Crossroads
Essays on the state of our culture by
Michael Meade.
Myth Makes Things Whole by Michael Meade
Myths are intended to break the spell of time and release us from the pressures and limitations of daily life. Myth speaks to the extraordinary in us and to the innate nobility of our souls. Hearing a mythic story awakens the myth living in each of us. As the story enters us, we enter the timeless territory of myth. We become mythic again, a knowing participant in our own story and a seeker near its source. For, being in a "mythic condition" allows us to reconnect to the core imagination at the center of our soul.
Myths, and the rites they inspire, compel us to think and behave otherwise than we would normally. We take mythic steps to change personal and collective conditions. Turning to myth opens the moment to things eternal. We tap and are tapped by an Otherness that is both in us and in the Soul of the World. Hearing a myth opens a door through which we become more of who we already are at our core. Each step of that order has an initiatory function through which we contact an otherness that momentarily makes whole the duality of life.
Meaningful change begins when and where we touch our soul center again. For, in mythic terms, the center and the beginning are the same. Each visit to the center of oneself is also a new beginning and further initiation of the soul. Creation stories were often told to bring the listeners back to their own origins and awaken again the potential in their lives. In that sense, myths are healing as well intended to change us.
Myths heal us by placing us in proximity of a "whole story." Not that any one myth tells the whole story, but that a genuine myth has everything it needs within its shape of beginning, middle and end. Viewed from the outside, myths are patently false; yet the same can be said of love. Only those who surrender to love know what love means, how it heals and how it teaches. Myth also requires some surrender and, like love, a little sacrifice.
In the modern world everything else is usually sacrificed in the service of linear time; yet to find again our mythic sense and touch timeless things, time is exactly what must be sacrificed. Only when time becomes broken can the "once upon a time" realm of genuine imagination appear again. Then, creation becomes possible again and love has a place to enter and healing can follow.
Creation wishes to continue, yet can only work through the souls of those alive at a given time. The creative aspect of our soul would have us find further initiations by continually returning to the core of Being and beginning life over again. As creatures of creation we carry a desire to sacrifice in order to incarnate further and in order to further the work of creation. We take mythic steps in order to continue our own story and contribute to the story of creation.
Parsifal, the Pathless Path, and the Secret of Abundance an excerpt of the re-telling of the story of Parsifal along with commentary by Michael Meade originally published in the Fall 2009 issue of Parabola Magazine.
After a long night of sleep disrupted by dreams of future suffering, Parsifal awoke. Two swords lay on the floor near the bed. One he had arrived with, the other he received the night before from the Fisher King during the revelatory ceremony. Parsifal accepted the Fisher King's gift in silence. He also kept silent before the evident wound of the king, and said not a word about the wondrous grail that fed each person whatever they desired from its unending abundance.
No sound or soul broke the penetrating quiet of late morning. Outside the silent, deserted castle, he found his horse and shield waiting. The great gate was wide open . As he rode uneasily forth, an unseen hand pulled the drawbridge behind him so hard that his steed was almost struck down.
Parsifal turned in shock only to hear stinging words of rebuke from an unseen source: "Ride, you goose, and bear the hatred of the sun. If you had only moved your jaws and asked your host the question.! In your silence you lost yourself great honor!" Parsifal, now compelled to speak, called back for some explanation, but a steady silence further rebuked him.
Excerpt from the World Behind the World by Michael Meade
MYTHIC INOCULATION
Although decidedly frail, perpetually foolish, and seemingly about to destroy the whole thing, humans are blessed with an imagination equal to the world and essential to its ways of continuing. In the great drama of life the human soul becomes the makeweight, the extra quantity, and uniquely living quality needed to help tip the balance of the world towards continuing creation.
The gravitas of the awakened soul helps tie the thread of the eternal to the presence of the present moment. When the dark times come around and the end seems near again, it becomes more essential for the individual person to learn and live the story the soul carries from before birth. If people are not invited into a living stream of culture, tragedies begin to grow. Unlived dreams become tragedies waiting to happen. Lose the sense that each life carries meaning and death becomes meaningless as well.
Traditionally, it has been the function of myth to wrap people in stories that make intuitive sense of the world and point to meaningful ways of being part of it. Yet, under the harsh rule of materialism and the dull spell of literalism myth becomes dismissed as fantasy, as something out of touch with reality. Yet in the inner recesses of the human soul, where the facts of life mingle with the mysteries of eternity, myth means "emergent truth."
In the long run, and it is the long run that's of increasing concern, myth makes meaning. The job of myth is to make the world meaningful and hold everyone in the mythic imagination of the living story. Meaning is a storied thing and many meanings appear and can become clear once the storyline has been found. Each life, each myth has its own inner logic, its own subjective truth, its own persuasive beauty and its own dramatic form.
Myth makes meaning and helps reveal the significance of both inner and outer events. Troubled and threatened as it may be, the world remains a mystery trying to be revealed. Reality isn't fully real until its hidden meanings have been revealed. Every event, inner and outer, has hidden meaning waiting to be revealed. Yet, it takes a story, a narrative shape to uncover the meanings that hide within the facts of the matter.
Excerpts from the recent series: Fear and Beauty in the Heart of America, Michael Meade in a rhapsody on the creative energy deep in the earth which connects to the spirit of longing in the human soul.
THE FEET OF DUENDE ~ Duende in the Dark Times
by Michael Meade
In Spain they say, one is not truly living unless one is dying. Only in dying again and again, do we truly inhabit the Earth. Only in learning to die do we learn to fully live. Each life a journey of many steps and each step the journey between life and death. Each moment a living and a dying away, so subtle it makes things appear constant.
Meanwhile, we walk the roads and work amongst those who knowingly and unknowingly craft the shapes that life will inhabit in the future. The philosopher Unamuno insisted that without the Tragic Sense that knows the secret conversation between life and death, we become simply visitors, passers-by who slow occasionally down to look on when accidents reveal the close presence of death. Those lives lack enduring meaning, are not fully lived into, like shoes worn for a while, then tossed aside as time marches on. This is the 'common tragedy,' the dull preoccupation that finds only the open earth at the end.
We know that civilizations and empires are born, take shape and die. Knowing that is part of being modern. We have Rome to refer to, the pyramids in Egypt, the collapse of the British Raj in India. Empires begin with a 'discovery' of new values, the power of ideas and images newly appearing. The poet Francis Ponge offered that the new values are 'always taken directly from the cosmos,' then magnified and distorted. 'What follows is the elaboration ...dogmatization and refinement... then schisms arise, followed sooner or later by catastrophe.'
It seems to be the nature of man and history to repeat the cycle again and again, prolonging the 'classical' period of dogmatics and refinement as long as possible. Meanwhile, catastrophes accumulate at the edges and the core values decline within the ruling state. Knowing that this pattern recurs is part of the cultural anxiety of modern people, enhanced by the sense that time has speeded up and everything recycles faster.
Going On the Peace Path
by Michael Meade
Going on the 'war path' involves raising a clamor of accusations, stirring up elemental fears and basic instincts for protection as well as aggression. Going to war calls on collective feelings of fight and flight that are just under the surface of human exchanges. Once stirred, the winds of war carry the heat of furor into all fields of life, penetrating homes and offices, farms and plants, schools and churches. The idea of war converts all fields to battlefields; a radical condition that supercedes other concerns and can convert all roads and networks into channels of the warpath.
While the super-charged atmosphere of war spreads quickly and widely, paths of peace develop more slowly and require a specific attention for finding ideas and places of refuge. Each attempt at peace means creating a new sense of sanctuary. Just as the war path involves the fashioning of weapons, the paths of peace require the reinvention of sanctuary. Peace is a re-creation of refuge at the edges of conflict.
War is a dragon with many heads; each head is an invitation to a battle. Each battle seems to be the decisive event, yet for each head cut-down another grows in its place. The dragon of war presents the face of evil to each party in any conflict. It feeds on fundamental oppositions, good and evil, right and wrong, free-market democracy and radical Islam, crusaders and infidels, believers and unbelievers of every stripe.
The dragon appears emblazoned on flags riding above the anxious armies. Moved by the winds of war, it shape-shifts from lion to a sword-slice of moon, an array of stars or a trenchant cross. Flags rise and fall in the battle that never ends; the bloody field of human history is strewn with dismembered tyrants, disillusioned warriors and defeated ideas.
The Cloak of Tragedy
On September Eleventh the rough cloak of tragedy fell
across the land.
The Inverted World
The world had already changed before
suicide-attackers reached the shores of America. We
were already in a different world, uncertain and
unsecured.
Returning to Normal
If we remain asleep to the dreaming of America and the
America of dreams, tragedy can become 'normal.'
Oppression is already normal in most places...'normal'
is an oppression of the human spirit.
Myths of Justice
These are not innocent times. The pretension of
innocence is of no help in the search for justice. Only
those who know torment are capable of making
peace.
The Evil Part of Evil
Tragedy wants us to change the direction of life. The
healthy reaction to evil is to find the endearing good
hidden in ones own soul.
What Happens to Dreams Deferred?
Address by Michael Meade to the young writers of
Language of Hope and their readers.
Seattle Art Museum, March 6, 2001
A Eulogy for Death
Entertaining Death, a philosophical hospice for the
soul.
This is a version of a talk given by Michael Meade at the
opening of the series of Conversations on death
sponsored by the Zen Hospice Center of San
Francisco.
Crossroads
Essays on the state of our culture by Michael Meade.