January 23rd, 2025
DEAR HUMANITY – EPISODE #74

Awaken Your Inner Genius: Mythic Wisdom for Navigating Rites of Passage in Kairos Time with Michael Meade

About this Episode

In this episode on the Dear Humanity Podcast, Laura Dawn sits down with renowned mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade to explore the power of myth and storytelling as tools for navigating the complexities of modern life. 

They discuss how myths provide timeless wisdom that can help us make sense of our personal journeys and the collective challenges we face today. Michael shares insights into the concept of Kairos time, the interplay between darkness and light, and the transformative potential that exists within crisis moments. 

Together, they explore the role of imagination, the necessity of rites of passage, and how we can cultivate a relationship with our inner genius to contribute meaningfully to the world.

Topics Covered
  • Stories as navigational tools for life, offering timeless wisdom to guide us through uncertainty.

  • The distinction between chronological time (Kronos) and the opportune, transformational time (Kairos).

  • Why crisis is not just a breakdown but an opening to something new and meaningful.

  • The interplay of light and darkness as a necessary cycle for growth and renewal.

  • Discovering the genius hidden within our wounds and how our deepest struggles shape our purpose.

  • The modern need for rites of passage and how initiatory experiences foster transformation.

  • The role of imagination in reawakening inspiration and forging new possibilities in uncertain times.

  • How reclaiming mythic consciousness can help us respond to the challenges of our era with wisdom and resilience.

"When we lose our connection to myth, we lose our connection to meaning."
Michael Meade

Michael Meade

Meade is a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology. He combines hypnotic storytelling, street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths with a deep knowledge of cross-cultural rituals. He has an unusual ability to distill and synthesize these disciplines, tapping into ancestral sources of wisdom and connecting them to the stories we are living today.

He is the author of Awakening the Soul, The Genius Myth, Fate and Destiny, Why the World Doesn’t End and The Water of Life; and the creator of the Living Myth Podcast. 

Michael Meade is the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, a nonprofit network of artists, activists, and community builders that encourages greater understanding between diverse peoples.

Listen:

The Western worldview is just fading before our eyes, but the end is connected to a beginning that's trying to start. So I often now tell creation stories, but I draw on the stories from different cultures because just as each place on Earth has its own plant and its own forest and its own ecological systems, each place on Earth has developed a mythological system.

Michael Meade

Free Resources

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Episode 74 on the Dear Humanity Podcast: Awaken Your Inner Genius: Mythic Wisdom for Navigating Rites of Passage in Kairos Time with Michael Meade ​

Laura Dawn: It’s so nice to meet you, Michael. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me. Your work has had a huge influence on my life, and I’m just really honored to be able to have this time with you.

Michael Meade: Oh, thanks. Good to be with you.

Laura Dawn: Recently, I was listening to one of your episodes on the Living Myth podcast, which is one of my favorite shows that I listen to regularly. And you were talking about something along the lines of how, and this is what, what I took away from it, how when we’re on a journey and if we have a backpack, if we’re hungry, we might reach for food or if it were in the dark, we might reach for a tool like a light and that you also.

are encouraging people to think about reaching for stories and myth as a really appropriate tool for navigating this journey of life. And I thought that that was a beautiful image. I often think about questions in that way, that they’re actually a really powerful tool and that we can learn how to cultivate questions to help inform how we view reality.

And so I’m curious if this is a good place to start for you to just share a little bit about myth and storytelling as a navigational tool for navigating the modern world.

Michael Meade: Okay, so yes, of course. There was an ancient poet, and people give the credit to different poets, but the statement was, this world isn’t made out of atoms, it’s made out of stories. And so stories are how we make sense of the world, make sense of ourselves. The word relate that gives us relationship comes from the Latin verb relatare, which means to carry it back.

And so a relationship really is based on the people in it carrying it back to the other person or the other people, the story of what’s happening to them. And so we’re always in stories and what becomes real important, I think, are two levels of story when the world becomes radically uncertain. And, uh, and polarized as well, and that is to say the mythic realm, which is not affected by or limited by or determined by the common world.

It’s part of the eternal world that just keeps going on. And then the personal story the idea that each person is here to unfold a story that’s partly written in their soul. And the unfolding of our story is how we make sense of our life and also how we contribute to the world that needs in a sense, our help. So then an interesting happened. And can happen when a person can put their personal story into a mythic story because the mythic story is universal, it’s timeless, and it can add insights and levels of understanding to the personal story. So, this is a particularly important time to be packing and unpacking one story, but particularly in reference to mythological stories. In myth, the world can come to an end. a particular story about the world can come to an end, but another one starts. And so in a time when people think the world might end, myth is helpful as a kind of, , uh, sustenance, a vitamin program for the soul. And then to put one’s personal story into the myth, then can help open that up and reveal resources that that otherwise might not become conscious.

Laura Dawn: Do you feel like there’s one overarching framework for a mythological story? Is it always, you know, a certain kind of pattern? Like, when you think about a myth or a story to define this time that we’re living through, do you draw upon many, many stories, or is there really one? bigger story, or are all of these other little stories really pointing to different facets of this time that we’re living in?

Michael Meade: Kind of the answer is yes to all of those things, because they’re all part of it. But the, , two big stories now are the stories of the renewal of the world. So, I spend a lot of time now with creation stories, because creation stories turn out to actually be recreation stories. Like, uh, traditional people all around the world, when there was trouble that was affecting the collective group would often tell a creation story.

They would go back to creation, because in going back to the beginning, you tap all the original potentials. And you can start anew. And so one of the response, in terms of traditional cultures, to the world going awry, would be to go back to the beginning and draw from the, uh, original things from which life keeps being made, keeps being remade.

And so, we’re at the end of an era. We’re at the end of a worldview. The Western worldview is just fading before our eyes, but the end is connected to a beginning that’s trying to start. So I often now tell creation stories, but I draw on the stories from different cultures because Just as each place on earth has its own plant and its own forest and its own ecological systems, each place on earth has developed a mythological system.

And so you can get insights from all these various, uh, creation stories in particular.  So yeah, uh, you, you can draw intelligence. All people are interconnected just the way all the roots of trees are interconnected and all that kind of thing. So right as the world is falling apart before our eyes, rapidly changing at a rate that human institutions can’t keep up with, At the same time, there is being revealed this old knowledge that we’re all interconnected.

So, that’s the kind of story we’re in. Collapse on one side, and a deepening of understanding and an awakening of ancient wisdom on the other side. That’s one way to use creation stories and use myth in general.

Laura Dawn: Do you feel like creation story is ultimately also a story of destruction, and that in our Western world, we’re just so focused on, oh, this is gonna keep going forever, and it’s just perpetual, never ending growth, and the fact that we actually don’t embrace that. part of the mythological story is part of the place that we run into trouble.

It’s like only being in the light and not acknowledging the darkness.

Michael Meade: Absolutely. And, and so now, when science thinks the world might come to an end because of, uh, ecological disaster, or an asteroid, or the misuse of, uh, nuclear weapons, and of course religions have been predicting for years that the world will come to an end, because they think that have to leave the earth and have it destroyed in order to go to heaven, that’s the kind of mythology that we’ve been living in.

And so what happens is, the very people who try to insist that growth is continuous and uninterrupted, that, uh, the enlightenment, everything will shine a light and will cure all the diseases, the very people following that belief, when things become dark and uncertain, suddenly give up on the world altogether, and say it’s all gonna end, and people become cynical, and they become, you know, trapped in a collapsing mythos, you could say.

And so I’m with you. Interestingly enough, almost all creation myths around the world begin in eternal darkness. And then the creation starts when the light is separated from the dark. And so people then chase the light without realizing all light comes in the dark. All life comes from death in a sense, or stillness of some kind.

And so now it’s time to understand that these two things happen together. And there’s many mythologies where there are gods and goddesses of destruction. If you go to India, you have Shiva, who dances the world into existence and then dances it into destruction. And you have Kali, uh, the goddess of, Kali means dark, but it also means the goddess of darkness.

And so then they interpret that we’re living in the Kali Yuga. Yuga means, like, a real long time, and we’re living in the dark times, but it’s happened before. And poets like Hafez, the great mystical poet, says, , let the darkness season you. In other words, there’s a, a seasoning that we don’t have if we’re only counting on the light.

There’s a intelligence in darkness. There’s a hidden light. The human soul used to be called the light hidden in darkness. We, when we understand the dark, we draw more soul, more of our own soul into consciousness, more of the soul that unites everybody into existence. So yeah, this is a time to actually revere the darkness and learn to dwell with it and draw from

Laura Dawn: I’ve heard you make reference to this being a time of Kairos. And making that distinction between Kairos and Kronos, and I love that frame. I actually found it really, really helpful around understanding that this is a different breaking open of time. Can you shed a little light on that? Explain that a little bit?

Michael Meade: One of my favorite things too. So Kronos in, in, which in it’s a Greek word, Greek God. K R O N O S from which we get chronology, which means the counting of time. Kronos is the god of limited time. And Kronos will trap you in time. And you could say the modern world is trapped in time. And, and, and what’s been lost is timelessness.

We don’t need more time. We need more timelessness. We need more in touch with the eternal, but Kronos keeps us trapped like the wrist on our watch. Now it’s interesting also in Greek mythology, Kronos eats his children. So there’s something, uh, kind of, uh, a warning about, , the world based on clock time.

Is that it devours the young energy, it devours imagination, and it traps everyone. But the ancient Greeks always had more than one thing, and so they had Kairos, K A I R O S. To this day, people in Greece will talk about Kairos. On a common language level, Kairos means weather, the atmosphere and the weather.

But on a mythological level, Kairos means time breaks open. And out of the breaking of time, the interrupting of time, the breaking down of time, out of the disruption of time, eternity enters the world again and you get the Kairos moment in which everything can change. And so on one hand, you could say we’re living in the Kali Yuga, the dark times.

On another hand, you could say the dark times brings us into proximity of Kairos time, which is when all things can renew. It’s the time of opportunity as well as the time of trouble. And so I’m a big fan of Kairos.

Laura Dawn: Interesting. Okay, so the story that I tell myself about this time that we’re living in is that humanity is sailing on the Titanic and we’ve already hit the iceberg and this ship is going down and that is a disruption of business as usual. This is an all hands on deck moment where we now have to find creative solutions and use our imagination to figure out what’s next for humanity.

I’m curious if you feel like that’s an , accurate frame of this time.

Michael Meade: Well, I like it, , several things I like about it. First of all, it brings in the Titans, uh, the Titans were these enormous. Unwise beings that existed before the gods. And so we now do have titans here in the United States. You have Donald Trump, who thinks he’s bigger than God, joined by Elon Musk, who’s richer than God, and they think they’re the titans of the universe, and they don’t know that titans didn’t know anything.

Titans were like giants. They, have the jewelry or the jewels or the gold and stuff, but, but they don’t know what to do with it. And so Titanic comes from the Titans , and the Titanic was built in Ireland. It was built in Northern Ireland. And it was uh, like a an overproduction on the part of European Kind of imagination and also lack of imagination because the thing couldn’t sail properly and hit the iceberg.

So yeah, I feel like the ship of humanity has hit something dark and that has stopped it. And then one or two things are going to happen. The ship’s going down and everybody goes down with it. Or it all changes back to the Cairo moment, Cairo’s moment. In, uh, kind of popular mythology In the African American community, they have, uh, a character who survived the Titanic, who swims away, and then, and begins to save people as well, so you could say that there’s a folk imagination that knows better than the idea of the whole thing going down, and there’s lots of myths that say we are in the time, we are in the moment of collapse, renewal. The institutions are collapsing some big ideas are going down, and then just like a forest that renews itself from the trees that fall down, there’s stuff trying to come up from underneath through us, into our imagination, and into the world to develop a new world view that’s more inclusive, and more accepting, or respectful of nature, earth. The feminine, all the things that are neglected and disrespected.

Laura Dawn: I recently had dinner with a man named Thomas Roberts and he’s a Mayanologist and I asked him about the Mayan calendar and just as an interesting side note here, you know, I’m also really big into etymology and , I asked him about how, what are like the common things that we talk about the Mayan calendar that are Not correct.

And he was the one who actually helped to write the dictionary of and translated the icons from Mayan temples into language. And he said, it’s not the ending of a calendar and a starting of a new one. He said the correct language is that it’s a replanting of time and I thought wow That’s so interesting It also made me think of Kairos like an opening where now we’re in the fertile soil and we can really plant something new and I’ve also heard you talk about this word crisis and how When you look at the etymology of crisis, it’s also just a turning point, that it’s not, you know, inevitable doom, it’s actually we’re at a crossroads right now.

Do you feel like we’re at a crossroads and that it’s not inevitable destruction, or do you feel like we’re in this cyclical pattern and that this is the destiny of humanity and that it is going to go into a destructive phase? Cycle. There’s like, there’s a lot embedded in there because we’re talking about destiny and free will and can we actually influence the direction of the next chapter of human history?

Michael Meade: So crisis, as you’re referring, the origin of it, it comes out of medical situations, uh, the crisis in a disease. And the moment of crisis is a turning point where either now the disease will get worse or the healing will begin. That’s us. We’re there. We’re in that. And we’re being called to first, first of all, witness.

The idea of things collapsing institutions not working polarization happening all over the world, that kind of thing. We’re here to witness that. But then we’re invited to help contribute to the recreation of, , human society. in conjunction with the recreation of the earth, which happens organically, but happens better if we’re not trying to ruin it or interfere with it.

 And so here’s an old idea of really like, go back to the Kali Yuga, the ancient Sanskrit way of referring to a dark time. And one of the things they say about Kali Yuga is when things get dark and trouble polarized and there’s a loss of virtue and an increase of misbehavior and that kind of thing even though it feels dark and desperate, a small change can have a greater effect than at any other time. And so that’s something to keep in mind, that small things can have a big effect because the structures are lucent and it isn’t coherent right now. And then the other thing that I think is connected to that human society does not change it at the collective or group level. People don’t just agree.

Oh, this is the new idea. We’re going to do this. It changes soul by soul. Each person has a capacity to contribute something meaningful to the renewal of the world actually. And each, because a small thing can have a big effect, we don’t know the effect of our own contributions to life. But then I want to put the other thing underneath that, is the way we best change ourselves, the way we best help the world, is become more conscious of and live more fully the story trying to unfold from within us.

That even though people have been told we’re really small when the world is accidental and all that kind of stuff, when a person is unfolding and living out their destiny, they are affecting other people and potentially affecting the world.

Laura Dawn: Maybe we can just keep going on this track with the etymology of genius, which I also just love and how you talk about how we’re actually all born with a speck of the original star in us and how that’s connected to our destiny.

Michael Meade: , so in the time that I’ve been alive, The only collective recognition of mythology, uh, on a meaningful scale that I’ve seen has had to do with the hero’s journey or the hero’s myth. And, and that’s a meaningful story. And, and Joseph Campbell brought it to people’s awareness, and I think that’s a good thing.

But Joseph Campbell happened to write that it was the only story, that it was a monomyth. And I’m sorry, but that’s actually wrong. It’s just simply wrong. Myth, like a forest, is multiple by its nature. There is no one story. There is no one myth. And so I have some issues with the limitations of the hero’s journey.

First of all, it tends to be very masculine. It’s often aimed at the outside in an, extroverted way that’s a little extreme. It often has a lot of musculature involved in it, and it leads to ideas like the superheroes, which then become like fantasy escapes from life, rather than deepening understanding of life.

So I wrote a book called The Genius Myth. And, and the first thing was to redefine genius because it’s a, it’s a common word in English language, comes from the Latin or the ancient Roman, but it means the spirit that’s already there. And what that means to me is each person born is born with an inner spirit that’s already there that doesn’t wait to wake up when you go to school, that doesn’t have to be confirmed by anybody.

It’s already there. And that genius spirit is a combination of natural gifts and talents and a certain style that makes that life unique. And so the proposition behind the idea of genius myth is everyone has some genius, and that genius is what the calling in life calls to, and secondarily, living out that genius adds genius to the world, adds beauty, adds talent, adds imagination, adds spirit.

By definition. And now what we need is the awakening of all kinds of genius spirits in all kinds of people, because we have all kinds of problem and there is no one solution. There’s no silver bullet. There’s only many people awakening and bringing their own genius to life.

Laura Dawn: I want to ask you about how we do that. And I, I want to read a line from your book, The Genius Myth, which I just loved. And you said, I recalled the old idea that a person’s true genius resides near their deepest wounds. I intuitively feel that to be true for my own life and for many other people that I’ve also supported.

And I, I use this phrase, your message is your medicine. And I’m curious, why does our true genius reside near our deepest wounds? Why does it have to be that way?

Michael Meade: It’d be nice if we could change that. So the idea is, well, there’s two ideas that go way back. This is why mythology is so valuable. mythological idea. Everyone who enters the world is wounded. And you could say, well, God, how, what, what kind of a deal is that? Well, the idea was that the soul of a person before it comes to the world lives in the eternal world.

As a matter of fact, many stories have the souls sitting on the branches of the tree of life, uh, where they’re looking into the, what we call the real world. And they’re going, look at what they’re doing. This is getting stranger. And then, and then the soul sees something that’s interesting and says, I’m going to go.

And so then the soul. comes, but it comes with an imagination of itself. But going from the other world into this world, the eternal world, into the time bound world creates a wound. We’re wounded because we’re separated from the eternal. If you want to put it in religious terms, we’re wounded because we’re separated from the divine.

And that’s the first wound. So everyone comes in gifted and everyone in coming in is now wounded. Uh, Carl Jung, the great psychologist said, genius hides behind the wound. So when a person is deeply wounded and dealing with their wound, they’re actually closer to their genius. Those are the two things, according to ancient stories, that are in the deepest part of a person’s heart and soul.

The gifts and the wounds. So in the modern world, where people don’t know how this works at all, you see Oh, a young musician or young Hollywood starlet or whoever it is. That’s going to rise like a star. That’s what they call it. Like a star, like they’re in a spec is now being seen by everybody and they’re rising fast, like in the modern world through Tik TOK or Instagram, you rise really fast, but when you get up a certain height, What’s happening is your wound is also being exposed because the gift and the wound go together and you watch people rise fast and then they come down really hard, often leading to depression, even suicide, because as the genius gets revealed, the wound gets exposed.

And so the path of human life, you could say, always has the two things going on. The further unveiling of and, and giving of the gifts of genius in a person and along with that the necessary healing of the wounds of a person. And so the old idea is everyone’s gifted. But everyone’s also on the healing path needed to be wounded.

And if people understood it , better, you have your rise with some successful thing, you need a break. Now you need to attend to the wounds that have been activated because of the intensification of attention and praise or whatever it might be gifted and wounded. That’s who we are. And everyone down the line, and it’s the person who says they’re not wounded that I would say is the deepest wounded person.

Laura Dawn: Do you hold that within a perceptual worldview? That we’re also whole and perfect and complete just as we are?

Michael Meade: I don’t do the just as we are thing. I don’t do that. So, , so here’s where psychology I think comes in. And I happen to like Jungian psychology, you know, I mean, the people actually believe that psychology began with Freud, you know I remember an Irish poet saying, uh, the dogs in Ireland have more psychology than Freud, but anyway, that people have always been psychologists, people are the only mythologists and probably the only psychologists and there are two, two of our studies naturally.

So , Freud brings. , psychology back into Western attention, but Freud was really afraid of what was down in the dark and the unconscious. And as he got older, he kept talking about, he had dreams about this horde coming from the darkness and, and destroying him. Jung is his student and saying, you know, thank you for opening the doors of psychology, but come on, there’s something deeper than the darkness in the real depths of a person is the deep self. The self is , hmm, the word for something that is whole, that brings the opposites together. It’s also the name of a centering place that , creates restful stillness and meditative attention. But it’s also the place where new ideas and great imaginations arise from. So that’s the term Jung gave to it, the deep self and that.

Part of us is whole and is always ready to give us some guidance, some support, some sense of what to do next, but the deep self is down in the darkness of the unconscious and what I call the emotional zone. Everybody has their own inner emotional zone. Some people are depressive. Other people are like volcanic.

Some people are deeply anxious. Other people are kind of inert and you have to go through that to get to the deep self. You have to work through and loosen up that aggregation of inner problems and issues and traumas and troubles. To get to the deep self. , so I don’t think the ego, call it the little self, the part of us that thinks it’s in charge, the part that we show the world, that can’t, that can’t manage to be complete and okay as it is.

It’s always pretending it’s okay, but it’s only when that little self gets connected to the deep self that we could say things are okay as they are. That’s my theory.

Laura Dawn: Two things. One, I feel like the fact that we live in a culture that has this pervasive view that genius is only a very select few and the mass majority of people don’t even think to communicate with their inner genius. which I like to think of like your in resident guiding spirit. And so if we all have this in resident guiding spirit in our lives, but we don’t believe that that’s even a possibility, then we wouldn’t cultivate a relationship with that.

And would you say that that guiding spirit is that our intuition talking to us? How do we cultivate a deeper relationship with our inner genius? And is it by just going through the wound?

Michael Meade: so it’s a little more complicated than that, but, but all right, good question. So let’s look at it in mythological terms. So the best myth, the shortest, most condensed one I’ve ever found about the idea of the genius and the idea of inner guidance and a pre shaped destiny. Comes from a little tribe in Central Africa, and it begins with the world tree I was referring to, and, uh, almost every culture has the world tree , and so on the branches of the world tree, the souls are hanging out, and, and they’re watching what we call the real world, uh, kind of like their television series, they’re watching this, you know, humans do this thing, and the animals in the forest, , and then something strikes the soul, as I said.

And so now the soul says, no, . I’m going to, I’m going to go and live out that thing that I’m seeing like a core imagination. And as soon as the soul starts to move towards the world, the spirit shows up and we’re going to call it the spirit of genius shows up and says to the soul. Here’s what I see.

Your life is going to be like when you go into the world and gives the soul this information about not predetermined, but themes and kind of, you know, attributes. And so, and then the spirit says to the soul, actually, this is going to be such an interesting adventure. I’ll go with you. So now the soul and the spirit are traveling together and they’re on the way to some human womb to be born.

But on the way, they enter this beautiful garden. And as they go into the garden is a stunning big tree and the soul who just left the branches of the world tree says, I’ve got to embrace this tree. It’s a soul embraces the tree. And as soon as the soul embraces the tree, it forgets why it was going to be born.

It forgets what the spirit told it about the shape and the condition of the life they’re entering into. And then the soul is in the womb and then it gets born. So, it’s there, the knowledge of it is there as a deep memory, as an aspect of the soul, soul of the self, but it’s been forgotten. And then the soul is born into a family, which has its own issues.

I mean, ancient people used to say family is fate. That is to say, there’s a fate working its way down through the generations of a family, issues that keep coming up. And the parents have no idea the genius nature of their child. It’s not their job. Their job is to nurture the child, to protect it, to love it, and help it grow.

But it’s not their job to know why it’s here. And so what happens eventually is children leave home. And some people say, well, what if the parents give them every day? everything they want. Well, maybe they stay home, but they become children. Actually, they become resentful children. And so mostly children leave home, leaving home, leaving childhood behind is also leaving family behind.

And that creates the opportunity for, you could call it a Kairos. Event where the person who has forgotten why they came to the world goes through a rite of passage. The purpose of which is to awaken the person to who they already are inside and why they have come here. And so in the modern world.

People don’t know that each child is a genius, and in the modern world, when children leave home, there’s no rite of passage for them to go through, so we wind up with a whole lot of grown or semi grown people who mostly don’t know who they are, and therefore they vote for people who will never know who they are.

That was a little political commentary at the end.

Laura Dawn: How do we go about awakening that connection though? I mean, I’m thinking about this Rumi quote that I can’t remember it in full, but it’s something about that strange pull, like follow that strange pull of what you love. For you in your life, do you feel like following the call of your genius is like a somatic experience?

Do you feel it as like a tug, an energy or? How do you help people wake up to that?

Michael Meade: I feel it as a dream. I feel like an impulse. I’ve learned to listen. To this little inner voice, if you read fairy tales and all, there’s always the inner voice or there’s the stories where you have the bad angel on one shoulder and the good angel on the other shoulder, and something is is speaking softly or whispering.

So it turns out the inner voice. And so in a very unquiet, very busy, maniacal, uh, outer world where there are distractions of all kinds, a modern person is distracted 24 hours a day and children are left to literally to their own devices. They’re not hearing this quiet voice that’s saying something. And so, but it’s so important.

That a person awakened to the nature of their own soul and their own genius, that it happens, but people don’t recognize it. So I got interested in it when I realized that on my 13th birthday, I had had an experience, a genius experience that looked like an accident and that can happen, but it wasn’t an accident.

And what happened is my aunt asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I came from a poor family. I never got what I said I wanted. So I wasn’t about to say I want this or that because I won’t get it. And not only that, it looks like my parents are depressed because they can’t give it to me. , , but she said, what are you interested in?

I said history. She went off, she was notoriously short, she went off to a bookstore, asked for a history book, they pointed to an upper shelf, she grabbed a book off the shelf, they wrapped it, she gave it to me. I received the book and I’m looking at it, and I pull the cover off, the paper off, and I see a flying horse with a man sitting on the horse and he’s shooting an arrow in this big arc, and I go, whoa, I want this book, and she said, no, it’s the wrong book, it’s not a history book, because it says right on it, mythology.

She got the wrong book, but of course it was the right book. It was an accident, but it wasn’t an accident. I read that book almost entirely that night, 13 years , of age. I knew what the calling was. I was called to be in that other world of myth. That was a language, totally cleared my mind of what’s wrong with my parents and why did my father have no spirit and how come no one in the neighborhood had any dreams and all this kind of things that I was living with.

It made clear to me there was another world. And I was being called to enter that world. But to be honest, it took me another over 20 years to actually find my footing in that world and realize that this is, I had to listen to this kind of voice and I had to learn about things that are trying to awaken in me.

In my case, it was connected to myth for other people can be connected to anything to plants, to animals, to inventions, anything. It’s there for everyone. Hints are given all the time, but we have to be open enough like a 13 year old might be, or quiet enough like a person needs to be to hear the subtle voices trying to give us encouragement and guidance.

Laura Dawn: I hear you making a distinction between soul and spirit, and I also hear you make reference so often to vertical imagination and this ascent and descent. I feel like a lot of people use the term soul and spirit interchangeably, but you’re very clear that they are not the same thing. Mm hmm.

Michael Meade: You could say that ultimately they’re the same thing seen two different . ways like a yin yang symbol, but functionally spirit is connected to air and fire and it’s rising up and spirit is rising towards the one and and people that are in the in spirit traditions will talk about the one spirit or just simply spirit soul is connected to water and earth and it’s descending and in descending it becomes more multiple like the roots of plants or the mushrooms that are underneath the roots of the trees.

 And so, A person needs to have both spirit and soul, and that means both experiences of ascent into the spirit world where things can become very clear, but if they’re not grounded into the multiplicity of the soul world, then a person becomes imbalanced or lost in the spirit, or, or there’s lots of things that can go wrong. Vertical imagination is this old reference to the fact that humans we live on the surface of the earth for the most part, we can go on the ground, but we mostly are on the surface. And the old idea was our feet are attached to the goat’s earth, that’s what they call it in the Odyssey. Our feet are attached to the goat’s earth, but our imagination is attached to the stars in the cosmos.

Humans are stretched vertically between the earth and the heavens, or the earth and the stars. And that’s been lost. People now think they’re interconnected through the world wide web, which is horizontal. It’s as if the imagination of the world has turned it, gone flat again. And we need to find that vertical imagination because the institutions and the patterns of culture are collapsing. And a lot of people’s sense of the world is collapsing with them. And people think that everything can be worked out through technology, which is a flat level of operation. What we need is that imagination that lifts our own spirit to the stars. At the same time, we deepen our sense of being connected to the roots of the Earth.

Vertical imagination is the key to living with genius and for, I think, for changing culture.

Laura Dawn: I hear you also saying that , myth and story is, of course, one of the primary ways to reawaken imagination and to stoke the fires of active imagination.

Michael Meade: Yeah, , so myth is our, uh, our intuitive connection to the world of wonder, of universal, eternal things, and what Carl Jung wound up calling the archetypal energies. And so part of the Kairos is a shift in the archetypes, that , the things that underlie everything that exists are shifting. like we’re in a cosmological turn that is causing the earth to churn.

And so we have two ways to survive it or to get coherence. The outside world not going to become coherent, not the human culture, outside version of things. It’s not going to become, that’s what Kali Yuga means. Dark times for a long times and so then where can we turn if we understand that we’re connected to the stars, that we’re connected to the cosmos, which isn’t just cyclical, it’s transformational. We’re in a time of potential transformation. The world of the cosmos is always transforming stars are born and they die and more stars come, it’s expanding and then other people say at times is contracting. There’s a big world out there that is not a. affected directly by what happens on the level of the earth.

And then there’s a matching microcosm. That’s the macrocosm. There’s a microcosm inside a person, which is usually called the soul. Self is like a psychological term for understanding the coherence that’s there. Soul is much more like embodiment. It’s much more like the pulse of, of the forest. Soul is, is, is like an energetic embodied thing.

And so If we can connect to our deeper sense of soul, we will find coherence even in the midst of chaos. And if we, if we can’t immediately find it there, we can find it in reference or connection to the cosmic dynamic of transformation. But the best thing is to have a sense of both. And in a time when humans can feel because of contemporary science, in a sense, or positivism, and also, uh, the limits of modern philosophy, uh, when people think they live in an accidental world, which makes each person accidental themselves.

If you replace that with the idea that each soul is connected to the cosmos, that each person has their feet potentially grounded on the earth, but their imagination potentially tied into the cosmos, all of a sudden you don’t have to be fully yourself or be a big deal. It’s just you find yourself, you’re living in the fullness.

It’s partly hidden inside, it’s partly a connection to the outside, and then it’s in that kind of fullness, psychological fullness, that a person can manifest their own genius and contribute something to the world. And I’ll repeat when that’s happening to more people, the world transforms, human culture transforms, and human culture refinds its natural connection to nature.

Human nature is deeply connected to nature, and somewhere in the process of the Enlightenment and the Cartesian split and all that kind of stuff, people actually determined that they were separate, separate from nature. Human nature is deeply connected to nature, and human nature is connected to the cosmos.

We have to re find that. In re finding that, we find a coherence that was missing, and has been missing for a while.

Laura Dawn: I think Jung a book called Active Imagination. Is that right?

Michael Meade: He invented the term.

Laura Dawn: invented the term.

Michael Meade: We coined the term. Yeah, where a person can enter states where their imagination is active, which is happening to artists, anybody who’s creative, and that would include people who work with plants and soil who are creating things, literally growing things into the world. Anybody doing that , their imagination is engaged.

And then the idea of active imagination is it’s more consciously engaged in a person, it becomes perceptive of their own active imagination. And one of the easiest or most direct ways to see that is working with dreams. Uh, dreams are delivery systems of knowledge and images and energies. And if a person works with them, you start to become actively engage with your own imagination, which is trying to manifest through dreams.

Laura Dawn: I’m curious if you have a perspective on the role that sacred plant medicines or psychedelics have in terms of helping to activate our imagination. Because actually quite a lot of research shows that it’s very helpful. And maybe it’s not a coincidence that we are witnessing another huge wave of these medicines entering Western mainstream culture and psyche.

And as Dennis McKenna says, , these are the neurotransmitters of the guy in mind telling us to wake up. Do you see a correlation there?

Michael Meade: Yeah. , I think medicine is, is the key thing now. And, and medicine is appearing in many ways that there’s drug companies making drugs of all kinds, which is another ramification of the kind of dull, Imagination. That is not connected to something more holistic. And then of course, traditional people have been using the medicine of plants all along.

And one level of that is using the plant medicine to break open the kind of shell of the ego. And release the inner imagination into a greater connection to natural things, but also to the cosmos. And so, yeah, that’s been a process for a very long time. But I would add to it this, a Native American idea from several tribes in North America, that everyone is born with their own medicine inside.

So it’s possible that the one way to understand it is the plant medicine is used to awaken or create a connection to an inner medicine that’s also waiting to become conscious and become more embodied and become more actively engaged. And so. The person seeking the medicine is also carrying medicine, and I think when that awareness is there, then you’re, you get less of a splitting off that can happen when a person either depends on, on a certain kind of medicine or certain way, or in the midst of the awakening of what’s inside a person, a person can also dissociate and, and, and get separated from the depth.

So there’s a, the outside medicine. I think is intended to connect to and awaken and activate a medicine that’s already there inside. 

We’re supposed to be all, we’re all supposed to be medicine people. We’re not all supposed to be on drugs. We’re all supposed to be medicine people. And that’s what nature has been saying all along.

Laura Dawn: I agree. In addition to maybe the exploration of plant medicines or the exploration of stories and myths, what other practices can someone engage with? You also mentioned dreams, paying attention to your dreams, maybe writing them down. But for someone listening who’s like, I’m really not very connected to my active imagination, how do we invoke that or stoke that fire?

Michael Meade: It’s a really good question because when the outside world becomes so full of uncertainty, and so rattled and so kind of uh, anxious and it produces anxiety. We have to turn inside. When we turn inside, in order to stay in a meaningful connection to our own imagination, our own souls, we need a practice of some kind.

Uh, dream work can be a practice, but classically speaking, there’s two roads of practice. In ancient India, they were called the yay and the nay, the yes way and the no way. And it’s a surprise to a lot of modern people that the nay, the world, the road of no is meditation, contemplation, and spiritual practice.

What is now known in the West as spiritual practice. And it’s a nay road because the person is saying not this, not that, not this, closing off the distractions. And so it begins with a nay to get to the deep connection to the spirit that’s embedded in the self and in the soul and that kind of thing. So that’s one road of practice. You know, one of the great things about contemporary time is all this knowledge from the Eastern world has come into the Western world, the Western world went off on its own with its fantasies of literalism and, and so on, and the ideas of dominating nature. And eventually the Eastern ideas have come in, which basically core idea is what you’re looking for is inside. was the big difference. That’s the inversion of the world that comes from the East into the West. And along with that, looking inside, comes all those spiritual practices, which are profound. But it’s not everybody’s calling. And so the other road, the Ye road, is the world of creative arts. And that involves everything you can think of as an art.

Uh, song and singing, you know, is a creative art that can, you learn chance. You learn old medicine songs, you can settle yourself and center yourself in a matter of 30 seconds by dropping into something that you can use as a practice to alter the rhythm and connect to the inner harmony of oneself. But for some people it’s painting, for other people it’s dance.

So just as the road of meditation, become still and silent, the road of the creative arts becomes more dance like, more, you know, more finding the right rhythm and moving with it. And so if we go back to the Kali Yuga, ancient ideas from India, where they say you’re in a long dark time now, they say the quickest way perhaps to get connected to the cosmos and connected to the deep self in the Kali Yuga is dance and song and evocative prayer. 

And in ancient India that was called Bhakti. And in, and in the Bhakti realm, uh, which is a very feminine realm in, in certain ways, in the Bhakti realm, they said the, the seeker in the Bhakti realm bows to everything, whatever comes, they bow to it. So in other words, it’s a, a place of, it can be a practice of surrender, not surrender to foolishness, not to surrender to bad ideas or autocrats and stuff, but surrender to the fact and the sense that something knowing and wise is trying to awaken from inside.

And when that awakening occurs, we can bow and become directly connected to the cosmos. If you want to think of it that way or to the divine. So we need a practice and some people need more than one. And sometimes you’re on the contemplative road for a while and it stops working practices can work magically and they can stop.

And then some, you might have to go to the other road and learn some kind of art or the person who’s in the arts gets stuck. 

They might have to learn how to meditate. We need a practice. sustain a connection to our own deep soul, to sustain a connection to nature, and to sustain a connection to the cosmos.

Laura Dawn: That’s beautiful and so well said. I want to go back to this notion of, of practices to reconnect to our inner genius because, if our genius is so closely tied to our wound. How do we unlock that genius within us?

 What are the instructions to move closer to that when a lot of people want to turn away from pain? You know, I’m also thinking of , that quote, , the wound is where the light gets in. , any guidance on how we open to that?

 

Michael Meade: one of the things that’s truly missing in the contemporary world is the idea of initiation, or people call it rites of passage. So the idea has always been, At the end of childhood when, when the child is outgrowing its condition as child, and when it’s outgrowing its limits as family. The modern world describes developmental psychology very well.

You can study what happens at each month of infancy and what happens at each age during childhood. They’re really good at it, and it’s a great thing. But it stops working when adolescence begins. The whole developmental thing stops because the next phase of life is not developmental. It’s radically imaginal from childhood into being a grown person is a leap into the whole world, a leap into mythology, you could say, and a leap into the depths of psychology as well.

And so most modern people do not have that experience. of consciously letting go of childhood, which would all was often called the death of childhood, because the beginning of a rite of passage is a separation and a descent. And because people didn’t have a guided protected experience of a descent into darkness, they were That brings up the light of the genius and the character of the soul.

People are afraid of dissent and because people don’t know that this deep self and soul is in them, they haven’t had the experience. They haven’t even been told that it’s not taught in school. And so what happens is they’re afraid to go down. The entire Western culture is afraid to go down and change happens only by going down.

And in the depths you find that which is trying to awaken and come up. And so, missing rites of passage, people are instinctively afraid to descend. And many people think there’s nothing inside, or when they get down there they’re just a crazy person. And and so people hold back. And holding back from darkness and fear.

from descent is actually, you could say, the major symptom of modern culture, which will be brought into darkness anyway, because everything goes down before it renews. And so we have a cultural omission, because we weren’t brought out of childhood into the natural process of descending to awaken to who we are.

And then we also wind up with people running the world who don’t know who they are and who don’t know their own pain and refuse to acknowledge their own pain. And therefore they wind up hurting other people rather than helping other people.

Laura Dawn: So what you’re saying is we are radically unprepared for this time of change, especially in the Western culture. I mean, yeah. And so how do we bring rites of passage back into our lives? I mean, there is a huge movement in the plant medicine ceremony ways, , I see a big awakening happening, but for most people, We’re completely disconnected from these ideas and , these processes that are incredibly supportive of transformation.

Michael Meade: So if we think of transformation as the most natural thing, transformation is happening in the world of nature. All the time endlessly happening and transformation is happening at the level of the cosmos and the stars all the time. So transformation is happening or trying to happen within us all the time.

Actually our bodies shed cells and every seven years we have a completely different transformation. aggregation of cells than we did. So it’s happening, but it’s happening without consciousness and it’s happening maybe simply instinctively without all the other parts. So because transformation is the essence of life.

I mean, people often say change is the only constant. I would say transformation is the necessary constant. Because it’s so necessary. It actually already exists in our life story. Like I know some people say, well just put the story behind, don’t go through those loops, and you can become a new person.

I don’t subscribe to that. I think if we go back and look at our story, you get to a certain age, say 20 or 22 or anywhere beyond that, and you look back and most things disappear. Most things just don’t, they don’t carry enough gravitas, they don’t carry enough meaning. But certain things are there like markers.

My 13th birthday I realized is a marker for me. At the time, by 13 I knew I was in pain. I knew that something was wrong in the family system and something was wrong in the neighborhood. I knew it. And I got that book about mythology and I got this instinctive, intuitive understanding. Oh, wait a minute. In, in the uncertainty, in the darkness, something appears.

So I got that there. But you can also look at any time in your life where there has been a descent a marriage falls apart you, you work with people where they have had a child who dies. They’re going to carry that period of darkness the rest of the rest of their lives. It turns out that those dark periods.

can be reentered and that light, that awareness, that knowledge, that deep self that was trying to awaken through that crisis is still awaken through that crisis. You can pull out of past experiences, the elements of an initiation that is unfinished. So I tend to think of modern people As the initiation or rites of passage.

Three classic phases. First is separation, which is often described as the death. It means death of the ego, not the person. The second stage is, well, you could call it crisis stage or I like liminal. The word liminal. You’re betwixt and between. You’re no longer the person you were, you’re not the person you’re trying to become, you’re between the two.

And then, when you work your way through the liminal, you’re then on the return, and the idea is you’re accepted back by a community of people who have already been through such a Uh, kind of experience and who can see you in your new version. Most people have separation. If people are honest, they can tell you, uh, depression as a teenager.

That’s a separation. Everybody else is out dancing and you’re in the bedroom in the depths of your own darkness. And illness is a separation. Everyone else is going somewhere and you’re in a hospital. All those things, the soul sees them as crisis opportunity. So everybody can find separation and then everybody has gone through ordeals where they felt lost or they weren’t going to make it, or they knew they were a bit twixt in between.

The problem is most people have never been recognized for that. Most people have never had the knowledge kind of drawn out of that experience. And so most people are living or carrying unfinished initiations. You can work at it psychologically without having to have a cultural pattern that defines it.

You can, one of the values of psychology is you can work it through that way. I’ll say one other thing about it. The closest thing I see in contemporary times to a nuanced sense of rite of passage is vision quest. Because first of all, you’re looking for a vision, which means You understand something besides you is going to deliver the message, the intelligence, the wisdom, the insight, the healing.

 Secondly, it always involves nature so that even if the people guiding it aren’t that developed, nature will provide, uh, you know, medicine circumstances. Animals, visions, and then all you all that’s needed is that last part. Someone to it doesn’t even have to be a person who’s at the vision quest, but someone who eventually can sit with the person here, the story and say, okay.

How about this? How about look at that? How about notice that the vision that came in the middle of the quest is actually connected to the wound that you had as a child and, and, and someone can help a person who has only gone, you know, the two steps and doesn’t have the third step to find the way to realize what the initiatory process is trying to bring out in them.

I hope that’s, that’s helpful because it’s trying to make a comeback. Because it’s archetypal ground for the awakening of human spirit, and we’ve lost it, we’ve lost contact with it. But it’s not trying to make a comeback. It’s a form of visionary thing trying to come back. It’s a medicine path trying to come back.

Laura Dawn: Do you think that in that liminal space or in a time of crisis or Kairos that that initiate, the inner initiate that I’ve heard you talk about , that that gets awakened in us, that that is the catalyzing moment that awakens something in us or can we awaken our inner initiate on a daily basis, , or is it really like that more catalytic force?

And I love the word. initiation and initiate because it’s about a new beginning. It’s that renewal cycle as well.

Michael Meade: Yeah. It’s both the defining experiences that then we carry that, that everything else disappears, we have that. You can’t take it away. That inner initiatory experience is deeply personal. It’s unique and it’s indelible. But it also can be reactivated every day. So when usually when a person goes through that kind of experience, they get a more conscious connection to their calling.

And so, so very, you know, just to say, I’m not making this up. At least not completely, uh, because so after my 13 year old experience, then as a 20 year old, I wind up in prison and not for doing really bad things, but for refusing to go to the Vietnam War , and in prison, I’m a bad prisoner and cause I won’t follow orders.

And so then I wound up in solitary confinement. And so I’m months in solitary confinement, 20 years old, isolated from everybody. I think in terms of separation and liminality, I’m in darkness by myself in a nine by 12, 12 concrete and iron cell. And I decided to stop eating food. So now I’m completely separated even from nutrition.

I am in the other world. I am in the underworld. I’m in an initiatory thing. And I, at times, I think I’m going out of my mind. I, you know, all kinds of things happen. I’m going through that zone that I always avoided and I’m going through it. And what happens at a certain point. is all by myself in my solitary cell.

I’m having visitors and, uh, and they’re not guards from the prison. They’re characters from myths that I read. The characters from stories are coming to be with me and guide me. At that point, I have to make a decision. I’m either losing my mind or I’m finding my mind. For me, that was it. I didn’t fully understand it, but I knew enough to go with it.

And I was getting guidance from Athena and guidance from Odysseus, and all these things that I had read, showed up, uh, like entities. And, and they guided me out of that thing, and I come out of that a different person. And so the way it makes sense, I think, for other people is in that depth of isolation, which can be depression for a person, it can be an illness, it can be loss of a loved one.

In that isolation, something tries to reach us. And if we are not careful. Uh, fully defending if we surrender, I think it’s the human condition that something of an enlivening spirit is trying to awaken in us and through us come to life, that’s how I got that experience. I mean, I didn’t understand it when I got out of there, I was very much a PTSD kind of person.

But I had to understand it somehow. And that’s when I started to study rites of passage and realized I had been in an underworld initiation and now I had to find a way to complete it. I had the first two steps solidly, and I was missing the completion, and that took a while. But that’s what gives me the idea that this is not, not only present, it’s present in every life.

Not that everybody has to go to prison. People make their own prisons all the time.

Laura Dawn: When I think about moving from the separation phase into the liminal phase, I feel like the liminal phase is the fertile ground for which we can awaken our imagination. And I often remind people that I think it’s really helpful to give ourselves time to grieve to actually acknowledge the letting go Where does grief play a role in this framework for you?

Michael Meade: Well, grief’s an important emotion, and it’s all the more important because it’s denied in the modern world. The modern world denies grief. When they realize something terrible happens, 9 11, or name your thing, and they say, let’s have a moment of silence. A moment of silence is not enough to feel the grief of all the loss that’s happening in nature, that’s happening in culture with wars in Ukraine and Gaza and all the things that are going on.

It needs more than a moment. So emotions have motions, like I just look at the word emotion. It’s really E with motion. So that tells you that emotions have motions. Anger will stand you up. And grief will break you down. And the old understanding of grief, grief is deeper than sorrow.

Sorrow is a river, grief is like an ocean. And both sorrow and grief are there to break down things that are no longer alive. So you grieve when someone dies, but there’s also grief when a part of us, we recognize it dies or it’s been dead for a while. And, and then the water of the sorrow and the grief dissolves those things and washes them away like a river or a tide.

So, grief is really important for letting go, for first of all accepting loss, and then letting go of the pain of loss , and, and the fear of loss and all that kind of stuff. And so, Naturally, in, in, in any kind of transformation, transformation means to move from one form to another. There will be grief for the loss of the form and, and it’s hard to move and get psychic motion without grieving for what has, happened.

And now the world is full of grief and, and if we don’t deny it, we can immerse in those waters of letting go. and become more fluid and become more open. And then the transformation can move on.

Laura Dawn: I heard you talking about emotions that come in pairs. So I think of like grief and Love or grief and joy as a pair like we grieve because we had the privilege and the honor of loving something so deeply worthy of our tears, which is such a beautiful thing to think about. And right now I think there’s a lot around hope and despair as another common pair.

It also makes me think of this idea of like the heart breaking. open. It’s breaking and it’s breaking open. And when we go into these places of grief and despair, you said something around like going into the despair and we have to go deep enough. And when we go deep enough, that’s actually where we connect to hope.

And I was like, huh, that needs explaining.

Michael Meade: Well, the emotions are just amazing. And so you, you mentioned it. Grief travels with joy. When enough grief happens, all of a sudden the joy comes back. Grief is the elevator going down and joy brings us back up. a funeral is supposed to immerse, bring all the grief out. Nowadays, people don’t want that.

Uh, they want solemnity, but it’s supposed to be grief. And as everybody descends into the grief, you let go of the one who has died, and you let go of parts of yourself that have died. And the next thing is joy. And so the end of the funeral is the party where those who had been with the dead returned to life.

So that’s a big thing that it’s always been part of the human experience until modern times. But hope, and a lot of people are losing hope now. The word despair means to lose hope. Uh, the middle of it is S P E R, which is a French word, spare, which is the French for hope. Despair is to be out of hope.

And people are hopeless about the world now for many reasons, environmental reasons and cultural reasons at the same time. And, and what’s important to know is if you lose hope and allow yourself to descend into despair, there’s a level below despair. You lose hope, there is no hope, and then there’s a new hope.

And that new hope is not naive hope. Most hopes are naive. Like I was going to be the best athlete, or I was going to be the most charming person. All those hopes we had in high school, you know, they didn’t pan out. Most hopes are like that. They’re, they’re naive. There’s a level of hope that involves deep imagination.

And when we go through the darkness of despair, which involves grieving, we then hit this deeper level of hope that is fully imaginative, not wishful. It’s not simple hopefulness. It’s hope, you know, entwined with living imagination. And so, that’s usually what So despair is not something to avoid, because it just means to be without hope.

So, nowadays people lose hope all the time. And the issue is not to move on. Not to deny that and become cynical. But actually to sit with it and then realize there’s something down there at the bottom of everybody’s solitary confinement cell. There’s something down there and it’s, it’s a level of hope mixed with imagination that then lifts the spirit all the way back up.

And then we come back from that more grounded, more in tune with ourselves, and more able to bring meaningful hope back into the world.

Laura Dawn: I want to share a word with you. . I’m also a major etymology geek, so I love all the vocabulary, and I’m not sure if you have ever heard this one. It’s a term I came across about two years ago. Transilience.

Michael Meade: Great.

Resilience and transformation. I didn’t know that. Thank you. Yeah.

Laura Dawn: word, it’s long gone out of fashion.

I am bringing it back into our vocabulary. It’s actually the name of one of my programs. And, from selir, which means to leap, and it actually referenced to take a leap, and as you are leaping, you transform into someone new.

Michael Meade: Yes, it’s great. And of course, related to resilience, which means to pop back up. It’s another leaping word. And hope. Hope is a leaping word. Hope is a hopping word. And so that’s great because transillions also open some of the doors and windows into the issues of trans people. So, like in the United States, there’s this big, really big controversy over trans people.

And, and on one level they say there are more trans people in the world. Another way you could say it is the idea of being, In a trans condition is more important and therefore it’s become more evident. I’m not sure what it is, but people are horrified and terribly afraid of someone who trans transits from one gender to another, but we’re living in the time of transformation.

And so we have to be open to transillience as well as transgender, as well as transitioning, as well as. We could keep making up words, transpiring, I don’t know, but liminality is the realm of transformation and transition. And that’s where we are culturally and many of us individually. So thank you for, uh, transillions.

I like

Laura Dawn: It’s making me also think of another word, a trans word, I just came across digging into some of Maslow’s old work. He had a term, transcender, and it never really made the light of day because his whole hierarchy really dominated, you know, his body of work. But he wrote about that and research he did about the transcender archetype.

 And it was all about moving beyond self actualization, transcending self to be in service to the collective, and he even likened it to the path of the Bodhisattva. And I thought, wow, that’s so interesting. And

Michael Meade: I’m good. Thank you for that. I’ll, I’ll research that. And of course, when he’s saying self, he means ego. Because in in psychology, typically, at least, usually they mean the little self, because you don’t transcend the deeper self. The deeper self is what allows you to transcend the little self, and so in other words. There’s a key issue, I think, in mysticism and philosophy, which is to say that when a person transcends, they don’t melt into the universal. That the transformational is the connection between the universal and the uniqueness of the soul. And the shortest distance to the universal is through the uniqueness of the soul.

In other words, I’m arguing for the uniqueness of the individual soul as being essential to transformation on earth, transformation of the individual into a unique representation of life, and transformation Between the limits of the small self to the greater cosmos. The idea is not that we melt. into the general or the universal, is that we are a specific, unique expression of the universal through the uniqueness of our soul.

That’s, that’s the part that intrigues me.

Laura Dawn: there’s another piece there that I’ve been playing with. And so I’m curious to just bounce it around with you too. I think of my relationship to my inner genius as my relationship to inspiration.

And so far for me, like the best way that I can describe aligning more deeply with my own soul’s calling, is following aliveness and actually learning how to tune into aliveness.

 And we can think, okay, that sounds very woo, , but everyone knows what it feels like.

feels like to be inspired. We know that viscerally.

Michael Meade: means to be breathed into. It’s the breath of the divine coming into the human body and human psyche. So, what do they say? You can expire, which means You stop breathing. But inspired, to be inspired, is the breath of the divine coming in. And honestly, it’s so essential and so basic, and it’s just been denied by the exaggerated rationality of the subject object split and all that stuff that people have been doing for a while that has left everybody bereft and isolated and feeling alienated from nature and from the cosmos.

But the old idea is that from the beginning, something of the divine breathed us in. We got breathe into the world and inspiration continues to try to breathe into us so that we become an expression of something. And that’s where you get back to the arts and, and the sciences and the practices that the breath trying to, to Enter and breathe through us, which is the breath of creation is the breath that makes us creative.

And so to be inspired as an artist, it used to be a reference to the muses that, uh, from the muses, we get music, we get museum and we get a music. And all those things that come into a person, they are not of the person. That’s one of those mistakes of thinking, it’s my genius, it’s my creativity. No, it’s me being a channel to something that’s trying to enter the world.

There’s an old saying that says, the divine is always trying to enter the world, and it can only enter through those people living at a given time. And so the solutions to the worldwide problems, the medicines for all the wounds and all the alienation that people are feeling the solutions and the inspirations for healing that is trying to come through us.

And it’s not that we’re going to turn out to be great. And that’s not the point. We turn out to be a channel through which the divine or the creative breathes more meaning into life, more beauty into life. And then when that’s happening, a person feels quite old. They feel, feel meaningful, and they feel connected.

And, , so inspiration is really important. And, and it’s a kind of, uh. What would you inheritance of everyone to be a potentially inspired in ways that are fulfilling to the individual and beneficial to other people?

Laura Dawn: Right. I feel like it’s free energy, almost like spirit, just blowing wind into my sail. And so what I’m trying to accomplish feels useful. I mean, we could also think of it as a flow state. So the more that I try to align my life with that energy, That’s where I feel like I’m in more of my genius.

Michael Meade: Yes, and that energy is creative by nature. So one thing that mythology says really clearly creation wasn’t something that happened at the beginning and we’re in the aftermath of it. It’s not a historical thing. It’s an essential thing. Creation is happening all the time. And when we’re inspired, we are as if agents of creation.

And people, and why I talk about practices is, people will naturally find that area of creation or that area of contemplation that is natural to them. Just as we all have genius, we all have instinctive connections to certain, uh, paths. So I found that early experience of mythology, and, and so I speak mythology, and I don’t prepare it.

I think you do the same thing. You, you trust that the words ain’t gonna come, that the ideas will come, the images will come, the inspiration will come, the energy to do the work will come. And it’s not foolishness, it’s actually aligning. With something that has been trying to pull us into alignment and pull us into a connection to meaning, but also to hold us all along, all along and and there’s no better time to find that kind of connection and that kind of alignment than this time when everything outside is falling apart.

Out of alignment.

Laura Dawn: Right. It makes me think also of John Vervaeke’s term, like, the meaning crisis. That we’re living in this meaning crisis, this void. Which also makes me think of Kairos time, where it’s this breaking open, and that finding our gifts and offering them to the collective is one of the greatest sources of meaning and connection.

And I do feel, and I’ve been becoming more and more aware of this, Especially when I’m looking on social media and looking at people’s messaging and what the work that they’re doing It’s really within such like an individualistic frame that we’re so rooted in this perceptual lens of individualism That it’s really about how do I do the thing for me?

How do I get the thing for for my gain and I feel like that’s one of the things that’s breaking open right now is talking about it within the context of humanity on planet Earth and in the larger scheme of this time that we’re living in.

Michael Meade: So in losing the sense of genius in life, what has been lost is the idea that when you find a connection to your genius, or it’s not quite the right preposition to the genius that entered the world with you. What happens is the genius grows by using it, by expressing it. The gift grows by giving it away.

And so the uniqueness of the individual is really important. But not the self absorption of the individual, not the pretense of the importance of the individual, the uniqueness becomes the vehicle through which meaning, through which inspiration, through which healing comes. And so, When people get that deeper sense of genius, then you realize that the point isn’t who I am and how great I might be and all that.

The point is to become an active vessel through which inspiration, transformation, healing, and energies of reconnection can happen. And, and so that, now I will say this, if a person doesn’t have enough psychic structure, if they don’t have enough ego, it’s very hard to do that. So I’m not a person that thinks you have to get rid of the ego, because the ego has the car keys and, and it kind of knows if you paid your insurance or not, that stuff.

We need that, but the ego needs to loosen. And realize that it’s best when it’s serving the deeper sense of the self and the soul. And then the ego becomes a helpful element in holding and then delivering the gifts that we are here to give.

Laura Dawn: Just to re clarify something you said earlier, are we living at the beginning of the new Kali Yuga cycle?

Michael Meade: No, we’ve been in it for quite a while. And so if you’ve studied Kali Yuga, you’re now you’re in the mythology of India and you’re deep in into Hindu mythology, they call it. And they say it started quite a while ago. A yuga is something like, uh, three, 632, 000 years or something like that. But I don’t think that’s what it means.

I think it’s symbolic. It means a long time. That’s how I say it. Because if you start counting You guys and Kauper’s, which are even longer. No one has ever, you can’t do that. It just means symbolically a long time. So it started a while ago. We’ve been in the descent for a while and and it’s going to go on for a while.

That’s my understanding of it. And, but if you go back to the idea of the liminal being the middle. of a rite of passage. We’re like in a collective rite of passage together. And transformation happens in the middle. It happens in the liminal. Awakening happens in the liminal. Learning to connect to the genius and deliver genius stuff happens in the middle.

And so we’re like that. We’re in the middle. And, and the world is probably going to be dark for a while. That’s how it looks. But it’s in that darkness that the transformation occurs. Just the way the butterfly only appears after the caterpillar has gone into the cocoon and basically melted into darkness.

Only after that happens can the It’s interesting, in biology, they had to give a name to the cells hidden inside the caterpillar that are going to become the butterfly. And this is, I guess, what you would call inspiration. They named them imaginal cells. And so you know, the inspiration comes into the scientists also.

And so we’re in that period of descent into the cocoon. And, and that means that we, we’re going to be next to the awakening of the imaginal cells, which are in everybody. And who knows how long it takes for the dark times to, to finish. I’m not sure. It could be that all of the periods, because Kali Yuga comes at the end of the four stages, uh, starts out with the golden age, , and it gets to the dark age. 

I think they’re all in existence at the same time. It’s just that right now the predominant energy is dark times, and so I don’t think it’s so much something we can figure out in the western or even eastern way of counting. It’s just trusting. That, like a forest, the Earth wants to renew, like the stars in the cosmos, the cosmos wants to renew, and we’re here to renew through the process of transformation, also, and as long as we’re part of that, we’re part of the recreation, we’re part of the re inspiration, and we’re part of the transpiration of things, and that’s good enough.

That’s good enough. We don’t have to know the ultimate outcome.

Laura Dawn: , it’s interesting because, well, maybe we’ll go back to the beginning of the conversation because you mentioned that we can actually learn to reach to different stories and myth to help us individually make sense of our own path in the world. this lifetime to make meaning of our own lives.

And so how does someone do that? You also mentioned the hero’s journey that that’s just one structure, but what are ways that we can actually learn about the different stories that exist that we can then place ourselves in? Like what’s the process for someone who’s totally new to storytelling and mythology to actually really work with this as a tool for transformation?

Michael Meade: so, you know, traditionally the stories would be told by the storytellers who would actually be reliving the story as they tell it. And then it would be going by virtue of actual sound waves into a person’s ears and stimulating their body as well as their soul and their mind and so on. If you can’t get that, then you can read them now.

And one good thing about the modern world is everything’s collected. It’s all online somewhere. You can read a bunch of stories and then see , what stirs you or , what comes back to get your attention. I recommend creation stories, uh, because we’re in this recreation time. So I’ll just, and so then what I recommend, like if I’m telling a story with an audience, I’ll tell the story, then I’ll say, okay, let’s just be quiet for a minute and see what struck you in the story.

Cause people will be spread all through the story and there’s no right and wrong in the story. There’s just right and left. There’s no best part in the story. Sometimes the best part is like in the middle or, or, you know, , but the psyche knows. And so like, I’ll give an example. So there’s a a myth from, it’s called an Apache myth, but it’s actually a misnomer because it’s a, the Apache didn’t call, they didn’t call themselves Apache, they call themselves Diné. The Diné people, Arizona, New Mexico tribes in that area, although they originally came from Canada, which is important in their mythology. But anyway, uh, they have a creation myth in which, uh, they call the creator the one who made the earth. So it’s kind of charming. It could be a goddess. It could be a god, the one who made the earth.

It’s that simple. And they’re the first people. They are the Diné, the people. And it turns out that when they’re created they don’t like where they are. I mean, it’s, it’s really interesting. It’s like they’re complaining. They’re saying, we don’t really sleep that well right here. But people are still doing that.

And so then the one who made the earth. Who it’s it’s close to the beginning. So the one who made the earth hears them and says, okay, if you don’t like where you are, just gather yourselves and go looking for another place. And so the first people begin wandering around the earth. It’s still happening.

People are wandering everywhere. . So they travel until they find a place where they settle down. And the reason they recognize that they’re in the place of settling, where they’re going to dwell, is because they’re having big dreams.

And that tells them they’ve aligned on Earth. So now it’s cool. They settled down. They’re first people. They found their place. They’re having big dreams. It’s like everything is great. And yet, On Earth, everything is only great for a little while because the next thing that happens is some people get sick, but because it’s back at the beginning, no one knows about healing.

They don’t even know what sickness is. No one knows what’s going on, except that some of the people are getting ill and they’re getting weak and they’re kind of falling away. And so they separate those people. People are still doing that to this day. When someone gets sick, they get separated. Anyway and now people realize something is wrong, but no one knows what it is.

And then four people, it just says in the story, four people decide to go out. At the end of the day when darkness is falling over the earth and stand each facing in the different direction and looking into darkness in order to find inspiration about what to do with what’s wrong with the people and as a whole.

And so this is the point I want to get to in the story where, uh, this is a creation story. So if you say we’re in recreation times now. And more people are getting sick, and they’re feeling alienated, and lost, and they’re losing vitality, and they’re drifting towards the door of death. Then we want to be one of those four people.

Kali Yuga is a symbolic reference to a long time. Four is a symbolic reference to enough people to change things. It’s not four people. It’s not four special people. We each could be one of those people. But as we’ve been talking about, they go out and they look into darkness. They stand in the darkness of not knowing, in a conscious realization, I don’t know what to do.

And at that point, the one who made the earth speaks to them. Because they’re doing the right thing. They’re saying, I don’t know. The only way to learn something new is to stand at the edge of not knowing. So there they are. And, and, and then the one who made the earth says to them, for every illness, there’s a cure.

For every sickness, there’s a medicine. For every problem, there’s a solution. And now they have knowledge for the first time. And so, there’s a story telling us about how knowledge came into the world by facing darkness. How, how change came into the world by separating from the common sense of the tribe to be the ones who are the seekers, the ones on the medicine path.

So they go out now every night. They found their practice. And they go out and they each, and then one night, The one facing the east gets a medicine song and the next night the ones north and until they each have a song, and they each have medicine that they have derived, which tells you also that music and song comes in mixed with knowledge and mixed with medicine, and now they have medicine, they have songs, and they have knowledge, and then the one who made the earth says, why don’t you go back then and take those people who are ill and bring them to the middle and gather everyone there.

And then sing your songs and lay hands on the ones that are ill and repeat the story of the creation. And that’s what they do. And that’s when healing begins. The story is called the origin of healing. So there’s a little compact myth that tells a whole lot about illness, about change, about medicine, about being willing to stand in the darkness of not knowing.

And it seems to me you can just add all the practices to the elements in that story.

Laura Dawn: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Michael Meade: Yeah. And thank the Diné people for, for keeping that story alive for thousands of years.

Laura Dawn: I mean, it seems like music and stories are the common threads of all of our shared humanity across all cultures, across all time.

Michael Meade: Well, and go back to ancient people. So when I was growing up, I, I was raised Catholic and, and, and the Bible. And they say in the beginning was the word, and that’s a great idea. You love words, I love words, I’ll start with the words all the time. But when you go back to tribal imagination and indigenous people, they say in the beginning was the sound. It was the sound that was the reverberation and the resonance of creation. And each thing and each person born is part of this continuing . Resonation of the beginning of creation, and each person, like each thing, is vibrating in their own resonance. So when we sing, we are rejoining creation. We are connecting to the resonance of creation.

Singing, and in India, when you study the origins of chant, it comes right at the beginning. Just as in the DNA story that people began singing right at the beginning and the deeply indigenous people like the sans people in Africa, who live on the in the forest on the border of the Sahara Desert. They’re known as great singers.

And once a year, they all gather on the night of a full moon, and they all begin to sing and dance together. This is without any education, without any books, without any, you know, prescribed religion. They just do it. And while they’re singing, their understanding is the animals are joining them, and they all sing to the stars.

And in that night of the full moon, when they all sing together, Their sense is that they do it all night long, that all of life has come back into the song and back into the dance of life and that they have rejoined, not just the animal world and nature, but they’ve rejoined the cosmos. That’s their idea.

I just love it. And they say that each person born has an invisible thread that goes from the heart to one of the stars. So that when a person dies, a star falls from the cosmos and the world actually is a little darker. So they think of each other as being tied to the stars. And that when someone dies, we’re talking about mourning and grief.

You’re really grieving the loss of a light of a star of a speck of star that had come to life and in grieving for that you’re remembering that you are part of that too. And so I love those old imaginations that we could sing ourselves into unison with nature and the animals and with the cosmos.

Good reason to sing, no matter how bad a voice you have.

Laura Dawn: I love it. Actually, I have this project that I’m working on called Rewilding Words. And I love the idea that We’re in this time of reclaiming words and the root etymology of words that actually have so much depth of meaning and a lot of the evolution of words that we use have been really stripped of their meaning and placed within a culture.

 Of separation and extraction and division. And I feel like there are a lot of people now who are waking up to etymology of words and also. Yeah. Coining new terms and a lot of new languages is emergent and birthing through. And what do you think is the role that words and new vocabulary play to tell new stories and to wake up the power of imagination?

Michael Meade: Well, there’s a way in which if songs are the speech of birds, words are the natural speech of people, so you can have wordless chants. And that’s great. And that can be very natural, but, but humans are poets. And, so the original people were also the first poets , and naming things, which would mean making names or creating names was considered a core power.

That if you could name something, it made it more real. And so this part of our souls that are poetic and, and of course the language needs to transit, just like everything needs to transit. And, I loved Shakespeare because he made up new words , and he got away with it , , and we should follow him or anybody that’s doing that because language is a natural expression.

And I know people say, well, it’s just words. You can say a certain thing to a person at a certain time, and it changes everything. It’s not just words. Words have power. And, uh, and people that understand words can speak with inner authority, , and authority has both author in it, Authoring things and then being authoritative about the author.

And so, yeah, language is part of how we keep ourselves alive. And you, you watch , the fascination that people have with technology right now. Technological language is usually not that inspired. It can be very dull and very mechanical and like right now, people are fascinated with AI and, and they say, what do you think of AI?

And I say, well, when something names itself, I’ll accept that name and it calls itself artificial intelligence. And so then, since we’re poets, we don’t have to leave it there. So I vote for authentic intelligence, and authentic has author in it and has making in it, and we’re going to have to make the intelligence we need.

It’s not going to be delivered to us through a logarithm, I would say.

Laura Dawn: , , you talked about hope in the sense of, of I don’t know what word you said, but I thought a bit in terms of like attached hope, like attached to an outcome, hope that something is going to happen.

 Versus a deeper level of hope that actually we’re trusting. for listening. That whatever happens is meant to happen. , I’m trying to get to this, this juxtaposition in myself around like agency and showing up for doing everything I can all hands on deck to support the collective versus this other narrative of that I think a lot of people struggle with right now of, you know, , why should we do anything? And how do we rectify that story? And, and how do you speak to people who feel that sense of, of, well, what is the point? Because things are falling apart.

Michael Meade: So one term for that attitude is cynicism, and it’s very easy to become cynical because, you know, virtues are diminishing. and inauthenticity is on the rise. It’s very disturbing. It’s, you know, but cynicism comes from the Greek. K Y N E is the source of the cynic. And it refers to a dog, but particularly a dog that’s chewing on a bone that has no marrow. so, so the, the cynic is the person who keeps chewing on the same bone, even though the person’s not Marrow has been already extracted, so it’s, it’s only a spot or a moment in the descent ascent dance to say, it’s all going to shit because yes, it’s all going to shit, but it’s gone to shit before. And actually what’s so wrong with shit?

It actually, , it goes back into the earth and the shit you put in the earth turns into flowers later on. So let’s not just be so judgmental about shit or descent. I know it’s really easy to lose hope, but also there’s, there’s always the deeper resonance. There’s always something under the despair and it’s just a hard thing for people to realize if they haven’t gone all the way down.

They don’t know that all the way down leads to coming back up. And, and anyway, I’ll go back to creation myths because they all talk about re creation and the real key to living at this time is to understand that collapse will go to, let’s go to another word, apocalypse. Which is a great word. It’s a Greek word.

It doesn’t mean fiery end of the world. That came from the Bible. It got taken out of context, so to speak. Uh, apocalypse means collapse renewal. It means a lifting of the veil. When the veil lifts, you see hopeless things. The veil lifts and you see that in this year with the United Nations says that more people have voted than ever before.

They voted To move to the right, they voted against climate crisis and they voted for, uh, autocratic leaders, not, you know, that’s the trend, uh, lifting of the veil. You see the foolishness that people can fall into. You see the limitations of the enlightenment, which turns out to be like an endarkenment. And so there is that thing of lifting and seeing how things die and how things wither and how mistakes are made and how people are caused to suffer unnecessarily. But then there has to be more than that. There has to be seeing things collapse and things renew at the same time. It’s not sequential. It isn’t just collapse and then renewal.

It’s collapse and renewal happening at the same time. We are the witnesses of the collapse. We are being called to be the agents of the renewal. And it’s down to a choice. I wrote a book called Why the World Doesn’t End, you know. And I was doing like a book tour and someone said, Well, what if you’re wrong? And I said, well, if I’m wrong, there’s no one around to criticize me. And if I’m right, we have this idea that the world doesn’t come to an end. And to stay with the etymology, the word end doesn’t mean final, complete, capito, the lights go out. The word end means remnant. At the end of everything there was, there’s a remnant.

And from the remnant, it starts again. That’s old knowledge. It’s in stories. It’s actually deep in the psyche too. We are at in an end times, but the world has ended and began many times that actually the forest is beginning and ending all the time we have to learn to read the text of nature and read the text of the cosmos and read the deep text of our own souls in order to find stories that give us resiliency, transiliency, and there’s probably a third way to use resilience that you’re going to think of.

Laura Dawn: Do you think it’s even helpful to think of it in this terms of, asking the question , is this a destined moment in time? The fact that we’re passing six of the nine tipping points and that we’re over consuming , is this moment a destined moment? ,

Michael Meade: yes, for several reasons, because everything is going through cycles or transformational cycles but also some big mistakes were made. And we’ve been living in the false understanding that history, It is, is what we’re living, , and the collapse of imagination into literal time also involved the collapse from mystery into history. And people like nowadays, they say pro, you know, prologue is future. Not necessarily unless you go really back to get a prologue at the beginning. We have contributed to this collapse in a way through a loss of imagination, through a giving into the idea of materialism, and particularly in giving into the idea of the subject object split, which then gives you the nature culture split, which then gives you the split inside people between the little self and the deep self.

People have given into those things, and, and so, yes, there are historical energies that lead us to this point, and then this point also is a Kairos point, a shifting of the archetypes. It’s both things I would say. And, and I like the bigger sense of the archetype shifting, because it pulls us out of the cynical pit that history’s been digging.

And, and it’s not just politics. We’re not just living between the polarization of Democrat, Republican, left and right, uh, liberal and conservative.

It’s not that. We are in the polarization that happens when the world is changing and things go into opposites and the tension of the opposite creates the third unexpected inspired recreational thing. And if we know that. We’re not as crushed by the foolishness of people voting for narcissistic people who can never help anybody, especially themselves.

Laura Dawn: with the Dear Humanity podcast series, I’m really ending on inviting my guests to share their core message for humanity, like the core essence of the message of your work and if you are writing a letter to humanity, what is the essence of what you want to share?

Michael Meade: Okay, is this email or am I texting? I’m kidding. 

So the short form, I think, Uh, begins with the idea that everyone is born with genius, and we’re here to awaken to a core story that’s really trying to unfold, and if our story unfolds, we get healing, we also get access to our genius gifts, our natural gifts, which then we can give to the world, and the old idea, and I’m sticking with these old ideas, is that, , everyone has something meaningful to give to the world, and when enough people do that, Then you have uncoordinated, uh, no one needs to be in charge and no one needs to be heroic.

You have healing, you have renewal, you have inventiveness, and you have imagination, and you have creation without anyone having to be in charge, without everybody having to believe in one thing. That, that can happen, and that, that’s the next stage that comes after the collapse of institutions, if we’re paying attention to our own deep self and soul.

That’s my sense of it, and I would add to that, that most creation stories are recreation stories. We are living in recreation times again, and the archetype of creation, Along with the archetype of the deep self are two of the things trying to become more conscious. That would be something like the message.

Laura Dawn: Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time. I’m so deeply grateful for your body of work and the legacy that you’re leaving behind. Deep bows of gratitude to you, Michael.

Michael Meade: Thank you, Lauren. Great to meet a fellow lover of etymology. That’s great. And so that’s how I’ll think of you as inventing new words.

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About Laura Dawn

Through her signature Mastermind Programs and Plant Medicine Retreats, Laura Dawn weaves together science with ancient wisdom. She teaches business and thought-leaders, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals how to mindfully explore psychedelics and sacred plant medicines as powerful visionary tools for inner transformation, fostering emotional resiliency and unlocking new depths to our creative potential.