Ep. 488 - Finding Hope in Times of Despair

Living Myth

Michael Meade

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2026

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

People increasingly question whether there is any hope for the world at this time. In this episode of Living Myth, Meade suggests that it is the nature of hope to become lost, before being found at another level of life. In the myth of Pandora, hope only appears after all possible troubles have been unleashed upon the world. There is a deeper sense of hope that can arise when "all hope is lost."

At critical times things must seem hopeless before the "second level of hope" can be found again in the depths of the human heart and soul. This sense of "active hope" depends upon the power of the soul to imagine meaningful changes that can help renew the force of life on earth.

The underlying spirit of life and the true resiliency of the soul are connected to the power of vertical imagination that rises from the original ground of being. In the dark times, when it seems that Pandora's Box is open 24 hours a day, it is a deeper sense of hope and a greater sense of imagination that we long for and that the world needs in order to transform and become renewed.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Living Myth podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective.
0:19.0	People increasingly question whether there is any hope for the world at this time.
0:25.1	In this episode, Mead suggests that it is the nature of hope to become lost
0:30.4	before being found at another level of life.
0:34.5	In the myth of Pandora, hope only appears after all possible troubles have been unleashed upon
0:40.3	the world.
0:41.3	There is a deeper sense of hope that can arise when all hope is lost.
0:46.3	At critical times, things must seem hopeless before the second level of hope can be found again
0:53.3	in the depths of the human heart and soul.
0:56.0	This sense of active hope depends upon the power of the soul to imagine meaningful changes
1:03.0	that can help renew the force of life on Earth. So what I want to do is take hope through three stages, one, literal meanings of hope,
1:26.4	psychological meanings of hope, and then mythological
1:29.7	perspectives on hope. But I wanted to start with a few quotes. This is something Salman
1:36.9	Rusty wrote a long time ago. One of the things that has happened to us as a human race
1:42.7	is to learn how certainty crumbles in our hands.
1:47.2	We can no longer have a fixed certain view of anything, but our lives teach us who we are.
1:54.9	So that was a prophetic statement by him a number of years ago.
1:59.0	And this is another prophetic statement from Samuel Beckett, the Irish poet and playwright.
2:05.3	This confusing is not my invention.
2:08.4	It is all around us, and our only chance is to let it in, to open our eyes and see the mess.
2:16.1	Then there will be new forms, and the forms will be of such a type
2:20.4	that they admit the chaos and do not try to say that it is really something else. So that's
	...

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