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.

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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