Episode 393 - In Dire Straits

Living Myth

Michael Meade

Transformation, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Genius, Education, Myth, Soul, Culture

4.9 • 944 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We live in a time when seemingly all possible conflicts and oppositions come crashing all around us. Each day leaves us more exposed to raw emotions and rocked by the harsh energies of life. The tragedies and calamities of this era leave us in the lurch of history as antagonisms harden into stone and life seems increasingly stuck.

In order to imagine ways to pass through the dire straits of these troubled times, Michael Meade turns to ancient myths which can offer a third way to see when we find ourselves caught between opposing ideas and hardened ideologies.

The old myth of Jason and the Argonauts includes the quest to recover the Golden Fleece, the symbol of justice, authentic authority and balance needed to bring peace back to the world. The tale also involves facing the famous obstacle of the clashing rocks that represent the danger of being crushed between the rocks and the hard places. The story illustrates that some greater imagination must be found, and something must be consciously sacrificed, or else more people will become unconsciously and unnecessarily sacrificed.

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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
0:16.6	perspective. We live in a time when seemingly all possible conflicts and oppositions come crashing all around us.
0:26.1	Each day leaves us more exposed to raw emotions and rocked by the harsh energies of life. The tragedies and calamities of this era leave us in the
0:36.2	lurch of history as antagonisms harden into stone and life seems increasingly stuck.
0:43.0	In order to imagine ways to pass through the dire straits of these troubled times,
0:49.0	Michael Mead turns ancient myths, which can offer a third way to see when we find ourselves caught between
0:56.5	opposing ideas and hardened ideologies. The At this point in life it's hard not to feel the weight of the world. It seems as if each day I wake up there's a new issue that everything has become
1:28.4	polarized around and because of the intensity of the polarization and the lack of connection to underlying
1:39.8	unities of life, each thing that comes up and becomes the subject of opposition remains unsettled so that there is a continuous growing of the weight of the world and nothing we can do about it.
1:57.3	It falls on all of us that weight.
2:01.4	I felt it when I woke up again this morning and I thought of the old alchemical idea of turning
2:09.4	lead into gold, as if we have to learn how to do that. Learn how to transform the very substances
2:19.0	that are driving us apart if we are ever to find any unifying way of going forward.
2:25.0	As becomes more and more clear, we live in a time when all the possible conflicts and oppositions come crashing all around us.
2:36.0	The world becomes more chaotic and threatening as antagonisms of all kinds intensify and often harden into stone.
2:47.6	The size and complexity of the issues we face as a global community are so extensive and intractable as to be mythic in scope.
2:57.0	Yet, as a culture, there's a tendency to turn away from myth as if it was too irrational or unreal to be helpful.
3:07.0	However, to be without a co-hearing myth means to lack To be
3:15.0	a co-hearing myth means to lack a containing story in which to place the seemingly
3:19.0	random and increasingly harsh
3:23.7	life. To be without coherent narratives
3:27.7	means to be even more exposed to the raw energies
	...

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