Episode 422 - Surviving the Maelstrom

Living Myth

Michael Meade

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

4.9 • 944 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode of Living Myth begins with the idea that we are experiencing not just radical changes that happen in quick succession, but a maelstrom that threatens to upend life as we know it. The word maelstrom comes from old roots meaning, “a grinding stream or great whirlpool that sucks everything into its downward spiraling vortex.” Being alive at this radical time when extreme changes engulf most areas of life means that we repeatedly risk being overwhelmed and pulled down by events that can be disheartening and discouraging.

Faced with increasing uncertainty we must find things to hold on to that can keep us from being pulled under. We need the practices, the arts and the methods that allow us to witness the maelstrom but survive the vortex of descent and despair. People in Finland use the term “sisu” to describe an inner ability to push past usual limits when facing great adversity and survive even when the obstacles seem to be insurmountable.

Sisu involves an innate quality and latent power that exists deep within each of us, that can be accessed when our limits are tested and our greatest fears are faced. In that sense, sisu involves having the courage to follow what feels right and what feels just, and trust in life's hidden potentials. While sisu bears similarities to notions of resilience, grit and will power, it goes much further. The understanding of sisu includes an underlying sense of individual courage, but it also involves an awakening of the principle and power of a just and inclusive sense of social unity.

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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.
0:18.2	This episode begins with the idea that we are experiencing not just radical changes that happen in quick succession, but a maelstrom that threatens to upend life as we know it.
0:29.6	The word maelstrom comes from old roots meaning a grinding stream or great whirlpool that sucks everything into its downward spiraling vortex.
0:40.3	Being alive at this radical time when extreme changes engulf most areas of life
0:45.3	means that we repeatedly risk being overwhelmed and pulled down by events that can be disheartening and discouraging.
0:55.0	Faced with increasing uncertainty, we must find things to hold on to that can keep us from being pulled under.
1:02.0	We need the practices, the arts, and the methods that allow us to witness the maelstrom but survive the vortex of dissent and despair.
1:13.6	The word witness is an extension of the term wit, which comes from old roots that can mean
1:33.7	knowledge or understanding, but that can also mean consciousness.
1:40.2	There's a kind of progression in the meanings of witness so that it begins with the need to have
1:48.6	genuine knowledge, something that has become increasingly challenging in what some people
1:55.8	call the post-truth era. And yet, the sense of having and holding genuine knowledge is required
2:04.9	in order to reach places of deeper understanding. The next step in being a genuine witness
2:13.4	would involve developing a greater sense of consciousness about ourselves and about the world we live in.
2:23.0	It is a part of the human condition to be a witness to the times in which we live,
2:29.6	and it is an indelible part of human calling to develop greater consciousness within the circumstances
2:38.7	that we live. At this time of radical changes on earth, we become like it or not,
2:47.4	witnesses to the extremes of weather as well as to the extremes of politics that can lead to
2:55.2	an unraveling of the fabric of human culture. One way of finding a place to stand and a way of
3:04.2	understanding the radical times in which we live is to imagine that we are witnessing
3:11.2	a process of collapse and renewal. And although ancient knowledge suggests that renewal is
3:20.7	secretly happening within the process of unraveling.
	...

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