00:01:50.880So I want to talk about your most recent publication to begin with, Awakening the Soul.
00:01:56.200And you touch on a number of very large global crises from climate change and natural disasters
00:02:03.120to political polarization and the proliferation of mass destruction.
00:02:07.740and you write about these issues as symptoms of a much deeper-seated problem, a toxic underlying
00:02:15.540culture of disconnection from the quote natural world, each other, and our own souls. So to begin
00:02:22.680this interview, I'm wondering if you could guide us into your thinking around these disorienting
00:02:28.620and troubled times. You know, how is our current predicament connected to a much larger and
00:02:33.900profound reckoning of who we are and how we must change in order to survive and thrive on this
00:02:39.060planet. And then maybe a second part is, how does this connect to how we can understand this time
00:02:45.960in terms of the mythological notion that there is the story of the world and the story of the
00:02:50.820individual soul weaving through one another? So that's where I usually start looking at the
00:02:57.820idea that there are two great stories going on at the same time for humans and one is what i would
00:03:06.000call the eternal drama of the manifest world in other words i think it doesn't come to an end i
00:03:14.520think it mythologically it can't um it had no specific time of beginning and therefore it
00:03:22.660doesn't have to have a specific end. So that's one big idea, mythological idea. And then the other
00:03:29.060is that the other, you know, kind of eternal drama is the drama of the individual soul in the midst
00:03:36.200of the ever-changing world. And why I like to look at those two things is when you approach
00:03:43.500from the old ideas of the embodied soul, then the individual soul is secretly connected to the soul
00:03:52.240of the world. And where that becomes important nowadays, I think, is it takes away some of the
00:04:00.800idea of, oh, I'm just a little speck in the great universe and there's nothing I can do to change
00:04:08.600the kind of catastrophic conditions that are now affecting the earth. And it doesn't go to the old
00:04:16.280kind of discredited idea that humans are in charge of nature. It actually goes a different route
00:04:21.560that humans are secretly through human nature connected to nature and if we could become a
00:04:28.140better version of our own nature we could actually relate better but also possibly contribute to the
00:04:35.080healing of what they used to call great nature and to pull the thread all the way through
00:04:41.840in contrary to western ideas of the kind of opposition of culture and nature when people
00:04:51.380act from the genuine ground of human nature, the human soul becomes the meeting ground of culture
00:04:58.920and nature. And so going back to the, I think what's the first thing question you were posing,
00:05:04.660I think we're in such an extreme condition that we need a different view of the world
00:05:13.120than we have inherited. And so that is the other element. I think we're in a cosmological
00:05:20.100crisis, mythological crisis, and a psychological crisis, as well as a climate crisis. And the
00:05:30.620latest thing, I guess, being reported on the crisis of nature in free fall, where it comes
00:05:38.240to the loss of species. So to transition into a conversation on the mythology of today and
00:05:46.760the notion of the popular, quote, American mythology. There are those who say we are
00:05:53.640lacking. Others argue that our mythology is embodied in concepts like democracy or progress,
00:05:59.800or even that mythology is recreated through the production of entertainment. And if this is so,
00:06:05.920then I can't help but think about how the stories we tell in this culture are grounded in
00:06:12.460individualism, the linear arc of the hero's journey, for example. So I'd love to hear your
00:06:18.320thoughts on this. Do you think modern culture requires a new mythology, or must we connect
00:06:25.060with age-old myths? Do you see a hyper-focus on individualism in the modern adaptation of
00:06:30.880mythology, and does this limit its ability to heal on a cultural level? Really good nuanced
00:06:37.420question so there's a problem with the idea of a new myth because myth is by its nature ancient
00:06:46.900it it kind of rests on what they used to call archetypes the kind of root basis of things that
00:06:55.300manifest in the world and um so it's a little bit of a hard thing to straight straighten out like a
00:07:02.180lot of people talk about a new paradigm, but paradigm is really another word for archetype.
00:07:08.080Arche means ancient. And so mythic imagination kind of is ancient and immediate at the same time.
00:07:17.540And so it's not a choice between new and old. It's really, I think, a bringing together of
00:07:24.400the ancient and the immediate. For instance, the big concern, and probably so is about nature now,
00:07:31.520Well, nature isn't new. Nature is the old, you know, ecology of plates. So new is the sales pitch of the culture of individualism and progress, I would say.
00:07:44.560So what I think we're looking for is, it's difficult to say simply, but where I wind up focusing is in creative imagination, which they used to say imagination is the deepest power of the human soul.
00:08:05.800And then even someone like Einstein said that nothing can exist until it has first been imagined.
00:08:12.180So when we get involved in creative imagination, we're actually close to creation itself. And I think what we're trying to do is find a greater and more imaginative way of seeing the world and our place in it.
00:08:28.500you mentioned you know the hero's journey which is probably the only familiar myth to people in
00:08:36.480the united states really and that's partially because it was the basis for um star wars and
00:08:43.360that's what made those ideas popular and there's a limitation to the hero's myth a number of them
00:08:50.380and that's why one reason i wrote the book called the genius myth i was trying to suggest
00:08:55.540and imagination different than the hero because the hero tends to be masculine in one sense,
00:09:02.760tends to be very external, achieve-oriented, kind of muscular, and in the extreme leads to all of
00:09:11.740these video games that are violent with kind of heroic battles and so on. So I was looking for
00:09:18.980or a concise way of saying or naming what is the character in people that is creative and
00:09:28.300meaningful, that is spiritual and soulful, that is natural and cultural at the same time. And I
00:09:35.560landed on the old word genius, which doesn't mean high IQ or spectacular talent. The actual origin
00:09:44.400of the word, it means the spirit that's already there. So each person is born with the spirit
00:09:50.620that's already there, which they used to call a person's genius. And the genius of a person
00:09:57.860has two big connections. One is to nature directly. There's another kind of genius called
00:10:05.360genius loki, which means the genius of place. And when a person loves a place or finds their place,
00:10:12.120They are connecting with the genius or the spirit of that place. And the other big direction of the genius in each person's soul, male, female, young or old, gay, straight, you name what it is, genius is like a universal connection, whereas hero tends to be a little bit more constricted to heroics as we know it.
00:10:33.340And so the other direction of the genius is it's the root of the creative imaginative capacity of the person, which, like I said earlier, puts a human potentially close to the energy of creation that gave us the natural world.
00:10:50.380And so I'm using genius as an old idea that can be reimagined to connect each of us individual and in groups to the kind of great challenge of trying to heal the separation between nature and culture and even assist in the reestablishing of the biospheres and the environmental balance.
00:11:15.620the idea of technology pops into my head because so much of today's culture is centered around
00:11:23.180technology the techno fix you know genius and technology i it's just it's such a
00:11:29.840a huge yeah cultural i don't even know how to describe it but i was recently reading an article
00:11:38.660examining our, quote, post-literate culture and the idea that we have become mutated by
00:11:45.840digital images and interactions. And in this article, Neil Postman was quoted saying,
00:11:51.800quote, Americans, because television stages their world, no longer talk to each other,
00:11:57.180they entertain each other, end quote. And this quote, really, it hit a chord in me because I'm
00:12:03.440not so sure that all of us can even distinguish the difference between talking to someone versus
00:12:09.600being entertained. And to think that in the span of a little over two decades, we have so readily
00:12:16.320traded in connection for amusement. So I'd really love to ask you about the relationship between
00:12:22.940technology and what you refer to as horizontal connection. In your view, why have we all been
00:12:29.600so willing to trade in connection for amusement? Well, in terms of the, first of all, the Greeks
00:12:35.920were great for dealing with concepts that were opposite to each other. And one of the great old0.57
00:12:43.000oppositions is between techne and gnosis. Techne is the common ability to connect, invent, or shape
00:12:52.220things and gnosis g-n-o-s-i-s gnosis is the ability or the experience of deeply knowing
00:13:01.420in the body in the blood and in the soul something and also someone and so back to the idea of a
00:13:10.520cosmological dislocation um the west has taken the low road of techne in a delusional way and so now
00:13:20.860there's going to be the the heroic pretension that inventive technology is going to save the earth
00:13:26.400and of course inventive technology is part of the problem that is endangering the earth and so
00:13:31.960unfortunately we're in this real crisis of um imagination mythos cosmos soul all of those kind
00:13:40.740of things and um even as i say it now i'm losing my track because of the size of the issues that
00:13:47.420everybody has to face. But I love language and I lament the loss of the literary world and even
00:13:55.920the damage that's being done to the conversational world. But words are interesting in that they have
00:14:03.140levels and they have their own depth. And the original meaning or the root meaning of entertain
00:14:08.200is to turn around together. And so I thought it was more close to the point when even the word
00:14:16.120a muse, if it's done with death, it has muse in it. A muse means to tap into the humor of the
00:14:25.680muses, the source of all inspiration in a feminine form. And humor itself comes from the idea of
00:14:32.600humus or earth. And so that's why so many jokes are earthy. So in a way, we've gone far from the
00:14:41.760source. And in another way, our own language, as deficient as it may be, is always connecting us
00:14:49.480to the source if we only pay attention. So the old mythological idea is everything that is
00:14:55.120experienced has more depth than is obvious and has meaning waiting to be found. So I fear greatly
00:15:04.480the artificial intelligence and this kind of continuing delusion about techne or technological
00:15:11.680solutions. At the same time, I know from working with a lot of young people and so on that people
00:15:20.540can go from being bemused by things that don't make much sense in the long run to being awake
00:15:28.720in an imaginative way and in the embodiment of their own soul. That can happen very quickly.
00:15:35.660how it happens on a collective level to a culture to me is the big issue in the latest book awakening
00:15:42.860the soul part of the time i'm writing about the idea of a collective initiation that is to say
00:15:50.260an awakening of imagination but also deep feeling happening on a collective level that allows us to
00:15:58.580see the world through different eyes and also feel connected to each other and the animal world
00:16:05.360and the world of nature, but also the cosmos in what we might call new, but let's say nuanced
00:16:12.580ways. We're talking about technology and imagination and the imagination that is growing
00:16:20.860in the sector of technology and design, you know, and it is creating these artificial worlds,
00:16:25.460like you had mentioned the video games. Do you think it's significant that it would appear that
00:16:30.920imagination is thriving in that realm, but perhaps stagnating in others. In the age of the
00:16:36.680Anthropocene, it would seem that our imaginations are adapting to a world in a multitude of ways,
00:16:44.100and I can't help but thinking about the younger generations who are immersed in tragedy and
00:16:49.180suffering and really staring into a future that might very well be unlike anything that will
00:16:55.380succeeded so I'd like to bring up the role of youthful imaginations in today's world
00:17:02.500and in your opinion how is youthful imagination functioning especially in regards to this idea
00:17:10.160of technology being the container for imagination in this culture so the things really do connect
00:17:21.580I'm following you there. So one of the things I've been saying is what we're lacking is vertical
00:17:26.680imagination. In a way, the world has become flat again. Remember when people used to think the
00:17:32.420world was flat? It's happened again. So that the great imagination that is the natural inheritance
00:17:38.640of each individual soul has collapsed into a horizontal level of connectedness that we call
00:17:45.020the internet or something, or people's ways of being socially connected, digitally connected,
00:17:53.500and pretending that that's a genuine social connection, even though it can be at times.
00:17:58.460So there's a collapse that has occurred. And so in a way, part of the challenge is to imagine
00:18:04.280ourselves part of the whole living, singing, cosmological, natural, constant expression
00:18:13.300of the source of creation, whatever a person wants to call that source.
00:18:17.940In other words, young people naturally inherit and tend to experience, whether people confirm
00:18:26.760it or not, their own dream of life, which always goes all the way from the personal
00:22:59.700an untied lock of rope is the music from a truck escape as flat as a deck of an aircraft carrier
00:23:08.980and i get to the top nothing's quite as quiet as when i turn my engine off
00:23:17.740i want to talk about your book awakening the soul you eloquently describe how what we may
00:23:32.020initially perceive as limits are actually the seeds of our soul's purpose and when we feel like
00:23:39.640we're merely condemned to an unfavorable fate we fail to engage with our genius or our gift
00:23:46.920And you shared the particular example of your experience serving time in a military prison in Panama during the Vietnam War in which, upon later reflection, you share this encounter and the difficulties it entailed.
00:24:00.480You know, it challenged you to turn inward and down a path of self-discovery.
00:24:04.820And so I'm hoping you're willing to share more on the alchemizing of so-called unfortunate circumstances and life passages.
00:24:12.840And I have a series of thoughts and questions around this, such as, you know, how can trauma
00:24:19.740Or why is it that in order to live close to our gift, we must live close to our wounds?
00:24:26.660Or maybe another one is how can we not only sharpen our ability to notice these opportunities
00:24:31.180for growth, but also courageously and boldly stand in our truth?
00:24:35.840And then the last thought I was having around this is how might we find agency to do so
00:24:41.480in a system that requires and feeds off of our disconnection from self. So I know that's a lot
00:24:46.800of questions. So please feel free to pick up on any of or all of these. Well, they're great
00:24:51.880questions. Thank you. So just a direct route to the gift and wound thing. Carl Jung, the psychologist
00:24:58.080wrote that the gifts hide behind the wounds. And that became meaningful to me because, you know,
00:25:06.920growing up very wounded person in the world winding up in in prison not for doing something
00:25:12.500wrong but trying to stand up for something right and then going through the dark night of the soul
00:25:17.760which for me was you know several months in solitary confinement eventually without any food
00:25:23.060and I found at the bottom you could say on the ground of the soul which is where I fell to
00:25:29.120I found both the gifts and the wounds and I didn't understand that I just experienced it and later I
00:25:35.560had to study psychology to figure out kind of what it meant. But a way to understand why it's
00:25:41.460meaningful. In other words, why would you have a world where everybody's wounded? Because that's
00:25:45.200the psychological idea. Everybody's wounded. Everybody's carrying trauma. One way to understand
00:25:51.060it is when you have someone who is in complete denial about their own woundedness or trauma,
00:25:59.020Donald Trump, and you put them in a position of power, they have no empathy for those who are
00:26:05.480suffering. They have no sympathy for the wounds of other people, and therefore they have to, by
00:26:11.640definition, misuse power. And so the old idea was you only want to give power to a woman or a man0.95
00:26:19.760who has both found a sense of their own giftedness because that realizing that a person is carrying
00:26:28.020a gift makes a person grateful. And grateful gratitude is like, you can only be grateful
00:26:36.320when you feel whole. And a person who knows gratitude knows that they are not in charge of
00:26:41.480all this. They are the receiving end of the gift of life. And then the other side of it is if a
00:26:47.640person knows how they are wounded, they should, because it's a very easy move to make, make the
00:26:54.640move to realizing that everybody suffers in this world, and therefore we are all connected
00:27:00.420partially through the gift of life, but also through the wounds of life. And it's through
00:27:06.340that sympathetic kind of caring connection that we feel a full connection to nature and eventually
00:27:13.520can feel connected to the world and what I like to call the cosmos. I was struck just last week
00:27:21.460When I was studying the reports of the tragedy in Christchurch, New Zealand, when the shooter went to the mosques and killed 50 people, it happened on Friday for Future, the day of Friday for Future, when young people all over the world left school and went on strike in order to bring the idea of healing climate change to more people's awareness.
00:27:51.460And it also happened from the news reporting that right near where the shooting occurred, there were a bunch of students striking for climate change.
00:28:00.400And it kind of hit me really strongly that there's the gift of the young people right next to the wound of the culture.
00:28:08.880Someone acting out of the madness of white supremacy, which is a rejection of other people and saying some are better than others and we're not really connected.
00:28:17.480right next to young people saying we're connected to each other we're also connected to the earth
00:28:22.900and the insects and the butterflies and the trees there it was in one moment you could say in one
00:28:29.740day the gift and the wound and there's no way we're going to heal those wounds and use the gifts
00:28:36.100I would say if we don't find the gifts in ourselves and the wounds in ourselves because
00:28:41.540that becomes the embodied experience that gives us knowledge as opposed to simple opinion or
00:28:48.560information. So I don't know if that helps. I found that kind of connection in a solitary
00:28:54.460confinement cell after months of being with just myself. It allowed me to realize that while prior
00:29:03.360to being in that state, I was blaming a lot of people for my own unhappiness, but I did find
00:29:09.400down there in the depths when there was no one else around, that it was really my own woundedness
00:29:15.060that I didn't know how to deal with. By the way, that's what got me interested in initiation as the
00:29:20.680old archetypal process for a person transforming their lives and finding everything from spiritual
00:29:28.960connections to connections with nature, which are often connected to each other, and made me realize
00:29:35.700that what's missing in the modern world is a genuine understanding and experience of initiation.
00:29:42.840In the idea of a collective initiation, everybody awakens to greater knowledge,
00:29:48.380real gnosis of the moment we're living in.
00:29:51.380And then inside the collective awakening, each person awakens in an individual way
00:29:57.780to their own gifts and what they have to give and to their own wounds and what they have to heal.
00:30:04.760and in turning to heal that realize they're connected to all wounded people or all people
00:30:10.640are wounded and therefore connected and then you get it's really easy to make the empathic move to
00:30:16.260nature and to everything the animal world and all that but if i don't know my own wounds and i'm
00:30:23.440denying them seriously again donald trump and many others then i can deny that i actually have
00:30:29.880feelings for the animals and even the insects that are threatened. And so by knowing our wounds,
00:30:36.900we actually learn a lot about the world. Oh, yes. I very much agree with that. And I want to talk
00:30:44.700more about initiation. But before that, I want to dive a little deeper into this time when you
00:30:50.380were in solitary confinement and an awakening of the soul. You recount learning of the old
00:30:56.100Irish tradition of ritual fasting in context to your own fasting in solitary confinement and
00:31:02.280you write quote I understood that my decision to fast while in prison was not simply personal
00:31:07.860it was also part of an ancestral tradition that under pressure had awakened as if from inside my
00:31:13.840bones and from the depths of my soul end quote so what do you think is the importance of studying
00:31:21.280the cultural specific mythology of our ancestors? And to what degree are we unconsciously reliving
00:31:28.840and rewriting the tales of our ancestors? That's another really good question. I put
00:31:34.800those things in a book so that people that happen to be reading the book would get a sense of where
00:31:40.980I'm coming from. I study things and I like what they used to call the sacred path of knowledge.
00:31:47.220but my test for things is what have I experienced you know can I back it up with some lived
00:31:55.420experience and so that was you know in some ways the worst experience of my life I mean as a young
00:32:01.860person it was I didn't expect to live no one thought I was going to live because in in the
00:32:07.840midst of being mistreated and punished in various ways and thrown into solitary confinement
00:32:16.120I realized that the authorities did not understand what my objection was. I couldn't sign conscientious objection papers because the papers actually said you had to claim that it was for religious reasons that you weren't willing to go to battle.
00:32:35.960And I said, hey, first of all, I'm Irish and I was raised as Catholic, so I don't think I can claim that the purity of having nothing to do with with war or battles.
00:32:48.080And I said, what I'm having is a conscientious objection from my own soul.
00:32:54.540And and that didn't qualify. So one thing led to another.
00:32:58.660But taking a stand like that, I was 20 years old, made everything in my life change.
00:33:07.860And whereas I never would have chosen to fall that far into like a dungeon of loneliness and so on, it actually turned out to be the best thing for me.
00:33:18.680And so I came out of it having an awareness that there was a voice in my soul.
00:33:38.600But it also was, I didn't want to die in the wrong way or having not lived my own life.
00:33:46.220I was willing to die if I couldn't live my life, but I wasn't going to die living someone else's
00:33:51.820idea of my life. I had that youthful exuberance for meaning. And now I'm going to get lost talking
00:33:57.660about it because even in talking about it, I go right back in to the experience of it.
00:34:03.380But what happened was when I got out of there, there was no counselor waiting or therapist
00:34:09.240waiting. I was actually more alone when I got out than when I was in the dungeon in some ways.
00:34:14.720I didn't know where to go. I didn't know how to fit in. But I did remember this idea of initiation
00:34:20.400or rites of passage that I associated with tribal groups. But I found out through that process that
00:34:26.980the knowledge of that is in our bones. This is just how it felt to me. And so shortly after I
00:34:33.200got out and I was trying to figure out what do I do? I'm a stranger in a strange land because no
00:34:38.020one knows who I am now. I went through life and death repeatedly. And now my friends don't actually
00:34:44.260know me I had to move away from everyone I knew because people I couldn't relate to them but they
00:34:48.340couldn't relate to me either and then I happened to hear about prisoners in a prison in Ireland
00:34:57.200who began fasting against the colonial rule and I realized that what had made me fast was
00:35:05.220you could call it an ancient Irish thing because the Irish had this practice of ritual fasting
00:35:12.100against the misuse of power. And I realized in my own sense of the world, that's what had happened
00:35:17.780to me. And I had tapped into something that, you know, we're going to call ancestry. But then I
00:35:24.480found out that there was such a thing also in India. So I was tapping into something that in
00:35:32.540psychological terms wasn't specifically ancestral. It was deeper than the specific manifestations of
00:35:40.600ancestors it's what you call the archetypal ground of the ancestors and I don't know I still
00:35:46.760try to explain it to myself these days but that felt to me like the ground of truth like a ground
00:35:53.400of being ground of truth experience and I tried to integrate that into my life and eventually began
00:36:03.580working with young people who were in severe trouble using the idea that by the time you're
00:36:09.760in severe trouble, you're more ready to transform than most people. If only there's an understanding
00:36:16.620that deep down in the soul, there's genuine meaning, there's truth, and there's beauty
00:36:20.960trying to awaken. And if you can put those things together, then the most troubling things can become
00:36:28.120the kind of irritation from which transformation can occur. If a person can hold on to that idea
00:36:36.600personally, you can then transfer it to the planet, as we say nowadays, and say when the planet is in
00:36:43.780this much trouble, we're in the dark night of the soul of the planet itself, then we are strangely
00:36:50.140closer to the seeds of imagination that can be used to reinvigorate life and also possibly heal,
00:36:59.260not just personally, but on a collective and possibly planetary level.
00:37:03.620i want to go back to this word initiation because i think that
00:37:11.220in our modern culture we're so far from not just understanding it but even having access to it
00:37:20.720whether it's in our communities or our schools whatever it is i mean i this question around
00:37:27.280initiation is something like do we need to be tying it to something ancestral is it something
00:37:34.260that needs to be done with others in a community is it something that we can create for ourselves
00:37:41.200we can create our own initiations you know how does one come to initiation at this time when we
00:37:46.580are so disconnected from each other from the earth from our ancestry many of us don't even know where
00:37:52.280we came from. So I'd love to hear your thoughts around this. Yeah, it's a real puzzle. I literally
00:38:00.060have studied it since I was 21 years old. And I've written about it at various times. And I've
00:38:05.680tried to put it in practice in various ways. So one reason I really became interested in gifts
00:38:13.700and wounds is because an initiatory experience, whether it happens randomly, like a person gets
00:38:21.860locked up and discovers themselves while they're locked up, or even a person gets an illness that
00:38:28.120they didn't choose, and they find themselves isolated. The isolation is one of the steps
00:38:34.860of initiation. The first step is to be separate from other people, often not by one's own choice,
00:38:41.360and in that separation, there becomes, consciously or not, the challenge to get to know oneself,
00:38:48.500And then the second step of initiation is some kind of ordeal, a suffering or a challenge that gets to the very root of one's being.
00:38:58.600And and so it's in feeling ourselves separated from who we thought we were or something like that, which can happen accidentally from an accident, even.
00:39:07.300and then going through challenges and ordeals which strip away, you know, the simple ego
00:39:15.000layers of things because you're challenged to become way more present. So even though
00:39:22.460initiation doesn't happen in a meaningful way culturally, it's archetypal and you can't take
00:39:27.300it away completely. But I think where it gets really interesting is the third step of initiation
00:39:32.600is a return as a transformed person to a community that genuinely welcomes someone back and ideally
00:39:42.680can see some way in which the person is changed or in which the person has a heightened sense of
00:39:49.080their own gifts in life and their own ability to be present. So what happens, for instance,
00:39:55.240in culture now is those who have power tend to be seriously uninitiated people. And in other words,
00:40:02.180they don't know who they are and therefore they cannot really know who other people are and then
00:40:06.900you get give them power and they cannot help but misuse it because they don't understand how power
00:40:13.320is supposed to be used to bring people together not divide them apart and so on like that but the
00:40:19.080problem now is a lot of people go through the separation experience um that happens in depression
00:40:25.860as well as it happens in an illness and most people go through challenges and ordeals
00:40:31.160but very few people i think get recognized for the transformation they've gone through
00:40:37.240you can see this even with things like something like cancer or let's say breast cancer which is
00:40:43.780a real modern scourge and i know there are people learning how to do this but when a person comes
00:40:49.820back from a terrible illness which challenges a person at all levels of psyche and soul
00:40:56.320the soul expects people to be waiting and to welcome them for having survived the brush with
00:41:02.860death which you wanted the old descriptions of initiation and it makes a person not less of a
00:41:08.820person but a more genuinely experienced person and they're on the path to actually becoming an elder
00:41:16.020because they've gone to the depths of their own soul and found a way back to life and i keep
00:41:22.900seeing that as the parallel to what's going on with nature in the sense of all the climate change
00:41:29.740and all the damages occurring and so on it's as if nature is going through the dark night of its
00:41:35.020own soul and if we can relate to it personally we're going to do better in terms of trying to
00:41:41.580help heal it and relate to it collectively i'm thinking about relating collectively the last
00:41:49.400thing you'd said. And I'm thinking back of a passage I read in preparation that loosely
00:41:55.520outlines how some mythological worlds are built up only to be shattered, from which new worlds
00:42:01.920are created. And so maybe a question around this is, what is the role of the mythic imagination
00:42:08.860in addressing global problems and shattering these old systems?
00:42:14.140So it's an odd world we live in where most people use the word myths to mean that the thing is not true. A myth is a falseness. And yet the old idea was myths meant emergent truth.
00:42:30.960so one of the problems we have is we've fallen out of story and and i mean the stories that
00:42:40.440carry people the stories that connect people we don't have enough shared mythic imagination
00:42:46.960to hold us together you could even say it's the lack of meaningful in-depth shared imagination
00:42:54.420that causes the polarization in the culture that people are now grabbing just a part of it. So
00:43:01.260people think you're on the left or you're on the right or you're conservative or you're progressive
00:43:06.200and all. And some of those things all used to have meaning, but now people are holding onto them
00:43:11.620as if it's a raft in the middle of an ocean being driven by a great storm. And maybe that's what it
00:43:18.580really feels like to the soul. So somehow we have to find stories or versions of stories
00:43:26.220that bring us closer back together. And that's a struggle. I mean, I don't usually think of
00:43:32.880finding new stories. I think it's more like new interpretation. A lot of what I write about,
00:43:37.880I take old stories and try to see how they apply right now. Because if you take a simple thing
00:43:43.340like the Greek myth of Icarus, you know, who has those techne, technological wings that were made
00:43:52.580by his father, Daedalus, when the two of them were trying to get out of a prison. So here's the
00:43:57.420problem with technology. Daedalus, who's the inventor of that mythology, makes the wings and
00:44:03.420attaches them with beeswax to his youthful son, Icarus. And Icarus, of course, being youthful,
00:44:10.680flies too close to the sun. This is the entire Western culture trying to fly towards the light
00:44:17.260and thinking it can do to techne version of wings, whether it's rockets or planes or whatever,
00:44:24.560going to other planets and all that kind of stuff. That's all Icarus stuff.
00:44:28.680But techne can't get us to where we want to go. And so when Icarus comes too close to the sun,
00:44:34.980it melts the beeswax and he begins to plummet really hard, which on another level you could
00:44:40.640say, on a meaningful level, that's happening to the Western culture as well. And so you can take
00:44:47.100an old myth like that. Daedalus, by the way, doesn't fly as high, and he manages actually to
00:44:52.920escape and fly away, and he lives a long life afterwards. And so it shows you something about
00:44:59.900youth and elders in one sense, and it shows you something about the limits of technology in
00:45:05.020another. And it's a fairly meaningful way of using an old story to talk about a contemporary
00:45:11.020condition. And that's what I mean by mythology. So I don't know, I'm not trying to invent the
00:45:18.200new story or the new idea. I'm trying to find myself continually and hopefully connect to others
00:45:25.980through what I see as old stories being reinterpreted or found anew. That's just the
00:45:33.680way I work out of it. I have concerns about a culture based on newness that has done great
00:45:40.820damage to the planet, then trying to find something new to solve the damage by that quest for newness.
00:46:03.680It's just a lie I want to believe is true
00:47:46.020So a lot of people, when they have a kind of academic education around myth,
00:47:52.540are mostly exposed to the great mythologies of the so-called great civilizations, which,
00:47:58.420by the way, were never very civilized. But I like to carry what I call the folk myths.
00:48:05.660They're much smaller stories that are harder to damage. So probably my favorite story of the last
00:48:13.880number of years is a Native American story that's told by a number of tribes in North America,
00:48:18.760or it was told. And it has an odd beginning in which it doesn't say once upon a time. It starts
00:48:29.140with this time, whatever that might mean to the person hearing it, and say, you know, every human
00:48:35.860born is always looking for knowledge. And it turns out that real knowledge is available in a cave that
00:48:43.160is nearby here they always say that here um and the strange thing is no one ever makes it to that
00:48:49.100cave everybody now rushing this way and that on highways and byways and and even uh internet
00:48:56.020highways and no one's making it to the cave the place where the knowledge we're looking for
00:49:01.580happens to be but if you found that cave inside the cave you would find an old woman and the old
00:49:08.040woman is sitting in the cave and she's weaving the most beautiful garment that anyone has ever seen
00:49:14.340and she's been working on it for a long time and because she wants it to be so beautiful
00:49:19.400she's making the hem of the garment out of porcupine quills and in order to weave them
00:49:25.760into the garment she has to bite down on the quills to flatten them and she's been biting0.83
00:49:30.340down on quills for so long that she's worn her teeth down to where they're just nubs sticking
00:49:35.540above the gums but still she keeps weaving this beautiful garment and every once in a while she
00:49:42.340has to stop weaving and go to the back of the cave and in the back of the cave there is a fire and
00:49:48.080some people say that fire is the oldest thing in this world and hanging over the fire is a cauldron
00:49:53.340and in the cauldron is a stew that includes all the seeds of all the plants and all the bushes and
00:50:00.040all the grains and all the fruit trees that have ever grown on the earth and if she doesn't go
00:50:05.040back and stir the soup of all the seeds then the the fire will get too hot and it will burn the
00:50:11.780seeds and we won't have the natural world and so she puts down the garment and goes back to stir
00:50:16.820the seeds but while she's going slowly to the back to stir the soup of all the seeds the black
00:50:22.800dog suddenly appears and the black dog sees a loose thread of that beautiful garment and it
00:50:29.100begins to pull on that thread and it keeps pulling until the whole garment is unraveled and not
00:50:34.980Nothing is left but a great chaos laying on the floor of the cave so that when the old woman comes back, she sees all of her work turned into chaos on the floor.
00:50:46.580And she stands for a minute to consider and she sits down and no one knows what she thinks or what she might say about it.
00:50:54.560But eventually she picks up a loose thread herself.
00:50:57.860and as soon as she picks up that thread she sees an even more beautiful garment that she could
00:51:05.120weave she sees the image of a greater garment and she begins to weave that new garment out of the0.99
00:51:11.040chaos of the previous garment and as the elders say a lot of people say damn that dog for unraveling0.63
00:51:18.760everything but they say wisdom would say this world has to come apart once in a while otherwise0.94