Welcome to the Living Myth podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective.

On this episode, Mead considers how the

specific struggles encountered in life can open pathways to the center of the self, where purpose

waits to be found, where vitality can ever be renewed, and where spirit whispers its precise

calling. Each personal crisis and life transition

can evoke the esoteric pattern of the soul and the deep self waiting to awaken within us.

As things fall apart all around us, the deep self seeks to awaken our primary impulses towards

creativity and the essential urge to become

who and what we are at our core.

The good thing about mythology is it has stories for almost everything that happens, it has many stories for chaos and creation. Creation stories are most profound stories that appear all around the world.

In almost every culture, even small tribes, will have more than one creation story.

As if to say, if you look at it one way, and I'm talking here about monotheistic religion,

if you look at one way, you have actually stopped creation. Creation is so

profound that it's manifold and it's endless. And then as I said, creation often begins with

chaos. In other words, it's dark. They talk about the endless dark ocean as a representation of chaos, nothing but darkness,

nothing manifest, nothing pronounced.

And then it begins.

And so this is a story, Native American story, White Mountain, Apache is one version of it.

And it's actually, the names of it vary, but it's called How Healing Ceremonies began, or How Healing

Began.

And nowadays, I tell a lot of creation stories because I think what we're in is a moment of collapse,

renewal, chaos, and recreation.

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