On this excerpt from a premium episode, Mead follows a myth from ancient Ireland and weaves together cosmology, psychology, and philosophy in order to open the soul's vision and catch the fish of wisdom. Rather than being abstracted knowledge, embodied wisdom is shown to be both immediate and eternal, both spiritual, and soulful.

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Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com slash living myth. Are you sure?

sure? Are you sure? Yeah.

Stories come in funny ways.

This is a story I've known for a long time, but I never told it until two weeks ago and I was

Walking in the desert and it suddenly came dropping into my mind, you know like a bird

Landing in a tree And so then I know, oh, I have to tell the story.

So it's an Irish story. Because like this.

I just realized I never introduced the story to the drum in a way it doesn't matter

stories like rhythm and they don't care but I realize that my tendency is to do

multicultural things and so this is an Irish story that it's going to happen while I'm playing an East African rhythm on a West

African drum I'm going to tell it with a New York accent and then follow with a pseudo-Irish

interpretation. In Ireland they say that wisdom began in the pool that stood at the foot of the great tree of life and that in that pool that was at the feet of the tree of life there was salmon who were swimming.

And from that tree occasionally,

there were nuts that would drop into the pool,

and when the nuts would hit the salmon or when the salmon

would eat the nuts then they would gain wisdom coming directly to them from the tree of light and they say that after that

the salmon would swim out of the pool into the great and sacred river Bois.

And then anyone who would happen to catch

one of those salmon and eat of the salmon

...