Living Myth – Details, episodes & analysis

For many reasons, people question whether there is any hope for the world at this time. Yet, it is the nature of hope to become lost before being found again at another level of life. In the old myth of Pandora's Box, hope only appears after all possible troubles, pains and agonies have been unleashed upon the world. At critical times, life can seem hopeless before a deeper level of hope can be found again in the depths of the human heart and soul.

This deeper level of hope includes a greater vision of the world, as well as a sharper insight into one's own being, and thus the individual soul becomes the ground of all invention, becomes the root of all genuine imagination that can, in truth, alter the course of life and become the source of renewed hope for the world. When life becomes full of uncertainty and subject to radical changes and continuous shocks, what we need is a radical sense of hope that connects us to the vertical imagination that can, in truth, alter the course of life.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael live by joining his free online event “Finding a Calling in Life” on Thursday, September 5.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events.

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 670 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events.

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 670 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

This episode of Living Myth is about how our dreams call to something in us that is awake in some other way. Dreams call us to recognize other aspects of ourselves, other levels of awareness and even other realms of being. Dreams are the universal evidence that there is an Otherworld and that we as humans, as dreamers live in both worlds. Each person born is called to become a living bridge where dreams and reality can meet.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we remember it or not, each night we dream. And each night we die to the practical, measurable, logistical world and float on waves of the eternal. We let go of so-called reality, pull on the skyrope of dreaming and whether we know it or not, we touch the source of life again.

We are called to awaken in ways that allow us to hold the two worlds together. For, what is most missing in the common world must be found in the Otherworld. In order to find our way in life and not lose our sense of self, we need both deep sleep and deep dreams. The two go hand in hand and each contributes to the creative presence of imagination and the renewal of life and that can happen while we sleep.

Life is the dream that dreams us up to begin with and that dreams the world on through us. Even when everything around us seems to be falling apart, dreams of a coherent center or a living source of life can appear to remind us that we are secretly connected to the Otherworld, to the center of things, to what used to be known as the Soul of the World.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 640 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

This episode of Living Myth begins with the meaning of the verb to think. Ever since Descartes declared, “I think therefore I am,” thinking has come to mean to form in the mind, to consider, to reflect upon. Yet, the Indo-European roots of the verb “to think” can also mean “to feel” and even “to imagine.” The sense of thinking having more than one meaning leads back to the ancient idea that there are three realms of life and three ways of thinking about the world.

The first and most evident realm of life appears as what most now refer to as the “real world.” At this level, things tend to be seen as concrete and measurable and thinking tends to be objective, logical, even logistical. The second realm of life involves a greater capacity for psychological thinking as there is a kind of doubling of reality. How we feel is added to the factual details of what we experience. Our inner life expands, a deeper self becomes more present and relationships become more complex and more important.

On the third level of life, we find that behind the logical and beyond the psychological, there exists the realm of the mythological. Seen this old way, myth has its own logic as imagination is added to the powers of thinking and feeling. It has become a common mistake to think that myths are about the past, the deeper truth is that myth is about what happens all the time. It isn't that literal things aren't real, but that they have never been the whole story.

Mythic imagination can reveal the hidden patterns and universal truths that make events meaningful and that can also make life renewable. For, myth has always performed a redeeming function as it can open new ways to envision the world and new paths to follow in life. Myths are vehicles of imagination that are not intended to be believed in, but that exist in order to be learned from.

The deep and abiding truths that nourish the roots of life can never be proven through scientific methods, but must be grasped intuitively. The point is to allow the immediate powers of myth and imagination to give us a poetic grasp of our own lives and the events in the world.

Whereas history is said to simply repeat itself, myth connects us to the origins of life where creation constantly renews itself. When life seems to make no sense at all, it is the mythic sense of life that we are lacking. Mythic imagination makes the most sense when the common sense of things has been lost and the familiar ways of thinking and seeing no longer work.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael live by joining his free online event “How To Not Abandon Oneself” on Thursday, June 13.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 635 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

On this episode, Michael Meade tells two stories about the question we are asked at the end of our lives. We enter the world as seekers and what we most need to find is the uniqueness of our own souls. Each life is a surprising pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim’s soul.

The figures most revered in the many traditions found throughout the world became memorable because they became uniquely themselves. Whether a spiritual teacher or an artist, a healer or a leader, they had to awaken to an inner vision and find a destiny that was already set within them for the tale of their life to become instructive to others.

Although it has mostly been forgotten in the modern world, each soul bears an inborn purpose and a natural way of being from the beginning. Each person born is intended to bring something meaningful to the world. When everything seems to be falling apart, we must turn all the way inside in order to find the threads of meaning and purpose that are woven into our very being. When we follow our soul’s inner thread it becomes more clear that the changes so urgently needed in the outside world have to begin with meaningful changes in the souls of those born to these troubled times.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael live by joining his free online event “How To Not Abandon Oneself” on Thursday, June 13.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 625 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

This episode of Living Myth brings a focus to the inner initiate, the eternal seeker in the soul. To initiate means “to begin, to originate, to enter into, to awaken.” The inner initiate is the “beginner’s mind” part of each of us that is always wanting to learn and ever ready to begin anew. In that sense, the initiate within us becomes the locus through which healing energies and inspired ideas continually try to enter the common world.

Entering the modern world is like stepping into the middle of a rite of passage that has reached the stage of darkness and descent. In the midst of all the conflicts and confusion, the inner initiate knows how to tap the original source of life and keep finding ways to start anew and help regenerate life on earth.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online event “How To Not Abandon Oneself” on Thursday, June 13. Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 625 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles. Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

In a world that's rapidly changing in ways that can feel chaotic and threatening, it becomes easy to feel diminished, lost and small. Although it is common now to feel like nothing but a speck in a vast, accidental universe; we only feel truly small when we lose our sense of soul. Small and insignificant as we may feel at times, we carry within our souls a spark that is connected to the galaxies and to the origins of creation. When the world becomes darker, more confusing and more chaotic, we have to learn to see with the eyes of the soul or else wind up feeling smaller and smaller when our souls would have us grow in meaningful ways.

When we begin to feel diminished by the chaos and the confusion in the world, there are two places to turn to. We can turn to our innate connection to the stars, to the origins of life and the source of ongoing creation. For that is part of the inheritance of the human soul. And we can turn the opposite way, looking inward where there is also a great expanse of darkness, in which the speck of star, the spark of life and inner light of the soul waits to receive our attention in order that it might grow, and it can only grow from darkness.

It is our nature to be betwixt and between, to be part of both the macrocosm and the microcosm; to be stretched between the mundane and the sacred, between the gravity-bound surface of the earth and the endless expanse of the starry heavens. We are here to grow our souls, despite and because of the darkness around us. For, the world is not a finished place; rather it is always on the verge of becoming. The same is true of our lives; for our souls are always on the verge of awakening further in both small and big ways that can connect with and contribute to creation ongoing.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 660 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

This episode of Living Myth begins with the series of shocks and radical changes that have occurred in contemporary American politics and the current election campaign. Michael Meade expands the theme of dramatic changes to include both nature and culture as we find ourselves “in the midst of a transformation of life on earth.” Whether we want to admit to it or not, we have entered a radical transition of life in which we are being pushed and pulled into territories that we would not choose to go on our own. We keep finding ourselves in uncharted waters in terms of the future of the planet and in unmapped territories in terms of human culture.

At the same time, the human soul is not separate from the living world, but rather is secretly attuned to it. The radical changes sweeping through both nature and culture at this time can be felt by our souls, and because humans are implicated at all levels of the current crises in the world, a transformation of humanity is also required. Without a renewed sense of genuine imagination, the battles between lies and genuine knowledge will grow, just as the divisions between the mind and the body, humanity and nature will also expand.  When everything seems about to fall apart or even come to a tragic end, what we need is not a sense of evolution over time, but a felt connection to the possibilities of recreation and renewal at this particular time.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 660 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

This episode of Living Myth looks at both the need to transform and our resistance to change through the lens of the metamorphosis of butterflies. The fact that the Greek word psyche means butterfly implies how we are secretly connected to the essential dynamic of transformation in life. As if compelled by the primordial poetics of transformation, scientists named the cells that carry the potential for a true transformation of the caterpillar “imaginal cells.”

The capacity of the imaginal cells to develop into a butterfly and transform life completely is related to the inner capacity of the human soul to also transform repeatedly in the course of life. In the same sense that the imaginal cells hold all the information and energy for the butterfly to be, there is core imagination and deeper self trying to awaken in the soul of each person.

At the same time, something within us resists changing, even when the time for transforming our lives has come. In the mysterious way of the world, the metamorphosis of the butterfly also offers ways to understand why we resist the exact changes we most need in order to transform ourselves and help change the world. In simple biological terms, an exchange of one kind of cell for a different kind of cell changes a crawling caterpillar to a winged butterfly. In terms of understanding the essential dynamic of change in the world and at the core of the human soul, a great mystery is revealed that can be called the wisdom of the butterfly.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his new online workshop “Ritual, Healing and Transformation” that on Saturday, December 9. Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can save 30% on this series and further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 580 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles. Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well during this challenging and uncertain times and thank you for your support of our work.