00:00:19.980When the planet is in this much trouble, we're in the dark night of the soul of the planet itself,
00:00:26.320then we are strangely closer to the seeds of imagination that can be used to reinvigorate
00:00:34.820life and also possibly heal, not just personally, but on a collective and possibly planetary level.
00:00:45.820Today we are speaking with Michael Mead. Michael is a renowned storyteller, author,
00:00:51.120and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology. He combines hypnotic storytelling,
00:00:57.660street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths with a deep
00:01:03.140knowledge of cross-cultural rituals. He is the author of The Genius, Myth, Fate, and Destiny,
00:01:10.420The Two Agreements of the Soul, Why the World Doesn't End, The Water of Life, Initiation,
00:01:16.300and the tempering of the soul. Mead is the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation,
00:01:22.200a non-profit network of artists, activists, and community builders that encourages
00:01:26.980greater understanding between diverse peoples. Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us
00:01:33.280today on For the Wild. It's really a pleasure to have you with us. Great to be with you, Ayang.
00:01:39.080So I want to talk about your most recent publication to begin with, Awakening the Soul,
00:01:44.140and you touch on a number of very large global crises from climate change and natural disasters
00:01:51.300to political polarization and the proliferation of mass destruction and you write about these
00:01:58.200issues as symptoms of a much deeper-seated problem, a toxic underlying culture of disconnection from
00:02:05.620the quote natural world, each other, and our own souls. So to begin this interview, I'm wondering
00:02:12.440if you could guide us into your thinking around these disorienting and troubled times you know
00:02:18.720how is our current predicament connected to a much larger and profound reckoning of who we are
00:02:24.460and how we must change in order to survive and thrive on this planet and then maybe a second
00:02:29.400part is how does this connect to how we can understand this time in terms of the mythological
00:02:35.560notion that there is the story of the world and the story of the individual soul weaving through
00:02:41.000one another? So that's where I usually start looking at the idea that there are two great
00:02:47.720stories going on at the same time for humans. And one is what I would call the eternal drama
00:02:56.900of the manifest world. In other words, I think it doesn't come to an end. I think it mythologically,
00:03:04.220it can't um it had no specific time of beginning and therefore it doesn't have to have a specific
00:03:12.600end so that's one big idea mythological idea and then the other is that the other you know
00:03:19.420kind of eternal drama is the drama of the individual soul in the midst of the ever-changing
00:03:25.360world and why i like to look at those two things is when you approach it from the old ideas
00:03:33.700of the embodied soul then the individual soul is secretly connected to the soul of the world
00:03:41.040and where that becomes important nowadays i think is it takes away some of the idea
00:03:49.540of oh i'm just a little speck in the great universe and there's nothing i can do
00:03:55.600to change the kind of uh catastrophic condition that have now affecting the earth
00:04:01.260and it doesn't go to the old kind of discredited idea that humans are in charge of nature.
00:04:08.060It actually goes a different route, that humans are secretly through human nature, connected to
00:04:13.700nature. And if we could become a better version of our own nature, we could actually relate better,
00:04:20.620but also possibly contribute to the healing of what they used to call great nature. And
00:04:27.900And to pull the thread all the way through, in contrary to Western ideas of the kind of opposition of culture and nature, when people act from the genuine ground of human nature, the human soul becomes the meeting ground of culture and nature.
00:04:48.020And so going back to the, I think was the first question you were posing, I think we're in such an extreme condition that we need a different view of the world than we have inherited.
00:05:03.060And so that is the other element. I think we're in a cosmological crisis, mythological crisis, and a psychological crisis, as well as a climate crisis.
00:05:17.600And the latest thing, I guess, being reported on the crisis of nature in freefall, where it comes to the loss of species.
00:05:28.320so to transition into a conversation on the mythology of today and the notion of the popular
00:05:36.780quote american mythology there are those who say we are lacking others argue that our mythology
00:05:44.460is embodied in concepts like democracy or progress or even that mythology is recreated
00:05:50.580through the production of entertainment and if this is so then i can't help but think about
00:05:57.000how the stories we tell in this culture are grounded in individualism, the linear arc of
00:06:03.100the hero's journey, for example. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think modern
00:06:09.220culture requires a new mythology, or must we connect with age-old myths? Do you see a hyper
00:06:16.180focus on individualism in the modern adaptation of mythology, and does this limit its ability to
00:06:21.920heal on a cultural level? Really good nuanced question. So there's a problem with the idea of
00:06:29.840a new myth because myth is by its nature ancient. It kind of rests on what they used to call
00:06:39.720archetypes, the kind of root basis of things that manifest in the world. And so it's a little bit
00:06:48.200of a hard thing to straighten out. A lot of people talk about a new paradigm, but paradigm is really
00:06:54.120another word for archetype. Arche means ancient. Mythic imagination is ancient and immediate at
00:07:04.100the same time. It's not a choice between new and old. It's really, I think, a bringing together of
00:07:12.580the ancient and the immediate. For instance, the big concern, and probably so, is about nature now.
00:07:20.180Well, nature isn't new. Nature is the old, you know, ecology of place. So new is the sales pitch
00:07:28.660of the culture of individualism and progress, I would say. So what I think we're looking for is,
00:07:36.600it's difficult to say simply but where I wind up focusing is in creative imagination
00:07:46.180which they used to say imagination is the deepest power of the human soul and then even someone
00:07:55.320like Einstein said that nothing can exist until it has first been imagined so when we get involved
00:08:02.220in creative imagination, we're actually close to creation itself. And I think what we're trying to
00:08:09.640do is find a greater and more imaginative way of seeing the world and our place in it.
00:08:17.740You mentioned, you know, the hero's journey, which is probably the only familiar myth to people in
00:08:24.660the United States, really. And that's partially because it was the basis for Star Wars. And that's
00:08:31.860what made those ideas popular and there's a limitation to the hero's myth a number of them
00:08:38.560and that's why one reason i wrote the book called the genius myth i was trying to suggest an
00:08:44.620imagination different than the hero because the hero tends to be masculine in one sense tends to
00:08:51.400be very uh external achievable oriented kind of muscular and in the extreme leads to all of these
00:09:00.300um video games that are violent with kind of heroic battles and so on so i was looking for
00:09:07.120a concise way of saying uh or naming what is the character in people that is creative and
00:09:16.480meaningful that is spiritual and soulful that is natural and cultural at the same time and i landed
00:09:24.040on the old word genius, which doesn't mean high IQ or spectacular talent. The actual origin of
00:09:32.820the word, it means the spirit that's already there. So each person is born with a spirit
00:09:38.800that's already there, which they used to call a person's genius. And the genius of a person
00:09:46.040has two big connections. One is to nature directly. There's another kind of genius
00:09:53.240called genius loki which means the genius of place and when a person loves a place or finds
00:09:59.640their place they are connecting with the genius or the spirit of that place and the other big
00:10:04.980direction of the the genius in each person's soul male female young or old gay straight you name
00:10:12.360what it is genius is like a universal connection whereas hero tends to be a little more a little
00:10:18.460bit more constricted to heroics as we know it. And so the other direction of the genius is it's
00:10:26.240the root of the creative imaginative capacity of the person, which, like I said earlier, puts a
00:10:33.120human potentially close to the energy of creation that gave us the natural world. And so I'm using
00:10:40.340genius as an old idea that can be reimagined to connect each of us individual and in groups
00:10:48.240to the kind of great challenge of trying to heal the separation between nature and culture
00:10:56.180and even assist in the reestablishing of the biospheres and the environmental balance.
00:11:05.700The idea of technology pops into my head because so much of today's culture is centered around
00:11:11.360technology the techno fix you know genius and technology i it's just it's such a
00:11:18.000a huge yeah cultural i don't even know how to describe it but i was recently reading an article
00:11:26.820examining our quote post literate culture and the idea that we have become mutated by digital
00:11:34.520images and interactions and in this article neil postman was quoted saying quote americans
00:11:40.880because television stages their world no longer talk to each other they entertain each other
00:11:47.100end quote and this quote really it hit a chord in me because I'm not so sure that all of us can
00:11:54.140even distinguish the difference between talking to someone versus being entertained and to think
00:11:59.860that in the span of a little over two decades we have so readily traded in connection for amusement
00:12:07.020So I'd really love to ask you about the relationship between technology and what you refer to as horizontal connection.
00:12:15.360In your view, why have we all been so willing to trade in connection for amusement?
00:12:20.980Well, in terms of the, first of all, the Greeks were great for dealing with concepts that were opposite to each other.
00:12:29.400And one of the great old oppositions is between techne and gnosis.
00:12:34.380techne is the common ability to connect invent or shape things and gnosis g-n-o-s-i-s gnosis
00:12:44.680is the ability or the experience of deeply knowing in the body in the blood and in the soul
00:12:53.020something and also somewhat and so back to the idea of a cosmological dislocation
00:13:00.560um the west has taken the low road of techne in a delusional way and so now there's going to be
00:13:09.660the heroic pretension that inventive technology is going to save the earth and of course inventive
00:13:15.660technology is part of the problem that is endangering the earth and so unfortunately
00:13:20.980we're in this real crisis of um imagination mythos cosmos soul all of those kind of things
00:13:30.240And even as I say it now, I'm losing my track because of the size of the issue that everybody
00:13:37.220But, you know, I love the I love language and I lament the loss of the literary world
00:13:43.440and even the damage that's being done to the conversational world.
00:13:48.660But words are interesting in that they have levels and they have their own depth.
00:13:53.660And the original meaning or the root meaning of entertain is to turn around together.
00:13:59.460And so I thought it was more close to the point when, well, even the word amuse, if it's done with death, it has muse in it. Amuse means to tap into the humor of the muses, the source of all inspiration in a feminine form. And humor itself comes from the idea of humus or earth.
00:14:22.160and so that's why so many jokes are earthy so in a way we've gone far from the source
00:14:30.360and in another way our own language as deficient as it may be is always connecting us to the source
00:14:38.380if we only pay attention so the old mythological idea is everything that is experienced has more
00:14:45.960depth than is obvious and has meaning waiting to be found. So I fear greatly the artificial
00:14:54.120intelligence and this kind of continuing delusion about techne or technological solutions.
00:15:01.820At the same time, I know from working with a lot of young people and so on, that people can go from
00:15:09.620from being bemused by things that don't make much sense in the long run to being awake in an
00:15:17.780imaginative way and in the embodiment of their own soul. That can happen very quickly. How it
00:15:25.100happens on a collective level to a culture, to me, is the big issue. In the latest book, Awakening
00:15:31.060the Soul, part of the time I'm writing about the idea of a collective initiation, that is to say,
00:15:38.440an awakening of imagination, but also deep feeling happening on a collective level that
00:15:45.860allows us to see the world through different eyes and also feel connected to each other and the
00:15:52.820animal world and the world of nature, but also the cosmos in what we might call new, but let's say
00:16:00.220nuanced ways. We're talking about technology and imagination and the imagination that is growing
00:16:09.040in the sector of technology and design, you know, and it is creating these artificial worlds,
00:16:13.640like you had mentioned the video games. Do you think it's significant that it would appear that
00:16:19.100imagination is thriving in that realm, but perhaps stagnating in others? In the age of the
00:16:24.860Anthropocene it would seem that our imaginations are adapting to a world in a multitude of ways
00:16:32.280and I can't help but thinking about the younger generations who are immersed in tragedy and
00:16:37.360suffering and really staring into a future that might very well be unlike anything that will
00:16:43.560succeed it. So I'd like to bring up the role of youthful imaginations in today's world and in your
00:16:51.940opinion how is youthful imagination functioning especially in regards to this idea of technology
00:17:00.340being the container for imagination in this culture so the things really do connect i'm
00:17:10.280following you there so one of the things i've been saying is what we're lacking is vertical
00:17:14.860imagination in a way the world has become flat again remember when people used to think the
00:17:20.580world was flat it's happened again so that the great imagination that is the natural inheritance
00:17:26.820of each individual soul has collapsed into a horizontal level of connectedness that we call
00:17:33.180the internet or something and or or people's ways of being socially connected digitally connected
00:17:41.380and pretending that that's a genuine social connection even though it can be at times
00:17:46.120So there's a collapse that has occurred. And so in a way, part of the challenge is to imagine ourselves part of the whole living, singing, cosmological, natural, constant expression of the source of creation, whatever a person wants to call that source.
00:18:06.120In other words, young people naturally inherit and tend to experience, whether people confirm it or not, their own dream of life, which always goes all the way from the personal to the cosmological.
00:18:22.100and so i agree with you completely i've worked with youth for years and to hear and see young
00:18:30.640people now going well this there's nothing we can do this thing has gone too far the climate change
00:18:35.920is about to turn into the hothouse state um everything's going to hell terrorism politics
00:18:42.920is completely opposed and negative and you know it's all true and it's all being delivered through
00:18:48.300technology to everybody every day and the strange thing and the only thing that i've experienced is
00:18:55.800when a person a young person taps in to the core of their self which i think has a genius in there
00:19:02.700a unique genius that brought them to life but also that that core is connected to the roots of
00:19:08.000creation they have access to the very opposite of the collapse of the world which on one level
00:19:15.180is vertical imagination that reminds us that we come from the stars and we have some speck
00:19:24.460of the original explosion that people think brought the world into existence and therefore
00:19:30.800we can tap into our own being and somehow contribute to the healing, to the meaningful
00:19:37.740change. But I want to put the other side of it there. So psychologically, the pairing psychologically
00:19:44.480is youth and elder. The old idea was a culture falls apart in two ways at once, where its elders
00:19:51.320are forgotten and where its youth are rejected or not welcomed. And so we've already gone through
00:19:56.940that. We already have the loss of the functioning of the elders. We have olders instead, people who
00:20:02.460live longer and longer, but don't necessarily get any wiser. I call it the olders versus the elders.1.00
00:20:08.420And on the other hand, we have young people really not feeling welcomed into culture in a meaningful human way.0.97
00:20:18.360They're more given the substitute of technology as a way to allay the kind of youthful experience of isolation and deep doubt in the self.
00:20:30.800And the function of culture, which would be welcome them and connect them to nature, is not there.
00:20:37.120and yet if it's true that everybody inherits you know the deep meaning and all the qualities of
00:20:45.240being human and and those are universal regardless of background or anything like that then we're
00:20:51.180going to have to somehow tap into that to reimagine all the connections and one of the
00:20:56.340core connections is between the awakened elder and the awakened youth and just to say one more
00:21:03.600thing because I'm getting rolling now. The environmentalism and the longing to make
00:21:11.340nature and culture come together and to heal the earth, as we say, it cannot happen in my mind
00:21:17.120without this awakening and reconnection of youth and elders. I mean, youth are carrying the dream
00:21:23.780of the future, but elders are supposed to be carrying the wisdom of the moment that illuminates
00:21:31.620and substantiates and confirms that dream of the youth.
00:22:53.060As flat as the deck of an aircraft carrier
00:22:57.180I want to talk about your book, Awakening the Soul.
00:23:16.900You eloquently describe how what we may initially perceive as limits are actually the seeds of our soul's purpose.
00:23:25.800And when we feel like we're merely condemned to an unfavorable fate, we fail to engage with our
00:23:33.580genius or our gift. And you shared the particular example of your experience serving time in a
00:23:40.120military prison in Panama during the Vietnam War, in which upon later reflection, you share this
00:23:45.860encounter and the difficulties it entailed. You know, it challenged you to turn inward and down
00:23:51.060a path of self-discovery and so I'm hoping you're willing to share more on the alchemizing of so-called
00:23:58.160unfortunate circumstances and life passages and I have a series of thoughts and questions around
00:24:04.440this such as you know how can trauma guide us or why is it that in order to live close to our gift
00:24:12.240we must live close to our wounds or maybe another one is how can we not only sharpen our ability to
00:24:18.280notice these opportunities for growth, but also courageously and boldly stand in our truth?
00:24:24.360And then the last thought I was having around this is, how might we find agency to do so in
00:24:29.800a system that requires and feeds off of our disconnection from self? So I know that's a lot
00:24:34.980of questions, so please feel free to pick up on any of or all of these. Well, they're great
00:24:40.060questions. Thank you. So just a direct route to the gift and wound thing. Carl Jung, the psychologist,
00:24:46.260wrote that the gifts hide behind the wounds and that became meaningful to me because you know
00:24:55.140growing up very wounded person in the world winding up in in prison not for doing something
00:25:00.680wrong but trying to stand up for something right and then going through the dark night of the soul
00:25:05.920which for me was you know several months in solitary confinement eventually without any food
00:25:11.240and I found at the bottom, you could say, on the ground of the soul, which is where I fell to,
00:25:17.820I found both the gifts and the wounds. And I didn't understand that. I just experienced it.
00:25:23.280And later I had to study psychology to figure out kind of what it meant. But a way to understand
00:25:28.960why it's meaningful. In other words, why would you have a world where everybody's wounded? Because
00:25:33.140that's the psychological idea. Everybody's wounded. Everybody's carrying trauma. One way
00:25:38.620to understand it is when you have someone who is in complete denial about their own woundedness
00:25:46.200or trauma, Donald Trump, and you put them in a position of power, they have no empathy for those
00:25:53.400who are suffering. They have no sympathy for the wounds of other people, and therefore they have
00:25:59.240to, by definition, misuse power. And so the old idea was you only want to give power to a woman1.00
00:26:07.280or a man who has both found a sense of their own giftedness because that realizing that a person
00:26:15.600is carrying a gift makes a person grateful. And grateful gratitude is like, you can only be
00:26:24.080grateful when you feel whole. And a person who knows gratitude knows that they are not in charge
00:26:29.500of all this. They are the receiving end of the gift of life. And then the other side of it is
00:26:35.060If a person knows how they are wounded, they should, because it's a very easy move to make, make the move to realizing that everybody suffers in this world, and therefore we are all connected partially through the gift of life, but also through the wounds of life.
00:26:53.500And it's through that sympathetic kind of caring connection that we feel a full connection to nature and eventually can feel connected to the world and what I like to call the cosmos.
00:27:06.200I was struck just last week when I was studying the reports of the tragedy in Christchurch, New Zealand, when the shooter went to the mosques and killed 50 people.
00:27:21.340It 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, you know, to more people's awareness.
00:27:40.120And it also happened from the news reporting that right near where the shooting occurred, there were a bunch of students striking for climate change.
00:27:48.020and it kind of hit me really strongly that there's the gift of the young people right next to the
00:27:55.380wound of the culture someone acting out of the madness of white supremacy which is a rejection
00:28:01.500of other people and saying some are better than others and we're not really connected right next
00:28:06.880to young people saying we're connected to each other we're also connected to the earth and the
00:28:11.700insects and the butterflies and the trees, there it was in one moment, you could say, in one day,
00:28:19.260the gift and the wound. And there's no way we're going to heal those wounds and use the gifts.
00:28:24.540I would say if we don't find the gifts in ourselves and the wounds in ourselves, because
00:28:29.780that becomes the embodied experience that gives us knowledge as opposed to simple opinion or
00:28:36.720information. So I don't know if that helps. I found that kind of connection in a solitary
00:28:42.640confinement cell after months of being with just myself. It allowed me to realize that
00:28:50.000while prior to being in that state, I was blaming a lot of people for my own unhappiness. But I did
00:28:57.120find down there in the depths when there was no one else around, that it was really my own
00:29:02.600woundedness that I didn't know how to deal with. By the way, that's what got me interested in
00:29:07.480initiation as the old archetypal process for a person transforming their lives and finding
00:29:15.700everything from spiritual connections to connections with nature, which are often
00:29:20.680connected to each other, and made me realize that what's missing in the modern world
00:29:25.860is a genuine understanding and experience of initiation in in in the idea of a collective
00:29:33.340initiation everybody awakens to greater knowledge real gnosis of the moment we're living in
00:29:38.940and then inside the collective awakening each person awakens in an individual way to their
00:29:46.820own gifts and what they have to give and to their own wounds and what they have to heal
00:29:52.940and in turning to heal that, realize they're connected to all wounded people or all people
00:29:58.800are wounded and therefore connected. And then you get, it's really easy to make the empathic move
00:30:04.240to nature and to everything, the animal world and all that. But if I don't know my own wounds and
00:30:11.440I'm denying them seriously, again, Donald Trump and many others, then I can deny that I actually
00:30:17.840have feelings for the animals and even the insects that are threatened. And so by knowing
00:30:24.480our wounds, we actually learn a lot about the world. Oh, yes. I very much agree with that. And
00:30:32.180I want to talk more about initiation. But before that, I want to dive a little deeper into this
00:30:37.860time when you were in solitary confinement and an awakening of the soul. You recount learning
00:30:43.380of the old Irish tradition of ritual, fasting in context to your own fasting in solitary
00:30:49.500confinement, and you write, quote, I understood that my decision to fast while in prison was not
00:30:55.100simply personal. It was also part of an ancestral tradition that under pressure had awakened as if
00:31:01.220from inside my bones and from the depths of my soul, end quote. So what do you think is the
00:31:08.240importance of studying the cultural specific mythology of our ancestors? And to what degree
00:31:14.060are we unconsciously reliving and rewriting the tales of our ancestors?
00:31:20.540It's another really good question. I put those things in a book so that people that happen to
00:31:27.320be reading the book would get a sense of where I'm coming from, that I study things and I like
00:31:32.600what they used to call the sacred path of knowledge. But my test for things is what
00:31:39.340have I experienced? Can I back it up with some lived experience? And so that was in some ways
00:31:47.340the worst experience of my life. I mean, as a young person, it was. I didn't expect to live.
00:31:52.820No one thought I was going to live because in the midst of being mistreated and punished in
00:32:01.760various ways and thrown into solitary confinement, I realized that the authorities did not understand
00:32:09.000what my objection was. I wasn't, I couldn't sign conscientious objection papers because the papers
00:32:17.820actually said you had to claim that it was for religious reasons that you weren't willing to go
00:32:23.700to battle. And I said, hey, first of all, I'm Irish and I was raised as Catholic. So I don't
00:32:29.340think I can claim the purity of having nothing to do with war or battles. And I said, what I'm
00:32:37.940having is a conscientious objection from my own soul. And that didn't qualify. So one thing led
00:32:46.280to another. But taking a stand like that, I was 20 years old, made everything in my life change.
00:32:55.440And 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.
00:33:06.880And so I came out of it having an awareness that there was a voice in my soul.
00:33:26.800But it also was, I didn't want to die in the wrong way or having not lived my own life.
00:33:34.400I was willing to die if I couldn't live my life, but I wasn't going to die living someone else's
00:33:40.000idea of my life. I had that youthful exuberance for meaning. And now I'm going to get lost talking
00:33:45.840about it because even in talking about it, I go right back in to the experience of it.
00:33:51.560But what happened was when I got out of there, there was no counselor waiting or therapist
00:33:57.420waiting. I was actually more alone when I got out than when I was in the dungeon in some ways.
00:34:02.900I didn't know where to go. I didn't know how to fit in. But I did remember this idea of initiation
00:34:08.580or rites of passage that I associated with tribal groups. But I found out through that process that
00:34:15.160the knowledge of that is in our bones. This is just how it felt to me. And so shortly after I
00:34:21.380got out and I was trying to figure out what do I do? I'm a stranger in a strange land because no one
00:34:26.360knows who I am now. I went through life and death repeatedly. And now my friends don't actually know
00:34:32.680me. I had to move away from everyone I knew because people, I couldn't relate to them,
00:34:36.300but they couldn't relate to me either. And then I happened to hear about prisoners in a prison
00:34:43.900in Ireland who began fasting against the colonial rule. And I realized that what had made me fast
00:34:52.980was, you could call it an ancient Irish thing, because the Irish had this practice of ritual
00:34:59.760fasting against the misuse of power. And I realized in my own sense of the world, that's
00:35:05.440what had happened to me. And I had tapped into something that, you know, we're going to call
00:35:10.620ancestry. But then I found out that there was such a thing also in India. So I was tapping into
00:35:19.640something that in psychological terms wasn't specifically ancestral. It was deeper than the
00:35:26.480specific manifestations of ancestors it's what you call the archetypal ground of the ancestors
00:35:32.900and I don't know I still try to explain it to myself these days but that felt to me like the
00:35:39.040ground of truth like a ground of being ground of truth experience and I tried to integrate that
00:35:48.600into my life and eventually began working with young people who were in severe trouble
00:35:54.620using the idea that by the time you're in severe trouble, you're more ready to transform than
00:36:01.160most people. If only there's an understanding that deep down in the soul, there's genuine
00:36:07.300meaning, there's truth, and there's beauty trying to awaken. And if you can put those things
00:36:11.700together, then the most troubling things can become the kind of irritation from which
00:36:20.460transformation can occur. If a person can hold on to that idea personally, you can then transfer it
00:36:27.580to the planet, as we say nowadays, and say when the planet is in this much trouble, we're in the
00:36:33.900dark night of the soul of the planet itself, then we are strangely closer to the seeds of imagination
00:36:40.920that can be used to reinvigorate life and also possibly heal, not just personally, but on a
00:36:49.300collective and possibly planetary level I want to go back to this word initiation because I think
00:36:58.980that in our modern culture we're so far from not just understanding it but even having access to
00:37:08.740it whether it's in our communities or our schools whatever it is I mean I this question around
00:37:15.460initiation is something like do we need to be tying it to something ancestral is it something
00:37:22.440that needs to be done with others in a community is it something that we can create for ourselves
00:37:29.380we can create our own initiations you know how does one come to initiation at this time when we
00:37:34.760are so disconnected from each other from the earth from our ancestry many of us don't even know where
00:37:40.460we came from. So I'd love to hear your thoughts around this. Yeah, it's a real puzzle. I literally
00:37:48.240have studied it since I was 21 years old. And I've written about it at various times. And I've
00:37:53.820tried to put it in practice in various ways. So one reason I really became interested in gifts
00:38:01.880and wounds is because an initiatory experience, whether it happens randomly, like a person gets
00:38:10.040locked up and discovers themselves while they're locked up, or even a person gets an illness that
00:38:16.300they didn't choose, and they find themselves isolated. The isolation is one of the steps
00:38:23.040of initiation. The first step is to be separate from other people, often not by one's own choice,
00:38:29.540and in that separation, there becomes, consciously or not, the challenge to get to know oneself,
00:38:36.680And 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.
00:38:46.780And 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.
00:38:55.460and then going through challenges and ordeals which strip away, you know, the simple ego
00:39:03.180layers of things because you're challenged to become way more present. So even though
00:39:10.640initiation doesn't happen in a meaningful way culturally, it's archetypal and you can't take
00:39:15.480it away completely. But I think where it gets really interesting is the third step of initiation
00:39:20.780is a return as a transformed person to a community that genuinely welcomes someone back and ideally
00:39:30.860can see some way in which the person has changed or in which the person has a heightened sense of
00:39:37.260their own gifts in life and their own ability to be present. So what happens, for instance,
00:39:43.420in culture now is those who have power tend to be seriously uninitiated people. And in other words,
00:39:50.360they don't know who they are and therefore they cannot really know who other people are and then
00:39:55.080you get give them power and they cannot help but misuse it because they don't understand how power
00:40:01.500is supposed to be used to bring people together not divide them apart and so on like that but the
00:40:07.260problem now is a lot of people go through the separation experience um that happens in depression
00:40:14.040as well as it happens in an illness and most people go through challenges and ordeals
00:40:19.340but very few people i think get recognized for the transformation they've gone through
00:40:25.400you can see this even with things like something like cancer or let's say breast cancer which is
00:40:31.960a real modern scourge and i know there are people learning how to do this but when a person comes
00:40:38.000back from a terrible illness which challenges a person at all levels of psyche and soul
00:40:44.500the soul expects people to be waiting and to welcome them for having survived the brush with
00:40:51.040death which you wanted the old descriptions of initiation and it makes a person not less of a
00:40:57.000person but a more genuinely experienced person and they're on the path to actually becoming an elder
00:41:04.200because they've gone to the depths of their own soul and found a way back to life and i keep
00:41:11.080seeing that as the parallel to what's going on with nature in the sense of all the climate change
00:41:17.920and all the damages occurring and so on it's as if nature is going through the dark night of its
00:41:23.200own soul and if we can relate to it personally we're going to do better in terms of trying to
00:41:29.760help heal it and relate to it collectively i'm thinking about relating collectively the last
00:41:37.560thing you'd said. And I'm thinking back of a passage I read in preparation that loosely
00:41:43.700outlines how some mythological worlds are built up only to be shattered, from which new worlds
00:41:50.100are created. And so maybe a question around this is, what is the role of the mythic imagination
00:41:57.040in addressing global problems and shattering these old systems?
00:42:02.320So 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.
00:42:19.140so one of the problems we have is we've fallen out of story and and i mean the stories that
00:42:28.620carry people the stories that connect people we don't have enough shared mythic imagination
00:42:35.140to hold us together you could even say it's the lack of meaningful in-depth shared imagination
00:42:42.600that causes the polarization in the culture, that people are now grabbing just a part of it.
00:42:49.340So people think you're on the left or you're on the right or you're conservative or you're
00:42:54.000progressive and all. And some of those things all used to have meaning. But now people are
00:42:58.740holding onto them as if it's a raft in the middle of an ocean being driven by a great storm. And
00:43:05.940maybe that's what it really feels like to the soul. So somehow we have to find stories or
00:43:12.760versions of stories that bring us closer back together. And that's a struggle. I mean, I
00:43:19.900usually think of finding new stories. I think it's more like new interpretation. A lot of what I write
00:43:25.500about, I take old stories and try to see how they apply right now. Because if you take a simple
00:43:31.220thing like the greek myth of icarus you know who um has those techne technological wings that were
00:43:40.440made by his father daedalus when the two of them are trying to get out of a prison so here's the
00:43:45.600here's the problem with technology daedalus who's the inventor of that mythology makes the wings and
00:43:51.600attaches them with beeswax to his youthful son icarus and icarus of course being youthful flies
00:43:59.240too close to the sun this is the entire western culture trying to fly towards the light and
00:44:05.940thinking it can do to techne version of wings whether it's rockets or planes or whatever
00:44:12.300going to other planets and all that kind of stuff that's all icarus stuff but techne can't get us
00:44:18.960to where we want to go and so when icarus comes too close to the sun it melts the beeswax and
00:44:25.140he begins to plummet really hard, which on another level, you could say, on a meaningful level,
00:44:30.480that's happening to the Western culture as well. And so you can take an old myth like that.
00:44:37.060Daedalus, by the way, doesn't fly as high, and he manages actually to escape and fly away,
00:44:42.380and he lives a long life afterwards. And so it shows you something about youth and elders in
00:44:49.760one sense, and it shows you something about the limits of technology in another. And it's a fairly
00:44:54.860meaningful way of using an old story to talk about a contemporary condition. And that's what I mean
00:45:01.420by mythology. So I don't know, I'm not trying to invent the new story or the new idea. I'm trying
00:45:08.460to find myself continually and hopefully connect to others through what I see as old stories being
00:45:17.940reinterpreted or found anew. That's just the way I work out of it. I have concerns about a culture
00:45:26.500based on newness that has done great damage to the planet, then trying to find something new
00:45:33.800to solve the damage by that quest for newness.
00:45:47.940Is it just left over, or is it everlasting?
00:45:55.560Is it just a lie I want to believe is true?
00:46:03.840Is it strength to forget it, or is it strength to admit it?
00:47:34.200So a lot of people, when they have a, you know, kind of academic education around myth,
00:47:40.720are mostly exposed to the great mythologies of the so-called great civilizations which by the way
00:47:46.980were never very civilized um but i like to carry the what i call the folk myths they're much smaller
00:47:54.580stories that are harder to damage so probably my favorite story of the last number of years
00:48:02.780is a native american story that's told by a number of tribes in north america or it was told
00:48:08.140and it it has an odd beginning in which it doesn't say um once upon a time it starts with this time
00:48:18.260whatever that might mean to the person hearing it and say you know uh every human born is always
00:48:24.800looking for knowledge and um and it turns out that real knowledge is available in a cave that
00:48:31.340is nearby here they always say that here um and the strange thing is no one ever makes it to that
00:48:37.280cave everybody now rushing this way and that on highways and byways and and even uh internet
00:48:44.180highways and no one's making it to the cave the place where the knowledge we're looking for
00:48:49.760happens to be but if you found that cave inside the cave you would find an old woman and the old
00:48:56.220woman is sitting in the cave and she's weaving the most beautiful garment that anyone has ever seen
00:49:02.520and she's been working on it for a long time and because she wants it to be so beautiful
00:49:07.580she's making the hem of the garment out of porcupine quills and in order to weave them
00:49:13.940into the garment she has to bite down on the quills to flatten them and she's been biting0.83
00:49:18.520down on quills for so long that she's worn her teeth down to where they're just nubs sticking
00:49:23.720above the gums but still she keeps weaving this beautiful garment and every once in a while she
00:49:30.520has to stop weaving and go to the back of the cave and in the back of the cave there is a fire and
00:49:36.260some people say that fire is the oldest thing in this world and hanging over the fire is a cauldron
00:49:41.520and in the cauldron is a stew that includes all the seeds of all the plants and all the bushes and
00:49:48.200all the grains and all the fruit trees that have ever grown on the earth and if she doesn't go
00:49:53.220back and stir the soup of all the seeds then the the fire will get too hot and it will burn the
00:49:59.960seeds and we won't have the natural world and so she puts down the garment and goes back to stir
00:50:04.980the seeds but while she's going slowly to the back to stir the soup of all the seeds the black
00:50:10.980dog suddenly appears and the black dog sees a loose thread of that beautiful garment and it
00:50:17.260begins to pull on that thread and it keeps pulling until the whole garment is unraveled and nothing
00:50:23.260is left but a great chaos laying on the floor of the cave so that when the old woman comes back
00:50:29.840She sees all of her work turned into chaos on the floor, and 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, but eventually she picks up a loose thread herself, and as soon as she picks up that thread, she sees an even more beautiful garment that she could weave.
00:50:53.600she sees the image of a greater garment and she begins to weave that new garment out of the chaos
00:50:59.540of the previous garment. And as the elders say, a lot of people say, damn that dog for unraveling0.99
00:51:06.940everything. But they say wisdom would say this world has to come apart once in a while. Otherwise0.99
00:51:14.200it will come to an end altogether because the old woman is the old woman of this world,0.99
00:51:19.820The one who is manifesting the world, and if she ever came to the end of the garment, it would be the end of the world, and therefore be thankful when things fall apart, and when you have the chance, calm yourself, look at the chaos, pick up a loose thread, and help the old woman re-wean the world again.0.95
00:51:43.920Oh, I have chills, and I could re-listen to that story, and I will when I re-listen to this episode.
00:51:49.820over and over again that was so beautiful and I feel it embodied on a macro level and a micro
00:51:56.740level individually collectively and I'm never one for hope I'm not a big fan of the word hope but
00:52:05.500that story instills in me a type of a type of desire to keep going and it feels right it feels
00:52:14.420really right to hear that so thank you so much and in closing this conversation i wanted to make
00:52:21.180sure we were able to touch on mosaic a little bit and i was curious about the work that mosaic does
00:52:30.640regarding community and initiations which we've touched on and it seems that we can't initiate
00:52:37.340ourselves but at this time and in this culture it seems that self-initiation occurs sometimes even
00:52:43.740out of necessity. So how is Mosaic offering a means of accountability and initiation through
00:52:50.420your various projects when it comes to rites of passage? No, it's a good question about
00:52:56.360accountability. So we don't do like, say we're doing rites of passage and come with us and then
00:53:02.140be initiated. I have great concerns about that. In other words, if someone is shaping rites of
00:53:13.240passage, the implication would be that they've gone through that passage and beyond themselves.
00:53:19.740And I worry about that. I worry about that in a culture like this. So where Mosaic started was
00:53:26.800I'm trying to work with initiation in order to understand my own unwanted, in a sense,
00:53:33.800rite of passage that had me almost die and barely find myself. And I sure didn't want to pretend
00:53:40.680that I could take someone through that kind of passage that is still a little bit mysterious to
00:53:46.600me. So I decided the only accountable way to do it would be to work with people when they're already
00:53:53.600in the place of extremity. So Mosaic formed around working with people who are outside the culture0.97
00:54:02.080or who are lost or who are deeply traumatized, both individuals and groups. And for 35 years,
00:54:10.680That's really what Mosaic was doing, working in prisons, working with people coming out of prison, working with young people in gangs, working with homeless people on the streets, working with refugees, and all an exploration of turning the trauma into transformation and trying to learn more how to take the broken pieces and make a new Mosaic, or in the case of the story, a new garment out of the broken threads of a culture or even a person's life.
00:55:07.280If we don't have a rite of passage that moves people from the entrapment of the modern world to a greater view of the world of culture and of nature, then we are kind of stuck.
00:55:20.720At the same time, if we do it with pretension or heroic pretension, we'll be stuck in new and more damaging ways.