Living Myth

• Episode 459 - The War on Empathy and Vertical Imagination in the Soul

  This episode begins by examining the rise of "vertical morality" that appears in both Christian communities and conservative politics and has given rise to a "war on empathy." Whereas Jesus famously preached love, mercy and care for the oppressed, vertical morality measures righteousness, not by goodness to others, but rather by something more simplistic and more divisive.     Vertical morality declares that human behaviors are right or wrong based upon what the higher power says. As proponents put it: "Our ethics and behaviors have a duty to please God alone. We must obey by furthering the will of God, no matter the cost to other people." In a religious context, the higher power is God, in politics, it can become an authoritarian leader. As this viewpoint desensitizes people, true believers can justify demonizing all immigrants as criminals, defaming gay and trans people as predators, and condemning political opponents as, not just wrong, but evil.     In direct contrast to vertical morality, Michael Meade proposes vertical imagination as a mostly lost quality of the human soul that would reconnect us to the heights of inspiration, but also keep us connected to the depths of genuine feeling. For the issue is not simply making a steady ascent on the ladder of morality. Rather, the point is for the soul to fully awaken to the process of ascent and descent that keeps Heaven and Earth connected, while it also connects us to the suffering souls of other people and to the all-embracing Soul of the World.     When oriented from the deep sense of self and soul within us, our choices can become truly meaningful and our experiences genuinely unifying, rather than be divisive and traumatizing. In extraordinary times the soul expects to find extraordinary and enlivening experiences, not some final salvation based upon the ladders of morality, but rather many little redemptions found in moments when Heaven and Earth, the eternal and the time bound meet in the wisdom of our waking souls and merciful hearts.     Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online events "The Heart Within the Heart" on October 30 and "Living with Awe, Joy and Gratitude" on November 20.   Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events   You can support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 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 and find it meaningful, 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.

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• Episode 458 - From Chaos and Trauma to Cosmos and Renewal

  The episode of Living Myth begins with a study on how our brains and our bodies respond to traumatic events. Apparently, our brains do not fully distinguish between something traumatic happening to us directly or something we observe that is harmful to someone else. To our brains a threat is a threat, whether we are actually experiencing it personally or are witnessing it on a personal device. Because humans are essentially social and typically empathic creatures, the same instincts that help connect us to each other can cause us to feel stress and pain by watching almost any kind of traumatic event.     A key issue is that in consuming mass media coverage of the flood of traumatic events that now plague the world, we cannot simply resolve the sense of threat and fear of harm that penetrates us and causes our brains to trigger our fight or flight responses. Our body remains convinced that we are in some kind of danger, yet we can neither completely escape by flight nor effectively engage with fight. As the world becomes more and more chaotic and this process repeats, we become intensely activated, but with nowhere for all the energy to go. We can feel increasingly on the verge of overwhelm as well as physically and emotionally worn down.     Psychologists who were consulted offered helpful suggestions such as setting boundaries on news consumption, calling friends or family members who can have a settling effect on us or spending more time in nature. However, the report also included the statement that under the pressure of repetitive traumatic stress a person's worldview might radically change. This greater fear involved the sense that in the midst of all the chaos people would conclude that life has no real meaning or purpose. However, the idea of an altered worldview can also be seen as our psyche's instinctive way of seeking genuine healing and finding meaningful ways to change the course of both our personal and collective lives.     Ancient wisdom along with ideas of depth psychology suggest that in order to truly change we must start right where we are and accept the mess we are in if we would find deeper understandings and wiser ways of being. For it is precisely in the dark nights of the soul that we can experience revelations of both our deeper sense of self and the regenerative energies that are essential aspects of both nature and the cosmos.     Chaos as disorder and cosmos as regenerative order are the two huge energies that continuously make, unmake and remake the world. As things fall apart, the knowing self within us moves closer to the surface and seeks to become more conscious to us. Seen through the lens of the deeper sense of self and soul, the traumatic events that we experience and/or witness are not simply intended to defeat us or overwhelm us or make us numb, but rather, they are secretly intended to awaken us to a greater understanding of our own inner capacity to change and be part of the life-enhancing, life-creating dynamic through which chaos turns into cosmos, through which we can individually be redeemed from our own darkness and also find ways to contribute to a re-imagination and re-creation of a more coherent, inspired and interconnected sense of human culture.     Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online event "The Heart Within the Heart" on Thursday, October 30.   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 700 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.

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• Episode 457 - Open Moments in the Heart

  The theme on this episode is the loss of eros and a sense of interconnectedness in the contemporary world. Eros is the elemental principle of connection, the touch of soul that binds us to this world but also connects us to our own essence. The feeling of eros or love is the soul's inner verification of its own genuine existence. When this elemental sense of eros and connectedness is lost, people can more easily be turned against each other, because inside they are turned against themselves.     In Greek myths, Eros is the original, archetypal source of all attractions and all connections, an essential opposing energy to Thanatos, the god of death. In that sense, each loss of eros in the world is a kind of death in life. The more disconnected we are from our own sense of Eros, the closer we are to the realm of death. Thus, this loss of the felt sense of interconnection is at the root of the current crises that can leave us feeling isolated and alone, but also feeling helpless and hopeless, not just about our own lives, but also about the future of life on Earth. The loss of eros is at the heart of both the mistreatment of the Earth and the extremes of hatred, fear and division that now permeate human culture.     The wisdom of the ancient myths also included the radical idea of "kairos," meaning moments in which time breaks open and the original potentials of life become more available, just as familiar patterns and conventional systems are breaking down. In the dark times in which we live, kairos moments become awakened time in which we reconnect to a greater sense of the world, but also to our place in it. If we fully enter the moment when time opens, we experience an intensification of being that changes the quality of time as well as the direction of our lives.     Kairos represents the opportune moment in which everything can change, the primordial tipping point in which there is a reversal of time and a reconnection to things that are eternal. In kairos moments time breaks open and timelessness reenters the world and can pour into our hearts and minds. And it is that blessed incursion of timelessness that is needed to reconnect us to the innate sense of eros and the hidden unity and interconnectedness of all of life.     Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online event "The Heart Within the Heart" on Thursday, October 30.   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 700 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.

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• Episode 456 - The Real Enemy Within

  This episode begins with the old psychological idea that warns that when the conflicts inside us are not made conscious, they must be experienced outside us as fate. It has become our mutual fate to live at a time when it is not just that nations attack each other with obliterating force, but also that people within nations become increasingly divided and see each other as the enemy. Each day brings another twist or turn in the increasingly tragic story of humanity becoming divided against itself.     Throughout history there have been people in positions of power who seek to gain more power and control by using every issue to divide people into increasingly polarized states of "us vs them." When Donald Trump told an assembly of all military generals and admirals that the primary threat to the United States is the "enemy within," he was echoing the dehumanizing rhetoric used throughout history, not only to turn people against each other, but also to justify state violence against its own citizens.     Besides its dark history as a tool of autocrats, the term "the enemy within" is also used in psychology to indicate the shadow side of each person. This personal shadow includes the denied, repressed or rejected aspects of our personality that are mostly hidden in our unconscious mind. Failure to recognize and become more conscious of our shadow aspects leads to projecting them onto those we deem to be "other" than us.     Not only that, but when we allow the shadow side to operate unconsciously, it will, at critical points in life, manifest in self-destructive ways. In that sense, Donald Trump, who projects all of his shadow issues and inner conflicts on others, can be seen as a psychological lightning rod that requires us to become more conscious of what can divide us from within and turn us against our own best interests.     Ultimately, our greatest enemy is within, but not in the cowardly sense of projecting our own faults on those we deem "others" in order to deny our own inner fears and hateful feelings. But rather, our greatest enemy is the fear that we do not have, already woven within us, an authentic way of seeing and being that can allow us to stand up to the troubles we face and find meaningful ways to contribute to a renewal of the core values and underlying unity of humanity that is also an inheritance of our souls.     Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online event "The Heart Within the Heart" on Thursday, October 30.   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 700 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.

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• Episode 455 - A Mythic Inoculation

  This episode begins with the idea that myths of creation are also intended to be understood as re-creation tales that reveal the world's capacity to renew itself. Critical to this old understanding of the potential for a renewal of life on Earth is the primordial idea that humans are mythic by nature. It is our mutual fate to be denizens of history and be limited by the restrictions of time and place; it is also our destiny to be tied to eternal things. By virtue of being human we live in two worlds and at critical times we can become vessels through which the eternal seeks to enter the daily world and bring a renewal of life on Earth.     Seen in this old way, the mystery of creation is not a problem to be solved through logic or evolutionary theory or religious doctrines. Rather, it may best be apprehended through deeper levels of consciousness, as presented in myths which speak directly to a person's imagination through primordial images and life-changing, life-affirming, life-awakening narratives.     Mythic stories depict universal patterns and symbolic codes that continue to speak to the deepest levels of the human soul and that also can inspire the highest levels of spiritual imagination. Through myths of creation, we can touch again the timeless images and archetypes from which the living world first arose. In doing that, we can find inspirations for our own lives, as well as insights into how the world might be renewed precisely during the time when it is most divided and out of balance.     The hidden aim of a dark period on Earth, like a dark night of the soul, is to dissolve our assumptions about ourselves and about the world around us, so that we might find our way back to the origins of life. For, in the age-old dynamic of chaos and creation, humans are revealed to be the missing link between heaven and earth, between the eternal and the time bound.     In the dark times, when all else seems lost, what we secretly seek is a connection to the deeper self within us that is, on one hand, truly personal and unique and on the other hand is transpersonal and touched by the divine. Surprising as it may seem in this time of fixed ideologies and systems of blind belief, what can truly change the course of history, in ways that heal divisions rather than deepen them, is an awakening of the deeper sense of self and soul in each of us that is secretly connected to the origins of life and to the powers of re-creation.     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 700 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.

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