The episode of Living Myth begins with a study on how our brains and our bodies respond to traumatic events. Apparently, our brains do not fully distinguish between something traumatic happening to us directly or something we observe that is harmful to someone else. To our brains a threat is a threat, whether we are actually experiencing it personally or are witnessing it on a personal device. Because humans are essentially social and typically empathic creatures, the same instincts that help connect us to each other can cause us to feel stress and pain by watching almost any kind of traumatic event.

A key issue is that in consuming mass media coverage of the flood of traumatic events that now plague the world, we cannot simply resolve the sense of threat and fear of harm that penetrates us and causes our brains to trigger our fight or flight responses. Our body remains convinced that we are in some kind of danger, yet we can neither completely escape by flight nor effectively engage with fight. As the world becomes more and more chaotic and this process repeats, we become intensely activated, but with nowhere for all the energy to go. We can feel increasingly on the verge of overwhelm as well as physically and emotionally worn down.

Psychologists who were consulted offered helpful suggestions such as setting boundaries on news consumption, calling friends or family members who can have a settling effect on us or spending more time in nature. However, the report also included the statement that under the pressure of repetitive traumatic stress a person's worldview might radically change. This greater fear involved the sense that in the midst of all the chaos people would conclude that life has no real meaning or purpose. However, the idea of an altered worldview can also be seen as our psyche’s instinctive way of seeking genuine healing and finding meaningful ways to change the course of both our personal and collective lives.

Ancient wisdom along with ideas of depth psychology suggest that in order to truly change we must start right where we are and accept the mess we are in if we would find deeper understandings and wiser ways of being. For it is precisely in the dark nights of the soul that we can experience revelations of both our deeper sense of self and the regenerative energies that are essential aspects of both nature and the cosmos.

Chaos as disorder and cosmos as regenerative order are the two huge energies that continuously make, unmake and remake the world. As things fall apart, the knowing self within us moves closer to the surface and seeks to become more conscious to us. Seen through the lens of the deeper sense of self and soul, the traumatic events that we experience and/or witness are not simply intended to defeat us or overwhelm us or make us numb, but rather, they are secretly intended to awaken us to a greater understanding of our own inner capacity to change and be part of the life-enhancing, life-creating dynamic through which chaos turns into cosmos, through which we can individually be redeemed from our own darkness and also find ways to contribute to a re-imagination and re-creation of a more coherent, inspired and interconnected sense of human culture.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online event “The Heart Within the Heart” on Thursday, October 30.

Register and learn more at: mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

The theme on this episode is the loss of eros and a sense of interconnectedness in the contemporary world. Eros is the elemental principle of connection, the touch of soul that binds us to this world but also connects us to our own essence. The feeling of eros or love is the soul's inner verification of its own genuine existence. When this elemental sense of eros and connectedness is lost, people can more easily be turned against each other, because inside they are turned against themselves.

In Greek myths, Eros is the original, archetypal source of all attractions and all connections, an essential opposing energy to Thanatos, the god of death. In that sense, each loss of eros in the world is a kind of death in life. The more disconnected we are from our own sense of Eros, the closer we are to the realm of death. Thus, this loss of the felt sense of interconnection is at the root of the current crises that can leave us feeling isolated and alone, but also feeling helpless and hopeless, not just about our own lives, but also about the future of life on Earth. The loss of eros is at the heart of both the mistreatment of the Earth and the extremes of hatred, fear and division that now permeate human culture.

The wisdom of the ancient myths also included the radical idea of “kairos,” meaning moments in which time breaks open and the original potentials of life become more available, just as familiar patterns and conventional systems are breaking down. In the dark times in which we live, kairos moments become awakened time in which we reconnect to a greater sense of the world, but also to our place in it. If we fully enter the moment when time opens, we experience an intensification of being that changes the quality of time as well as the direction of our lives.

Kairos represents the opportune moment in which everything can change, the primordial tipping point in which there is a reversal of time and a reconnection to things that are eternal. In kairos moments time breaks open and timelessness reenters the world and can pour into our hearts and minds. And it is that blessed incursion of timelessness that is needed to reconnect us to the innate sense of eros and the hidden unity and interconnectedness of all of life.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online event “The Heart Within the Heart” on Thursday, October 30.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

This episode begins with the old psychological idea that warns that when the conflicts inside us are not made conscious, they must be experienced outside us as fate. It has become our mutual fate to live at a time when it is not just that nations attack each other with obliterating force, but also that people within nations become increasingly divided and see each other as the enemy. Each day brings another twist or turn in the increasingly tragic story of humanity becoming divided against itself.

Throughout history there have been people in positions of power who seek to gain more power and control by using every issue to divide people into increasingly polarized states of “us vs them.” When Donald Trump told an assembly of all military generals and admirals that the primary threat to the United States is the “enemy within,” he was echoing the dehumanizing rhetoric used throughout history, not only to turn people against each other, but also to justify state violence against its own citizens.

Besides its dark history as a tool of autocrats, the term “the enemy within” is also used in psychology to indicate the shadow side of each person. This personal shadow includes the denied, repressed or rejected aspects of our personality that are mostly hidden in our unconscious mind. Failure to recognize and become more conscious of our shadow aspects leads to projecting them onto those we deem to be “other” than us.

Not only that, but when we allow the shadow side to operate unconsciously, it will, at critical points in life, manifest in self-destructive ways. In that sense, Donald Trump, who projects all of his shadow issues and inner conflicts on others, can be seen as a psychological lightning rod that requires us to become more conscious of what can divide us from within and turn us against our own best interests.

Ultimately, our greatest enemy is within, but not in the cowardly sense of projecting our own faults on those we deem “others” in order to deny our own inner fears and hateful feelings. But rather, our greatest enemy is the fear that we do not have, already woven within us, an authentic way of seeing and being that can allow us to stand up to the troubles we face and find meaningful ways to contribute to a renewal of the core values and underlying unity of humanity that is also an inheritance of our souls.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his free online event “The Heart Within the Heart” on Thursday, October 30.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

This episode begins with the idea that myths of creation are also intended to be understood as re-creation tales that reveal the world’s capacity to renew itself. Critical to this old understanding of the potential for a renewal of life on Earth is the primordial idea that humans are mythic by nature. It is our mutual fate to be denizens of history and be limited by the restrictions of time and place; it is also our destiny to be tied to eternal things. By virtue of being human we live in two worlds and at critical times we can become vessels through which the eternal seeks to enter the daily world and bring a renewal of life on Earth.

Seen in this old way, the mystery of creation is not a problem to be solved through logic or evolutionary theory or religious doctrines. Rather, it may best be apprehended through deeper levels of consciousness, as presented in myths which speak directly to a person's imagination through primordial images and life-changing, life-affirming, life-awakening narratives.

Mythic stories depict universal patterns and symbolic codes that continue to speak to the deepest levels of the human soul and that also can inspire the highest levels of spiritual imagination. Through myths of creation, we can touch again the timeless images and archetypes from which the living world first arose. In doing that, we can find inspirations for our own lives, as well as insights into how the world might be renewed precisely during the time when it is most divided and out of balance.

The hidden aim of a dark period on Earth, like a dark night of the soul, is to dissolve our assumptions about ourselves and about the world around us, so that we might find our way back to the origins of life. For, in the age-old dynamic of chaos and creation, humans are revealed to be the missing link between heaven and earth, between the eternal and the time bound.

In the dark times, when all else seems lost, what we secretly seek is a connection to the deeper self within us that is, on one hand, truly personal and unique and on the other hand is transpersonal and touched by the divine. Surprising as it may seem in this time of fixed ideologies and systems of blind belief, what can truly change the course of history, in ways that heal divisions rather than deepen them, is an awakening of the deeper sense of self and soul in each of us that is secretly connected to the origins of life and to the powers of re-creation.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

This episode takes us back to the origins of the theater in ancient Greece where many of the ideas of democracy also originated. Tragedy began with a lament for the fatal flaws in human character, while comedy used the cutting edge of humor to expose the hypocrisy of those who misuse power. Throughout history, satire has served as an instrument of the powerless against the powerful and as a necessary expression of freedom of both imagination and speech.

The term stage comes from roots that mean “to stand or to take a stand;” not to simply be a stand-in, but to play a major role in the essential drama of living out the inner character and living truth of our soul. For, life requires that we stand for something meaningful, something beautiful, something enduring, especially during tragic times.

Psychological maturity, whether in a person, a political party or a nation depends upon the ability to stand in the tension of opposites long enough for an unexpected third way to arise. By contrast, seeing life simply as a zero sum game of winners and losers can only lead to those in power demonizing others in order to sustain a false sense of superiority.

While the two poles of a polarity may seem to be irreconcilable opposites, they are secretly part of a hidden unity, for existence itself is an essential unity appearing as a de facto duality. In times of polarization, the real point of  meaningful discussions and debates is not simply to prove one side to be right or be superior to the other, but rather to seek to a “catharsis,” an emotional and mental release that clears both the mind and the heart and can lead to a genuine sense of healing and wholeness.

The healing effects of a catharsis were considered to be an essential part of both tragedy and comedy. The point would not be to simply provoke strong emotions in the audience, but rather to create ways in which the expression of strong feelings could lead to new insights and greater realizations about life and how people, though we may disagree, each and all suffer both the inevitable conflicts of life and a deep longing for a sense of unity.

As has been said, all the world is but a stage and we, by virtue of being alive at this critical time, are the only players available to take a stand for the essential freedom and life changing imagination of the human soul. And surprising as it may seem, each soul born bears a genius self, that should it become conscious, can reveal layers of understanding and ways of healing and creating that can help change the course of the world.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

While often being considered the leading nation in the world, the United States increasingly finds itself on the cutting edge of cultural upheaval, political polarization and increasing violence that includes mass shootings and politically motivated killings. The recent tragedy of a political activist being shot and killed by a radicalized young man, while appearing distinct in the sense of being a political assassination, can also be seen as part of the larger tragedy of young men acting out cultural violence.

Whether we like it or not, young people tend to manifest, express and even act out the psychological and emotional symptoms of the culture in which they must grow. In particular, if young men are not fully invited into social life and given a genuine sense of meaning and purpose, something volatile and potentially destructive inside them can drift towards the darker areas of the psyche and in the modern world, can pull them into the darkest parts of the world wide web.

While specific causes and motivations for shootings by young men are complex, there are familiar patterns to the trajectory that leads to acting out violently. Research indicates that there is often a strong sense of grievance that comes from a disconnect between the lives they actually lead and the lives they think they should have. This inner disconnect can lead to fantasies of having unlimited power along with intense desires for recognition and admiration. Aided by the extremes of social media, their sense of grievance and their violent visions take up more and more of their mental and emotional lives.

While modern societies lack clarity, understanding and wisdom when it comes to issues of men and violence, traditional cultures developed rites of passage in order to directly engage and temper the wild energies of youth and the reckless urge to battle with both life and death. For, there is an inner volatility that cannot be denied or be ignored without consequences that can turn inward as depression and self-harm or erupt outwardly in violence and destruction aimed at the society that failed to recognize, accept and include them.

It seems to me that in this group, we also have to include those who appear to be grown men, but who demonstrate untempered emotions, reckless immature attitudes about violence that contribute to the tearing apart of society. In many ways, we are all in the midst of a collective rite of passage that requires that we awaken to the deeper issues that can turn a society against itself, while leaving young people in growing gaps of isolation, alienation and despair.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his new online series “Finding Calling and Purpose in Uncertain Times” beginning on Thursday, September 18.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can save 30% on this new series and further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

This episode of Living Myth begins with a description of psychological projection as the necessary process through which people project their power on to others in order to see it and become more conscious of it. Modern mass media causes unprecedented amounts of power to be projected onto popular figures including political figures, tech leaders and “influencers.” Inevitably, the condensation of wealth and power causes an activation of their darker, shadow side which inevitably leads to misuses of power that are detrimental to both collective society and the Earth.

The oldest meaning of the word king is “to sacrifice” with the inherent meaning that those elevated to the heights of power should become willing to sacrifice their own desires for the benefit of the people as a whole. The classic symbol of the misuse of power appears in stories where a ruler acts out the shadow side of the archetype of the king. The shadow king symbolizes leadership reversed, nobility perverted, and sacrifice used in the wrong way. Instead of practicing self-sacrifice and serving other people, the shadow king requires the endless sacrifice of others to satisfy his own desires.

Michael Meade uses a series of mythic tales to depict the dangerous arc of descent that can lead from the heights of wealth and power to the depths of tyranny, oppression and brutality. What begins with an inflated sense of self-importance and a false sense of omnipotence inevitably devolves into delusional states of denial, along with an increase of cruelty and a growing taste for violence.

And in these dark times when fear and intimidation are in the air, when we can feel lost and isolated at any moment, it becomes ever more important to know that cruelty comes from weakness and that the will to power comes from an inner abyss of emptiness that cannot be satisfied. But also that we are each the inheritors of the gifts and the powers of our own souls and that becoming fully grown involves reclaiming our power by living out the meaning and purpose of our own lives.

An old meaning of the word soul is “the light found in darkness.” We are here to find the light within our own souls which knows, not just how to survive the dark times, but also how to bring creative energy out of darkness that can be used to offset the misuses of power and to reset the core values of humanity. The importance of truth, the wisdom that keeps mercy at the heart of justice and the necessity of love are part of the endowment of each soul born that cannot be denied or be deported, but rather are always on the verge of awakening more deeply in the hearts of the people.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his new online series “Finding Calling and Purpose in Uncertain Times” beginning on Thursday, September 18.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can save 30% on this new series and further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

Michael Meade talks about inner genius and how without a calling we can feel lost throughout our lives. Without a genuine purpose, we can turn bitter, drifting without genuine passion and withering without the blessing of the spirit of life. A true life purpose is not an optional choice or an outline of goals we might accomplish, but rather something inherent and expectant seeded within each heart and soul.

In that sense, being purposeful does not simply mean being goal oriented, but being connected to the inner meaning and core pattern of our self and soul. Finding a genuine purpose gives us a sense of being centered and dwelling deeply within our true self, while also being more able to respond spontaneously to a rapidly changing world.

This episode is edited from a Jung Platform Summit presentation.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his new online series “Calling and Purpose in Uncertain Times” beginning on Thursday, September 18.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can save 30% on this new series and further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

On this episode of Living Myth, edited from an interview with Thomas Hubl for his Collective Healing Conference, Michael Meade considers transformation as an ongoing and natural dynamic of the universe. This core theme is woven through an in-depth conversation about finding deeper self-awareness by examining the ego’s resistance to change and how the wisdom of elders protects and guides us through transformative processes.

As the inner dynamic of transformation, Meade considers how initiation means the continuous breaking open of areas of the soul in order to reveal hidden capacities and inherent gifts. The dramas that befall us become the detours from the mainstream that keep our hearts open to growing and our minds open to learning who we are at our essence and what we are meant to do in the world.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his new online series “Calling and Purpose in Uncertain Times” beginning on Thursday, September 18.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can save 30% on this new series and further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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

On this episode, Meade considers how the specific struggles encountered in life can open pathways to the center of the self where purpose waits to be found, where vitality can ever be renewed and where spirit whispers its precise calling.

Each personal crisis and life transition can evoke the esoteric pattern of the soul and the deep self waiting to awaken within us. The presence of the greater self is what shifts the ground of trauma and heals the aching soul. As things fall apart all around us, the deep self seeks to awaken our primary impulses towards creativity and the essential urge to become who and what we are at our core.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his new online series “Calling and Purpose in Uncertain Times” beginning on Thursday, September 18.

Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events. 

You can save 30% on this new series and further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 700 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

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

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