Episode 435 - Why We Resist Change

Living Myth

Michael Meade

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

4.9 • 944 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Even when change is greatly desired, it is not easily accomplished. This episode of Living Myth considers the problem of resistance to change from psychological and mythological viewpoints. While we are facing radical changes that threaten both nature and culture, we are also challenged by the dilemma of human resistance to change at both personal and collective levels. The issue is not simply a lack of commitment to change. Rather, resistance arises precisely where we have the best intentions to change.

The problem becomes all the more difficult as we may not be aware of our resistance because it occurs at an unconscious level. Attempts to meaningfully change can feel like an internal struggle between opposing parts of ourselves; one part that overtly wants change and another part that covertly works against it.

What some psychologists call an internal “competing commitment” or a subconscious “immunity to change” was once known as the fatal flaw that leads us away from our soul's natural goal of transformation and spiritual realization. In terms of mythic imagination, each soul has an original intention waiting to be found and a life dream waiting to awaken. And each soul also has its fatal flaw, a kind of reverse attitude that works against that original intention.

Genuine transformation develops from the inside out. Thus, when change becomes essential, not just for ourselves, but also for life on earth, we are called to awaken to the true aims of our authentic selves as well as to the fatal flaws that work against meaningful change, both personally and collectively.

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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.
0:20.0	This episode considers the problem of resistance to change from psychological and mythological viewpoints.
0:29.6	Genuine transformation develops from the inside out.
0:33.6	Thus, when change becomes essential, not just for ourselves, but also for life on earth, we are called to awaken to the true aims of our authentic selves, as well as to the fatal flaws that work against meaningful change, both personally and collectively. In many traditional cosmologies and mythologies, the moon is considered to be more powerful than the sun.
1:18.2	A modern person might argue that the sun is so powerful, it rises every day and fills the world
1:24.9	with light, and it makes so many things on Earth possible.
1:30.3	Not only that, someone might say, but the light of the moon is just a reflection of the
1:35.9	light of the sun. But the point about the moon being powerful was not about astronomy
1:42.8	or about how things might seem in the clear light of day.
1:48.0	The reason the moon was seen to be more powerful was because the moon constantly changes.
1:56.5	And since change was understood to be the essence of life, and because each time we see the
2:04.5	moon, it is in a different phase, the moon represents change, whereas the sun appears more or less
2:13.2	the same each day. Lunar knowledge is an ancient phrase connected to the sense of understanding the nature
2:23.8	of change. And since we are living in a period of radical changes in both nature and culture,
2:33.2	we are being challenged not simply to change, but also to understand
2:39.0	the nature of change. And lunar knowledge would include the sense that things go dark every
2:46.7	once in a while, the sense that at times we can only hold on to a sliver of knowledge.
2:54.5	And then we have to trust that that sliver could grow in brightness and become some kind of
3:00.1	revelation. And because the moon in its instructive cycle goes to complete darkness, which is then called the new moon,
3:12.6	as if to say the new thing we're looking for might best be found in the darkness that precedes
3:19.6	the return of the light. If we want to take the metaphor of the phases of the moon and the nature of change
3:28.5	into psychological terms, the dark of the moon might relate to what's called resistance to change.
	...

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