In this dialogue, I talk with one of our fellow visionaries (and media activist) Duane Elgin about certain of the core themes Living Dialogues has expressed since its inception. Included among these Living Dialogues perspectives are: (1) the fact that we live in an “alive universe”, in which our dialogues as humans are not exclusively with ourselves, or even “within ourselves”, but from my perspective, also with all of manifest and unmanifest creation -- involving a feeling for the natural world and the cosmic potential for goodness (acknowledged by Einstein among countless others), which supports us in our hope for an evolved future beyond the destructive fragmentation of our current cultural settings; (2) the recognition that as a species, our human family is currently in an adolescent stage of development, now beginning a kind of collective rite of passage into a greater maturity, so that we can go beyond demonizing dualism as a survival strategy into a greater sense of understanding and unity within diversity (“out of the many we are one”) – and so keep pace as a species within the evolutionary imperative coming from an infinitely expanding universe, which science shows us is continuing to further complexify and integrate at an ever more rapid pace; and (3) recognizing that, as I often say, “dialogue is the language of evolutionary transformation”, that we can only make this evolutionary adaptation and survival leap in concert with one another, a shared midwiving if you will -- involving multiple ongoing dialogues between all participants in this birthing of a new and deeper required understanding of ourselves and our world.

As the well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: “For humanity to evolve, the conversation must deepen”. This is what the program Living Dialogues is about, with myself, my guests, and all of our deep listeners continually and collectively evoking further insights of this new understanding from and with one another.

In this concluding Part 3 of my 3-part dialogue with Duane Elgin, I focus on at the first of the three core themes of Living Dialogues set forth above, the foundational awareness that we exist in an “alive universe”. In order to survive, much less thrive, as a species, we recognize the need to move beyond our adolescent preoccupation with materialism into a more mature, reflective, and co-creative consciousness. This fascination with materialism is a result of our “modern” conventional scientific world view, which for the last four centuries has viewed the world beyond our subjective consciousness as objective, fragmented, and inert – there, essentially, to be manipulated for our own purposes by humanity. As Duane observes, if the universe is essentially dead at the foundations, then consumerism makes sense, but now contemporary science is finding that the universe is, in fact, integrated into a whole conscious system. Despite the enormous distances that separate its different parts, the universe functions as an integrated unified whole, so fragmentation is being overcome with unification.

As I have observed in other dialogues, contemporary science is now confirming this “wholistic” consciousness that we can also access by in effect “remembering” and reawakening to our indigenous heritage, where as a species we experienced ourselves as embedded in an alive universe. As Barry Lopez observed in Arctic Dreams, “the land is an animal that contains all animals” (see his praise for Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest and the dialogues Paul and I engaged in in Programs 35 and 36 in this series). Duane adds that these new “discoveries” by contemporary science do not constitute a new idea. In addition to the worldview of native peoples everywhere, Plato in our Western culture said a couple of thousand years ago that the universe “is a single living creature that encompasses all living creatures within it”. As we begin to understand that the universe is really a living universe, then our experience with the soulful dimensions of life and relationships become so rich and meaningful that a consumerist lifestyle appears pale by comparison.

We know that in general our culture is in great crisis because we have literally a multibillion dollar industry of anti-depressants that’s being sold, as we speak, to many millions of individuals throughout the world, so that there clearly is a crisis of meaning and purpose in the midst of the consumer lifestyle. Joseph Campbell once described the finding of the Grail (what in the East is called “enlightenment”) as awakening to aligning one’s own personal energies with the inexhaustible energies of the universe. This requires an understanding that we exist as an integral part of “the force” of a self-renewing, constantly regenerating living cosmos. When that pours into time through our own consciousness, we experience ourselves as fully alive, embraced in a caring intelligence vibrating with purpose and meaning, accessing the full richness of our inheritance as divine human beings on the planet. This kind of poetic or mythical or mystical understanding is now being confirmed in its own way by Western science. By bringing together the best, enduring aspects of both our indigenous and modern mind heritages in dialogue, we can “transcend and include” both in a new and renewed integrative vision and experience. In so doing, we can reconnect what Vaclav Havel calls our “transcendent anchor” with our lived, day to day, experience, move beyond temporary pleasures into real joy, and come together in collaborative contribution to our shared alive universe.

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WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, MATTHEW FOX, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, CAROLINE MYSS, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

In this dialogue, with another fellow visionary, Lynne McTaggart, I expand, build upon, and update the subjects that Duane Elgin and I talked about in the three prior dialogues on this site (Programs 40, 41, and 42). Here is an excerpt from the opening of this dialogue Program 43:

“Duncan Campbell: We're going to talk about how science in the West has moved forward beyond ‘modern mind’ conventional classical physics of the 17th-19th centuries, and the Quantum Physics of the 20th century, to the contemporary 21st century discoveries of the “field effect” and its implications, and what these exciting, really revolutionary discoveries have been in just the last few years, and what they indicate in terms of the evolution of consciousness.

Lynne McTaggart: OK. I think the most fundamental point is to understand that we, all of us in the universe, swim in a sea of light is the way I like to put it -- there's a field out there of energy that’s very much like ‘the Force’ in Star Wars. It is very interesting if you go back and look at Star Wars after seeing the later movie What the Bleep on quantum physics, you see a lot of the presence of the original moviemakers there, too.

A lot of scientists realized, after the discovery of Quantum Physics, that there was a thing called the “vacuum” or the “zero point field”. This is the energy, basically, in empty space, in ground space because what they realized is that even if you reduce temperatures to even much colder that we've got today to nearly absolute zero, some atomic particles don’t stop moving. They do a little energy dance with empty space.

If you imagine all of us, it takes us to our absolute nether particles, the undercode of our being, we're just, basically, energy in charge. Our subatomic particles are constantly treating energy with the energy of the field. So it means that there is this insurmountable amount of energy lying there in empty space. If you were sitting a yard away from me, this energy is so dense and has such extraordinary inherent potential that it would be enough to boil all the oceans of the world. So I think the most fundamental thing is that we have this constant energy dense with the field. It's so fundamental that we realize that we are all one, we're all connected.

Duncan Campbell: That really, I think, is one of the things that we can key off on now to talk about the history of this and of our consciousness altogether. One of the ways I like to look at it is that in the vast sweep of the evolutionary history of the species, if we go back to our early indigenous ancestor roots -- the DNA of which we still have in our contemporary bodies [and emotional bodies, as we shall see in my next set of dialogues, Programs 45 and 46, with Eckhart Tolle] -- we find that our ancestors had a profound understanding of the inner connectedness of all things. [What a number of contemporary intellectuals and scientists sometimes confuse and conflate with “magical thinking”, which they use in a derogatory sense.]

In scholarly terms, this sense of the interconnectedness of all things (called the “Web of Wyrd” by the Celts, and “Indra’s Net” in the Indian Vedas) is sometimes called the “participation mystique” from the French, or the “mystical participation”, with nature. The ‘indigenous’ early members of our species, before the advent of the ‘modern mind’, understood innately that they were in an alive, wondrous and at times dangerous universe, and that even rocks and stones had sentience or consciousness in the sense that they were a part of creation and all of creation was infused with what sometimes is called “The Great Mystery”. So there could be communing with standing stones, there could be communing, of course, with plants and animals as well as humans.

Then we as a species got into what we might call, and what I refer to generally as, the ‘modern mind’. Some people date the advent of what I term this “adolescence” of our species’ consciousness (which continues to our contemporary “late adolescence” today) back as long as 35,000 years ago, when people, at that time, began as humans to move from homo sapiens to homo sapiens sapiens (“the aware human that is aware of its own awareness”), and put symbols on caves’ sides and so on, the first graphic record of radically self-aware human consciousness which has survived. (Others would also date it back to 70,000 years ago, the time of the first known decorative shell artifact used as separate self-recognizing “jewelry”.) The separation from our sense of embeddedness in the womb of an alive universe into individuated human identity can subsequently be seen evolving from the time humans moved to develop agriculture and tried to control nature, domesticating plants and animals for our use. Then most importantly, in the last 500 years – starting in the West say, with Copernicus, and then moving into the Industrial, Scientific, Technological and Information Revolutions -- we have an intensification of the individuating modern mind which literally disenchanted the universe. This made the world beyond the separate human mind simply an array of separate objects that was inert, without consciousness, existing only for us to try to figure out the rules that apply to this fragmented, objectified universe, a perspective sometimes referred to as the ‘Newtonian/Cartesian’ world view. [One of the most recent and dramatic examples of our species’ predilection to try to ‘control’ matter (nature) with our technology is the Chinese Army practicing using artillery to shoot into clouds to precipitate their rainfall before the clouds can drift over Bejing in August 2008 and rain on the Olympics.]

This really is at the heart of a quotation I'm about to read to lead into our next set of comments, Lynne, and this was made by the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzche, who realized at the end of the 19th century that the epochal crisis of the modern mind would happen when it became conscious of its destruction of the metaphysical world or of the alive universe. He said it in this aphorism, “God is dead.” By that, he meant that people had literally killed the mystery, a kind of Midas’ touch of the mind: instead of everything turning to gold, everything turned to dead matter that we could try to organize according to the laws of physics and mathematics but that had no independent interactive consciousness of its own.

So here's what Nietzche said to predict what our crisis would be in the 20th century: “What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?” Following that, we had the 20th century with its attempt to unilaterally master the mystery of the universe with the human mind and its mind-made artifacts alone, and the death by human hands of more millions of people in one century than all of prior human history.

So with that backdrop, I think now, Lynne, let us talk about how Quantum Physics began to shift that perception and open the door to what has become an ongoing rediscovery and reawakening of an evolving alive universe infused with consciousness -- in which current cutting edge Western science now perceives and demonstrates by its own methodology -- in the many examples highlighted in your book The Field -- what the ancients knew with theirs: that we are, in fact, not all separate but deeply interconnected and possessing the skills and the heart and the energy within ourselves – the life Force -- to actually bring about a new harmony, a new evolutionary era.”

[See also in this connection my dialogues with Richard Tarnas, Programs 31 and 32 on this site, regarding his description of the “participatory epistemology” characteristic of this new era.]

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WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, CAROLINE MYSS, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

In this Part 2 of our dialogue, fellow visionary Lynne McTaggart and I give examples of various contemporary scientists and scientific experiments that have been and are demonstrating how the so-called “quantum reality” of interconnectedness, non-locality and the “observer effect” extend to the “big world” of everyday reality as we all experience it (see, for example Programs 6 and 8 on this site with world-renowned biologist Rupert Sheldrake). These examples are explained in easily understandable and accessible terms revealing their relevance to our lives. One of the major implications of these experimental findings which emerges is that we all influence the world that we experience through our perceptions and intentions, whether we do so consciously or unconsciously.

At the end of the description of our previous dialogue (Program 43), I made reference to Richard Tarnas (Programs 31 and 32) and his phrase “participatory epistemology”. This phrase is an elegant etymological way of saying that what we know (or think we know), and how we know things, is dependent on our “participation”, at whatever level of consciousness we bring to the moment of awareness. In this dialogue Lynne and I describe how this phenomenon is called the “observer effect” by scientists who now understand that there is no such thing as a “passive neutral” or “objective” observer or observation of a separate reality independent of subjective perception. A corollary of this is that everything in our alive universe is interconnected and the future is open to be influenced and shaped by the power of our conscious intention.

To connect to this understanding we must, like the scientists we dialogue about, be willing to open to this paradoxical new and ancient worldview beyond the modern superstitions of mainstream industrial culture that take the Newtonian classical laws of physics to be immutable and all-encompassing -- limiting our reality to a world of matter and mind separate from one another in which our best intentions seem to matter little in the face of larger, impersonal forces fueled by the competitive desire to dominate.

How we can understand the difference between conscious, inclusive, intention for the larger good and mere self-referential desire, and how we can bring this awareness to our own “participation” in shaping our world, individually and collectively, is the subject of this dialogue and of Lynne’s new book The Intention Experiment. The worldwide experiments being designed and conducted by Lynne and her team of world scientists are directly relevant to our planetary evolution, involving how each of us can together impact global warming, the proliferating conflicts and violence in different areas of the world, etc.

And what is particularly useful and innovative in this is that Lynne is structuring pioneering worldwide experiments in conscious intention that any of us can participate in at this time by simply: (1) listening to this dialogue to first learn the basics of the nature and power of intention in the way described in this dialogue (and in her book), and then (2) going to the websites referenced by clicking on the Episode Detail orange box above at the left of this dialogue description.

If you are interested and have not already done so, you can begin this process by reading the description of dialogue Program 43 below – Part 1 of my dialogue with Lynne McTaggart, referencing her earlier ground-breaking book, The Field – and listening to that Program.

And stay tune next week and after for my two-part dialogue with Eckhart Tolle (Programs 45 and 46), whose series of 10 web programs with Oprah on his book A New Earth have involved over 2 million participants each week. My dialogues with Eckhart on his and our collective awakening to the Power of Now and the centrality of this to the evolutionary unfolding of our planet are directly complementary to the series with Oprah.

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WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

Included in the beginning of the biographical sketch of Eckhart Tolle (click on Episode Detail on the upper left of this introductory summary) is the following sentence: “Eckhart Tolle is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Power of Now (translated into 33 languages) and the highly acclaimed follow-up A New Earth, which are widely regarded as two of the most influential spiritual books of our time.”

Consistent with the evolutionary perspective and thematic thread of all my Living Dialogues -- that we are now embarked in a planetary quantum leap of consciousness, a new great awakening beyond both religious or secular scientism dogma -- my two-part dialogue with Eckhart explores the connection between our personal search for true happiness and the cessation of proliferating suffering and violent conflicts worldwide.

The kind of world that will be brought about in the 21st century is directly linked to the quality of worldviews and manner and content of communication that we bring to our personal and collective relating. We are developing with one another a new vision – a co-creative and participatory cosmology -- bringing the best of our ancient and modern heritage together in a journey characterized, using Martin Buber’s phrase, by the transition from an “I-It” to an I-Thou” mutually respectful and creative relationship with all that is.

One of the signature trademark expressions of Living Dialogues is: “Global Talk Unites Us.” These two dialogues between myself and Eckhart can also serve as an illuminating and deepening complement to the unprecedented interactive live webcast inaugurated and conducted by Oprah and Eckhart for 10 weeks from the beginning of March to the beginning of May 2008, with over 11 million people coming together each week online “to the same place – with the same purpose – to create a new earth”. (See www.oprah.com to participate live during that timeframe or listen anytime to those archived programs.)

Here is an excerpt from this dialogue Program 45, in which Eckhart and I explore the origin of suffering, the path to real happiness in the present and not some anticipated future, and the nature of our human heritage and possibility from an evolutionary perspective, relating to what Eckhart terms the personal and collective “pain body”:

“Duncan Campbell: The fascinating thing about this archetypal journey [to an enduring presence of happiness, equanimity] in how you explain this from your own personal experience is that the path to the present and the path away from the future is often, perhaps for most, if not all of us, through pain, through suffering. I recall, a great Buddhist teacher once being asked by a student, “Why did the Buddha call the First Noble Truth the ‘Truth of Suffering’? Why is it noble?”

He replied, “Because without it, there's no doorway into liberation from the imprisonment of ego.” That’s why the First Noble Truth [of the Four Noble Truths used by the Buddha to describe his own experience of “awakening”] is called “suffering”. The Second Noble Truth is discovering the source of suffering: the desire and attachment, not desire by itself, but desire and attachment. Then the Third Noble Truth being the possibility of liberation and the Fourth being meditation or the practice to achieve liberation.

What I'm thinking of now is a poem recently translated by Coleman Barks of the great Persian poet Rumi, talking about the role of grief. He says, and this is Rumi from the 13th century: “I have broken through to longing now, filled with the grief I have felt before but never like this. The center leads to love so opens to creation’s core. Hold on to your particular pain. That, too, can take you to God.” (See also Program 3 on this Living Dialogues site with Coleman Barks on The Soul of Rumi.)

“Hold on to your particular pain. That, too, can take you to God.” I have the sense that many people are going through this particular longing and grieving that may be familiar but it adds a new level of intensity. As you've described it, it is also the suffering and frustration of people in many countries around the world who have perhaps been many years on the so called “spiritual search” and experienced a new kind of hopelessness, a level of despair that they’ve not experienced before.

This may be the doorway to a collective awakening as you suggest in your book. This is not an isolated experience but what I call an emerging democratization of the mystical experience that traditionally has been seen as isolated in only a few people in different traditions such as Rumi in the Sufi Tradition, such as Jesus, such as Buddha, such as Meister Eckhart in the Christian tradition and so on. But now, there seems to be a very wide experience of this and as a result, I'd like you to talk a little bit more about what you mean by the pain body.

Again, as you put it, because you yourself had a particularly heavy karmic pain body, your personal pain was particularly heavy; it literally drove you “out of your [thinking, self-referential] mind”. You talk about the pain body not as an individual experience only but as a kind of collective experience. So perhaps we could spend our time for the remainder of this first Dialogue talking about the pain body, and how our individual and collective experience are merging and mutually informing.

Eckhart Tolle: What I call “pain body”, of course, like everything else, in this particular language of mine is one perspective on something among other perspectives. So nothing that we speak about is the ultimate truth, whatever language expresses is always a relative truth. Knowing that, we can talk about this particular perspective that I have on human pain. What I call pain body is the accumulation of emotional pain from the past, not only of one’s own personal past--and of course, there's an accumulation of pain from everybody’s childhood and life also--but also, pain that is part of collective human pain.

If you look at human history, you can see a very large part of human history is the history of self-inflicted suffering of humans inflicting dreadful suffering on each other, on themselves also, of course. The 20th century was the supreme example of that, what I call “the collective madness” where I believe nobody knows the exact figure but perhaps 100 million people were killed by other humans and this is the height of madness.

This has been going on, this magnified knowledge through science and technology, so it's the destructiveness of all of that. But yet, this has been going on forever since recorded history and before that, I'm sure, so that incredibly so much pain in human history collectively has accumulated. I'm sure that pain gets genetically passed on, it's probably even built into the DNA, every DNA has a built-in pain. So every human being partakes of collective human emotional pain.

Now, most human beings don’t know that. They believe their own pain is a very personal matter. They don’t realize very often that the pain they carry inside, a lot of that is simply human pain. So what I call pain body is an accumulation, an energy field, a residue left by past pain, an emotional field of heaviness or turbulence or tightness that lives in the body as that heaviness, that tightness. The way I look on the pain body--and I believe it's a very useful perspective--is to say it's almost as if it were an entity, an independent-like parasitic entity that lives in you. Don’t take it as the ultimate choice of language, it's just a useful perspective.

So that pain body lives in each human being, in some it manifests more strongly than in others. It is not always active, it has a dormant stage and it has an active stage. So at times, the pain body, you can hardly feel it, or it may just be in the background. Then something happens, a trigger happens, a thought comes into your head or somebody says something or a little thing goes wrong and that suddenly produces an enormous influx of emotional pain. When that happens, that means the accumulated pain needs to come up and feed on more pain. I call that “the pain body awakens.” Suddenly, you are flooded with emotional pain.

So this pain body, this parasitic entity, ultimately, it's not an enemy at all but it's just a way of looking at it, it needs periodically to feed. When the time comes for it to feed, it will use any excuse in your surroundings or in your mind to wake up. Suddenly, intense anger or intense depression or great fear arises and that moves into your mind and suddenly controls your thinking. All your thinking then becomes aligned with the painful energy field, what you feel, the thinking becomes dominated by the pain body.”

We go on from there to describe how to break that vicious cycle, as I put it: “particularly at a time when the collective consciousness worldwide through global communications, the Internet, cable TV, and the particular horror unleashed after 9/11 with the tremendous ongoing struggle between competing worldviews at the meta level”, continues to feed our pain body through seemingly all-pervasive infotainment. I then invite us “to explore in our next Dialogue [Program 46 following] this great paradox that when suffering ceases, it doesn’t mean that you’ve added the state of happiness to the content of your consciousness. In fact, you may still experience unhappiness, but you’re not suffering [because you’ve released attachment to a particular future]. That’s one of the great paradoxes that is addressed in The Power of Now.”

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WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

One of the signature trademark expressions of Living Dialogues is: “Global Talk Unites Us.” These two dialogues between myself and Eckhart can also serve as an illuminating and deepening complement to the unprecedented interactive live webcast inaugurated and conducted by Oprah and Eckhart for 10 weeks from the beginning of March to the beginning of May 2008, with over 11 million people coming together each week online “to the same place – with the same purpose – to create a new earth”. (See www.oprah.com to participate live during that timeframe or listen anytime to those archived programs.)

In commenting on Eckhart Tolle’s contributions to our ongoing planetary dialogue addressing the big questions Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? Why Are We Here? And Where Are We Going? in the “great big classroom community around the world that we are participating in in this live webcast”, Oprah described The Power of Now and A New Earth as “not, let me repeat, not, a new religion or a new doctrine, but really an invitation for you to connect to your authentic self, and to connect to your spirit, to your soul, to our inner being, to your consciousness, whichever word you want to use.”

Here is an excerpt from this Dialogue Program 46, in which Eckhart and I explore further the personal and collective “pain body” and how consciousness plays “hide and seek” in form until we come to the realization that we are not the form in which awareness is embodied, but in our essence we are the awareness itself. This realization arises from an appreciation of the historical evolution of our species and of our own life’s unqiue progression. This awakening moves us from depression or even despair in the face of suffering and feeling separate and isolated to an appreciation of these feelings as a necessary initiation into a mature sense of conscious unity: that “out of the many we are one”, even as we come to accept and celebrate our unique being and the diversity of all other persons and manifestations in nature and in the cosmos.

In the face of the declaration “Humanity is faced with a stark choice: Evolve or Die”, we have a choice, and together we can create a New Earth:

“Duncan Campbell: I'm thinking of it, also from the evolutionary perspective, we started this particular Dialogue talking about Joseph Campbell’s perception that the way of the Sharman that began 40,000 years ago was perhaps the first example in the development of the human species where the collective mind began to move away from its embededness and unity and in nature and the individual experience of the path of suffering and separation began to be seen as a vehicle of transformation.

In here, I'm thinking, that when we talk about pain and suffering, it's not as if we made a mistake or there was anything wrong with the development of this egoic separation. It has been a part of this vast evolution of consciousness coming to know itself, moving into self-awareness and this painful birthing process of losing the unconscious embedded sense of unity in order to create a sense of separate--almost like an adolescent moving away from the matrix or from childhood.

Now, the species itself being challenged to either move beyond the space of separation and move into a deep maturity and co-creative bringing together of all of these experiences or as one person put it, “Committing teenage suicide.”

Eckhart Tolle: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: It's very similar at the species level to teenage suicide where the sense of isolation or not being understood, not crossing the threshold into another layer or adulthood or maturity seems so intimidating that one actually commits suicide.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. So there's no absolute guarantee which way it will go, but the fact that we are sitting here, talking about this, the listeners are sitting somewhere else listening to this should help us to see that actually it's arising at this moment. It's not that let's hope that the new consciousness is going to rise on the planet before the old consciousness, so to speak, has destroyed it completely. The new is already arising at this very moment and so I am quite optimistic more than perhaps once before about the humanity’s possibility of surviving and go beyond this particular evolutionary stage into liberation.

Liberation, has until now, been an isolated phenomenon. Liberation from egoic mind. Liberation from thought has been an isolated phenomenon. Only a few individuals here and there became free because it was never a necessity on the planet. I call them the first flowerings of human consciousness, those few individuals the Buddha and some others that perhaps we haven’t heard of. In those, the flowering happened and those were the first flowers, the early flowers.

I was told by somebody who studied the evolution of the evolution of the planet that before any flowers appeared on the planet, the planet was already covered in plant life for millions of years. Plants were everywhere but not a single flower had opened yet. So one good site to use this analogy that the flower represents a new evolutionary level in the life of plants.

There must have been a day on the life on this planet when the sun rose one morning and suddenly, the first flower opened. Maybe it didn’t survive for very long. Perhaps, a few thousand years later, two flowers opened and a few more and suddenly, a point was reached when flowers opened all over the planet.

I believe humanity has reached that point now where enlightenment, liberation, whatever you want to call it, is not a luxury anymore. It's happening now on a larger scale because if it doesn’t happen, the species will not survive humanity. Often, transitions, evolutionary leaps, evolutionary transformation happens only through necessity when there's no other choice but to evolve.

You can see this in your own personal life. You can't stand it anymore. Life becomes so dysfunctional with this self-created pain that now, you have to evolve or die. That is the point that we have reached now, that humanity has reached now. Another hundred years of the old egoic consciousness that has created the history of the 20th century which is mad, the planet will not be able to survive another 100 years of that madness.”

And be sure to listen to next week’s Living Dialogue Program 47 with myself and Richard Tarnas: Initiating a New World View Through Dialogue, when we go into further rich exploration of the above subjects. These themes are the thread running throughout the vision and practice embodied in all Living Dialogues. All other programs in this series will be of interest on these themes, but particular ones you might wish to click onto listed on the right hand column next to the programs with Eckhart Tolle are those with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell, Gangaji, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Rupert Sheldrake, Steve McIntosh, and Stanislav Grof.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

Duncan Campbell: Rick, I just want to thank you for these two great masterworks, The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche, and all the gifts that are given in them, and for the perseverance and the great patience, openheartedness and open-mindedness that you describe on your own journey you had to develop, from your initial education as an intellectual and one who is well-educated in the modern mind, to open up to these insights. It’s been a great journey. It’s a great journey to take with you when we read these books, and it’s a great pleasure to spend this time together and to have you as a personal friend.

Rick Tarnas: Duncan, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Your knowledge of the fields we cover always makes the dialogue just flow so beautifully. And also, there’s something about the very nature of a dialogue as you do it, that is a kind of parallel to the whole attitude towards life and towards the cosmos that I think certainly my book is trying to support. And I think our whole spiritual challenge of our civilization at this time is, as you say, to move into a more dialogic mode – with each other, with other cultures, between male and female, between generations, and between humanity and other forms of life, and with the cosmos itself. So, in a sense, I think maybe what we’re doing here as a personal dialogue, and that you do with so many people who visit here in Boulder with you, is a kind of microcosm of this larger dialogical imperative really, that calls us in our time.

Duncan: Well, thank you so much, Rick. It is really a wonderful opportunity to celebrate all of us together with all of our deep listeners in an alive universe, and in a cosmos full of beauty and wonder and possibility.

This Part 3 of my dialogues with Richard Tarnas (Scroll down to hear prior Programs 31 and 32 on this Site) is itself a kind of prequel, as is Rick’s prior book The Passion of the Western Mind, to his later work Cosmos and Psyche, which we discuss in Programs 31 and 32 below. In this Program 47, I start with a detailed introduction that summarizes from the perspective of the Living Dialogues’ theme and viewpoint what Rick calls “participatory epistemology” and I call “participatory dialogue”.

In this dialogue we further illuminate the critical importance and history of the emergence of the modern mind with its stress on empowering the individual sense of self, following the indigenous emphasis on the collective, in allowing us to now be able to transcend and include the essence of these prior perspectives in a new “both-and” third consciousness. This new consciousness is further emerging and blooming in the 21st century beyond the late 20th century ‘post-modern’ bridge phase of the modern mind (what Rick refers to as an “era between eras”).

This third consciousness is both brought about and characterized by dialogue and co-creative participation with the universal consciousness in both its material and subtle energy manifestations. (“Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation” is a trademark phrase of Living Dialogues.) It is from this perspective that we can appreciate the great contribution Rick Tarnas has made in Cosmos and Psyche, showing how a contemporary deep and expanded ‘archetypal’ astrology can be supremely relevant to all aspects of our personal and public lives, helping to revivify the unifying worldview aspect of the ancient understanding of “as above, so below” on a planetary scale, threading through the work of modern depth psychology from Freud through C.G. Jung, James Hillman, Stanislav Grof and others in the fields of philosophy, science, spirituality, and cultural transformation.

And be sure to listen to next week’s Living Dialogue Program 48 with myself and Michael Meade, when we will explore the role of myth through the ages from indigenous mind through the modern mind and into the newly emerging ‘third consicousness’ (sometimes called ‘noetic’, ‘supramental’, ‘integral’, etc.). These themes are the thread running throughout the vision and practice embodied in all Living Dialogues. All other programs in this series will be of interest on these themes, but particular ones you might wish to click onto listed on the right hand column next to this Program 47 are those with Richard Tarnas (31 and 32), Rupert Sheldrake (6 and 8), Steve McIntosh (25 and 26), Michael Dowd (28), Vine DeLoria, Jr. (29), Stanislav Grof (30), Paul Ray (37), Duane Elgin (40, 41, and 42), and Lynne McTaggart (43 and 44).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

In this Part 1, Michael Meade and I share stories and perspectives on the nature and role of myth throughout the human experience, and in so doing enact and give voice to a fresh contemporary story, together with you, the deep listening audience evoking the new story, as part of our larger mythic interconnectedness. The great challenge and necessity calling each of us is to go beyond our either-or modern polarization and mythless argument culture into artful co-creative dialogue, to realize ourselves as bards and storytellers in our lives, embodying the personal transformational stories which together can weave the next evolutionary Great Story of unification in diversity so needed in our time.

Here are some excerpts:

Michael Meade: Well, I think the Greek word for myth is M U T H O S, muthos, and there’s lots of meanings to it but one way to look at it is it’s the story and then the other, it’s the story when its being told so that people often separate myth and ritual but the telling of the story is the mythic ritual because when its told, people have to open their entire set of ears all the way inside to hear a story, and when people are listening to a story, you can tell it when you see the rapt attention of an audience.

The listeners have become momentarily whole, because you listen to a story with your whole self, your whole history and your whole imagination and your whole kind of purpose in life to tell you the truth and that’s one reason why people need stories so badly and why a culture suffers when there isn’t a shared kind of over-arching myth.

Duncan Campbell: Absolutely, and what I am thinking about, there are two or three things as you begin these opening verses, if you will, from this particular story as Homer says in the beginning, ‘Sing to me of the man’ when he is talking about Odysseus and so we’re doing that now in this very dialogue and it recalls me to the feminine version of that of course, one of them, would be Sheherazade ( ‘She-her-azade’)…

Michael Meade: Exactly…

Duncan Campbell: …Who literally kept the king entranced and enchanted for 1001 nights in order to spare her own life and in the process transformed the kingdom. And here I am thinking also of this sense of listening, deep listening where people are, as you say, listening with their whole selves, they become literally enchanted in the sense of entrained into a deeper and at the same time a higher kind of awareness of who they really are, simultaneously above and below the subconscious gossip or the story our intellectual mind might tell us about who we are, and at the same time creating a resonance with the collective, with the whole, and ultimately with all of humanity and for that matter, all of history and all beings that exist, in fact all that is. That is dialogic mythmaking.

Michael Meade: Yeah, a person has to meet the myth with their own story, which, with their own life and so in essence, it’s a full engagement and the old idea was that to be part of the living myth, the telling of the myth and the entering into it fully is by definition and active healing and an initiatory event.

So that when the stories were told, people would actually be entering it in order to change their lives and in that sense, yes, it affects everybody because when someone changes at a deep level it affects essentially everyone there related to and on from there.

……

Duncan Campbell: That seems to be one way of looking at our modern mind dilemma and how it is reflected in the world where from my point of view for instance, I see modern culture altogether as being in an adolescent phase of development and perhaps the industrialized countries of the West, we could say are latter stage adolescent and the ethnic Muslim extremists that they are in great warfare with are perhaps an earlier stage of adolescence in a linear way of looking at it, but it does seem almost like gang warfare, the very kind of thing that you encountered at the age of 13 and both sides are awaiting the proclamation or the singing or the telling of a great unifying story that can touch the hearts of people of all genders and all nationalities to provide a way out of this kind of adolescent warfare.

Be sure to listen in to Parts 2 and 3 of this Dialogue, which will take up where this one left off.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING

WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. If you wish you can in addition try me at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

Appreciation: “I’m Michael Meade, the author of The Water of Life and The World Behind the World, and I can say this about Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell: It is one of the few places in this country where you can hear an intelligent, poetic conversation that brings together myth, genuine imagination, the extemporaneous poetic thought natural to people, and the practical issues of the environment and politics – a mixture that is necessary for the re-imagination of this culture. Thank you Duncan for the invitation and the delightful conversation.”

In Part 1 of this ongoing dialogue, Michael Meade and I shared stories and perspectives on the nature and role of myth throughout the human experience, and in so doing demonstrated how we enact and give voice to a fresh contemporary story, together with you, the deep listening audience evoking the new story, as part of our larger mythic interconnectedness. The great challenge and necessity calling each of us is to go beyond our either-or modern polarization and mythless argument culture into artful co-creative dialogue, to realize ourselves as bards and storytellers in our lives, embodying the personal transformational stories which together can weave the next evolutionary Great Story of unification in diversity so needed in our time.

In this Part 2, we share how stories -- telling them, listening attentively to them, learning thereby to see the individual story of our own lives as embodying and resonating with the purpose and mythic meaning illustrated in a Great Story – how all these aspects of story give us knowledge, healing, inspiration, and initiation into a higher life-enchancing and embracing consciousness. We share certain ancient and modern great stories in illustration of this, including the meeting by the well of the 13th century world poet Rumi and his dialogue inspiration Shams Tabriz (see Program 3 with Coleman Barks on The Soul of Rumi below on this site), the Divine Dialogue between the big Self Krishna and the aspirant Arjuna of the Vedic Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, from thousands of years ago, the prophetic poetry of William Butler Years (The Second Coming) in the early 20th century, and the anonymous pre-Christian poet(s) who gave us the biblical Book of Job (in the superb translation by Stephen Mitchell – see Programs 13 and 14 below on this site).

As I say at the beginning of this Part 2: “The power in storytelling is the power in helping people to understand how to situate themselves in a world that, at times for many people anywhere, can seem chaotic and without meaning when we experience ourselves as powerless to change the great course of events that affects us all.” Michael describes the challenge we then address in this dialogue as follows: “On the national and on the global stage, it seems to me, things have become more and more literal, less and less imaginal or mythic. Therefore, more and more rigidly polarized people tend to cling now to ideas that don’t hold water and people tend to cling to beliefs that no longer transfer the living breath of the living waters of the divine or the eternal. So while holding on to these almost empty institutions and empty thought patterns, people then use them as weapons and attack each other.”

Our response to this challenge is an expression of what I term “The Art and Evolutionary Necessity of Dialogic Mythmaking”.

Be sure to listen to the other Parts of this Dialogue, listed separately on this site in sequence -- and to both explore and make possible further interesting material by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description column, and by taking 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is throughmy website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

Appreciation: “I’m Michael Meade, the author of The Water of Life and The World Behind the World, and I can say this about Living Dialogues: It is one of the few places in this country where you can hear an intelligent, poetic conversation that brings together myth, genuine imagination, the extemporaneous poetic thought natural to people, and the practical issues of the environment and politics – a mixture that is necessary for the re-imagination of this culture. Thank you Duncan for the invitation and the delightful conversation.”

In Part 1 of this ongoing dialogue, Michael Meade and I shared stories and perspectives on the nature and role of myth throughout the human experience, and in so doing demonstrated how we enact and give voice to a fresh contemporary story, together with you, the deep listening audience evoking the new story, as part of our larger mythic interconnectedness. The great challenge and necessity calling each of us is to go beyond our either-or modern polarization and mythless argument culture into artful co-creative dialogue, to realize ourselves as bards and storytellers in our lives, embodying the personal transformational stories which together can weave the next evolutionary Great Story of unification in diversity so needed in our time.

In this Part 2, we share how stories -- telling them, listening attentively to them, learning thereby to see the individual story of our own lives as embodying and resonating with the purpose and mythic meaning illustrated in a Great Story – how all these aspects of story give us knowledge, healing, inspiration, and initiation into a higher life-enchancing and embracing consciousness. We share certain ancient and modern great stories in illustration of this, including the meeting by the well of the 13th century world poet Rumi and his dialogue inspiration Shams Tabriz (see Program 3 with Coleman Barks on The Soul of Rumi below on this site), the Divine Dialogue between the big Self Krishna and the aspirant Arjuna of the Vedic Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, from thousands of years ago, the prophetic poetry of William Butler Years (The Second Coming) in the early 20th century, and the anonymous pre-Christian poet(s) who gave us the biblical Book of Job (in the superb translation by Stephen Mitchell – see Programs 13 and 14 below on this site).

In this Part 3, Michael and I go into the nature of story as accessing the deep Source we all share, and in the process finding the thread of deep meaning and purpose that runs through each of our lives. It is in this way, finding the thread that weaves all of the pieces of our personal stories into resonance with a Larger Story, that we can become the “missing piece” of our adolescent cultures: the new elders, giving birth to an elderhood of service at all ages, including the wisdom of the “youth elders” as well as those chronologically older, each engaged in a dialogue of mutual mentoring.

As I say at the beginning of Part 2: “The power in storytelling is the power in helping people to understand how to situate themselves in a world that, at times for many people anywhere, can seem chaotic and without meaning when we experience ourselves as powerless to change the great course of events that affects us all.” Michael describes the challenge we then address in this dialogue as follows: “On the national and on the global stage, it seems to me, things have become more and more literal, less and less imaginal or mythic. Therefore, more and more rigidly polarized people tend to cling now to ideas that don’t hold water and people tend to cling to beliefs that no longer transfer the living breath of the living waters of the divine or the eternal. So while holding on to these almost empty institutions and empty thought patterns, people then use them as weapons and attack each other.”

Our response to this challenge is an expression of what I term “The Art and Evolutionary Necessity of Dialogic Mythmaking”. As I say in concluding Part 3, “this call to dialogue that has become so imperative right now is the same as the call to the deep story and the sharing of stories”.

Be sure to listen to the other Parts of this Dialogue, listed separately on this site in sequence -- and to both explore and make possible further interesting material by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description column, and by taking 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.

Appreciation: “I’m Michael Meade, the author of The Water of Life and The World Behind the World, and I can say this about Living Dialogues: It is one of the few places in this country where you can hear an intelligent, poetic conversation that brings together myth, genuine imagination, the extemporaneous poetic thought natural to people, and the practical issues of the environment and politics – a mixture that is necessary for the re-imagination of this culture. Thank you Duncan for the invitation and the delightful conversation.”

In Part 1 of this ongoing dialogue, Michael Meade and I shared stories and perspectives on the nature and role of myth throughout the human experience, and in so doing demonstrated how we enact and give voice to a fresh contemporary story, together with you, the deep listening audience evoking the new story, as part of our larger mythic interconnectedness. The great challenge and necessity calling each of us is to go beyond our either-or modern polarization and mythless argument culture into artful co-creative dialogue, to realize ourselves as bards and storytellers in our lives, embodying the personal transformational stories which together can weave the next evolutionary Great Story of unification in diversity so needed in our time.

In Part 2, we shared how stories -- telling them, listening attentively to them, learning thereby to see the individual story of our own lives as embodying and resonating with the purpose and mythic meaning illustrated in a Great Story – how all these aspects of story give us knowledge, healing, inspiration, and initiation into a higher life-enhancing and embracing consciousness. We share certain ancient and modern great stories in illustration of this, including the meeting by the well of the 13th century world poet Rumi and his dialogue inspiration Shams Tabriz (see Program 3 with Coleman Barks on The Soul of Rumi below on this site), the Divine Dialogue between the big Self Krishna and the aspirant Arjuna of the Vedic Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, from thousands of years ago, the prophetic poetry of William Butler Yeats (The Second Coming) in the early 20th century, and the anonymous pre-Christian poet(s) who gave us the biblical Book of Job (in the superb translation by Stephen Mitchell – see Programs 13 and 14 below on this site).

In Part 3, Michael and I went into the nature of story as accessing the deep Source we all share, and in the process finding the thread of deep meaning and purpose that runs through each of our lives. It is in this way, finding the thread that weaves all of the pieces of our personal stories into resonance with a Larger Story, that we can become the “missing piece” of our adolescent cultures: the new elders, giving birth to an elderhood of service at all ages, including the wisdom of the “youth elders” as well as those chronologically older, each engaged in a dialogue of mutual mentoring.

As I say at the beginning of Part 2: “The power in storytelling is the power in helping people to understand how to situate themselves in a world that at times for many people anywhere can seem chaotic and without meaning when we experience ourselves as powerless to change the great course of events that affects us all.” Michael describes the challenge we then address as follows: “On the national and on the global stage, it seems to me, things have become more and more literal, less and less imaginal or mythic. Therefore, more and more rigidly polarized people tend to cling now to ideas that don’t hold water, and people tend to cling to beliefs that no longer transfer the living breath of the living waters of the divine or the eternal. So while holding on to these almost empty institutions and empty thought patterns, people then use them as weapons and attack each other.”

Our response to this challenge is an expression of what I term “The Art and Evolutionary Necessity of Dialogic Mythmaking”. As I say in concluding Part 3, “this call to dialogue that has become so imperative right now is the same as the call to the deep story and the sharing of stories”.

In this concluding Part 4, we dialogue about how the modern mind paradigm and its “mid-level” national myths (including America’s dominance in the late 20th century, often dubbed “the American century”) are losing their energy and no longer have the hold on the planetary imagination they once did. This is the arena of what Michael refers to as the “mesocosm” – that place of conflicting cultural and religious myths which lies between the universal Great Stories of the planet, the macrocosm we spoke about in Part 2, and our individual microcosm stories, which we sometimes experience as unraveling to the extent we fail to explore our inner world sufficiently to see them as linked to the Great Stories, but rather identify with our own culture or religion’s limited surface mesocosm stories (which are themselves unraveling as we enter the 21st century). [For instance, as Fareed Zakaria points out in his new book The Post American Century, India, starting basically from scratch just a few years ago, now has 18 of its own TV news channels, each of which revolves around a narrative with India at the center, no longer dependent on the America-centric narrative of the 20th century and CNN. Yet the new India-centric narrative is still at this point a 20th century holdover to the extent it remains nation-centric rather than world-centric.]

To participate in the dialogic co-creating of a genuinely r-evolutionary New-Old planetary-scale and sustainable Mythos, we each need to catch hold of the thread of our own deep story as our mesocsom “gets messy and comes apart”. This messiness is at once the necessary prelude to a genuine re-imagination of our culture and the falling apart predicted in the prophetic vision of W.B.Yeats in The Second Coming mentioned earlier, “where the center cannot hold” and the desert landscape of our old polarized politics gives rise to negative and mendacious campaigning and governance “with its gaze pitiless as the sun”. As this “beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born” once again in yet another election cycle, we are in a potentially “tipping point” historic moment, where if we each take our own story thread to the frontier depths of our integrity and return to the center to reweave together a “protective mythic garment” as in the completion of the old Irish myth -- but this time as a “coat of many colors” -- a renewal in the U.S. of the original real dream of America, in its authenticity, character, and wisdom, can occur. (See Programs 38 and 39 with myself and Joseph Ellis, the “Founders’ historian”, below on this site.)

We are being called upon to hear, live, and tell stories of rejuvenation from our own experience, as is being done out of the view of commercial media in the vital energy margins in many ways, including by people doing hospice work, working with poverty and illness, doing personal depth processing, psychological and spiritual, and as is being done in the public realm by Barack Obama and supporters, co-creating, enacting, and telling a story of hope and possibility that resonates with this land and all lands because it is both new and ancient, a story as I say “which refuses to give in to the lie for personal advantage but actually endorses the truth of our deep reality”.

Here is an excerpt from this Dialogue Part 4:

Duncan Campbell: …There's a lot of racial talk going on (in the U.S. election story of 2008) that’s disguised and it's very debilitating because we have to encounter that old story of America, which is the slavery story and really purge it, I think, considerably more, and ultimately, once and for all, to free the psyche of the country to really live out its great destiny. As I have talked with you previously, the depth psychology of Jung gives a real insight here, that if we don’t bring up from the unconscious these old stories that are influencing us without our knowing it, they will be our fate rather than our destiny.

One of the great contributions you’ve made, Michael, is by collecting all these stories from around the world in your two books and showing us the power of story. You show us both how unconscious stories can be directing us toward ends that are less beneficial for our individual lives and our culture, and by encountering them, by going directly into them, by running towards the roar, by going into the field, going into that unsettledness – “running towards the roar “, your beautiful image presented at the beginning of The World Behind The World -- we can actually encounter and live out the deeper story for the benefit of all.

Michael Meade: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. The destined leaders need to run towards the roar at the right moment and people will follow and safety is found on the other side of the darkness, not in running towards the light.

Duncan Campbell: So tell the short story, Running Towards the Roar, it's an old African story.

To hear Michael tell the story, you’ll have to listen to Part 4 of our dialogue.

I conclude this dialogue with Michael by coming back to the deep story themes which I describe are “the very warp and woof of what we do here on Living Dialogues”, some pertinent examples of which were previewed in Programs 38 and 39 below and in the three previous parts of this dialogue (Programs 48, 49, and 50), and will be seen in next week’s Program 52 with Angeles Arrien, the leading cross-cultural anthropologist of our time, with Episcopal priest become shaman Peter Calhoun in Programs 53 and 54, and with renowned African teacher Sobonfu Some, visionary James Redfield, and others in subsequent dialogues.

Be sure to listen to the other Parts of this Dialogue – and, also, to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.