Episode 572, released 11th November 2026.
Lian and mythologist Michael Meade explore how awakening your soul’s genius and calling can help transform a world where nature and culture are both unravelling.
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Michael Meade is a renowned storyteller and author who combines hypnotic storytelling, street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths. He has a unique ability to tap ancestral sources of wisdom and connect them in illuminating and healing ways to the dilemmas we face and the stories we are living today.
Michael is the creator of the Living Myth Podcast, a highly regarded weekly podcast that goes out to a diverse and growing audience spanning over 150 countries. He is the author of The Heart of Transformation, Awakening the Soul, The Genius Myth, Fate and Destiny, Why the World Doesn’t End and The Water of Life. Michael is the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose projects bring the medicine of myth and story to the issues that trouble both culture and nature in ways that inspire creative imagination and genuine hope.
Michael is a storyteller and author, founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, creator of the Living Myth Podcast heard in over 150 countries, and author of The Heart of Transformation and The Genius Myth.
In this episode, Lian and Michael explore the core of his new book, The Heart of Transformation, the old idea that changing the soul changes the world. With nature rattling and culture unravelling, Michael says we can’t change society at the level where the problems were created, and that the renewal of life on earth will come through individual souls awakening and living with authenticity and meaning, until enough people are doing it that it begins to affect everyone around them.
They look at the caterpillar dissolving in the dark of its cocoon as its dormant imaginal cells begin to wake, the forest that collapses and feeds the young forest still in the roots and seeds, the rites of passage the modern world has lost, and the practices and friends of the soul that help each of us answer our calling.
Listen if you feel helpless watching everything unravel, or wonder whether your own soul’s transformation could really help change the world.
We’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
Why the inner life may be the most practical response to a world falling apart, and why waiting for everyone to agree on a big plan only divides us further
How to recognise when life is asking you to stop and go inside, and what is waiting in the dark when you do
Why your calling grows stronger as everything outside stops working, and what helps you to sustain it
Resources and stuff that we spoke about:
Michael’s new book The Heart of Transformation
Michael’s Patreon
Michael’s YouTube
Join UNIO, The Fellowship for Wild Sovereign Souls: This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth.
Don’t want to miss a thing?
Subscribe (BTW, it’s absolutely FREE) to the show on your favourite platform or app by clicking the relevant button below… That way you’ll receive each episode automagically straight to your device as soon as it’s released!
Thank you!
Lian & Jonathan
Episode Transcript:
Please note: We are a small team and not able to check through the transcript our software provides. So you may find some words are out of place and a few sentences don’t make complete sense. If you do see something utterly ridiculous we’d love you to let us know so we can correct it. Please email any howlers with the time stamp to team@wildsovereignsoul.com.
Lian (00:00)
What if the transformation the world needs is already lying dormant inside each of us? This week I'm joined by the mythologist Michael Meade once again to explore how awakening your soul's genius and calling can help transform a world where both nature and culture are unravelling. Michael is a renowned storyteller, an author who combines hypnotic storytelling, a perceptiveness and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths, connecting ancestral sources of wisdom to the dilemmas we face and the stories we are living today. He's also the creator of the Living Myth podcast and the author of many books, including The Heart of Transformation that we explore today, and The Genius Myth, Fate and Destiny, and he's also the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation.
So we dive deep into the core of his new book, The Heart of Transformation, the idea that changing the soul can change the world.
With nature rattling and culture unravelling, Michael says we can't change society at the level where the problems were created. And the renewal of life on earth will come through individual souls awakening and living with authenticity and meaning.
Until enough people are doing that, that begins to ripple out and affect everyone around them.
We look at the caterpillar dissolving in the dark of its cocoon as its dormant imaginal cells begin to wake. The forest that collapses and feeds, the young forest still in the roots and seeds. The rites of passage the modern world has lost, and the practices and friends of the soul that help each of us answer our calling.
So listen if you feel helpless watching everything around us unravel, or are wondering whether your own soul's transformation could really help change the world.
If you're new here, this is a show about the deeper, truer life, the one your soul is calling you towards. If you've been here before, you already know that.
And that calling is exactly why UNIO exists. UNIO is the Fellowship of Wild Sovereign Souls, where Jonathan and I meet with members twice each month in our guidance circle to meet you in whatever is alive in your life. And it really could be absolutely anything. It could be your business, your relationships, your health, your soul path, the places you feel challenged or called, or both, and often they are one and the same.
And we bring everything we are and everything we know to meet you exactly where you are and to help you move forward. You can find out more and join us at wildsovereignsoul.com/unio. I'm really looking forward to seeing you there soon. And now, back to this week's episode, let's dive in.
Lian (03:03)
Hello, Michael. Welcome back to the show.
Michael Meade (03:07)
Great to be back with you, Lian. Good to see you.
Lian (03:10)
Oh, so good to see you again. And there's something so timeless about just your surroundings and you know, everything is like I just as soon as I saw you, I just felt like I was kind of like back in some kind of familiar setting with you. There's something very inviting about that. So I'm really delighted to be back in conversation with you and on such a timely and needed topic.
So very, very much looking forward to everything we're going to get into. So I'm going to begin, I suppose, by just asking the most simple question, which is inspired you to write this book at this time? And of course, by asking that, I'm also asking you to kind of just start to I guess set a foundation for the conversation we're about to have, like the themes that we're going to be exploring.
Michael Meade (04:10)
So I was watching the world, which you can see more of nowadays, and realising that we're in this really unusual moment in which nature is rattling and culture is essentially unravelling, and during which the institutions that normally protect people from in some way cannot keep up with the rapidity of changes that's happening in both nature and culture.
And so I realised transformation is really the name of what we're dealing with now, that it isn't simply change, it is radical change. And transformation means to transit or move from one form or shape to a different form or shape. And so it occurred to me that we are living through a transformation of life on earth. And that maybe I should try to write about that.
And so then the next thing I thought of well, there's really three parts to it in a way. So the book has three parts. First of all, it's called The Heart of Transformation. So I decided the heart is the essence of this change, not the mind, not the brain, the heart.
Then I had a vision of the heart, a burning heart in the sky, so we put that on the cover of the book. And then I had to kind of defend my vision in a sense, or extrapolate from my vision.
And so the book has three parts. The first is transformation seen through the lens of nature, the second transformation seen through the lens of human psychology and human nature, and the third transformation seen through the lens of human culture changing at radical times in other periods, or some way of seeing what might be happening to culture in general and how we could maybe trust that something meaningful can come out of it.
Lian (06:07)
Beautiful. So a kind of acknowledgement of where we are and I guess lighting the way forward, providing a hope and a map for where we might be going.
Michael Meade (06:20)
Yes, and part of it to me becomes salvaging the importance of the individual human soul.
So one of the ideas that I'm presenting in the book repeatedly is that we can't change culture or society at the level where the problems have been created. You have to do it from a different level. And the old idea was the human soul, the individual soul, which nowadays can feel like a fragile speck in the midst of a dark, you know, fatalistic universe, the individual's soul is connected to the soul of the world. So one of the ancient sayings was, change the soul, change the world. So rather than wishing or hoping it all might change, or rather than fearing that it's all going to go to hell, the real thing to do is get engaged with the depth of one's own soul, live a life of authenticity and meaning, and that protects us at the same time as it gives us traction and gives us the capacity to contribute to the healing and the renewal of life on earth.
Lian (07:24)
Wonderful. So as I said to you, because there's so much of what you're sharing here that is just true for me too. Sometimes I'm going to ask things that I have a sense that people listening or watching might want me to ask you.
And so I'm going to do my best to kind of, you know, put myself in other people's shoes and minds and hearts and lives with some of the questions I'm going to ask. And the first one that occurs to me, and in some ways, I think you're not saying that this is the, you know, first and only time that we've been at an end of an era. In some ways you're saying, you know, we've been here before and we can take learning from that. But there's also I think something that I wonder if it's worth exploring, you know, many times people have this sense of, you know, this is... we're at the turning of an age. You know, one way of living is ending, another beginning. What makes this time different if you see it is indeed different?
Michael Meade (08:34)
Well, I think it is different because of the fact of nature and culture both being in danger and both being changing rapidly. That's unusual.
Then I think the other thing is that in the Western world, I think we're the end of the era of the Enlightenment era, really. That we've reached the end of it. And that it's that world, that worldview, that's disappearing. And so the world we thought we had is already gone, really. It's already gone. If you, you know, we just have to almost accept that. And accepting that is part of the process of beginning to imagine the next world. So there's a point in the book where I describe the original meaning of apocalypse, because a lot of people think about apocalypse now. And of course people imagine apocalypse means the fiery end of the world. And that's a possibility.
That's why people are thinking about it. But the original meaning of apocalypse, it's an old Greek word, and it means collapse renewal. And it doesn't simply mean collapse
Lian (09:40)
Wow.
Michael Meade (09:41)
And yeah, that's what it means. Apocalypse. Apocalane is the old Greek root. It means collapse, renewal, and it doesn't mean collapse and then maybe the renewal. It means collapse and renewal happen at the same time. And that's why I began with nature. Because in nature, if you think about a forest, the forest grows up and the big trees grow as close as they can to the sun and then they run out of energy. No one knows exactly why, and they collapse down and they rot into the ground and they become the nurturing of the new forest coming up. And so that's how nature... that's how nature acts. And people used to know because they live closer to nature, and it used to... one term was reading the text of nature, that nature is its own book.
And when you read that book, then you read you get the idea of collapse and renewal. Things are always collapsing and renewing. So the world we used to have has collapsed. It is dysfunctional. It cannot sustain. It's unsustainable, as people say. The world that's trying to come into existence is in the roots and the seeds. And so we don't quite see it. It's like that young forest that hasn't broken through the ground yet.
And we are betwixt and between those two places. That's what I mean by transformation, in the sense that we are in the middle of it and no one ever sees transformation. You see the results of it. The reason we don't see it, it's a mystery. And in the book I repeatedly go back to what ancient people said the core mystery of life on earth is life, death, and rebirth, life, death, and renewal.
And we are in the middle of it. That was the whole really core sense of the book. And it's a mystery that we can learn from, but that we cannot simply observe. You can't see the change from the life to the death to life part. You can experience it, but you can't see it. And so in the middle of the book, I take rites of passage as the ancient form through which a person's soul could transform. And the middle of rites of passage was called liminality. Limen, Latin word, the bottom of a doorway. And so we're in like a threshold and we're on at the liminal's place. And we can see what we leaving behind. We can look back and see that. And we can't quite see where we're stepping, and we're on the verge. And what each of us does matters. This is the old idea. Yes, we're each just a speck in this endless dark universe and so on. But we each have a spark of life in us, or people call it a speck of star in us. And that is essential. And when we connect to that and live that into the world, we're bringing presence, we're bringing meaning, we're bringing purpose into the world. And so it matters.
Lian (12:47)
Wow. It's such... it really brought it to life when you were describing that kind of being in that liminal space between the kind of what was and what is, and the way that because we can look back, we can be very attached to what was. Is it we would have to actually turn around to really kind of focus on what has been, but of course, in order to move into what's next, we need to kind of turn towards it, which I think is part of what you're talking about. There is a recognition, like this is where we are, and something is being asked of us, something is ahead of us. I think there's something really powerful about that simple image of it being this kind of threshold, the doorway that really brought that to life for me in that moment.
Michael Meade (13:42)
And so one of the things missing in the modern world, modern Western world especially, is a lack of rites of passage. And so in the middle of the book, I'm going through human psychology essentially. And so up until modern times, each girl and each boy at the end of childhood would in traditional cultures would leave everything behind, leave their family behind, leave everything. They would be almost naked in the initial states of the rite of passage.
Because the point was to show that you are leaving your childhood behind and you're stepping into a different world. And in order to do that, you have to let go. And so this is that turning point that you were just describing. And so if we had grown up in a different time in a traditional culture, we would have an experience of that, which would be psychologically impressive. Our psyche would know that transformation was possible because human cultures early on would support this radical change. Up until adolescence, developmental theory in modern psychology is really helpful and it describes the stages and steps of infancy and childhood. When you get to adolescence, developmental theory doesn't work anymore because it's not developmental at that stage. It's gonna be a leap from childhood into an awakening to who the person already is inside. That was the point.
And since we don't have it, we don't have a clear, confirmative experience of transformation. And therefore, modern people tend to doubt that we could truly transform, both individually and then culturally. And so in the middle of the book, I'm trying to show all the ancient practices and things that people did in order to support the transformation of the individual soul.
Lian (15:33)
So I'm by no means a pessimist. I'm very much naturally quite Pollyanna-ish. So again, kind of really representing what might be coming up for people listening. Given where we are culturally, that we have so much lost those rites of passage. We've lost that understanding of that
Michael Meade (15:55)
Yeah. Yeah.
Lian (15:57)
Cycle of life.
How do you see that what's being asked of us in order to enter this transformation in the way that you're describing? Sadly, not every human on earth is going to read your book. Like if they were, that could be the answer. Sadly, that's
Michael Meade (16:19)
Like that.
Lian (16:21)
Let's hope. But how do you see that what's being asked of us can happen when we've lost those maps?
Michael Meade (16:32)
All right, so another thing that's happening throughout the book, I tell stories throughout the book, but I always tell ancient stories, they're mythological stories. And the only... you know, we've lost mythology, that's another problem of modern people. We don't inhabit stories like people used to. And so when you get polarisation in culture, people think they're actually in different stories when they're in the story of polarisation.
Lian (16:59)
Yes.
Michael Meade (17:01)
Which is a step towards recreation. But people don't know that and they take the literal for the real.
So what came to mind when you asked the question was there's a Native American story, it's a creation story. So the only myth that has become part of mainstream culture in my lifetime has been the hero's myth, the hero story, which is a great story.
And it's always useful because it's archetypal. It... myths don't get old, they just get renewed all the time. But the hero's journey is rather masculine, if not muscular even, and it projects things out into the world that what we're looking for is out there, and it has limits. And I know that it's been called the monomyth, the only story, but that's just a mistake. It's just a misunderstanding.
A myth that by its nature is multiple and there are whole categories of myth that have nothing to do with the hero and one of them is creation stories. And so but I call creation stories recreation stories because if we were in a traditional culture, every culture has more than one creation story. That's just the way it is, including the Bible, which has two. If we were in a traditional culture, several times a year we would hear a creation story. And our ancestors, it wasn't a question, do you believe it or not? The question was, are you getting something out of it or not? And so since they would get something out of the story every time they heard it, it wasn't a creation story, it was a recreation story. To me, that's important because we're living
Lian (18:34)
Gosh, yes.
Michael Meade (18:37)
In a time of potential recreation. So there's a Native American story from the Navajo people about the origins of the world.
So in this Navajo creation story, it begins very simply. Typically in a creation story, everything is created and the last thing created are human beings. It's just usually the way it is. Would really interesting. Because if you imagine that the world is constantly recreating itself, that means the world is unfinished. If the last things that was created, if that was human beings, that means we are also unfinished, which means we are more open-ended than other creatures, and therefore we are more capable of changing and transforming. In this Navajo story, it's kind of simple in its way, but it's beautiful. It says that, oh, and they don't define the creator. They just say the one who created the earth, or try to find charming. The one who created the earth put human beings in a certain place on earth.
To be on Earth, you have to be in a certain place.
And it's interesting, at the very beginning, those first humans, our ancestors, started complaining right away, which maybe explains why everybody's complaining all the time. Anyway, so they were complaining, but the one who made the earth was still close by and could hear them and say, Listen, if you don't like where you are, pick up your stuff and move. So the original humans began to wander around and people have been moving and wander around ever since.
Eventually they found a great place to settle and they knew it was a great place when they had big dreams. So they're okay, they're having big dreams, they found their home, everything's good. But on earth things can only last for a certain amount of time, and soon enough there was a problem. And the problem was some people got sick. And because it was the very beginning, no one knew what sickness was, and therefore no one had any idea what healing might be. And so the original people simply rejected those that were sick and push them away. And that caused them to get more and more ill each day. And at that point, and this really is where I was trying to get to, four people of the original people decided to go out at the end of the day and stand facing into the darkness, each looking in their own direction. It was just an instinct on their part to stand in the darkness and kind of acknowledge, not knowing we don't know how to take care of those people.
And at that point, the one who made the earth spoke to them directly and said, Listen, on the earth, for every sickness there's a cure, for every illness there's a remedy. For every trouble, there's a solution. And now you have knowledge. And so the people, only those four had that knowledge. They went back and they decided, we're going back every night, and we're gonna stand in the darkness and see what else happens. Each night when they went out, then the one who made the earth gave the one facing the east a song and a rhythm, and they wound up each getting a song. They each had a story. And then the one who made the earth eventually said, Now go back and take the people who are ill and put them in the middle of the community and gather everyone around them and then tell the stories that we've learned about creation and sing the songs that we've learned and lay hands on each other, and you will be able to cure those people and you will have a whole community. And that was the beginning of healing on earth. So, long answer to the question. But it only took four people. So the idea is not that everybody's going to agree, here's our new plan. It's not going to be like that. People don't agree. The diversity of people is the essential element of people, but it's that some people are going to awaken to the realisation that this is the time to transform, this is the time to answer one's calling.
In the book, I explain everyone has genius and everyone has calling. This is the time to live with purpose and authenticity. And when enough people do that, it affects other people, and that eventually changes the society and the culture. So that's the idea in the book is that we're not going to have a big idea we all agree on. That's people have been trying that for a long time. Doesn't work. You get more divided. Becoming
Lian (22:53)
Yeah.
Michael Meade (22:54)
One's unique self and living meaningfully gives that purpose, that person aim and purpose, and that affects things, including their neighbours. And so not everybody has to transform just enough people. And I don't know what the number is and no one will probably ever know, but when it happens, you see the result.
Lian (23:14)
Yes. Yeah. That's so beautifully put.
There is something quite meta in as you're saying, is not part of the looking into the darkness, part of the mystery is not knowing how many people that is, not knowing kind of who they'll be, not knowing what the form that will be. That's part of the willingness to not know.
Michael Meade (23:37)
It's part of the initiation. It's part of the rite of passage. Because
Lian (23:39)
Yes.
Michael Meade (23:41)
All we can know is what we know inside ourselves. So again, contrary to the modern Western Enlightenment-based ideas, what we're looking for is in the dark, and in a sense, it's inside ourselves. So one of the big changes in the Western world is having things from the Eastern traditions come into the West, like meditation practices and... And the core of that mythology, because it started as a mythology, is that what we're looking for is inside. And the whole Western world is built on what we were looking for and what we need is outside. Advertising is based on that, but most science is based on that. And the science of the soul is that what we're looking for is inside. So we could say, Well, wait, did those four people get it from the outside or was it already in there? And the answer is yes.
The seeds of it were there. It got enhanced and it blossomed because of a connection to something transcendent or divine. And so there's a chapter in the book called The Divine Word. And it takes this old idea that each person when they're born has, you know, has a divine word inside. And it's a radical idea, but it's an ancient well-known idea in ancient times that what we're looking for is inside.
And that was the key of the rite of passage. Because in the rite of passage, two things had to happen eventually. First, you had to have separation and entering not knowing. A lot of the initiates are walking in the dark or they're left in a dark hut, that kind of thing, to get that experience of facing the darkness all alone. And then the two things that would happen would be a person would learn their natural gifts. I call it their genius. Everyone has genius qualities, and someone would get to learn that.
And the second part of a rite of passage would be the beginning of the healing of early life trauma. So each initiate would become awakened to gifts that are theirs, that are essential to their being, and they would begin the healing that's going to go on throughout life. And then life becomes the expanding of the awareness of my own gifts and what I have to give to the world and then at the same time or alternately healing the wounds that I'm carrying so that I'm not visiting those on other people. We pull back and look at the people that are in charge of the world right now. They're almost all entirely uninitiated. It's obvious.
They are, they don't know who they are. That makes it really hard for them to help other people learn who they are. And if they don't know their own wounds, then they are visiting those wounds on other people. And we see that all over the world. In the book, I'm saying, rite of passage, initiation, becoming an initiate is archetypal. It can be forgotten by the culture, people can, but it can't be lost because it's in the soul. And so a lot of the middle part of the book is talking about how we find our own gifts and our own wounds and begin to trust the ways in which we're gifted and the ways in which we need healing. And that really becomes the basis for the change, not just of the individual, but of the culture.
Lian (26:58)
Yeah. Going back to what you said there earlier about the genius and the calling. And we talked a lot about this, the idea of calling in our last conversation.
Would you be able to just kind of talk a little bit about how you mean you just define genius there? Would you just share a little bit more about what you mean by calling in the context of this conversation, please?
Michael Meade (27:26)
Yes. So I love the origin of words and they're... it's really meaningful. Genius doesn't mean high IQ. It doesn't mean excellent capacity. The literal meaning of genius, a Latin word. It means the spirit that's already there. So when a person comes into the world, each person is unique. There's lots of cedar trees, but no two are the same. There's lots of ravens, no two are the same. No two humans are the same. Each person is unique, and what makes us unique is our genius, the spirit that's already there. So that's there, but the family doesn't know about it. The person doesn't know about it, because entering the world, you know, you become very dependent. Humans are more dependent than any other animal.
And so it doesn't come till later the capacity to awaken to that. So then calling is... well, go back to the beginning of the book.
Because the book starts with the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly, because it's the universal symbol of transformation. And so the caterpillar, which is almost blind and can only see what's right in front of it, is eating its own environment. And then suddenly it stops. It gets a message to stop, and then it creates a cocoon, and then it descends into the darkness of its own cocoon.
And it's in the darkness in there that the butterfly cells begin to awaken. They were in there, but they were dormant. And so I use that to understand human psychology. That we develop an ego that can only see what's right in front of us and is terrified of things that are beyond its own vision. But deep inside there are the cells of a butterfly. The scientists, the biologists working on transformation at the level of the butterfly had to name these things. They named what we call the caterpillar, they call the larva. The word larva means mask. So to me, that's the ego. The ego is the mask we present to the world. And then on the other side, you have the caterpillar cells, and they had to give them the name and they named them imaginal cells. As if to say, I think the scientists got inspired because what they were saying, the core of the butterfly is imagination. It gets really interesting when you realise that the Greek word psyche has two meanings. It means butterfly and it means soul. As if the ancient Greeks were saying, if you want to understand the human soul, look at the metamorphosis of a butterfly.
Lian (30:08)
Yeah.
Michael Meade (30:09)
So I'm saying inside each person, there are these genius cells that are dormant and waiting to awaken.
And just the way the caterpillar gets this signal to stop and look inside, descend into darkness again, the human gets signals to say, stop, your life is out of control. It's not going where you want it to go. You know, you're too anxious, you're too, you're too fatalistic, whatever it is. Stop and descend inside. Because inside, even though it seems challenging, inside there are these imaginal cells trying to awaken.
The calling is calling to the genius that's already there. And it's archetypal, it's in everyone's life. The problem is, with all the distractions in the world, and especially with the increased invasion of artificial intelligence, really a disturbing thing at the level of the soul. With all of that going on, we don't necessarily hear the calling. And because Western world forgot about this whole rite of passage that is essential to the soul. People don't trust that even if they hear a calling, it goes against the family's wishes or the family's idea, or it seems pretty strange in the culture, because the calling is unique. But in the book I mentioned this very old idea, the calling is so important that it keeps calling right to the end of a person's life. The calling is the call to awaken.
Very similar to the caterpillar getting some kind of a message, this isn't going very well. When the butterfly finally comes out of the cocoon, it has come multifaceted eyes that not only can see in many directions, it can see different dimensions. So if we take, if we say the caterpillar or larva is like the ego of a person, the deep self, the deep soul, you can call it self or soul, has multifaceted vision. It's that part of us that can see what our life really means and how we are aimed. It's that part of us that awakens and then becomes potentially part of the recreation, not just of the individual life, but the potential recreation of human culture.
Lian (32:28)
Yeah.
So we've got the theme of this world that we're in at the moment going into this kind of potential sort of death process. And then we've got what you're talking about here, this happening for each individual soul.
Looking at it back from the context of the culture, it seems to me that perhaps both are going through this kind of same process at once, both the individual soul and the culture.
Michael Meade (33:03)
Yes.
Lian (33:04)
Which makes it potentially is kind of both, you know, the most magical, most sort of possibility filled, the most transformational, in fact, using the words that you're using. Would you talk a little bit about what you see is I guess one way of saying it is this idea of that, you know, there needs to be this dissolving, this kind of crumbling of the caterpillar in order for it to become the butterfly. What do you see is happening when it comes to kind of again, out there, the cultural crumbling? It's not a particularly defined question, but anything that you have to say on that, I think it'd be interesting because it's kind of that's happening in the environment that we're going into the cocoon in.
Michael Meade (33:47)
Right. So the whole third part of the book is looking at cultural change. So at some point in the book I write a little bit about the Renaissance. Because Renaissance means rebirth and renewal. Those are the two core meanings of that word. And of course the Renaissance follows the Dark Ages. And so it's a general way of speaking, but there's truth in that. So that the renewal came from the Dark Ages. It's the same as the cocoon of the caterpillar. It's the same of the rite of passage of the human soul.
And in the Renaissance, it wasn't that people started agreeing. I mean, if you imagine Italy at that time, a lot of stuff was going on in Italy. And people weren't walking around going, hey, why don't we paint differently? Or why don't we do architecture? They weren't doing that. They were going, I'm gonna paint differently. I'm gonna do architecture, I'm gonna do science differently.
And you know, because science changed at that time. And so... so was individual souls going, I'm gonna do it. And we still revere them, Michelangelo and everybody else. We revere them. And not only that, but they were recalling ancient wisdom. It was... they called it Neoplatonism. They were going back to Plato and before Plato. So there's a couple of core ideas. One is that ancient wisdom can be forgotten, but it cannot be lost. And so it's available to us, and it's available especially to the deep self and deep soul.
The other thing that happens in the third part of the book, I think I begin that part by talking about paradigm shifts. So paradigm shift is something, a phrase that became... it was coined in the 60s when everything was changing in the 60s. And so industrial revolution was a big paradigm shift, and you can find a number of them. And right now it's AI or AGI, artificial general intelligence.
I'm defining it as a paradigm shift. And that's how most people in that field are defining it. The paradigm shifts are essentially something new that replaces something old. And I'm contrasting paradigm shift with archetypal change. So archetypal is a different word. Arche means ancient and original. Type means shape or form. Archetypal things are tied to the origins of things. They're ancient, but they're also immediate. They're original and therefore they can keep renewing. And archetypes are a deeper type of change than paradigm shifts. So the paradigm shift that's going on now is AI invading everything. And we know instinctively there's something wrong. And then they're creating their own agents who already are attacking the creator, which I guarantee that's gonna keep happening. Because it's not really creation. It's piling data in imitation of creation, I would say. Archetypes are deep in us, in our soul. So that when a woman becomes pregnant or a certain time in pregnancy, the archetype of the mother kicks in. The individual woman doesn't have to figure it all out. It's kicking in, it's archetypal.
To be a child, if you're allowed to be a child, is archetypal. You play, you create, you make mistakes, you do all kinds of silly things. That's the archetypal energy of the child. So in the book I say there's two key archetypes that arise when everything's falling apart. One is the archetype of... and I'm following Carl Jung here. Carl Jung brought out the idea of archetypes, actually.
And so the deep self, the archetype of the deep self, awakens when everything outside falls apart. So this is another argument for going inside. When we can't trust the world outside, the world outside is not going to find unity. It's not, it's already past that. We're in the collapse renewal part. And so we have to look for unity inside. Most of us have been told we're empty inside. I'm saying no, we're not.
We have genius, we have a unique soul, we carry meaning, we can live with purpose, and we are archetypally reinforced. So when everything outside falls apart, we're not left all alone. The archetype of the deep self and soul kind of becomes more present. We get support from the archetypal realm. Paradigm shifts are the new replacing the old. Archetypal changes are the ancient and original coming present again in order to allow us to renew our own lives, but also life in general. It's a deeper thing. And the second big archetype that gets activated when everything's fallen apart is the archetype of creativity. Again, creation myths become really important because creation myths are about recreation. And when everything's fallen apart, the creative energy of life becomes more possible.
When everything's falling apart, there's an acceleration of calling. Part of the instinct of the soul goes, Hey, I'm not gonna get protection here, I'm not gonna get safety really, no one's gonna make my life better. I have to change. And when a person gets to that point, under these conditions, the archetype of the creative can enter a person more fully. And the book kind of ends with the idea of all the healers and all the creators and all the artists and all the scientific minds, everything all standing at the edge of the river of life, looking for a way to cross over in order to touch into the other side of the river, which was called the other world. The Irish called it the other world. You could call it the eternal world. You could call... there's many names for it. In order to cross over and bring some of that timelessness, some of that ancient stuff back into this world.
And so I think the calling intensifies as everything outside falls apart. And some number of us, you know, we don't know what it is, will respond to that calling. And just as AI is sending out its agents, its bot agents, we can become, rather than artificially motivated, we can become genuinely authentically awakened and we become agents of recreation rather than succumbing to the data-based agents of AI.
Lian (40:32)
My goodness. Yes. Such a vision. I love what you described there about standing at the edge of the river looking over.
Michael Meade (40:41)
Yeah.
Lian (40:42)
So a couple of... the time's flying by, but I'd love to ask you a couple of questions again, kind of putting myself in the shoes of listeners. I know that so many people at the moment are finding everything you've named here, the changes that are happening, the way AI feels like it's kind of infiltrating almost like every part of life, the just uncertainty, all of the different things that are happening at the moment. It's whilst I completely agree and experience it in the way that you do, that the calling actually feels strongest now.
There's also the fact that I hear a lot of people say it's harder now than ever because there's so much kind of calling us outwards. There's this that needs attending to, this needs, you know, I need to worry about this. How on earth am I going to be able to, you know, manage whatever it might be, it could be financially or something else. And I would love to hear your senses to for those people that you know, that it's not that they're close to what you're saying. They may well be feeling, yes, there is something being called of me, but how on earth can I descend into myself? How on earth can I go into that cocoon when there is just so much out there that is asking me to pay attention, to attend to that? What
Michael Meade (42:13)
Yeah.
Lian (42:14)
Do I do with this?
Michael Meade (42:15)
Yeah, it's really... it is a serious problem. And it's understandable that people can feel really stuck or my God, wait a minute. Imagine a young person now entering the world, being told that they're not gonna have a job because AI is gonna take most of the jobs. And by the way, the world might end any moment. That's what young people are facing.
Lian (42:35)
Completely. My children are eighteen and sixteen. And so just the cusp of exactly what you're talking about, and
Michael Meade (42:40)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Lian (42:44)
You know how normally I think in so many previous ages as parents, you would be able to kind of guide your children as to like, you know, these are normal things that happen and then there's this, then there's that.
Michael Meade (42:57)
Right.
Lian (42:58)
I notice in some ways it goes back to what you're saying.
It does require that we speak from a deeper place, a more archetypal place, but there is also
Michael Meade (43:06)
Yes. Yes.
Lian (43:09)
That recognition of I don't know what's coming. I've not faced those kinds of challenges that they're facing.
Michael Meade (43:16)
Yes.
Lian (43:16)
But yes, you're completely right.
Michael Meade (43:18)
I was thinking about young people when I wrote the book. I was thinking about parents. I was thinking about people who feel some responsibility on a cultural level. That's why the middle of the book is rites of passage.
In the middle of the book, I show that rites of passage is archetypal. And like with an audience, I'll say how many people have gone through separation where you're separated from everything and everyone.
And almost every person raises their hand. And how many people have gone through ordeals where you don't know what's coming next and you feel like your life is unravelling and you're in the dark? And some people are putting up two hands. And then I say, and then how many people got through that and got welcomed back by a community of people who understood that they had transformed and were capable of confirming and blessing the change in their life? And only a few hands go up and I'm not usually trusting them too much either.
So what happens archetypally is we all go through, we've already been through it. I mean, people that are older, we're all survivors. And because we haven't had the kind of lens to understand that each time we get depressed, or each time we feel lost, or each time our life does unravel, because most people will have several unravellings by the time they're thirty-five. Each time we have survived it. So there's a part of us that knows something. There's a survivor part of us. And I'm saying that survivor part is connected to the deep soul and that we can trust it because it's connected to something older than us. All souls are old souls. They're... the soul is ancient and immediate at the same time. So when it comes to our children, grandchildren and so on, we need to help them with that. We need to start, you know, saying there's something in you that knows how to survive, and maybe we can say, here's how I got through it. But if we haven't figured out how we got through it, then we're as confused as they are. And but we have to give it a try. The other thing I've learned is young people... I've worked with a lot of young people at risk. And they're watching the so-called adults really carefully to see, first of all, what the hell's wrong around here. But second of all, are there any interesting people?
And so the idea is to become an older, fully alivened, weird person. And I say weird because it's another old
Lian (45:39)
He's
Michael Meade (45:40)
Word that means to have a foot in each world. That when young people see they don't want to just see someone who does acts right or does the good thing. That can be interesting, but only up to a certain point. They want to see someone who's unique and in a sense weird because they can relate to that. And that makes a difference.
So I'm getting towards the end of the book and I'm realising, yeah, people are probably going, well, wait a minute, what do I do? Even if I get to this point of going, no, I want to be one of those people who lives with meaning and purpose. I want to be not artificial but authentic. So I just go into the idea of practice. That the first problem is actually accepting that things need to change. The second one is then allowing the change to happen, which requires not knowing and trusting, and that's when something arises, because it's inside us, it's there. And then the third thing is how do we sustain it? And in order to sustain a meaningful life, a person needs practices or a practice or practices.
So I go back to the ancient idea in India, where they say there's two roads of practice. One road is the becoming better known now, road of meditation, contemplation, solitude and turning inside. And one of the images for that is arriving at a deep self-centred place where there's a still pool and blissful peacefulness. It's a profound thing. It's available for anyone who wants to go there or can learn how to go there. And someone doing that develops a place. They develop a refuge inside themselves, a place they can go. You know, you look at the latest political thing and you go, my God, well I think I'll go meditate. And then you wind up back in this deep self-centred place, which is an ancient tradition.
The other road is the opposite road, not the still pool at the centre, but the core energy of creation at the centre, the other road is the creative arts, the expressive arts. They're both the same centre, by the way. It's just it has two sides. One side is stillness and centredness, the other side is intensity and expressiveness.
And so I'm looking at the instruments hanging on the wall and I know a lot of... I love music, know a lot of musicians, and I'm always reminding people music is the healing road. In every culture, music was the healing road. So music is a healing thing that's available to everyone. And if a person just tracks what they love about music or learns certain kinds of chants and things, they can use that to settle themselves and centre themselves. And all of the arts are really expressions of the depth of the soul.
And so some people are attracted to the expressive arts and they should go as far as they can with whatever pulls them. Other people are more attracted to the interior meditative arts and they should go as far as they can go. And then most people go to one and go to the other. There's no real rules here. You can have more than one practice. You can be meditative and be expressive. I know, you know, musicians that create music and compose and write songs, and they also meditate and dwell on the other road.
And so there's no rules about it. And if a person lives long enough, they're more than likely going to change their practices. I'll mention one other thing because it involves both in a way. Dreamwork is a core ancient practice that has a meditative quality, but it also has a creative imagination quality.
And so dreamwork is one of those things almost like a bridge between the two other roads. So I'm saying, yeah, how do we handle all this? We have to have an inner life. The inner life requires practices that give us a sense of centre, a sense of grounding, a sense of depth, and that becomes our refuge. And once you have that, no one can take it away from you.
You can be locked up in prison and you can meditate all the way down and you're not really in prison. You can, you know, and even
Lian (49:52)
Yeah.
Michael Meade (49:54)
If your voice is being, you know, silenced somehow, I remember there's all these stories about I forget the name of it. It was a British explorer who was in prison before he became a famous mountain climber. And while he was in prison, he realised he never knew he was a writer, but in prison all he wanted to do was write. And of course they didn't have paper or anything. So he would steal the toilet paper and he was writing this book on toilet paper while he was imprisoned and not allowed to express himself at all. Yeah.
Lian (50:26)
Wow.
Michael Meade (50:27)
And it was in prison in the darkness that he realised he was a writer.
And so we're all in a sense in the prison of confusion. And it's in those uncertainties, in the not knowing that we find out, wait a minute, you know what means something to me? You know, like a... People can get a tremendous amount out of singing. And a lot of people are afraid to sing because someone told them you don't have a good voice or you can't hold a tune or you're out of rhythm. Well, who cares? The point isn't to fit into a mould. The point is to find one's own voice. And sometimes that voice is musical from the vocal cords, but sometimes it's musical through the strings of a stringed instrument or whatever it might be. That whole road, which now they call music an industry, which is an insult to music. All
Lian (51:18)
Yeah.
Michael Meade (51:19)
Right. All those things that now are commodified were essentially connections to the divine, to the eternal, that give a person refuge and also that feed a person's imagination. And so the way we get through it, first thing is try to keep trying to awaken to who we already are. That's our... because that gives us protection as well as purpose.
And then the other thing is then get practices that can sustain that. And since we're there, I'll add one other thing. Everyone needs friends of the soul. And so I really found it ironic when Facebook started because people were kind of well, I got eight hundred friends, I have nine hundred friends and all... they're not, those aren't friends.
Lian (52:04)
Yeah.
Michael Meade (52:06)
They don't know you. You know, friends are someone who knows you and they still like you. You know, friends are deep. And so they used to say if you can have three or four, three or four friends of the soul, you're fine. So we need people that are the friends of our soul that we can confide in. And our young people need that too. They need that opportunity to recognise what they're really needing is inside themselves. But the other thing they're needing is some kind of guidance that's genuine, and then some kind of friends that are also authentic and genuine.
And practices and then trusting the world is renewing itself as it always has done. Doesn't mean it's not going to be hard. No one knows how long it's gonna take. So another old idea that I reference in the book, Kali Yuga, the ancient idea from India, Kali means dark, yuga means a really long time. And so you could say, we're in the Kali Yuga, we're in the dark times. The question of how long it takes is determined by the amount of people who awaken. It's gonna change eventually no matter what. But if people awaken, the change then becomes more conscious. It happens sooner and there's more benefit to everyone because the culture changes and everyone gets a... well, when it changes, you imagine what comes back is the things that were forgotten, the ancient wisdom, which is that humane values that each individual soul counts. Each person is gifted and aimed. Each person is blessed at the level of the soul. The idea that everybody has the right or the opportunity and needs to be fed properly, to have... you know, all the things that don't exist in the current political climate are what's gonna try to come back. And it can only come back through the awakening of individual souls. And then those souls need to have practices to sustain their awareness and their calling and that's how it changes.
Lian (54:17)
Gosh, so much, so much in what you just shared. I'm feeling like there's a whole other episode actually still to be spoken about. But want to come back to what you were saying there about creation and music. And I saw a quote that a friend had shared, funnily enough, on Facebook earlier. And
Michael Meade (54:41)
Yeah.
Lian (54:42)
Sometimes there are friends of the soul on Facebook.
Michael Meade (54:43)
Yeah, yeah. You can have both. Some people, yeah.
Lian (54:47)
Yes.
And there was a quote shared by Sun Ra, and it says, “The planet is asleep and it's the fault of musicians who are untrue to themselves.” And that just popped back into my mind. I only read it this... earlier today. And there was that idea of musicians that are untrue to themselves.
And if I recall correctly, in the book, you talk about this idea of honesty and this being a vital aspect of transformation. And so given it was kind of you talk about music that recalled that quote to mind, and I was like, there's something really interesting about this that creation and in needing to be honest, us needing to be honest with ourselves, that I would love to... for us to kind of finish this episode on if you're willing to talk a bit about that, please.
Michael Meade (55:46)
Totally is beautiful. And of course I saw Sun Ra once. I remember it was in Berkeley, California. He was an amazing musician. And he was taking jazz to a completely other level. It was really astounding. Oh.
Lian (55:58)
Wow.
Michael Meade (55:59)
Yeah, and he knew, he knew what a... but a lot of musicians know this. You think of some... Sinéad O'Connor just came to mind. And of course that winds up in a tragic
Lian (56:08)
Yeah.
Michael Meade (56:09)
Place. But she knew what a lot of artists know. At some point you have to be honest and authentic, or you're not actually being creative. And then sometimes that costs a lot. And so on. You made me think of another old idea, which when they shift to poetry, they say if the poets don't tell the truth, the muses will not visit them. So all of the
Lian (56:35)
Ooh.
Michael Meade (56:37)
Arts, yeah, all of the arts are trying to get to the edge, and the edge is the edge of not knowing, like those four people in that story.
The artists are all at the edge. Sometimes modern artists haven't gotten the full education in a sense and they don't know, they call it their work and their art. It's not ours. I mean, I mentioned that the cover of the book came as a vision, and then the question becomes, am I up to that vision? Can I stand with it? Will I put it on the cover of the book, you know?
A burning heart in the sky above the earth. Am I going to put that on the cover of the book? Yes, I am. Because I know now that that vision is actually not simply mine. It came to me.
And by putting that on the cover of the book, and I'm still answering your question, I'm saying the key to this whole thing is the heart. Not the mind, not the brain. I know the modern world is fascinated with the brain. The ancient world is fascinated with the heart.
And in the book, I use the ancient Greek word, like we need to turn everything around. We're at the place where almost everything isn't working. We need to turn it around. Of course, the Greeks have a word for everything. And their word for turning things around is metanoia. Meta means great or big beyond. Noia means deep knowing, knowledge, understanding. What turns everything around is, first of all, deep knowledge understanding, and that exists in the heart. And so you could say that the musician being true to themselves is tuning the chords of the heart more than they are clarifying their ideas.
And so in the book I call it the heart within the heart. That's where imagination resides. So maybe this is the right place to end. Core to the entire book is the heart within the heart. Core to the heart within the heart is imagination.
Back to the butterfly with its dormant cells that the scientists called imaginal cells, as if the muses got through in the lab. And we all have these imaginal cells that are the core of our heart. And if we cannot live to that, if in the critical moment, because all the artists are adding something to the world that doesn't exist, every generation has to rewrite all the love songs. There's... they're very written, but that's not good enough. Some of them are good. We need new ones because they need to express the heart at this time. And so coming from the heart means coming from the heart within the heart. It means coming from the ground of truth. I like the word authenticity, because the first author comes from the beginning and authentikos is the old Greek word. Author at the beginning means maker or creative... deep or essential self. When we make from the deep or essential self, we are putting something in the world that didn't exist and we are adding to the ongoing creation of the world. And maybe one other thing to say is in lot of cultures they say, all the elders are healers. And it's not a simplistic idea like all the elders suddenly become surgeons or something. What it means is the elder is someone who has become themselves. And they become not older, but elder. They become wiser, not just older. And in becoming that, they become a healer because they understand more of their own suffering and their own healing. And therefore they become capable of being empathic to other people's suffering, but also they understand how essential healing is. And so everyone has a calling. Many people are called to the arts. Music is essential. Everyone's called to be part of music because music is another old idea. Creation stories don't say in the beginning was the word. They say in the beginning was the sound. And that it began with a reverberation and a resonance that is continuing. So there's a whole bunch of things waiting to be rediscovered. For instance, artists and musicians and even scientists, we do not have a clear understanding of what those roles are anymore. I'm including science. The word science means knowledge. And so positivistic science, which is drifting into AI, is a distortion of the essence of knowing.
So we're... one of the great things you had said it earlier, it's the hardest time to be alive, and then it borders on the magical, because since nothing is working, that means everything is possible. And
Lian (1:01:33)
Yeah.
Michael Meade (1:01:34)
Since everyone, according to the old stories, has genius qualities and has meaning and an aim in their life, that means it's more possible to become ourselves. And anytime we are being our genuine selves, we are adding meaning and presence to the world. And that was our job to begin with.
Lian (1:01:55)
Now that feels like the place we should complete. My goodness. So beautiful. Thank you so much, Michael. Where can listeners find out more about you, the book you've just been speaking about, as well as course all of your other work? Where's the best place for all of that?
Michael Meade (1:02:17)
So home base is... our website is mosaicvoices.org, and there you can find all kinds... there's a free podcast, Living Myth, that comes out every week, goes all over the world. It's just me talking this way about stuff. And then as far as the book, and this is exciting because we've had problems in recent years, we can't ship books to England, for instance, because it costs too much.
But now Amazon is printing on demand all around the world. So The Heart of Transformation is available through Amazon in the British Isles and in Australia and in Europe, everywhere now, in English, because it's now being printed by Amazon and it doesn't have to be shipped from the US. So the book is available through Amazon on demand. And there's an ebook.
It's already out on all the platforms for ebooks, so it's available that way also. And then we have a free online event next week that's gonna pick up some of these themes and go deeper into them. And I'm gonna be doing that for the rest of the year. We offer through the website free events, free podcast, and other things that you can pay for, but the main idea is we're trying to get these ideas, images, and stories out, because we think of them as mythological medicine.
Lian (1:03:47)
Yeah. My goodness. Thank you so much. Thank you, Michael, for this conversation. But also the work you do, and there's something... it feels like there's a kind of something emerging from you that is so needed for these times. It feels like there's something different. I mean, you were wonderful when we spoke last time, but there feels like something coming from you and through you that is just so needed right now. So I really appreciate that.
Michael Meade (1:04:20)
Well, thank you for that. And it's always great talking with you, Lian.
Lian (1:04:25)
Oh, thank you again. And until the next time and your next book perhaps. Be well. And lots of love.
Michael Meade (1:04:28)
All right. Yes. Until then, be well. Be well. Okay.
Lian (1:04:34)
Bye bye.
Michael Meade (1:04:35)
Bye.
Lian (1:04:37)
Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Wild Sovereign Soul Show. If this conversation has stirred something in you that you want to follow deeper, that's exactly what UNIO is for. UNIO is our fellowship for Wild Sovereign Souls, and in our guidance circles, twice each month, Jonathan and I meet with UNIO members to meet you with whatever is challenging you, calling you, or both, and we will help you to move forward.
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