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Michael Meade is a brilliant storyteller and author. He re-contextualizes ancient myths and ancestral fountains of wisdom in ways that help us to understand both our challenges and our gifts. Michael is also the creator of the Living Myth Podcast. I’ve been reading his books for a long time and I loved his latest, which is called, The Heart of Transformation.

I had Michael on Pulling the Thread about a year ago, and I’ll link that conversation in the show notes.

In today’s conversation, we talk about what gives rise to our own transformations, renewals, and rebirths. Michael offers a different, and more helpful, way to think about our resistance to change.

He talks about how each of us can search for, and find, our own genius and gifts… How we might go about fulfilling our inner dreams… And how we might respond to the call to live our own unique lives.

I love every metaphor, and every personal story he shares.

New Book: The Heart of Transformation

Michael’s First Pulling the Thread Episode: “How to Grow Your Soul”

ELISE:

It won't surprise absolutely no one listening to this conversation that I was really picking up what you were putting down in this last book. We are unsurprisingly, because you've informed the hymnal, but we are drinking from the same hymnal and I was just like, yes and yes and yes. Good, good. Yeah, no, I loved it. And maybe we'll start there. So the last time that we convened, we were talking about the adolescence of sphere, your recasting as the hero's journey, as an internal descent to find and harvest the soul, the trickster and the destroyer archetypes, just this very difficult moment that we find ourselves in and how to find a path through. And so when I read this book, I was like, "Well, of course, this is a piece of this puzzle that we all need." And what I love about you, obviously you tell some of the same stories in some of your books, always in a slightly different way, and you as a mythologist are going to connect us to the metaphors that are the most meaningful.

And so I loved, can we just start with the chrysalis because it is both the most overused and I would say also slightly misunderstood when you were telling it. Can we talk about it because you added layers to it that I did not know. So thank you.

MICHAEL:

Yeah. So I started with that. The first part of the book is about transformation seen through the lens of nature. And I'm using the old phrase reading the text of nature, but it really also could be called reading the esoteric text of nature because what happens in the chrysalis is pretty esoteric in the sense that it has a mystery in it. And as much as modern scientists have studied it in tremendous detail, going in there with microscopes and everything, you can never see the mystery that generates new life. You can see the result of the butterfly, but you cannot see the actual transformation that remains a mystery. And throughout the book, I'm trying to suggest that the core mystery of life is life, death, and renewal or life, death, and rebirth. And throughout history, people have used the caterpillar transforming into the butterfly as a primary metaphor and way of imagining transformation, which itself is happening in nature all the time, all the time.

And it's really happening in us all the time. We are just captured inside a cultural view where people want to say, "I am me. I'm the same person. The I is overly resolved when the soul is here to transform." So the metaphor of, well, metamorphosis as metaphor, amazing things are going on there. For one thing, the caterpillar cells are completely different from the butterfly cells scientifically. They're not connected in any way. It's just if there's two beings in there. And then it turns out that the caterpillar or the larvae has to die for the butterfly to be born. And so for me, that says there's the mystery. Death produces the new life. Something has to die for new life to occur. You can then run that into one's own psyche and you can run it into a cultural collective as well. We're in the midst of things that need to die so that other things can be born and that's nature.

That's not a perversion of history, that's nature. But when there was biologists in there studying inside the cocoon, one of the surprising things they found was that the larva cells are attacking the butterfly cells. And of course it's amazing they have to give a name to the butterfly cells. So they call them imaginal cells as if they realize -

ELISE:

Can't make that up. Yeah.

MICHAEL:

The whole thing is based on imagination, the entire structure of life, you could say, and certainly the dynamic of transformation. And then it turns out that the Greek word psyche can mean either butterfly or human soul. And so it's as if our own souls are tied into this metamorphosis of the butterfly, but they noticed that the larva cells are more than resistant, but strongly resistant to the presence of the butterfly cells. And so then they did this thing where they tried to take the butterfly out so it doesn't have to break out of the cocoon and it's not being so endangered by the caterpillar cells. And so when they took it out of there, the butterfly couldn't fly as if to say the resistance is there to produce the strength in the butterfly to break out of its cocoon. And so that to me then becomes a psychological delivery system saying we all want to change and then we resist the very changes our souls most want us to take and that's natural.

That's what I took from it, that our resistance to change is natural. And if we see it that way, maybe we won't be so stuck with it. But also if we watch this whole story of the caterpillar and the butterfly and see it as psyche, as soul, as our soul, that each person has a kind of resplendent, deeper self that's trying to awaken inside the cocoon of our depressions and our confusions and all of that, but something has to die for it to get its full strength to live. And that means letting go of a lot of things that the motion of transformation depends on the letting go of things that are no longer enhancing life individually, collectively. And then you could say right now in the story of humanity as a whole.

ELISE:

Yeah. It's so beautiful because it's this idea that if someone comes to save you, even if you prevail on spirit or some universal force to pull you out of whatever death, spiral, loss of identity, loss of job, loss of relationship, whatever it might be, that you lose the transformation. I mean, you put it really plainly, you write, "Whereas people often believe that meaningful change will come from an outside source, the living text of nature has always demonstrated that genuine change comes from within." I mean, oof.

MICHAEL:

Yeah. There we are. And then I preface that by saying transformation is the essence of the cosmos, the essence of nature and the earth as seen in a forest where the forest grows by having the big trees collapse and turn into the material that nourishes the new trees. So there's never a forest that is a still picture. The forest is a process of transformation. And then the ancient idea is so is the human soul. We are here to transform. We are here to move from one form to another and repeatedly, repeatedly, and so is the world so that as the world seems to be coming to an end, we're in the end times, the end of an era, it's really important to know we're also close to the beginning of the next era or the visioning of the next world. Mythologically, the world can't end.

And in terms of the mystery of life, it can't either. Many things can end, but from the ends comes the next stage of things. That's where we are and that between between and it's really confusing and it can be devastating. But if we know that we're part of that and our souls are capable of that, I think it's much less devastating and can get a little bit exciting.

ELISE:

I agree. And you write so beautifully about that, the ends containing the remnants of the new beginning. I love the story that you tell about, is it the woman at the end of the world or the woman in the cave with the black dog? And I wanted you to tell that story. But before we go there, because this is so Michael Mead, I have to just say that one of the things that I just want to put a point on it that when you're writing about this metamorphosis, this transition, that you write about the word larva, which I guess Carl Lineus coined it, which means a specter or mask. And so he was the Swedish scientist who was obsessed with this idea that a creature could hide or mask their inner nature and intended adult form. And that in the larval stage, a secret identity behind the outer appearance of the worm-like caterpillar begins to awaken and take shape.

It's so rich, this idea, you can call it the tower, you can call it the mask or the persona or the ego, whatever it is, that it's a concealing force for who we really are.

MICHAEL:

And that is created very early in life when the infant has a sense of being abandoned and feels a tremendous sense of fear and uncertainty that feels like it could be obliterating. And so that's when the ego forms to protect us from ever feeling that again. But later in life when we need to transform our lives, we have to feel that again. We have to become conscious that we have to go up against these big fears that were really there early on. There's a few places in the book where I go into the idea that we're all abandoned, that every human being goes through an abandonment experience. Early on is usually pre-verbal, and then that sets us up to be afraid of change because we're afraid we're going to be abandoned like we felt as an infant. And so then it becomes a psychological necessity to become aware that we're not children anymore.

Most people have survived that life collapsing. I'll be with the big audience and say, "How many people have had your life unravel?" And almost all the hands go up and many people are putting two hands up saying, "I've been through this a few times." And then the trick is to focus on the part of us that survived that, that the story of collapse in a given phase of life has in it hints about the part of us that can transform and the part that's trying to become the biggest sense of self and soul. And so because the world's falling apart and we cannot get a sense of center or peace or calm in the outside world, it's not going to happen for quite a while. We have to find it inside. And the problem with most people is we've been educated to think that inside could be nothing.

It could be just confusing. It could be the antithesis of what we really want to be. And so in the book, I keep bringing in the deep self and soul as the underlying thing behind the mask of the persona, like the butterfly behind the larva, behind our persona and the way we present ourselves to the world is the deeper sense that is always greater, more imaginative, more capable, more gifted and aimed because modern people grow up without realizing that inside we are arranged and aimed in a certain way specific to that person. So I'm trying to put that in the book as many ways as I could because we're going to go through this collapsing of the world for quite a while.

ELISE:

Yeah. This end of one era in the beginning of the next, which feels like chaos. Will you tell the story of, is it the woman at the end of the world? Or am I adding extra words?

MICHAEL:

No, that's there though. It's the woman who weaves the world.

ELISE:

Who weaves the world.

MICHAEL:

Okay. So part of what I'm saying in the book too is that creation stories are actually recreation stories. So until modern times everybody understood, it's not that the world was created at a certain point and we're in the aftermath of it. The world is creation ongoing all the time, just as a forest is recreating itself from its own remnants. And so people used to tell creation stories to remind everybody we are in the middle of recreation at all times and that we have a legitimate honest connection to the capacity to recreate life just by being born with a soul. So this is a recreation story that's told by a number of Native American tribes in North America. And unlike a lot of stories, it doesn't begin once upon a time. It actually begins by saying, not far from here nearby there's a cave and all the knowledge that people are looking for, now this is before AI, so this is talking about knowledge that cannot be controlled by AI is talking about nosis, deep knowledge.

All the knowledge everybody's looking for is in that cave that is nearby, but somehow people don't find that cave despite all the highways and byways. But if you did find the cave, inside the cave, you would see this old woman and she's weaving the most beautiful garment anyone has ever seen. And she'd been weaving it for a long time, so long that when she's finishing the hem of it using porcupine quills, she has to bite down on the quills. And she'd been doing that for so long, she's worn her teeth down to nothing but nubs, but still she keeps biting on the quills and weaving the hem of the most beautiful garment. But every once in a while she has to get up and go to the back of the cave and in the back of the cave there's a fire. Some people say it's the oldest thing in the world, that fire.

And over the fire there's a cauldron and in the cauldron there's a stew of all the seeds of all the flowers and all the grains and all the plants and everything that grows on the earth. And if she doesn't go back and stir the stew, then it will all burn and nothing will grow. So she puts down the garment and she goes back to the cave. And because she's old and been weaving for so long, she moves slowly. And as she slowly goes back to the cave, the black dog, what black dog? The black dog comes over to where the weaving is laying on the floor of the cave and seeing a loose thread, the black dog takes the thread and pulls and keep pulling until it has unraveled the entire beautiful garment that she had been working on for so long. She comes back and instead of the beautiful garment, she sees chaos, complete mess on the floor, and she's stunned for a moment.

And then she sits down and then she sees a loose thread and she picks the thread up. And as soon as she touches it, she has a brand new vision of the world and it's even more magnificent than the one she had been weaving that got unraveled. And so she starts weaving the world again. And so the elders are the ones who tell the story and they tell it when everything's falling apart. And then someone is bound to say, damn that black dog, if it wasn't for the black dog, she'd finish the garment and would be so wonderful and everything would be great. And the elders say, be careful what you wish for because once it's finished, it's over. And she's been weaving the world. And if she ever finished, then the world would be over. So be thankful for the confusion and the chaos sometimes.

And in the meantime, look for your own loose thread.

ELISE:

It's so beautiful. And not just because this podcast is called Pulling the Thread.

To that point too, what I love about your book and the way that so many of these things work on sort of the micro and macro, and I think about each person as a thread essential to this tapestry and you write about talent and it being latent so beautifully, but I think that for everyone, so many people, some people I think feel like they understand, I hate the word purpose, but what their sort of ongoing contribution or they have some tension on that thread, they understand or are coming to understand who they are and what their gifts are. And that's inherently a massive... It is the gift, I think, is to feel aligned with your soul. But for those who are like, "I don't know what I am doing here or what my gifts are," what is your best advice?

MICHAEL:

Well, it's a tough one because it is a mystery because they used to call it the invisible thread that guides your life, and invisible is the operative word. It's invisible, but it's there. And so I usually recommend if a person is over 20, look back over your life. And some people, psychological studies would say, look at the period between nine and 11, that age period, because the person's genius usually manifests between nine and 11 and then it goes latent again until teenage years. And so there's been some manifestation of inner gifts early on. The problem is it was often not recognized by anybody or it was somehow oppositional to the family sense of self, and so it got rejected. So there's that. You have to look sometimes in the rejected parts of a person. The other place I would look, not nine to 11, but later on in life, like teenage years or early into youth, is when something goes completely wrong and you're kicked out of school or you have an illness or something that happens that separates you from everybody else.

I would look at that period because there's hidden gold in that separation. The idea is everyone is gifted and uniquely so, and that's what we're supposed to find in life. The culture doesn't know that. Traditionally, there would be rites of passage where each girl and each boy would have some experience in nature, which then the elders would help them figure out, like in the elders telling the story of the old woman in the cave, help them figure out that's your thread. And it's become an unnecessarily great mystery in life right now. So the way I've found it working with young people is the giftedness and the wounds inhabit the deepest part of our soul together. They're right next to each other. So if you can't find the gift, go work on the wound and the gift will appear.

ELISE:

Oh, it's so beautiful. But that requires, which I think is the thesis of, and to be fair, my next book is swimming and it's very different, but swimming in similar waters. And you talk about the pain, the fear of abandonment. I just think of it as a less localized, the fear, that this fear is our baseline reality as vulnerable humans in this world and that our ego and the construction of identity is what we think keeps us safe. And I think we both agree that in order to get outside of the ego, which becomes its own prison or its own cocoon, you have to go into the fear, right? Is that for you the same as going into the wound?

MICHAEL:

Yes. So part of everybody's wound is abandonment. No family can even gauge the wonders of their own children, even the parents that love those children so much. We're not as parents gifted with the knowledge of what the genius of our children is. That's not our job. The job of the parents is to love, protect, nourish the children as much as possible so they feel welcome in the world, which is a really big deal because that starts to reduce the sense of abandonment. But the sense of who we are and what we're called to be in life has never been part of the family's dynamic. That's why all children leave home. If we could get everything we wanted when we're at home, we'd stay home. We'd never get out in the world and have the soul's adventure. So the soul's adventure requires leaving the family behind.

I described this old Irish idea that a person is made out of three things.

ELISE:

Yes, I love this.

MICHAEL:

One is the parents, what we would call now the combining of the DNA of the two parents. People didn't think of it as DNA in the past. They thought more of the spiritual qualities or something like that. Anyway, the combined energy of the parents is one third of the child that's about to be born. Then another third of it is an ancestor trying to come back into life. And we know that idea because we'll talk about a young person having an old soul, and really we all have an old soul. It's the ancestral connection that we're bringing back into the world. And then the third element is a spirit that has never been seen before. And that third element is what causes us to go out into the world looking for who we are and what we're supposed to be and how we could serve and be part of things.

And we're at a tremendous disadvantage in the modern world because we don't have rites of passage, which was common in all traditional societies. And because at the end of childhood, childhood is a developmental process which modern psychology knows a lot about, but that knowledge of that developmental stuff stops at about 12 years of age. And the next step is not another developmental step. It's a leap into the life intended for that soul. That's the idea. You leap out of childhood, not into adulthood, that's just modern framing, but into the life that that soul is called to live. And cultures, when they were healthy, would help each young person do that. So we wouldn't be isolated individuals in an accidental universe trying to figure out who the heck we are. There would've been more connections to people outside our family who knew who we are, who could see it.

And there would've been an experience of waking up to ourself at the end of childhood. And so since it doesn't happen now in a collective manner or in a formal manner, then I think we have to find it psychologically and you have to track back really seriously. I didn't figure out parts of myself. I remember I had become a storyteller, which was all unusual, all on its own, but I was doing it, so I didn't think of it as unusual. And then I was being interviewed by a journalist who said, "When did you first know you were a storyteller?" And I just was totally They stopped for a minute. I never thought about it. And then all of a sudden I went, oh, on my 13th birthday when my aunt mistakenly gave me a book of mythology and she grabbed the wrong book in the bookstore and we were having a tug of war and she was saying, no, it's the wrong book.

Give it back. And I'm saying, no, I want this book. And that night I read almost the entire book on mythology and I knew my language. I found my language. I didn't have to be older to get it. I was in a poor family. I didn't have to have more status to get it. I got it. In my soul that night I got it. But no one around me confirmed it. I tried to talk to my parents, teachers at school, my friends. Everybody's going, what are you talking about? You're just off about something. And it took me almost 20 years to get that confirmed. So everybody has those moments just as everybody has their wounded moments. They're those moments when the giftedness speaks up or manifests itself.

ELISE:

Yeah. And then you write about your own separation, liminality, your own initiation right in a prison after getting dishonorably discharged from the war, after essentially protesting at every step that you didn't believe in Vietnam, which seemed like a late breaking initiatory right.

MICHAEL:

So the second part of the book is looking at transformation through the human psyche and how does the psyche transform? And so I thought I had to give some credential for why I'm talking about it. And even though it's the only time I get really personal in the book, but it seemed like the right thing to do because I learned about it by being in solitary confinement. So I had this 13-year-old awakening that then never got validated by anybody. And then at 20 years old, I refused to go to Vietnam and I wind up in prison and then I'm not a good prisoner, so I wind up in solitary confinement. And then I'm in there for quite a while and it's really discouraging and talk about fears and getting... I was completely by myself day and night for months and somewhere in there I got the idea to start fasting and so I stopped eating.

And so then not only I'm alone, I'm mostly in the dark and I'm losing weight rapidly. I almost died a couple of times. But in that collapse, that descent into the darkness and my own dark night of the soul at 20 years of age, I came to a point where I really realized I'm either going to lose my mind or I'm going to find my mind. And in my case, characters from the stories were visiting me in solitary. I was not alone and that saved my psyche and it saved my life and it let me know there was something deeper than anyone had told me about. And so I come out of there very traumatized and almost like a battle veteran. And I've worked with battle veterans because of that, but I had something that I didn't have before. I had regathered that 13-year-old experience and it saved my life in the sense.

And so I come out of there knowing that my life has to do with myth and stories. It still took me another 12 years to be able to actually realize, oh, now I'm doing this. I'm going to tell stories now. And I've been doing it ever since. And so I know not everyone has such an extreme experience, but I though I should authenticate why I'm talking about it or writing about it.

ELISE:

I think it's really beautiful. I also think as you pull the aperture out, you think about the unfolding of your life over time, the experiences that you've had, the foresight, the hindsight, the ability to recognize, diagnose what's happening and where we are. And you think about these end times, new times, whatever is emerging, you talk about, or not even the need for a collective rite of passage. We are in a rite of passage, and you write about these boys finding the Lascaux caves during World War II, which was so beautiful. I'd never heard that. I mean, I know obviously what the caves are. I'd never heard the story of their discovery. What do you think this rite of passage, what is our Lascaux cave? Do you imagine that there's going to be a collective turning or an aha? What do you see?

MICHAEL:

Yeah, I was really trying to work my way to that. And then there is a mystery involved. So even in that story, it's four boys who are in the south of France and they've heard the local legend that there's a golden treasure buried in a tunnel somewhere in the forest nearby. And it's while the Blitzkreig is on in Paris, which is not that far away, and that they go out looking for this legendary golden treasure and they wind up finding the opening shaft that leads them down into the earth and they discover the cave of Lascaux, which is way more important than the golden treasure they were after. And I'm using it to show that right in the middle of World War II, the world is being torn apart. And what's happening at a different level is the origin of art is being rediscovered because when Lascaux was discovered, it was considered the oldest example of human art.

And so I'm using that to say that in the midst of this tearing apart of the world that we're in, that there are things waiting to be discovered, that the breaking down of the outside and the structure of the world around us doesn't leave us in obliteration necessarily. It actually can open us to the cave of the heart. So then by then what's happening in the book is I'm now moving the heart to be the central thing in the course of transformation. And so the book cover has a burning heart on the book cover. And so what I could say very simply right now as the intensity around AI intensifies, it grows, and now AI has become the metaphor for the end time fears. And we are in the end of time, but not the end of all time. We're in the end of the world we thought we had.

So in the midst of the descent that we're all in collectively, there's something waiting to be found. And then I'm trying to suggest it's found in what they used to call the heart within the heart, not the pulsing heart that moves the blood through the body, but the inner mystical heart that is the source of imagination, not thinking. And so what I'm doing in that chapter is trying to introduce the heart within the heart, although the old Greek word, I mean the old Sanskrit word guha meant the cave of the heart and that we're trying to open the cave of our heart just the way those boys accidentally opened the cave of Lascaux. And it turned out that it was an initiatory cave. Young people like the age of those boys would be taken down into the center of the earth and then they would light torches.

And all of a sudden they would go from pitch black in the cave to torch light and all those pictures of animals and transfigured humans would be moving on the wall because of the flickering of the torch. And that would be part of their initiatory awakening to the capacity for imagination in their own heart and soul and their interconnection with nature and animals and the world of spirit. That's what those boy discovered. I think we're on the way back to rediscovering that very opposite of the externalization of everything, the deepening into the mystery of the heart and soul and where the core dynamic is imagination, that what we've lost in the modern world, I call it vertical imagination. The world is essentially flat again. The worldwide web is a horizontal web. People are all interconnected and more isolated at the same time and we don't have the depth that we need.

And if we don't have the depth, then we can't imagine the height of our own spirit or the height of the spirit of nature. And so I think we're stumbling towards a rediscovery of depth and meaning that has drained out of the contemporary world.

ELISE:

I am 100% with you in this horizontal vertical construction. Obviously we like to separate the two. So those who have a vertical life, many are church and state about it or have a totally different conceit. I think I'm probably more in your world where I see it as a vertical spilling into the horizontal world and that our job, I guess I wouldn't want to call it a job, but it is to bring the vertical into the horizontal. And I sense how much that's severed, particularly in the materialist reality where this feels like it's all there is, et cetera, where we see everything in a linear progression and life is up and to the right and progress is forward and all of the things that you write about as well. So what do you think when we think about the wonder of the Lasko cave, and sometimes I'm like, is it the arrival of aliens that suddenly re-contextualizes everything?

What is it that would capture us?

MICHAEL:

I think it's the awakening of the depth of our own souls.

ELISE:

Okay. Say more.

MICHAEL:

That everything has become so externalized. So people think that their aim in life is to be found out there. They think that which describes them best can be found out there. We're trained to think in terms of careers rather than callings, vocations. And the thing about a calling is calling to something already deeply set within the person's soul. So there's chapters in the center part of the book where I'm talking about birth and rebirth. And I use the story of the child who's born with all these gifts, but then the midwife takes the gifts and gives them to some people who are out in the mountains and they put into another cave. There's a lot of caves in the book. And so then that's a boy whose name, he's given the name Poder, which means power, luck, fate, giftedness. It has many meanings, but he has to go out into the mountains, which they call the holy hills in this Mayan myth, in order to find the gifts that were given to him at birth.

So in a way, I hope we're going to find ourselves back on the track of rediscovering how we each are gifted and then responding more to the call to live our own unique life. Another key in the book is each person is unique never to be born again. That's the third part, the spirit that's never been seen before. That's what we want to live. That's the potential for satisfaction and fulfillment comes from fulfilling the inner dream or the inner shape that was with us when we came in. I use the word genius because it's a really old word that people know, but genius literally means the spirit that's already there. It doesn't mean high IQ. It means the spirit and the person. So when everything else falls apart, what do we have? We have the spirit of our own life, which is gifted by nature and aligned with the calling if we could awaken ourselves to it.

And that's why I'm telling my story about finding a hint of it when I was 13 and then when everything was taken away. I mean, really, solitary is pretty strong medicine and everything's gone. Everything I hope for, I'm dying and then I'm starving myself as if to make sure. And then I get this awakening at the very bottom. And so those boys going down looking for gold, they have to get to the bottom inside the earth and they rediscovered the origins of art. So I'm also trying to say that our souls are secretly connected to the origins of life. And when we find our sense of self, our genuine sense of self, we have a capacity to tap deep original energies and we can go through a process of renewal again and again. So also part of the second part of the book is that we're here to be born again and again.

When I meet someone who says I'm born again, I say, great, get ready to do it again because we're supposed to go through the cocoon and come out over and over again and each time becoming more of our genuine self, more the butterfly that ourselves imagined to begin with. Then I think we can find a work in the world or a way of serving in the world or a way of creating in the world. You can use any kind of verb. And so as everything's falling apart, part of what I'm suggesting is when the structures get so loose, there's an acceleration of calling and right in the middle of the chaos, more people can find how they are called to live in a meaningful way. And when enough people do that, then you get a change at the collective level. So as people are slowly learning about modern politics, you can't change a culture at the level of politics.

It changes from the inside out at the level of the individual soul.

ELISE:

Yeah. I'm very interested, I don't want to take us on too much of a tangent, but David Hawkins, the idea of power versus force and that we really don't understand power because we don't see it. We see force in operation in daily politics or in the culture at large, manipulation through anger, fear, grief, desire. I also want to reflect back what I think is so fascinating about your personal story, which is nestled into this book too, is that you were at odds with the prevailing culture. And yes, there were other people who were engaged in that protest with you, although you didn't do it as part of a formal protest. It wasn't like a virtue signaling or I am of this group against this group. It was personal wrestling. And I think that that's worth saying because I feel like particularly in this moment that we find ourselves, there's so much group think, there's so much safety and belonging to one group versus another that we seek, that that's not really what I think we're talking about either.

It's actually an individual or personal confrontation with that fear of abandonment or fear of loss of security or safety that we all have to do on our own together.

MICHAEL:

Yes. That's the path of awakening. So I've described various initiatory things. So there's three steps in a classic initiation or right of passage. First is separation. And so the young person is separated from everyone they knew and everything they had, and that's why they're often naked or they're barely simply clothed and they're either in a cave or in a dark hut. They go through solitary confinement because the issue is to find who you already are, and that doesn't involve anyone else, at least at that stage. And so we just all went through that with COVID. We were in a collective separation and then we were also in kind of a descent, which is usually part of the separation. And then the next phase is liminality or betwixt and between. And that's where I'm saying we're in the midst. We're in the liminal state of a collective rite of passage because in the liminal part, the world we knew is gone and the world that's coming we haven't seen yet.

We may get hints of it, but we haven't seen it. And so we are between one thing and the other, and then the only place to turn is deep inside. And then we're getting back to what all the traditional cultures knew that each person had to go through something, the peace movement. I was by myself just going, I can't kill people I don't know for reasons I don't understand. I can't do it. That would be like the death of my soul. That was my position. And then I wound up having to find the depths of my soul. That's where it took me. And then I studied when I was trying to resolve things and trying to heal my own mind, I couldn't find anyone to talk to about it. And I started to study rites of passage and I realized I had been in a rite of passage that was an accidental or informal.

I think we all have that. Everyone has life will put us in circumstances where we can awaken to who we already are. And that's what we need. At the end of the book, I talk about how knowledge comes into the world about the inner initiate as the part of ourselves that understands how to stand in not knowing, how to tolerate the insecurity and the fears and the abandonment energies and realize that we can be receiving knowledge from deep inside ourselves and from the other world, as I call it, the divine eternal realm. So the whole book is really an argument leading to the awakening of the individual soul in the midst of collective chaos.

ELISE:

I think it's so powerful and so subtle and such an important distinction at a moment where it's like, it's us versus them. We're all going through something together, yes, but that individual birthing and the not clinging to all of these ego identity factors is what we have to give into the fire, even as we want to use them to proclaim at this moment, I'm a good person. I'm the good one. I'm right. I'm whatever it is. It's very difficult. And you tell the story, my favorite story, Zusha, Rabbi Zusha. It's the best story because I think it speaks to that, this idea that we can abide by the highest principles or the highest values or whatever those happen to be according to the people that we look to. And that's not it either, right? Will you tell that story for people who aren't like, "Oh yeah, that story."

MICHAEL:

So I had been going around telling stories and always telling stories about the necessity of the awakening of the individual soul. It's just I learned that the hard way and I've been preaching it for a long time. Then people kept saying, "Well, how can you prove it?" And so I was looking for a story that would prove the other end of it. So this is an old rabbinical story and Rabbi Zusha is one of the best loved rabbis because he was so wise, but he was also generous and he was a great teacher. And so we had all these students that loved him. And then of course he gets old and he gets ill and he's on his deathbed. And so all the students gather around him because they love him and they want to support him. And somewhere in the course of this, he mentions that he's afraid because he's going to die.

And they all say, "Zusha, how could you be afraid? You've been such a great person. You've been as wise as Moses. You've been as strong as Abraham." And then Zusha says, "I know, but my fear is that when I meet God, God won't say to me, Why weren't you more like Abraham? Or why weren't you more like Moses? I'm afraid that God is going to say to me, Zusha, why weren't you more like Zusha? And so that's the teacher teaching on the deathbed. His last breath is him saying, we are here to become ourselves. And most cultures have a story about the test at the end of life, and it turns out that the test has one question, did you become yourself? And so we're all facing that. Now, there's a psychological way in which every time we're in a really tense tension of the opposites, that question is being asked.

In other words, as the mystics say, most people don't read the small print on the agreement to be alive. And the small print says, what you find here is what you will find there. In other words, let's not wait until we're Zusha on the deathbed. Let's become ourselves now. And then when it comes to the end of the road, we appear as we were intended to be as a more awakened version of ourself.

ELISE:

I think the greatest lesson that you're teaching and pointing to is that the only way to contend with fear is to go into the fear. It's to face the darkness. You write one line, "In the end, the only genuine safety in this world comes from risking oneself completely in order to become oneself more fully."

MICHAEL:

Not bad. I wrote that, huh? That's not bad.

ELISE:

But it's scary, right?

MICHAEL:

It is. And that's why I go back to the infant trauma that... And to me, I'm just always making stories. So I'll study psychology, but then I turn it into a story. And so to me, the story is that the infant to one degree or another is basking in the loving look of the mother or whoever's doing the mothering, because you know that when you have a baby and you see how cute it is and you're smiling at it and you're tickling it and the baby's taking it all in because it's a validation of life, it's a blessing. And then it happens that at the moment where that infant wants very, very much to have that loving gaze, mom is busy with other things. She doesn't have to be... It's not about abuse. It can be, as Karen Horney, the early psychiatrist called it, it can be indifference on the part of the mother or the mother has another child or other children or she has a job.

And so she turns away right when the infant is going, "Hit me one more time with the loving gaze and it's not there." And then the infant thinks this is the end of the world. This is obliteration. This is the most horrifying, fearful thing. Apparently the infant takes it as overwhelming fear of annihilation, and then the ego forms to not feel that again. So then later in life when we have to change, we're no longer a child, we have to become not an adult, that's that maturing stuff, which doesn't matter that much. We're supposed to be awakening to our adventure in life, not as a family member, but as a unique being. And when that change has to occur, all those early fears come back and then we have to face those fears. And so that's why all cultures until modern time would figure out some ritual pattern to hold that young person so that they could face the fears and feel somewhat supported and somewhat contained.

And nowadays it hits people out of the blue and all of a sudden, where's the drugs? Where's the alcohol? Let me get into another relationship as fast as I can. Anything to not be standing there naked in front of the fear that is really the fear that we felt as an infant. And here we are.

The pressure of the falling apart of the outer world is coming down on everybody near as I can tell, and it's pushing us into those early life fears. And so it's our natural chance now to face them. And then psychologically, if a person doesn't know they have a deep self or a deep soul, then it is too fearful almost to deal with. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've worked with who think there's nothing inside them. That's common for young people in the world right now. And that's another reason I was covering it so much in the book, because I'm hoping to get some of those stories to young people who are seeing the world as an obliterating zone.

ELISE:

I like to remind people that I think we all chose to be here, so never waste a good crisis as they say, right?

MICHAEL:

Yeah.

ELISE:

But is that fundamentally, foundationally, the idea is you let go and you fall and that deeper self or soul or spirit will catch you?

MICHAEL:

Yeah. The more you're holding on, the less it will show up. The old idea is if you find yourself in a river caught into the pull of a tide, the only way out is down. If you resist it, you're going to get pulled in a really rough way. You dive to get out of the descent. So when we're descending, the idea is to go deeper, but it's really hard to do it if we don't know there's something in there that will not only catch us, that's waiting for us to arrive. And so from the mythological point of view, this whole falling apart is creating a descent in which more people can find out who they are in their own essence. And it's never complete. It always has doubts and it doesn't mean we don't suffer, but we start to suffer in the right direction. And in doing that, we're getting genuine maturity, psychological maturity.

And the other idea is if everyone is gifted, and I have a whole story of how everyone is gifted, we're here to give those gifts. And if we give our gifts, it doesn't use them up. We get more gifted as we give it away because the it of it is spiritual and it's not materialistic, it's spiritual. And so I think we're really called into a rite of passage like it or not, and we're doing it at the same time that nature's doing it because nature is also unraveling, partly due to human interference, but nature by its own nature can know that it can renew. We just have to get back connected to nature and realize that human nature can also renew and that that's what we're here for.

ELISE:

Yeah. And so going into this sort of downward eddy that you're describing, the way that we're caught in this river, your best advice is take it down, go down, move with the momentum of life to the bottom of the riverbed?

MICHAEL:

Yeah. Yeah. Because from the bottom, it all renews again because the depth is not emptiness and it isn't simply darkness. One of the old descriptions of the human soul was the light found in darkness. In the darkness, we find our Soul. I mean, in my own little story, I had found the connection to the soul through the myths through reading that book early on. And there I was at the bottom of my life for sure. I mean, I went into that cell. I was probably 155 pounds. I was 87 pounds when I came out.

ELISE:

My God.

MICHAEL:

Yeah. I look like death, but I actually had more life in me in the sense that I got connected to something in such a singular way. There's another interesting aspect. I didn't put this in the book, but the instinct to fast came out of the blue. It wasn't a strategy. I just realized they don't understand how much I mean that I won't do this. I will not kill people I don't know for reasons I don't agree with or can't understand. So maybe if I stop eating. So I'm out of there and now I'm 87 pound walking around trying to figure out how I put myself back together. And I heard about Bobby Sands and the IRA guys in Ireland fasting against the British government. And I researched it and it turned out that fasting against unjust power is an old Irish tradition. And so remember the second part of a person is an ancestor coming back.

Something ancestral in me said, fast. And it was a radical thing to do, but it worked for me. It really worked. And I come out of there realizing I wasn't alone because I found this depth of character in my own soul. I wasn't alone because the characters and myth were hanging out with me. And I wasn't alone because I had tapped into something ancestral that I never even heard of, and yet there it was. And so it's like the boys finding Les Go. If we can just go down far enough, we enter the cave of the soul where the old woman is saying, "Here, take your thread." And as soon as you touch the thread, you have a new imagination of yourself. And no one is here to live a small life. There are people who are quiet and there are people who are empathic and don't make a big deal, but they affect a lot of people.

But no one's here to live a small life. And yet everything in the modern world would have us get smaller and smaller. And right now I'm thinking specifically of AI, which is by its own definition artificial. And it's trying to take people's essence away. We don't need just more common knowledge. We need more self-knowledge, and that's how we get through this.

ELISE:

It's always a wow to talk to people like Michael Meade, not only because I've read him for so long, but he's an incredibly gifted storyteller and writer and contextualizer and synthesizer. And I'm just going to read. I mean, I could literally pick any passage from his book and share it with you for these purposes, but I'm just going to read one small moment from the end, which is sort of this provocation to all of us to get going. “Following the call to awaken requires courage, but also humility. For some, courage is difficult to find. For others, humility is hard to reach. Either way, we cannot remain in control and undergo change at the same time. Someone or something other than our usual self must take charge. There is always a price that must be paid for genuine learning and inner growth. The cost for finding greater truth involves giving up habitual attitudes and sacrificing fixed beliefs to make room for living wisdom.”

Well, we need more living wisdom right now. So here's to letting go simultaneously and together, and yet each one of us has to take, undergo our own process of individuation to find ourselves, but we can still do it together alone. All right, friends, I will see you next time.

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