This episode begins with an ancient myth from a tribe along the Amazon River. The story tells how the inner soul of each person travels at night all the way the center of the cosmos. Once there, the soul receives a message that is brought back and shared with the tribe as a dream. Meade draws on this link between the individual soul and the cosmos to describe how ancient cultures imagined each person to be born with a speck of star hidden in their soul, buried in their heart, just waiting to become a person’s “guiding star.”
Each person is intended to contribute presence and meaning to the world and liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of our soul. We are here to awaken and learn how to express the uniqueness of our souls, and if we do that we add presence, being and creativity to the world and we become irreplaceable. If we don’t find the meanings hidden in our souls, the world loses presence and people who have no idea who they are come to dominate society.
Rumi wrote that: The world inside is bigger than the world outside. Meade argues that in this time of darkness and conflict, hatred and bigotry, we have to revive the sense of the inner magnanimity and enduring brilliance of the individual soul.
In the collapsing of the world, cosmology now means scientific study of the stars and the origins of the stars, something like that. But the old meaning of cosmos was the story that explains the entire world. And every group of humans, no matter how small a tribe, has a story for the whole universe because our imagination is that big.
One of the tribes—I’ve never seen them, I don’t know anything— I just read about this tribe, the Apenteri (sp?) along the Amazon River in South America. And I love them because they have an idea that says—like most traditional groups they think you have more than one soul. A soul is such a good thing why just have one? So you have a body soul which keeps the biology going and then when you die that’s the part that disappears. But then what they call the second soul is the dream soul.
This little tribe has this idea that when you go to sleep at night your body soul goes quiet, that allows you to sleep. And your dream soul goes all the way to the center of the cosmos where it gets a message that it tries to bring back and that’s a dream. I love this idea. And they follow through; they’re good about it. So someone has a dream, everybody gathers in the morning to find out the dream and then if it’s a dream that feels significant they all start to sing the dream back to the person who had the dream. And for weeks afterwards whenever they see the person they sing the dream back to them.
I mean, I think that’s better than most things on the internet. Then someone says, Well, if your soul went to the center of the cosmos and got a dream, why is your dream so damn weird? There’s an explanation for that. Because the average human—we only have our life with which to meet amazing things. So the message from the cosmos could be quite intricate and profound but for some reason they have to deliver it through a girl you knew in the third grade. Just because of the human quality there. You know what I’m saying? Anyway, I’m joking.
People used to understand that we were connected—the modern people think you have culture and nature, two different things. Forgetting that you have human nature and human nature is connected to great nature and we’ve been connected all along. It’s just that some mistake has occurred. Some fracturing has occurred. I think things have gotten so bad, it’s gone so far, that it intensifies the opportunity to reimagine the whole thing.
In other words, the next election is not going to fix the damage that has happened. Hopefully it produces a better cast. Because whatever that was, that was a disaster. But it’s not going to solve it. I’m not saying don’t be political and don’t vote and all that. I’m just saying to expect answers to come from places where the imagination doesn’t exist is not wise. And since the problem is globalwide climate change and globalwide collapse of cultural institutions, like we’re at the end of an era, to expect it simply to come from there is to make make a mistake.
I think it’s a better thing to imagine that we are on the edge of the birthing of something as yet unseen and that we have an effect on it. That’s how I’m thinking about it. So then that means we have to imagine a kind of capacity in ourselves that is greater than how we usually think of ourselves but not inflated—you get what I’m saying? There’s a difference between you thinking you’re great and having access to the great self hidden deep within.
The Poets have been talking about this for a long time. “Our greatest endeavor must be to make ourselves irreplaceable ... [so] that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die” ... [I]n fact [each of us] is unique and irreplaceable”—at least our soul is that if not our life. And it “is worth the whole Universe.” That’s a metaphysical, mystical turn. The connection to the universal is through the unique. All of us, each one of us, can and ought to give as much of ourselves as possible, give more than we can, exceed ourselves, go beyond ourselves, and “make ourselves irreplaceable.”[1] That’s Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish—I’m thinking about Spain a lot these days—the Spanish philosopher/poet.The idea is that we’re supposed to become a unique—well, each soul is unique. Did you get that memo? Nature only makes originals. Most of my arguments come from poems. I find them more believable than most thesis or treaties and to me they’re more convincing.
Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must even ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it you may come back again, simply by saying Here.
Listen: no two trees are the same to the Raven.
No two branches are the same to the Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
Then you are surely lost. But then just stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
And you must let it find you.
That’s called Lost, A Native Elders Poem. The idea that’s talking is about presence. And if the branches of the tree are unique—and they can be proven to be—then the soul of each person is unique. We are here to awaken to and learn how to express the uniqueness of our souls, and if we do that we add presence, we add being, we add creativity, and we become irreplaceable. I mean what else are you going to do? Watch the Trump campaigns over and over again? Watch the battling between people arguing over things that are not as serious as what’s really happening throughout the world? What are we going to do?
They say when things get really rough, there’s an acceleration of calling. Calling is that thing that is secretly trying to awaken each one of us to what we came to life to do. Did you get that memo? I know that the modern world thinks that the universe is accidental and therefore everybody in it is an accident. But let’s face it, that’s just a mistake. Or at least—there’s only two big, two philosophies about the human Soul. Either it’s empty and it gets filled with what happens around you. Or, it’s seeded and it’s aimed and it’s purposeful.
Maybe there’s a choice between how you consider it. But all the traditional cultures thought that each person came here with something—they used to call it the speck of star hidden in your Soul which is buried in your heart waiting for you to just realize how profound it is.I prefer to go that route and think that we’re not empty and we’re not just simply the victims of what’s going on, even though we are to some degree. I like this old idea that in difficult times there’s an acceleration of calling and the calling is calling to the thing that’s hidden in the Soul.
I call it the genius because I wanted to use a western word. The Western word genius doesn’t mean high IQ or unique talent. It means the spirit that’s already there. That’s the meaning of the word: the spirit that’s already there. We come in, bearing, or even being carried by, a spirit that intends to live into the world in a meaningful way. The old idea was each person is gifted and we came here to give our gifts. It becomes more important to do so when the world has gone wrong. Because people are fighting over things that are not satisfying. What was that old statement: You can never get enough of what you don’t really want? I think they should have that right over the top of Costco.
We’re just trying to get into the mood of the Soul. A few more of these little statements. The increasing disorientation in modern culture makes it more difficult for individuals to find a genuine orientation and purpose in life. The increasing disorientation that’s happening in the culture is making it more difficult than usual for people to find a genuine orientation and purpose.[2] And yet we are imbued with purpose if you take the old notion of the Soul.
William Stafford has a poem called When I Met My Muse. The Muse introduces him to a sense of himself that has this connection to beauty and awe and wonder. At the end the Muse says to him “I am your own way of” seeing the world. Whenever you look at the world through my eyes each moment is a kind of salvation. So there’s a way in which we could see redemption in the world, a salvation. I don’t mean in Christian terms. I mean more like fairy tale terms because redemption is about little things not about what happens after you die. Redemption is supposed to happen here: redeeming ourselves from just getting too distracted or not really living the life we came to live.
One more little statement: “Liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of our soul.”[3] What we’re looking for is inside. I hope you don’t mind me talking like that. When I was younger I would be more clever about it and try to deliver it sideways. But getting older and seeing what’s happening I’m just starting to say things straight up.
We’re here to do something meaningful. Humans have always been vehicles of meaning and if we don’t exercise the opportunity to do that, then we are by default letting people take over who have no idea who they are. I mean isn’t that the problem? If someone knows who they are, they automatically have compassion because they know their own suffering and they recognize when someone else is suffering and they have empathy and they don’t have to work on it or pretend to have it. They just have it because they know who they are in the world. If we don’t inhabit the world in that way then we’re by default giving it to people who will probably never know who they are. And I don’t want to let anybody off the hook, but when you see the intensification of the misuse of power of all kinds you can intuit the emptiness of the people that are doing it; that have to fill themselves with a sense of presence by using power in a way that demeans or harasses or hurts other people.
You can intuit the emptiness behind that. One way to change that—regulations won’t change it even though we need regulations—we change it by bringing more presence into the world and bringing more being so that people begin to recognize what it’s like when people are fully present and it changes that dynamic or the imbalance of power.
The old notion of genius is some people are really smart and then there’s the rest of us. But the meaning of it, really, is everybody is born with the genius quality inside them self and each time it appears it’s unique.
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There is a profound thing in there because everyone has genius qualities but they need to be blessed by people outside ourselves to become fully real. There are things to begin with, but you know how we are: we can’t quite trust ourselves and so someone from the outside has to see it in us. Not only that, when people from the outside see the flame of genius in us, it grows. It grows in two ways. When we recognize it in ourselves and when people recognize it from without our selves and acknowledge or bless it.
I’m saying these things in order to encourage the burning of the flame of the deep imagination of the soul in a time that lacks imagination and lacks courage.
I like some aspects of the hero’s journey. I like the idea that there’s a journey. I like the idea that it’s seeking something and it might bring it back for the benefit of everybody. That’s the underlying ideas of the hero’s journey. Over time I’ve become less intrigued with the idea that it’s always looking for it outside; less intrigued with the fact that it’s so damn masculine, and that it easily morphs into power figures and even violent video games that seem to have heroes in them and so on.
So I started to think about a genius myth. Because genius exists inside everybody and you don’t even have to go out to look for it that much. You could actually go in to look for it. That what we’re looking for is hidden inside not simply outside. I don’t know if that’s helpful. It’s helpful to me. It’s also helpful to me to think that the qualities that are normally considered heroic, which could be imagined as just deeply human or, in this case genius, occur in a person regardless of their age or their social background or their gender orientation or any other quality that you can apply to someone. That the qualities are there in everybody. It’s either in every human or it’s actually not there. You get what I’m saying?
I’m arguing against the specialization of genius. Naturally there are people that are super geniuses at music, or they’re more intelligent than everybody. That’s not the point I’m after. The point I’m after is everybody has a unique quality in their soul that you could call genius, that if they live it out, contributes something to the world that otherwise would not be there and that at this time the world needs that from as many people as possible rather than more heroics.
No solitary idea, no matter how great, no single notion or shared belief, can shift the weight of the world towards a meaningful future. But the accumulated vitality of many lives, lived more fully, might become a meaningful make weight in the balance between time and eternity. Strange as it may seem, individual consciousness forms the make weight and living out the hidden meanings within life helps to balance the weight of this world. Each living being, wrapped around an invisible eternal thread, each one a story breaking out of the wall of time to sing its own unfinished song. So that’s that idea.
You could ask the question: If everybody has this giftedness and genius, why isn’t everybody doing it? That’s a good question. A couple of reasons: the Apenteri (sp?) down on the Amazon River said because everyone has something crosswise on their heart. And that crosswise thing cancels the wise thing beneath it and until we learn to take the crosswise off we don’t live the wisdom that’s buried in our souls. That’s how they do it really fast. You don’t even have to go to college to get that.The other reason you could say is because it’s a scary thing to become oneself and therefore most people try to be someone else. And not only that, most families support the notion. I mean, I don’t know about you, or your family, but my family—I mean families decide, oh here’s—I think you should be like this. My family thought they needed a little priest and then when I got in so much trouble that it didn’t look like that would happen they thought, well maybe you could become a doctor; anything but actually turn out to be yourself.
I hope that’s helpful. Because you actually have people where the family wanted a son and here comes the daughter and unless everybody suddenly woke up, which they tend not to do, you then have to live in a kind of captured spellbound way that doesn’t work for the soul. So the last piece of arguing against against the flatness of the world:
I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions.I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado.
I would say leaf. I would say tree.
I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews.
I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words
turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew
into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough
to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me
would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.
That’s Aimé Césaire, the African writer.[4] You hear the whole world of temples and gold mines is inside the soul. Isn’t that what Rumi said? Inside is a world bigger than what’s outside. And the person says, I don’t know—not me. But then Rumi goes on and he says aren’t your eyes small but can’t they see great things? The soul is even greater than that.
I’m arguing in this time of darkness and conflict and hatred and bigotry and collapse of imagination, that we have to revive the sense of the magnanimity and the brilliance of the individual soul. Even at the risk of being a little bit foolish or making some pretty big mistakes. Because the alternative is to allow the current way that it’s going to continue to go.
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