Dancing in the collapse with Michael Meade
Dancing in the collapse can happen even through the situations in life. The Greek word "Apokalypsis", which is "Apocalypse" in English, means the lifting of the veil. But it also means collapse and renewal. In this podcast episode, we learn about life lessons from mythology and how everyone has some genius inside of them. Michael Meade shares with us the art of dancing yourself into life and experiencing this collective collapse.
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Dancing in the collapse with Michael Meade
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Michael Meade
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[00:00:00] Hey, welcome back to the today. Dream of podcast, where through conversational space, we explore ways to cultivate the practice of presence in our lives so that we can better participate in the emergent world story. Sorry, if you're interested in helping that world story blossom, then you're in the right place.
[00:00:22] And today's guest is all about stories and he's all about mythology. So Michael made his renowned storyteller, author and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology. He combines hypnotic storytelling, street, savvy, perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths with a deep knowledge of cross cultural rituals.
[00:00:47] So we'll be talking about mythology. We'll be talking about the current state of emergent chaos, um, birth and. And where we may be as a collective, according to Michael's beautiful, um, deep wisdom when it comes to mythology. Um, and the stories that have been around since ancient times from a multitude of different cultures.
[00:01:20] So we're going to be having interesting explorations that's for sure. But before we get into things, how just quickly like to say that I am offering one-on-ones. So if you're someone that's interested with, um, in a spiritual friend or someone to kind of help you through a transformational space in your life, or a passage that you might be moving into, then please head over to today, dream.com and we'll see if we can embark on that journey together, developing a state of presence along the.
[00:01:55] And yeah, I've developed a bit of a structural course, uh, that I'm looking forward to leading people through. So if you're someone that's interested in that, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Also, if you haven't had a chance yet, and you're enjoying the episodes, please take a moment to leave a review.
[00:02:14] I think I've only got like seven reviews on apple podcasts. I guess what I'm trying to say is, yeah, a little, it's a weird thing. Talking about this, asking for likes comments and subscribes and reviews. I don't know if it feels right. Leave a review and a comment because it helps. I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
[00:02:37] Sorry. Before we move into the conversation with Michael, it might be really nice to do what we usually do and just take a slow and deep breath together, giving us a chance to kind of pause wherever we might be in our day in our minds and in our ha. So I invite you now, you special being out there listening to gently close your eyes
[00:03:09] and just take your time with the slow and graceful inhalation through the,
[00:03:23] and whenever it is that you get to the peak of that innovation, feel free to pause for a moment and notice the subtleties of your experience
[00:03:37] before releasing any tension and exhaling just as gracefully on the way.
[00:03:49] Uh, Opening your eyes. You might like to synchronize your next out-breath with the gentle opening islets, staying connected with the breath and with the subtleties of your experience as your day. And this podcast continues to unfold
[00:04:27] in modern culture. The word myth has morphed to mean something false people say it's just a myth. Whereas one of the meanings of myths is emergent. So some of the truths that people can find in the literal world, even in the psychological world are waiting to be found in myth. Um, myth is not about the facts of the matter.
[00:04:59] It's about the facts of life. So what really matters is connected to myth. Um, another way to talk about myth is to say that the Greek word from which we get the English word myth, um, uh, means, uh, story. It means both to know the story and to tell the story can have either meaning and so stories, um, and narrative intelligence you can say are the central mode of humans.
[00:05:34] Um, Relate, as in relationship comes from a Latin verb , which means to carry it back. So our relationship is really based on what we carry back to each other in the relationship. And, you know, you know what I mean? If some, someone isn't carrying back to their partner, um, or their partners, whatever it is, uh, the story that's happening to them, the relationship becomes less intimate and less meaningful.
[00:06:06] And so stories are how we relate to each other, the stories of how we relate to the world and the condition of the world. And so, um, it used to be better understood that myth makes me. That myth adds levels of meaning that people cannot get from the facts because the facts aren't even believed now anyway, so it was all the more reason to go to myth.
[00:06:34] But, but, um, so that's another role that idea myth makes meaning. So a person can have all kinds of experiences. It doesn't mean they learned anything. If those experiences are converted into a story. And if that story is related to a mythic type story, then all of a sudden meaning begins to flow. So I'll give a simple example.
[00:06:59] Most people know the myth of Icarus who flew too high, got too close to the sun and the wax holding on his wings melted and he fell all the way into the sea. So that's a mythic story. It's th was there a myth, uh, an actual character Icarus who flew near the sun? Probably not. In other words, the myth is a series of lies that reveals the truth.
[00:07:25] So even though there probably was no Icarus in history, the story of Icarus has been living for thousands of years. It still applies right now. If someone rises too fast, too high, let's say they become famous because they're on internet or on, they become viral. They're likely to fall just as hard and just as fast.
[00:07:49] And that's the myth of vigorous. And so if a person is going through rising and falling, be really helpful to know the myth of Icarus. So on the way up you can go, ha if I get too high, I'll probably gonna fall harder down. And suddenly you're getting meaning out of both rising in life and falling in.
[00:08:08] Yeah. Yeah. It seems to me that you, you know, quite a few stories and, you know, the roots of quite a few words. So I think that together is like a real wealth of, of kind of wisdom to be, you know, passing back, like you mentioned, and this, this idea of, you know, um, stories connecting to the human psyche and having them flow from that space throughout time and then having, I'm not sure, but I'm sure you've, you've, I'm sure you have realized that the patterns within the different myths from different places and different times, and even now you just mentioned that there's a way that we can kind of connect our own story.
[00:08:49] Once we, once we're able to kind of step back and observe what that may be and see where things might be heading or derive some lessons from these ancient tales and yeah. Have you, and we've got, you know, the internet these days, so is an access point to. Like looking into MIS and seeing how they may be able to inform our lives and you can get the information more easily.
[00:09:14] That's true. Yeah. You can study all the myths in the world online. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a beautiful thing. How it just thought the idea of how these stories have been passed throughout time, over and over again. And they're probably informed many people's lives. And although, like you mentioned it, it may be seen from one perspective as you know, lies that lead to a sense of deeper truth.
[00:09:38] Um, it's still in kind of, it can, it has the power to inform the way that we live in a really meaningful way. So there's an old, um, challenge, which is. Uh, twofold. There's always two stories going on in the world. One is this store, the ongoing drama of the world, and the other is the individual drama of human life.
[00:10:04] Those are the two stories they're secretly connected. The more connected they are, the more the human understands the world. Um, but so inside the dynamic of those two stories, one of the question, uh, key questions become, do you know what story you're in? Do you know what myth you're in? So since we're now in a period where global issues are known that most everyone knows there's a climate crisis.
[00:10:38] Most everyone knows there's a COVID crisis. I mean, I know there's people that don't believe that, but they're kind of in the story as not believers, they're not out of the story, they're in their story. And so, and most people know that there's a crisis of truth and meaning. Um, and so what story are you in when all of that is happening?
[00:10:59] What story are we in when we know we're in trouble together? Um, and so there's an answer on a mythic level and, and the simplest answer or the most direct one is the myth of apocalypse, which is another old Greek word, which doesn't mean the fiery end of everything. It actually has a couple of meanings.
[00:11:24] One meaning of apocalypse or the Greek word is apocalypses is a lifting of the veil. Which means things that are usually hidden are now seen. So that's a way to look at what's happening in the world as many more, um, radical things are out in the open. People say out in the open things that used to be said behind closed doors.
[00:11:48] So that's the lifting of the veil, but the greater meaning of apocalypse is, and as many myths about it, but as a mythic theme, it means collapse, renewal. So one way to understand what's going on now for all of us, because, um, due to the scope of issues right now, which are global and due to what you were mentioning about the internet, which is almost everybody knows what's going on, which wasn't always the case.
[00:12:20] Um, people could realize that we are in this mythic dynamic of collapse and re. Now most everybody knows we're in collapse. You can get people to just tell the story of how things the healthcare system is falling apart that this the distribution network is falling apart. The educational, you know, collapses all over the place.
[00:12:43] What most people don't know is the other half of the myth is renewal is collapsed and renewal, and it isn't even collapsed. And then renewal, secretly renewal is happening at the same time as the collapse. So to me, that's a tremendous piece of knowledge. That is the say, each of us has the opportunity to figure out what part of renewal are we connected to?
[00:13:09] We're all witnesses of the collapse. You have to really hide nowadays, not to know that things are falling apart, but then when you go back to the human story, each person is innately connected to an area of life where they have something meaningful to continue. And so if we can figure out what that connection is, what we came to life to give, or what gifts we naturally have that make us more able to continue to contribute to a renewal.
[00:13:43] All of a sudden being alive at the time of collapse has a very positive counterpart, which is if I could follow my own genius, then I'm in a position in the midst of the collapse to continue contribute to the renewal. That's also good. Yeah, it seems like a different type of seeing is needed in this space.
[00:14:05] And what comes to mind is even just, you know, the idea of mosaic voices. Now you're saying this it's making a lot more sense, you know, a coming together of these unique, um, beings in their own different way and whichever way feels more, um, like they're seeing from this inner place. And it feels the most right to them from a place of contribution and participation.
[00:14:31] And that adds to the kind of collective emergence of this continuous story. And I just guess what's coming up for me is this idea of dancing in this space of the unknown and looking to things like myths to maybe cast a fraction of light onto what is going on and what, you know, almost like as a sense of maybe, um, encouragement or, um, You know, I guess trust needs to come from within, but it's always nice having little signifiers on the way to show you that you're on the right path.
[00:15:07] Well, I want to pick up the image that you had. Cause to me, it was an image of dancing in the middle of the collapse. So there's a myth from a small tribe in south America. Um, the story is usually called econ two to drum. Econ Chu is a character in the myth of this, not very big tribe, and this story is kind of complicated, but the essence of it is something goes wrong and not only does the planet overheat, it goes on fire and everything is turned to Ash, everything, forest animals, humans, everything is burned to Ash.
[00:15:47] And there's only two characters that aren't caught in this kind of, uh, incineration of earth. He can't you and his partner. Um, what's the, I forget the name because the partner never speaks. So the partner of econ is the witness to everything that happens. And anybody that knows the Hindu myths of ancient India will recognize this old, old idea of the actor and the witness.
[00:16:17] But anyway, I can't think of the name of the, the witness guy, but so they wind up the two of them in the ashes after the world has burned up. And, um, all there is, is ashes in there starving. There's no food and economy starts kicking around in the, in the ashes to see if he can kick up anything they can eat.
[00:16:40] And what he kicks up is a, uh, uh, a burnt piece of. Part of a cheap tree that was burned to chocolate. And so he's holding this charcoal, standing in the ashes of the world and he realizes he can't really eat the charcoal, but he knows he came from a tree and then he remembers that drums come from trees too.
[00:16:59] So it occurs to him. Maybe this piece of charcoal could be a drunk. So he starts to play it like it's a drum and he gets so intrigued with the rhythm he's playing. He starts to dance. So now is dash dancing in the ashes after the incineration of the world. And for awhile, that's good enough entertainment.
[00:17:16] He falls asleep in the ashes. He wakes up in the morning and he's still in the ashes, but he's looking around and he sees there's his piece of charcoal. He looks for his little drum, but he notices coming out of the charcoal is a green tea. New life in a green tendril coming out of the burned out remnant of a tree.
[00:17:35] So he understands what's happening. He goes and gets the charcoal and begins to play the rhythm on the charcoal and dance. And now he had singing and it's always singing, dancing and playing his charcoal drum in the ashes of the incinerated world. And as he does that, the tendril continues to grow. And soon enough, that grows into a tree and he puts it down and now the tree is rooted in the ashes of the previous world.
[00:18:01] Um, and so now the tree of life essentially has come back because of him dancing because of him. Instead of lamenting instead of giving up or whatever else might happen. Um, anyway, from there, the tree of life gives birth again to all the forest, to all the plants, to all the animals and the humans keep come back to and the whole world starts over.
[00:18:24] So there's a myth coming right out of your mention of dancing in the midst of the calamity. Yeah. Please keep them flowing. If any others tend to arise over the next little while, please feel free to just let them flow because this is so, so beautiful. Um, to hear what comes to mind for me is I just, I've got a picture of you on the gem bay.
[00:18:45] Back in the day, I saw a video a little while ago, and you were, you were sharing stories while drumming and also what's coming up is this idea of you mentioned lamenting, but it's almost like, um, not falling prey to the. Almost using it as a signal and an enlightening, a sense of love within or lighting, a sense of love, the flame of love and moving into that feeling and whatever expression calls to you.
[00:19:15] So whether that's dancing or painting or, you know, you know, sharing time with a loved one, whatever that may be, whatever your calling is. Would you be able to, yeah. I'm curious to know if that's what you did when you were playing the songs on the gem bay and sharing stories and how that combination came to be.
[00:19:35] Okay. So, um, I still play Jem bay, but I don't do it on zoom zoom. Doesn't like drumming, the rhythm doesn't work. It's too. It's actually too strong for zoom. So, so I've learned to present without. Without playing drums, but it's really interesting what happened because I was a young father long time ago. I was a young father.
[00:20:00] My first child, my daughter had been born. It turned out she was sick. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong. And so she couldn't keep food. She couldn't keep food down and digest it. So she was kind of disappearing. And I spent a lot of time holding her. And when I held her, I, I was studying at the time ethnic musicality.
[00:20:22] And so I would be playing music from all different places in the world. Uh, she to this day loves music from anywhere in the world. Uh, but that was my way of nurturing her when she couldn't take nourishment. But it was also my way of keeping myself present because it was overwhelming to have be a young father and think my child might die.
[00:20:45] And, and no, no, one's. But, uh, so I took care of her a lot. One night though, I had a break and I went out walking and I was walking with the weight of realizing that, uh, ha having just contributed to a new life in the world, I might lose that. I was really overwhelmed. That was, and so I'm walking down the street in this university district and I hear rhythm music coming from behind the closed down storefront.
[00:21:13] And because I'm studying ethnic musicality, I recognize that it's a music from Gympie. And I go over and the door is slightly cracked open, and I slipped in, and here's this, uh, African teacher teaching a bunch of local people, uh, how to play marimbas and, and how to play the music from actually shown the music from Zimbabwe.
[00:21:33] And I'm standing there with my broken heart, but I'm affected by the music. And he comes over and says, listen, if you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing. If you can count, you can play an instrument. Which one are you going to do? Because everyone here has to play. So the next thing is a drama.
[00:21:49] Next thing I'm dropping. That's how I got into drumming. And I spent the whole night there drumming with my broken heart and my fears and my sorrow. And I left there with a whole different sense of being alive in the midst of a potential tragedy. So that was my introduction, introduction to drumming. And, and so just to fine, tune it a little further.
[00:22:12] So then. Couple of years pass and I'm playing drums at home once. And I'm thinking about a story that I learned or read, I think, but it was broken stories, get messed with just the way culture gets meshed with what do you mean by that? So if you imagine let's just take Europe. Um, so the stories that wind up being considered part of the human, uh, European heritage, like fairytales and some folk tales, um, often have gone through the hands of, of, uh, religious clerics.
[00:22:51] And they changed them. They changed the wording, they changed the, they take parts out that a disturbing cause story is, uh, a wild, this stories about everything. And, and, and, and, and there is no censoring of stories. Everything has to happen in the story that ha in the story world. And so they. Things that are offensive to the doctrine of whatever it is, the sensibility.
[00:23:14] And so I have this great story, but there's something missing. I know that I know it's broken and I'm gonna have that going on in my mind when I happened to start playing a drum. And all of a sudden that story came into view like a film, like not, not just a film, it's like I'm walking in the story. And as long as I'm playing the drum, the story is there.
[00:23:35] Like this living vision, it was astounding. I mean, I had no idea what was happening, but also I could see what was wrong with the story quite specifically. And I had an imagination of how to fix the story. So in that one moment, that was seemed accidental. I learned, um, about how imagination active imagination you would call it nowadays can get triggered by telling the story and how, and ever since then.
[00:24:04] So I don't read stories. I, you know, I never have rehearsed. Uh, because each time it's slightly different because it's coming from an awakened vision of that story. And so each time I'm telling your story, the words come out differently because I'm in a different place. The audience has changed. The world has changed.
[00:24:24] And I learned on that occasion that this process of spontaneous storytelling, I know the shape of the story, but the words are going to change. And so I started telling stories that way. And I didn't, I thought I had just stumbled into something, maybe even invented it. And then over time I found out that's what the grios in Africa do.
[00:24:45] That's what the Shauna keys in Ireland do. That's what the shamans in Siberia do. They all use drums as vehicles to activate the imagination. And the telling of the story was not by rote, but by being present fully in the rhythm of the most. Yeah, it, it sounds like that's kind of like you, you're kind of in the story in a way.
[00:25:10] And that, that sprout came out in that moment and it continues to come out every moment that you decided to dance. Good interpretation. All right. One more turn on it to show how this stuff goes. So then, uh, I work on dreams and I have that. For 40, some odd years of writing dreams down almost every day.
[00:25:31] And I'm noticing I'm having a series of dreams where in the dream I'm playing a drum, but it's solid wood. And I, it's really hard to play solid wooden. It's hard to get the sound out of it and I'm in pain, but I keep playing. And then I have a series of the dream to eventually the dream becomes Birchwood and I'm actually in my dream playing Burntwood.
[00:25:54] And I remember didn't, I read a myth about that somewhere in south America, and I have to then go searching and searching until I can find that story. And then I realized the dream was telling me to go find that story because that's one of the stories for understanding what's happening in the world.
[00:26:11] And so, so there's, I don't even know what do you make out of that? So, in, in a sense, then I'm playing. Uh, drum as it was being invented in this ancient myth with that in my current dream. So, I mean, in Australia, they'd say, well, you've slipped into the dream time where the past can be the present and the future.
[00:26:36] It could be the present too. So that whole thing about drumming. And like you say, the sprout coming out, uh, became a mythology of how I wound up being a storyteller. Yeah. I'm just thinking of a river right now. And you kind of flowing with that river instead of kind of getting in the way and that's, what's kind of needed for you to, to keep opening into this story.
[00:27:03] And I'm also thinking of how. When we reflect back our memory changes in stories that tend to shift a little bit and the imagination has this kind of present, ah, sorry, this kind of quality as well of, you know, just emerging, spontaneously in its own way. And it's not really something that can be forced to controlled.
[00:27:24] Um, we can sit down to imagine, but we can't, you know, plan what we what's going to come up. And it seems like that's kind of happening on a collective level as well. Like there's a sense of this ever emergent quality. And for me, the question comes up as to how are we going to dance to that tune and how we, how are we going to find a way to listen to it first off?
[00:27:50] Um, because we're, we're immersed in it on one level, but I think we're kind of, even though the veils are opening, there seems to be, um, a path that we've been trading for a certain amount of time. That is still in the realm of the kind of unconscious. So the curiosity comes up there and I mean, dreams are certainly a channel in for sure.
[00:28:14] Couple of things. One is yet another good image, which is the river. So it turns out what I had to figure out what was going on. What did I learn when I was playing the drum and it turned into this visual imaginative experience, I had to have some understanding of it. Um, and so I continued to do it. And so now I was going around telling stories, having no idea what the words were total trust has to happen.
[00:28:43] But then when I reflected on what was going on, there were two rivers inside. One was the river of memory, uh, where I re I'm remembering the story that I had learned, but I'm not reciting it. I'm remembering it. And by the way, the word remember comes from the old Greek word, nemesis. NEMA safety is the goddess of the river of a river.
[00:29:07] And so, so memory is a river. And, uh, so one of the things coming through in the storytelling spontaneous storytelling was the river of memory. So that the story is there in this kind of a flow of memory, but there's another stream coming or river, which is spontaneous speech. So I realized what I had stumbled into was being using the rhythm to get centered in a space where these two rivers could happen at the same time and then trusting it.
[00:29:40] And so it's another way of understanding art. Um, because, you know, in a sense that was an odd experience. Um, so then I want to go back to your image of dancing. And so, um, if we take econ two as our model for dancing in the midst of the ashes and the disaster and the collapse and the tragedy and the loss, um, then what is, what could that mean?
[00:30:08] And so the old understanding of dancing to two ideas about it, one is dancing is another way of saying rituals. So, um, I've a good friend. Who's a Latino poet who went to, to research his, um, ancestry down in Southern Mexico. And if you know, his mother was, uh, from the relevant. Raleigh Rala Mouli people down in Southern Mexico and he went and visited them.
[00:30:39] And it turns out that some of the poorest people on earth and they have very poor, uh, earth for growing things and they live in caves. And, uh, he said they actually have so little to eat that they mix earth dirt in with the flour to make tortillas. So they're eating dirt some of the time he said, but they have a saying, which is really compelling to him.
[00:31:05] He said, he's sitting there in caves with people. People are practically starving and they're saying his dance or die dance or die. That's their saying. And, um, and what they mean is be in the dance of life. Uh, and on one hand they'd been being the rituals that keep life going. But on the other hand, it means find your way of dancing yourself into life.
[00:31:31] So that the second idea first idea is being the dance native American tribes used to call it the great dance, the thing we're doing the road of life and death, the great dance, but so that's the big story. The specific story is how do you, how do I, how does each person find their own dance? And that's connected with the old idea that when a person is really dancing, they're no longer thinking about how do I look for my cool, my doing it pretty well, watch this.
[00:32:01] That's all gone. That's all the ego stuff that's gone. I'm no longer. Considering, what am I doing? But so fully doing it, that the dance is dancing the person. And the idea was when you're dancing from the inside out, then what hap, what you're doing is you're fully being yourself. So to dance men, to be yourself, to become yourself through the process of a revelation by being in the creative mode.
[00:32:38] So I'm just taking your sense of dance. Like how do you dance in the middle of all this and, and extracting the meaning, which is you become more yourself and you're more in the dance of life. And you're also more able to contribute to sustaining the dance of life. When many things are dying, we came here to be ourselves.
[00:33:03] We have no real alternative. Oscar Wilde said, be yourself, everyone else has taken. We're here to be ourselves. And that allows us to contribute to the dance of life when most people think it's all coming to an end. Had an experienced recently. When I found out I found out that I, you know, you think you're being yourself sometimes and there's that's in itself is a process.
[00:33:31] And there's layers to that. And I almost discovered the space between the end of one layer and the beginning of another. And I was very intrigued by that because I realized I was looking at my own thoughts and I realized it actually came to me in a river when I was considering kind of just taking my clothes off and being naked in this river.
[00:33:53] And I was almost like I had thoughts come up. You know, what, if someone pops around the corner and sees me, or, you know, what, what am I like? I was worrying about what other people would think of me instead of just flowing like that river and just kind of being in that moment. And it made me realize almost like maybe fall to tears.
[00:34:14] Cause it, that feeling was probably always there, but I hadn't recognized it. And in some way it was an, it was a mask of sorts and that was stopping me from being as close as I probably could to my authentic self. And it's it just really fascinated me this whole idea. So it's interesting. We're speaking about rivers now and this idea of being ourselves.
[00:34:36] Because all this has kind of, um, yeah, quite actually fresh for me. And it was my, probably my most recent kind of exploration into that space. So it's fascinating. This is coming up. Um, any thoughts on that would be most welcomed, but also I'm kind of curious about this goddess of the river. I'd love to hear more.
[00:34:57] Whoa. Okay. So there's a lot there. So it turns out that, um, rivers are essentially mythological, right? Think of India, the Ganges river mother Ganga. It's the great mother. That's that rhythm. The other famous river is sour Swatson which, who is the goddess of music and all instruments and poetry. And so they're what they're doing, what they used to do, especially in India.
[00:35:26] They're amazing. They make the myth part of everybody's life. So everybody knows it's the reverse. And everybody knows that that's your mother. And most of them know that the river came crashing in over a great Sheeva's head and so on and so forth. So they know the river doesn't come from the mountain.
[00:35:48] It comes from the divine. So the river that is the physical river is also the divine river, which gives birth to life over and over again, which is what, um, the ritual of baptism is about. And that's why they're always going in the river because the river is the river of life. Just the way each child is born from the breaking of the waters inside the ocean of the womb of that.
[00:36:14] And so, so then we all came from the river that came from the ocean in the womb of our mother, which is a model of the whole big thing. Uh, and so baptism was, is not a Christian thing. The Christians got it from African tribes and the African tribes, uh, would do baptism, not once, but every time you forgot who you were.
[00:36:42] You could go back in the water and find out. Um, and so your attraction to be naked in the river is actually like a call to go back into the river of the womb or the river of birth. Um, and so in the African tradition, a person has a big loss or they make a big mistake, something goes wrong and they're disoriented and people would take them down and baptize them begin to get them back.
[00:37:10] It's not. So the idea of being reborn, which meant to go into the water and be reborn. But what it really means is to go back to the potentials at the beginning of life, when we first entered the world on the flow of the waters of the world, And so when we make mistakes and we have great losses, we also lose our connection to our potentials, our gifts.
[00:37:32] The thing we came here to dance with and baptism was a way of going into the river into the river of the divine mother, if you want to call it that and get in touch with the essence and the origin and the potential of our lives. And so whole villages when something went wrong, but all go down and baptize each other.
[00:37:53] Um, and so, you know, your attraction to that is quite meaningful. Um, and the thoughts coming in this, maybe I shouldn't do this, what happens? That's what I call received ideas. We've received all kinds of ideas that interfere with our instinct and our intuitive ways of being ourselves. But, um, so you can go on and on with rivers, um, uh, One more idea about rhythm.
[00:38:24] So you decided to go into the river, you know, naked the hell with them, who cares? You know, this is more important than what they're thinking. I'm trying to get connected to myself or even to nature or whatever we had to call it the origin of life. So then here's an interesting idea. Time is a river. And so that's why they say you can never enter the same river twice because the river is flowing.
[00:38:51] Time is going by, but once you're in the river of time, um, you can look back with the past is sending things down the river. But strangely, you can also look forward and catch things that are bouncing off the river of the future. And so that's connected to the word prophecy and prophecy doesn't mean to predict the future.
[00:39:17] It means to be standing in such a deep place that you get gifts from the past and glimpses of the future, a prophet is not a predictor. Simply a prophet is actually someone who's in touch with the ancient stream of knowledge and wisdom. And by staying in touch with that, get glimpses of the future. So that's just part of, you can go on and on sounds like a lot of words are misinterpreted or misunderstood.
[00:39:48] You mentioned already apocalypse and prophecy people simplify and people get excited by, um, the glittery things like, oh, predict. Um, but the ancient or the old statement was you can only go as far forward as you can reach back. So everybody that's leaning too much in the future. It's just getting unbalanced.
[00:40:12] The balance of the present is a combination of being in touch with the past and allowing, uh, the future to present itself. Mm Hmm. So what I'm hearing is getting in touch with and allowing yeah. And when everything's falling apart, as you said, right at the beginning, you can go online and get all the mythologies of the world.
[00:40:40] Years ago when I, when I was studying mythology on my own, without any guidance, I was in a lot of libraries and a lot of used bookstores trying to find all these books. I still have them, uh, you know, mostly ignored, forgotten, strange books about myths of small tribes and so on like that, that same stuff is online now for the most part.
[00:41:02] So when the structures are collapsing, knowledge becomes more available in a certain way. And, and this is a radical idea, but I've been led to this, you know, in recent years, um, when things are collapsing, the future is sending us when things are collapsing, more messages about the future. When people say, I don't know what's coming next.
[00:41:32] That's when you dream, we'll send you some pretty good images about what might be coming next. And I've found stories, uh, you know, ancient stories where people practice standing in the unknown because the known world was disappearing. And so, um, this idea of standing in the river and not trying to predict the future, but actually getting glimpses of the future is a real thing right now.
[00:42:03] Yeah, it's it just seems to be a, quite an uncomfortable space to step into and an unusual. Well for Western culture, Western culture is all about logic and planning the next step, and everybody has their strategic plan. Well, how is your strategic plan doing with COVID how'd your strategic plan doing?
[00:42:26] Would worldwide climate crisis. This is not the time necessarily for strategic planning, but very difficult thing for the Western world and the Western mind to actually stop and say, I don't know. Don't know. Don't know what's really going on. Don't know what's coming next. Don't know. And yet that's the moment of beginner's mind stopping and beginner's mind occurs, but I've found in stories, these stories where the people actually stop and they stand in the darkness.
[00:43:07] And in mythological stories, suddenly a spirit talks to them, or God talks to them or something, you can call it whatever you want, the ancestors talk to them. And so in the periods, when the structures are collapsed, so they loosen, everything's more permeable and yeah, everything's more falling apart, but everything is more possible at the same time.
[00:43:32] Mythological, I'm getting an arising curiosity. It might be a bit off topic. I kind of curious to know what's going on behind. I've seen this whole bookshelf of amazing books and this, it looks to be maybe an urn and this beautiful painting on the statue. Is, does anything come to mind that you might want to share that maybe in any way connected to what we're talking about and what you're referring to as a painting, as a Tonka.
[00:44:04] And so Tonka is a traditional, um, mythological, spiritual work of art. That were typically created for rituals. I mean, now you can get there, there are tankers that are considered a more like works of art knit and they're intended to be around for a long time. But the oldest ones that I could find were, were actually thrown away after the ritual.
[00:44:33] And so I got some tacos that would throw away. Because someone, uh, painted on silk and, and made this elaborate thing, just the way, uh, in the Russian Orthodox monasteries, they'll do those paintings with the, of the saints. So the, or the, you know, yeah, the same sort of Jesus or Mary or somebody with the glowing, uh, uh, halo around them.
[00:45:02] Uh, well that would be done in a ritual and for a ritual and the person would, would be fasting and going through all these steps of ritual as they did the painting, very similar to in Tibet with Tonkas are, uh, traditionally from, uh, they would make these, um, usually on silk type material, these representations of divine figures, that would be like the veil and the divine is coming through that veil.
[00:45:33] And it would be used for. And so I'm trying to remember what might be behind me. Um, is it a green Tara, maybe? Uh, but anyway, it's one of these dailies of, uh, like a bodhisattva would be an example. And then below that is a statue that's actually a similar of a bodhisattva figure standing like that. I like the image of bodhisattva.
[00:46:02] It's the origin image of Buddha Bodhi software is an ancient reference to a series of Davies that appear as male and female, um, that eventually become codified as the Buddha the way it's now known. Um, and what I like about bodhisattva is there, um, the story about them is they're beings who become enlightened.
[00:46:30] But rather than become enlightened and D part for heaven or some of this fear, they return to the world knowing that most people are not enlightened and they returned to the world to help other people find their way. That's to me the core of the Bodhi south. And I think, or I try to say lately we're in bodhisattva, like it has many traditions and even practices where people imagine themselves leaving the earth with all its problems for higher spheres, Christians go to heaven.
[00:47:12] So to peop most of them is due to, and you know, that's not what we need. Right. The earth is in trouble. Now the earth needs prayer, attention, practice, relation connection. So I call it Bodhi Safra time, but ever we know or might know our little phase of enlightenment. The thing now is to bring it back to the earth, bring our gifts and our experiences bring our prayers and our intentions to the earth because we're living in a time now where the actual home, very close to the word own.
[00:47:51] The actual home is in danger. And so it seems to me that the proper spiritual practices now, um, would be best used to help heal the planet as people say, and help reconnect human culture. To me. It's quite interesting to have that hanging there. Yeah. It's interesting that you do though, because if you think about it, they've put it together in a ritualistic way.
[00:48:24] Like you mentioned, through fasting and certain tensions for this specific ritual as well. And then it seems like there's a clear link between, um, almost like you, we mentioned earlier how we began all of this around coming into our own form of expression for the benefit of all like a Bodhi Sapper, and then, um, rituals being almost like a path to do that, bringing meaning into our own lives and then that connecting back to the whole.
[00:48:56] Um, so it's interesting that you've, you know, that's kind of how this was created and now it's hanging behind you and now we're kind of having this chat well, it's interesting also. In the, um, kind of struggles of the Western world. People forget that the origins of all arts or service to the divine that's was art, art.
[00:49:22] Wasn't. I mean, you could always have the level of art, which is beautification, you know, making the, the, the home or the area beautiful, which is really meaningful. Beauty is not a superficial thing. Beauty is a resonance of the soul, so that's great, but all of the art and all of the artists used to be in service of the divine.
[00:49:45] There wasn't a music industry. It's really a kind of contradiction in terms, the word music comes from muse. The muses are, you know, kind of spirit energies. That's hanging around mountains and show up in dreams and inspired people to do creative things. And so then they don't spawn an industry. That's not what they were up to.
[00:50:08] They're up to getting people connected to creation. And so all of the arts were a return to creation and all of them were connected to the divine. So I know I love music. I have a lot of musician, friends, and I always remind them music is the healing path. Music is about receiving inspiration from the unseen and applying it in some, through some instruments or the voice as an instrument and using that for the process of healing and reconnecting the human to the divine.
[00:50:42] And the same thing is true with visual arts. They weren't there simply to, uh, benefit the galleries and museums. They were there to create this kind of penetrable Vale. That would attract the unseen or the eternal on one side to the human on the other side. And that is an example of that. The people making that new, that it was let go of as well towards the end of the ranch, it was let go of, so there's like you mentioned, they probably let go of it after the ritual and that's how you yeah.
[00:51:21] Yep. In that ancient tradition, when the ritual was over, everything would be removed and the only people will have ever seen it where the people at the ritual we do that when we do ritual stuff, that's what we do. But yeah, but, and that meant that beautiful things would be disposed of as so as not to get stuck on the literal level and realize that when we want to be present again, we have to start again and create things of beauty to bring ourselves present.
[00:51:54] So, so that the, um, It didn't necessarily lead to building cathedrals, that it was actually more connected to nature. And nature is the bountiful represented representation of creation, ongoing and nature is casting off what it creates all the time. Nature just reach creates it. Doesn't hold onto it and say, here's this tree, everybody got help.
[00:52:20] This tree. I mean, there were very old trees and that's fantastic, but, uh, but nature's basic mode is life, death renewal. Yes. And that was the road. The motive ritual to it was the mode of art. And even to this day, someone paint something and they have to let it go. It could wind up in the house of someone they don't relate to at all.
[00:52:46] You have to let it go and. Music that we make really, you can try to hold onto it, but really you have to let it go. And if someone gets in a creative mode, that's natural to their soul, that's what's going to happen. I mean, how many love songs have been written, but they all have to be rewritten because the river has changed.
[00:53:08] The world has changed and the people have changed. So the artists were part of that remaking recreating and, and, and doing each time, uh, the dance of trying to connect to the divine that can come back. That's an awareness that could come back.
[00:53:33] I'm just kind of taking in what you're saying while at the same time. Well, I've got this one more point of exploration that I, I really didn't want to miss out on chatting about. And I'm cognizant of time in this, in this case. River that we're in at the moment. I was wondering if you might be open to diving into, uh, it seems to be something you're really well versed in is initiations.
[00:53:58] And this idea of the collective initiation, I find quite fascinating, but I'm also looking at it from a perspective of, um, almost like, uh, creatively putting together rituals of initiation and how one might go about doing that for either themselves or their children or, um, you know, to, to enliven that energy within their life in some way.
[00:54:25] And I'd love to hear your kind of thoughts or whatever comes up in your heart or mind around that. So initiation, um, is a reference to, um, revelation in a sense. Not, not religious revelation, but one of the old meanings of initiation is to reveal oneself to oneself. So, um, in all the old mythologies, each soul that is born is gifted.
[00:54:57] Everyone that comes into the world is gifted. I call it genius. Everyone has some genius. And so, but then you're born into a family and the family doesn't even know who you are. I mean, they say, you look like your father or your grandfather, but that's as close as they can get. Uh, because the family didn't give birth to the spirit of the child, to the soul of the child, to the genius of the child.
[00:55:23] And so there's something inside the child that is uniquely that child, but the child, like all American. Uh, American, like all human beings is deeply dependent. Humans are the most dependent beings when they're born. And so you go through this long period of being dependent on mom and dad and the family and the village and the culture.
[00:55:49] Um, that's called childhood and it's usually a mixture of glorious things and really devastating things. So at least that's how it usually goes. And then it comes to an end. Um, and nowadays they have these great, really good studies of developmental process. They know what's going on in development of the child.
[00:56:10] And that last up to about 11 or 12 years old. And after that developmental developmental theory doesn't apply. Something else happens. Childhood comes to an end. And what was a developmental, biological, somewhat predictable process now changes, but not incrementally. A leap has to occur from the end of childhood, which could be seen as a death leaping from a dependency of childhood, into the rest of one's life.
[00:56:40] And that moment of transition, um, can be called rites of passage or initiation at different words, for the same thing. And people traditionally understood that when the child, when the period of child is over, um, the person going through the radical change. Handle it all on their own. They have to be reborn, but not in the familial way.
[00:57:10] They have to re be reborn to independence, not dependence. And so they knew this was psychologically, we'd call it psychologically now a really important transition. And so humans began to experiment with initiatory process in order to help the child awakened to who they are inside, um, distinct from family and distinct from culture because initiation rights were done in the.
[00:57:43] Not in the village, but in the Bush. And so what that meant. So then here's a, a nice image for that, that, so girls and boys would go through initiation because the boat's supposed to become full awakened versions of themselves. And so, um, the move of initiation was one way it was described was moving from the lap of the personal mother, to the lap of the great mother, to the lap of nature or the gangs river or whatever image you want to use.
[00:58:19] It was supposed to be this awakening to this much bigger life and an understanding that human nature is secretly intimately connected to great nature and that the rest of a person's life was going to be more like nature. And the mystery of nature is birth, death, renewal. And so initiation rights enacted a death.
[00:58:44] And then a period of not knowing liminality is the fancy term for it. A peak period of betwixt and between that can be a mixture of challenges and ordeals and awakenings through which the person who was a child becomes aware of who they're supposed to be. So when initiation is done in a healthy manner, there's actually two things that happen.
[00:59:12] One is the person realizes, uh, who they are at their essence. The person has an awakening, a genuine awakening. And we were talking about the moment where suddenly I started seeing stories while I was drumming. That was an initiation. If that had happened in a different era or it happened in a traditional culture in Africa or Ireland or Siberia, people would have been there that knew what was going on and saying, oh, this guy look at that.
[00:59:41] He's going on that road. Not because he wanted to, but because it's happening to him, something of his nature of nature is coming through. So people had a better understanding of that. So one part of it would be a revelation of who the person was. And then the other part would be a healing because since the human family doesn't know, the nature of their own child is not even supposed to, they're supposed to love, protect, and care for that child.
[01:00:12] But the essence of the child is a mystery to them naturally. Um, and so things go wrong. Everyone. If the human family could give the child everything they needed, everybody would just stay home. Everybody would stay home. It never works out. There's always something that goes awry. There's trauma, there's myths, misunderstandings and so on.
[01:00:34] And so in order to step from childhood, with its innocence and its traumas into the rest of one's life, there needs to be this awakening and realization on one side and a healing of things that are already been wounding and traumatizing on the other side. And so the middle ground death of the child letting go of the previous phase of life, stepping into the unknown and then, or deals and challenges through which the two things happen revelation of what's inside the person on one hand and healing of what's traumatizing the person on the other hand.
[01:01:12] And now the person is being initiated into that life. And the rest of their life, you could say will be a further revelation of who they really are. And that requires continuous healing as well. And so that's why they'd say once you have initiation, it's, you are on the initiatory path for the rest of your life.
[01:01:34] That life is about awakening and healing. Um, and then there's one more phase after the middle ground of awakening healing, ordeal challenge. Um, then there's a return to the human community. And so in traditional cultures, whoever it was, the girl or boy would eventually come back and the whole village would be waiting for them.
[01:01:56] And very classic thing would everybody would sing to them. And so they would be sung back into the human community and, uh, and it was understood that, um, the initiation of one person had an effect on the whole. Um, and so, so now what happens is you can't get rid of this stuff. It's archetypal. That's what Carl Young would say.
[01:02:20] And initiation is an archetypal process. So what happens is people leave home, but without the right of passage and they go into initiation initiatory trouble. Anyway, they have ordeals, they have woundings, they have losses. Um, they're in liminal spaces, there's all kinds of confusion. There's some revelations and people really have unfinished initiations.
[01:02:47] That's how I think about it that most people, yeah, sorry to interrupt. Um, what's coming up for me is this, I guess it's a confusing element and I think I'm trying to work through it. It's this idea of almost something we spoke about earlier about in every new moment, we're continuously being reborn and we're dying again and there's this.
[01:03:11] Always ever going change. That's taking place of the emergence story within ourselves and within the collective. And what I'm not sure about is, you know, it seems like what you're saying and correct me if I'm wrong, but is that a healthy process because it's built into, you know, um, us on a, on an architectural nature is to go through and these initiations and, you know, to like, not go back, but come through this, this Rite of passage, but it seems like this is going on over and over again.
[01:03:45] So the question is, you know, how many rites of passage are right. And at what points are they significant? So you mentioned this moving out of childhood into like a teenager and I'm sure there's other parts like mid-life, or maybe when you're older, um, you know, moving into. Or into menopause for a woman or something like that, but I'm just kind of curious of how do we know, how do we feel into, um, when a Rite of passage is being called and, um, yeah.
[01:04:21] Like how do we know? Cause, cause of just putting that next to the, the idea that we're, we're always kind of going through this change and we're always going through passages of, of sorts. So those are the, but those are the two dynamics. So usually we speak about Roxanne, Patrick, just start with youthful initiation because I think that's how people discovered it.
[01:04:45] They realized wait, then they're children, but they're not children anymore. And so adolescents and youth is the period where, you know, you can't tell. You know, if your own children are going to be acting like a kid today, or they act like a junior adult today, what's going to happen. And, and, and in psychology, it's a problem too.
[01:05:03] And in the education, it's a problem. The things that worked in grade school, you try those with teenagers. You're going to have a hard time because they have to have their own space more. They're trying to reveal themselves, they're trying to get seen. And so that's how it got started, I think. Um, but then archetypally, there's two things that happen expected.
[01:05:26] Rites of passage, youthful, Rite of passage marriages, a Rite of passage, um, midlife could be called a Rite of passage. Uh, elder becoming an elder is a Rite of passage and dying as a Rite of passage. So those are the ones that are expected, but then, because it's the psyche, because it's the river of experience.
[01:05:49] There are the unexpected unpredicted rites of passage. So we were talking about baptism. When a person finds themselves in trouble in a descent falling apart in a depression, something happens, they've lost. They lost a loved one. Death has decimated them. They're in a Rite of passage or they're in a they're in an initiatory moment.
[01:06:15] And so the archetype can apply in the expected occurrences of life, but it also applies to the unexpected. And so, so then you say, well, on the level of expected initiations, you can predict roughly how many there are. And it ends with death on the unexpected level, which is where we live now, the great uncertainty of the world, the lack of traditional practices, lack of lack, lack of rites of passage.
[01:06:48] We're in the unexpected rough layer. It can happen at any time. And, and so w at that layer, what they say is, oh, you've had an initiation. Well, that qualifies you for an even deeper initiation. If you think about revelation, what's being revealed is the deeper and deeper levels of the psyche. And so you have both of those levels.
[01:07:15] So then, you know, so you can have, people can learn how to do marriage rituals in ways that are really connected to initiatory practice. Um, and people can learn that about elders too. It's really a beautiful thing. I'm hoping it makes a comeback, but I think the more important thing is to realize how the unexpected, the informal need for initiation, uh, becomes part of what I've been calling a collective Rite of passage.
[01:07:47] If you take the idea that the previous form of life childhood in the case of the young person of the previous form of life is, is discarded is shed it's over somehow. And the person steps onto this unmount unknown new ground, which is the middle phase, which involves descend and challenge and ordeal.
[01:08:13] Well, that's what we're in the world. As we knew it is gone, people are clinging to it. People claiming they're going to go back to it, but it's gone. We're in that middle ground already. And so then that, that means we're all in initiatory Terri initiatory territory right now. The big trick in this dynamic.
[01:08:36] Is finding ways to bring the initiatory experience to a meaningful finish because that involves the community. The individual can go through all kinds of initiatory experiences, but then not over until the community is there welcoming them, us back and the community has to be a conscious community. So we have two problems right now, collectively one is we have to go through all these initiatory experiences of loss and not knowing and confusion or deals and challenges.
[01:09:08] And the other is we have to figure out how to create community to welcome ourselves back on the field. So we're in a radical form of collective initiation or rites of passage from my point of view. Good news. There's myths about that. There are stories about. They're not the stories of the, uh, strategic plan.
[01:09:34] They're not the stories of the predictable occasions of life. They're the stories of the radical changes that happen inside the inside myths. Are there any particular misses stand out that you might want to point us towards or any that come up? I'm sure this whole, you know, river fall, but so the problem with myth is it keeps opening up and I think, and, and myth like ritual will destroy time and I know we have a time limit, but yeah.
[01:10:06] So, um, let's see, where could we work? Can we close it up? Um, What's interesting in econ, too, the story I was talking about where the world turns into ashes. So, you know, the fear of global warming, well, this myth takes global warming into incineration and says at the end, when nothing is left, there were secretly something left.
[01:10:31] And that thing which is burned and darkened is actually where life is hiding. And that thing, which is the last thing you would think of, which is dancing in the middle of disaster, is where the vitality is hiding. And so what happens in the rest of that story? Cause I told part of it. So you could see the elements of initiation, uh, econ two and tuna, his partner.
[01:10:55] His name is Jonah. June is the witness to everything. It's very Buddhist, this part of the story. And, um, they're the only ones left, not just their childhood has gone. Their childhood home is gone. Everybody's home has gone in, in, in the. Mythological language that means initiations on. So now they're in the ordeal.
[01:11:16] There's nothing to eat. They're suffering. It's like the fast thing people do in an initiatory process. Um, they're in the place of not knowing they don't know north, south, east, west, cause there's nothing to see except ashes. Uh, and so they're clearly in the middle stage, but what happens after he caught you, gets the dance going and the, and the, the tendril turns into the tree of life.
[01:11:42] And eventually the forest comes back and the animals come back and the people come back. And then what happens is this is the story that they tell every year about why they're alive. They live in the forest and why the forest continues to be alive because it's the story of the renewal. You know, life, death, renewal.
[01:12:04] And so the tribe that tells the story has their annual event, where everybody comes together. And so in the story of econ two, after the tree of life, is there, there's no explanation for this. He's kicking around in the ashes again, and he hits something hard. He digs into the ashes and pulls it up and it's a rock, all of all things to do.
[01:12:28] And he throws the rock at the tree of life. Um, it seems, uh, Counterintuitive and probably politically incorrect, but he throws a rock at the three rock, hits a branch. The branch falls into the ashes and quickly turns into a tree itself. And so he realizes that this thing at the scent that has come from the tendril that has come from the charcoal is indestructible.
[01:12:54] And so he gets rocks and he's throwing it at the tree of life. And each time he hits a branch, it becomes another tree. And that's how the forest comes back. So what the people do in the tribe that have this story is every year they get together and there's certain trees that bear fruit at this time of year and they all get little rocks and they throw it at the tree and knock the fruit down, and then they get the fruit and they all eat the fruit together.
[01:13:17] And then they have a big dance cause everybody's been reborn and, and they're all part of nature and they realize it and they're back in mythic time. So, so we have to learn that kind of stuff. Uh, The world isn't really going to break. The tree of life is not going to disappear and we have to learn how to, ways to dance, like you mentioned early on.
[01:13:41] And then we have to learn ways to all dance together so that we can welcome each other into the world best trying to arrive. And it can only come through the people who are alive at a given time.
[01:13:59] That's us for now. Thank you so much, Michael. Um, yeah, it's want to reach out and give you a big hug and of appreciation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good to be with you again. Is there, is there any chance of, um, maybe pointing listeners in a direction of, I mean, there's going to be links in the show notes, that kind of thing.
[01:14:18] Um, your website or some of the courses that you run it quite, um, quite extraordinary. So if you wanted to just maybe rattle off a few things, people could check out to deepen that. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Yeah. So it's a mosaic voices, all one word, mosaic, voices.org, or the other way to find that is through our weekly free podcast, which is called living myth and that'll lead you to the same place.
[01:14:44] And then since we're talking about all this pretty soon, we're about to start a course, which, which is called lead into gold. And what it's about is taking the lead, the heaviness, the denseness, the inert qualities of our life, like econ chew with that piece of charcoal and turn it into gold. The alchemy of the soul, the alchemy of, uh, initiatory change in the midst of a world, uh, turning to Ash.
[01:15:18] Thank you so much for sharing your presence with me and for coming on this journey. If you're interested in working one-on-one with me, head over to today, dream it up. Let's see what I may have on offer. And if you're interested at all in checking out some of the other videos, head over to youtube.com forward slash today, dreamer, or there'd be more content around cultivating the practice of presence in order to more fully contribute or participate in the blossoming of the emergent world story together, catch you in the next episode and be well.