and its own plans and its own expectations, and now the soul has to adapt to that family, or you don't get fed. And so the soul goes through its busy adaptations, which also is how the ego forms, is in an adaptive response to the circumstances into which it was born.
And so the child is in a family that doesn't know it's genius, doesn't know it's calling, and usually can't see that. And that's why in the history of humanity, everybody has always left home. Because if your parents could give you everything you wanted, you'd be a child your whole life. And so everybody leaves home looking for the thing that's going to complete them, which is an awakening to what's already in them.
And so that's what's supposed to happen. But, and when it doesn't happen so there's a connection to rites of passage, because that would be the natural time at the end of childhood that the soul is ready, the person is ready to leave the family and find their own individual unique life. And that's what rites of passage would create the possibility for a revelation of oneself to oneself. But since rites of passage doesn't happen anymore for the most part, you have people who have never figured out who they are with any sense of confidence, have never had this inner genius blessed and so you have people who think, oh, I better do what my family wanted me to do, or I better do, pick a career that other people will approve of or that will keep me safe.
In the meantime, there is a calling That is part of everybody's human inheritance. And the calling is calling to the genius that's inside that has been forgotten. That's the setup. And so often the calling comes when a person is in darkness. In other words, rarely does you're going down the road, you're feeling good, everything's going good, I got better grades than I expected.
No, no one's giving me a hard time. Oh, I found my calling. No, usually the calling is found in a descent
Into, and because it's a matter of going deeper inside. And so now that we're living in a collective descent I've been suggesting there's an acceleration of calling. people would just surrender and say, I don't know, I'm not sure what to do, all of a sudden the calling might come.
Small problem though also, the voice that calls to us is quiet. And with the modern world, with all the distractions and all the gadgets and all of the interconnectedness at a horizontal level, the little voice gets obscured. And so a person has to become pretty quiet and pretty much in the mode of surrender, typically, to hear that voice.
But all the old stories say that voice is there, that calling is there. And it's called calling to the genius that's also there.
Michael Reiley: Nice. Maybe it should be called the Whisper of Genius, that way people would know it's not going to be blasting to you, it's just, you have to, it's a subtle, can be a subtle thing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's such a brilliant framing of it. Cause yeah, like our culture, it's seen as a noble thing to do the profession of your father, let's say, and to say, Oh, I'm a fourth generation plumber, and it's celebrated, but in some ways maybe those children were forced into something that ignored their genius.
Yeah.
Michael Meade: It's also a replacement. It's a replacement since the there isn't the mythological imagination, says that each story is really connected to the mythology of creation. And we've lost all that. There's been a collapse of vertical imagination. We live in a flat world in terms of psychology and in terms of the world wide web.
It's a flat web. And the old idea was humans were stretched between heaven and earth. We're. We have as a natural inheritance vertical imagination, which most people don't have. And when you don't have it, then you say I'll pick one of the obvious careers or the one I'm being pushed towards, or the one I went to school for.
And then you have all these people later in life, maybe they're successful, but they don't feel fulfilled. They actually can feel empty because the fulfilling thing is hidden inside, waiting to be discovered.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. And that flattening too, I, I sense that again, in our culture, I don't know if you listen to modern music, let's say, but I feel like there was, especially in the 20th century, there was this verticality to new explorations and experimentation and classical music and jazz and.
rock music. And I think somewhere around the year 2000, that became flattened. And so if you go on the modern charts, everything sounds like, Oh, that sounds like a song from the eighties. Oh, that sounds like it could be from the nineties. Oh, that's a throwback to the seventies. And there's this kind of grayness and there's not it's really hard to tell where songs are from because it's all just in this endless nostalgia loop.
Michael Meade: I totally agree. I totally agree. And the arts in general first of all, the word music comes from muses. So does museum. So does a music. All the things. And so here's my understanding is that When we get inspired, which a musician or an artist of any kind is supposed to be inspired that's coming in from outside.
It's not that I'm creative and I make things. I'm participating. The inspiration was always understood to be divine or spiritual. It was, all the arts were in service of spiritual aims in the beginning or early on, and now they're industries. which are flat and part of the horizontal mechanistic world.
And I think a lot of people don't really understand that inspiration is constantly trying to get to us, but it's obstructed by the way the world operates and by the distractions that we have. And I'm always telling people you have to have a practice. You have to develop a practice in order to be coherent and in order to be inspired.
And the practice can be a meditational contemplative practice, and or it can be an artful creative practice. But to not have a practice is to be like an accidental person in the accidental world. But I agree with you, there's a flattening that has happened in the arts. Now, we're also at the end of an era.
So there is a kind of a built in nostalgia. There is a repetition because the world that we used to think we were in is really gone. And but, music has always been recreated. It's always, not only that, this is interesting, in most cultures other than the western culture In the beginning wasn't the word, in the beginning was the sound, and sound was the beginning of creation, and in like Mayan mythology, the original reverberation continues to resonate throughout the world, and in their understanding, everything that exists continues to change.
is vibrating and resonating at a certain level. Most of it we can't hear, music we can't. And so the musicians really are invited to tune in to a completely different arrangement of sounds and rhythms and stuff. Or, on the other hand, to tune all the way back to ancient stuff. Because one of the tricks of being fully creative and one of the tricks of helping to sustain this world is to connect the ancient and the present and the future.
And so there's ancient knowledge about music that's missing, that people have forgotten, and there's new threads of the harmonics and the orchestra of life that are trying to reach people, unless they're nostalgic.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah. Not only the Mayans, of course the sound of creation, Nada Brahma is in the, the big bang, our current creation myth starts with the sound, that's not an accident. I don't
Michael Meade: A bang. I think there was drummers involved. But, yeah, and Om is, of course, beautiful because it's the three sounds, Ah is the opening, is the sustaining, and is the closing of that sound, which is three phases of an age, you have the beginning, the sustaining, and the end. And so Om is a repetition of this core mystery of beginning, middle, end, or life, death, and then renewal.
Okay. Yeah, there's an old one that I think is having probably new residences. I think it's, I hear people using that in ways that are not traditional, but that recognize they're traditional.
Michael Reiley: I know you're a percussionist too. Do you know those book "Drumming at the Edge of Magic" by Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead?
You know that book? Yeah. Because he talks, there's a whole section about that, about all the creation myths and how they're connected with
Michael Meade: yeah, and it's a great South American myth where the world burns up, and at the end there's nothing there but ashes. And the, one of the two characters that this, that somehow they weren't burned up with the whole world because they were in the other world when this world burned up, and then when they come back it's all ashes.
And the main character's called Ikan Chu, and he's hungry and he starts kicking around in the ashes, hopefully to find something to eat, and all he finds is a piece of charcoal. And so that, at the end of that day, I guess it is, I don't know if it's night or day, but he lays down with the piece of charcoal.
But before he does that, he handles it like it was a drum, because he thought it might be, because it came from a tree. And then in the morning when he wakes up, the piece of charcoal has a green tendril coming out of it and from that drum that was charcoal that was part of the burning up of the world, the whole world comes back, and how he assisted is by singing and dancing around This piece of charcoal that was like a drum that became the source of the re re reiteration of the whole green world.
And the trees come back and everything comes back from that one tendril that came from the charcoal.
beautiful,
Yeah. So drum rhythm is really at the center of a lot of cultural myths.
Michael Reiley: Yeah, I love it. Have you ever done like a course on that on kind of the rhythm and myth?
Michael Meade: I guess never directly, but for many years I would be telling stories while drumming. And so it was like. Educating through sound because the drum registers in the lower chakras in a way that people can't resist it and it stimulates from below. And so without, I guess I used to say something about it, but I never did a course on it.
No, that'd be interesting.
Michael Reiley: Yeah
Michael Meade: I just did it "of course".
Michael Reiley: That's the old school way
So getting back to some of the modern diseases or modern ailments that we're suffering with. You mentioned the idea of hearing our call by quieting down. So it seems like that's the anecdote in, short is to just become more quiet, become more still, to just make space for these things to emerge, right?
Michael Meade: Yes. Although I think there's a companion, there's always a companion. And so one aspect is quieting down so that the psyche can settle and so that a person can become more open to what's trying to reach them from inside and from outside, but in that becoming more open is a vulnerability. And so what happens is the deep emotions are stirred.
It's like when a person first does meditation, it sounds really simple. You just sit down, you breathe, you change the rhythm of your breathing, you breathe down and everything's going to be fine. Except when I first tried it, I was breathing down and then all of a sudden there was turmoil and I'm going, how did my mother get invited?
I'm just joking, but it was, For me, it was issues with my mother, and all of a sudden I was in turmoil inside. And so then you have to begin the practice. I'm going to breathe through the turmoil, I'm going to, and so on. So that's one part of it. But the other part of it, I think, is the need to express the emotions that are present. And so if people have emotions, but don't express them, then the emotions don't go away. They become stronger, they need more, we need more effort to repress them, and if we manage to do that, they just go pick a place in the body to hang out, and emotions are the primary cause of back pain, for instance and , humans are emotional beings.
And in the midst of everything going on, we also have to express the emotions, like I watch the news, and I go, into rage, at the foolishness, at the mendacity, at the meanness and brutality that is being, promulgated on everyone, and I have to express it, I have to, yell or, Or in my case, I might actually drum with a lot of ferocity.
The drum doesn't mind. And just to get that emotion out. So I think if a person just tries to be still, they could get into trouble from the emotional side. And so it's like a back and a forth. I think of something else. I also write stuff down. If I hear enough really, disturbing things, I'll just stop writing.
And I'll take that and turn it into some kind of language that I then may use in public or not, I don't know. But I'll move it into, because writing is another practice for me, I'll move it into a more conscious form, just the way a person might write a dream down and work with it. The emotions require our attention.
And it's the passivity in certain elements of culture that has allowed people with not good intentions to rise so far.
Michael Reiley: That's what's coming to mind right now. It's just when we think about justice movements, oftentimes there's a, especially in spiritual circles, there's a movement towards, let's just meditate together. Let's, have a silent vigil. And those things can be nice, but oftentimes we're bypassing, like you said, the emotional component that you see in a more angry protests where people are banging on things and chanting and, obviously not, but don't condone, condone violence or hurting other people, but showing the rage, that we see it like Extinction Rebellion events or Black Lives Matter or other, social justice movements.
And
Michael Meade: those require living those emotions. And again, when people become more conscious about what the real journey is, that the journey is an awakening of the deep self and soul, which is unique in each case, which has a capacity to bring meaningful things to the world and affect change in the world.
In order to allow that to keep going, we need to allow the emotions to go through it. Emotions are. Give us vitality and they give us knowledge. Anger very much misunderstood. Most people, what most people call anger is actually rage, right? Because rage is blind and it destroys the things as closest to anger has eyes.
And it's smart. So if someone steps on my toe or does something to offend me, I look right at them. It's totally clear. And if we express anger when it first arrives, it's not rage at all. It's a clarifying thing. Anger has the capacity to reset boundaries. And it's when people allowed all the boundaries in the culture to be broken, and there wasn't a strong enough pushback, That allowed now, what used to be the Republican Party to just break all the norms.
And so anger is a protective boundary setting emotion when it's healthy. And for instance, two people who are in a relationship, if they can't find a way to express anger. And disagree and have the emotions be present, the relationship goes cold because it's the heated emotions that are also connected to the passions of love.
And so not expressing emotions leads to hollowness rather than centeredness.
Michael Reiley: it seems as though feeling our emotions, whether it's anger or more positive emotions can lead us towards. And I wanted to get back to this topic of the deep, the true self, the authentic self that you're talking about. That would seem like that's one of the paths to discovering that, right?
Michael Meade: Yes, yeah, there's always the reflective past and then the creatively active past. But also, I was thinking of grief as being a necessary emotion now. So much pain in the world. And because of modern communications, we know about the pain all over the world. This is another unusual thing about being alive right now.
Throughout most of human history, people wouldn't know what was happening 100 miles away. We know what's happening everywhere. And that's what makes it so overwhelming. And that's what makes it so necessary that we become more conscious. And one of the things that we have to be conscious of is all the suffering and all the loss.
that's happening everywhere you look, either because of climate crisis or because of human crisis. And so each, so when I first started looking at emotions, I noticed that the word emotion is really motion with an E in front of it. So that means most emotions have emotions. And anger will stand you straight up. will bend you down and make you weep. And the old idea of sorrow and grief is that it's a washing out of everything that's not alive that's inside. And when we don't grieve, we don't wash the inside of ourselves. And therefore, we're cluttered and clunky and blocked. And therefore, we can't be as creative or even as compassionate as we want to be.
Compassion is a beautiful energy and it can be a practice and it's connected to all kinds of beautiful things like forgiveness and empathy. But if a person doesn't have compassion, they can't have compassion. Passion comes first. And if a person realizes I'm a living being and I have passionate experiences, and if I can learn to understand them better, oh, all of a sudden I realize other people are having these experiences and I can have compassion to them.
If I don't know my own passion, I don't have real compassion. That's what I would say. But that's an extreme thing to say, but it's said from the side of passion.
Michael Reiley: But yeah, I love the, the deconstruction of words that you do, because it's going against the stream of our culture, which likes to group words together into acronyms and emojis and to simplify everything into, bite sized texts. But you're saying, no, let's go backwards and let's actually look at the word and break it apart and trace the etymology and see what are we actually saying?
Words are magic. And it's like, when we utter these words, what are we bringing forth when we say the word "compassion". What does that mean?
Michael Meade: I completely agree. Words are alive. They're actually stories, too. Like the word myth is a really important word, and in a modern word, myth means something that is untrue. And in the ancient world, myth meant emergent truth. So a word can even have a lifespan, or it can have an arc where it goes to its opposite.
But yeah, to me, words are alive and they're full of information. They're like stories.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. And they are, they are magic. It's like you're vibrating the air, which is coming through the computer, which is coming to me. And we're creating this understanding from thousands of miles away. That's pretty magical,
Michael Meade: it is. It is. And when you put it into a song, you're actually now combining the origins of creation with the expression of the moment, and that changes the world in some little way. But, yeah. And words are part of words are to us what songs are to birds. There are language, there are language of expression, and anybody that thinks that words don't have.
Value, validity, and even velocity hasn't really paid much attention words spoken in this recent election where we started from have caused all kinds of fear, all kinds of disinformation and misunderstanding, and I think have caused people to make a very big mistake by voting for things that are inhumane.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things that the right always trumpets is this idea of free speech, of liberating words of saying, we can't, don't censor, people can say whatever they want, don't worry about offending people with your words. And, This is just occurring to me now.
It's it's somehow related to this religion of capitalism and capital that everything should be free and everything should go to the lowest common denominator of, extraction and get, find the cheapest labor possible and, exploit everything. And it's like free speech, although it's important, obviously, to have free communication, to have the ability to share ideas, the idea that there's value to words and anyone can just say anything and you can live in an era of post truth and politicians can lie because it gets them to the, to their ends is a, is really, it's really taking value away from something that's really, as you said, precious to our species.
We're one of the only species, we are the only species I know of that uses words as a way of communication.
Michael Meade: And it's not freedom, there's no freedom in that. That's a bunch of people who are trapped in their own misunderstanding, even of themselves, that are insisting that they be able to continue to do that. That's not freedom. Freedom is the imaginative mind, it's the open heart, that's freedom. And that kind of thing has nothing to do, in a sense with freedom.
It's interesting, the word truth. Has roots that are connected to the word tree. And so tree and truth come from the same roots, which is almost like a pun in itself. And so that means that truth is something that grows, something that can branch out and blossom. And it means that truths have deep roots that you can't simply uproot by claiming that something false is true.
And and that leads me back to. Mythology, so one, one description of mythology is a series of lies that reveals the truth, because a myth by its nature is not literally true. It's revealing deeper universal truths, and we may have to go to the deeper roots of truth in order to cancel the culture of the post truth lunacy.
Michael Reiley: Wow. Cool. Flipping cancel culture back onto itself. I don't know if that's accurate, but it sounded clever. But yeah, I know what you're saying. Nice. You've offered so many portals into change. You've offered a lot of, as you said, transformational recipes, let's say. Um, I know you have a podcast because I listen to your podcast from time to time.
What are some other ways that people can connect with you and to learn more about what you offer?
Michael Meade: We have a website called mosaicvoices. org and we offer first of all the podcast is free every week. People can support it if they want to, but they can listen for free. And that's the whole idea, is to get people listening. Mythological ideas out there to whoever is interested.
But we also offer courses, I've written books, have recordings of all kinds, and then we do live online events. And the one that's coming up real soon is called arts, art and practice as two ways of finding antidotes to overwhelm and tapping the resilience of our own souls. That's and so those are free and those all over the world with the idea again, we call it medicine, trying to put mythic medicine out into the world, but on the website, there's all kinds of things.
Michael Reiley: Okay, cool. Yeah. We'll have links to all that. Yeah the that upcoming webinar sound, it sounds like all the things that we were talking about today are distilled perhaps in that. So you, if to find out more, I think, any
Oh, yeah, there's a lot of material on genius and calling, a lot of material on the meaning and the value of creation myths in the time of collapse. It goes on and on. There's a lot of stuff.
Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much for being in conversation and reconnecting with the sand community. I feel like we , could have gone further in some domain. Invite you to, , if you'd like to come back to come back again and do another episode in the future.
Michael Meade: Great to be with you. I'd be happy to come back again.
Michael Reiley: Thank you, Michael.
Michael Meade: All right. Thank you. See you down the road.
