Special Edition: Michael Meade, Finding your Calling

At this time of crisis Earth, Mosaic offerings bring the medicine of myth and story in ways that inspire creative imagination and genuine hope.Drawing upon decades of “hands on” work in the trenches of healing and transformation, Mosaic presentations and practices bring deeply intuitive and intensely imaginal approaches to pressing personal and societal issues.Mosaic’s Living Myth presentations and publications demonstrate how each person, regardless of age or background, is imbued with genius and able to contribute to a transformation of life on Earth.Participants learn to transform personal struggles and traumas into creative expressions that bring meaning and purpose to individual lives and also contribute to greater sense of genuine human community.

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.

https://www.mosaicvoices.org/

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/earth-ancients--2790919/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, it's Halloween time for those of you in the
United States. I think Halloween's celebrated in Europe in some
other countries as well, but here in the US it
is a big deal. And it's the actual ending of
summer and the beginning of autumn, so that means the
fall weather is upon us. And I have noticed it

(00:56):
is getting colder by the way. November two, set your
clocks back one hour. That means that it's going to
be darker earlier here in the United States. You know,
I think there's a I think it's either Arizona or
there's one other state that is not participating in Daylight

(01:16):
Saving Time. But anyhow, happy Halloween, and also remember to
get up in your outfits, your devil, your warlock, or
your witch outfit or whatever to scare away the evil spirits.
That's what the ancestors, what our ancestors were doing in

(01:38):
Europe and in other countries, they would dress up on
Halloween and gather and move out the spirits in the house,
in the barn wherever you were living, so that you
had the rest of the year to live in peace. Hey,
this is Cliff, your host of Earth ancients. This is

(01:59):
a special edition of the program, and we are welcoming
somebody who I've known about for a year years. Actually
his name is Michael Mead.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
And if there is.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Anyone on the planet who you can consider kind of
a storyteller but also an avatar, someone who is very
versatile in mythology, anthropology and wisdom traditions, that's Michael Mead.
And he's probably best known for his work with Robert
Bligh in the Men's Movement in the nineteen eighties and nineties.

(02:35):
But he is somebody who is brilliant and is also
again a storyteller who mixes mythology and storytelling into his talks.
And we're going to hear from him shortly to talk
about ancient history and how it applies to us today

(03:00):
and personal success, personal activation, so that we're not lost
in space right now here in the United States, we
are not only dealing with political unrest, but there's also
a sense of personal unrest and a lot of issues

(03:22):
coming up with work with income, with just how stable
our country is. We're not really stable right now. There's
a lot of infighting and I don't have to say
anymore other than you know, it's not very comfortable for
a lot of us, including me, and so hopefully it'll pass.

(03:44):
It won't be an everlasting kind of thing. But the
program today is called responding to the Planet's Calling, and
it's all about your own personal calling. It also has
to do with what you're here to do, and we're

(04:04):
each incarnating on this planet known as Earth, to be
of service, to also have satisfaction, and also to have
a sense of purpose, and that can mean a ton
of things. Working with your kids doesn't have to be

(04:25):
working with other people, can be working with your family
as a parent, as a mother, as a father, making
sure your kids are taken care of, that they're happy
and healthy, and they're being prepared for adulthood, so forth
and so on. But for me, when I hear about
a calling, it's more a deep sense of purpose. And

(04:52):
I think that's really critical for us to consider today
as having purpose in our life, because if you don't
have a purpose, you're just living in nine to five
existence and that gets really boring pretty quickly. And you
wake up, you go to work, you and you repeat
the thing, and then you have two days of the
weekend just to sit and sleep, which I have to

(05:13):
admit I love to sleep. In I mean, I mean
I get.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Up at Let's see, I get up at seven thirty
every morning. That's not that early.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
I have friends that get up at at five o'clock
to go to work. They have to commute. But I
get up at seven thirty. But there's some mornings I'll
get up and I'll sleep till eleven. I'll wake up
at six seven thirty. Excuse me, I say eleven. I
meant to say I'll sleep till nine.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Very rarely.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Well, I sleep till ten, but I'll get up and
I'll wake up, and then I'll kind of lay in
bed and then I'll turn around and I'll.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Sleep for another hour or more.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
So anyhow, So today's program is responding to the planet's calling.
And my guess is Michael Mead. We're really lucky today

(06:38):
to have a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology,
and psychology that's.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
None other than Michael Meade.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
And I've been a huge fan of his for many,
many years. And I don't know how he did this.
We pulled a rabbit out of the hat to get
him on the program because he's so in demand and
so great interest to so many people, and we're gonna
talk to him today about the past and the present
and a theme that he's been bringing up quite a bit. So, Hey, Michael,

(07:11):
welcome to Earth Anterests. Great to have you on the program.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Great to be with you. Cliff.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
You have been presenting a series on YouTube on calling,
and I have found it so important because of our
current situation here in the United States, Specifically, people are depressed,
they feel lost, they feel disenfranchised, and I want you

(07:41):
to explain to us what calling means and if you can,
can you talk about how our ancestors received and acknowledged
the calling?

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah, I'll try.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
So.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
It actually begins with a kind of decision about the
nature of the human soul, and there's typically two big theories.
There's lots of smaller theories, but the two big options
are that a person comes into the world with an
empty soul, and the Latin for that was tabula rasa
the scrape clean table. There's nothing in there. And then

(08:22):
your parents write on you, and your neighborhood writes on you,
and your teachers write on you, and your cultures write
on you, and you become the aggregation of those things
that have impressed you. Or been impressed upon you. That's
the one theory that's not a very ancient theory actually,
but it's a very popular theory. The ancient theory to

(08:43):
bring the past into it, found in almost all cultures
around the world, is that each person comes into the
world already gifted and already aimed. And so that's the
idea of the pre not pre shaped, but pre scripted soul,
not in the sense that it's predetermined that it has

(09:04):
to go a certain way, but it's more like a
living plot line. And so the components of that gifted soul,
not the empty soul now, but the gifted soul are components.
One of them might call it the genius. Genius is
an old Latin term that doesn't mean high IQ or
specific talent. It means the spirit that's already there. That's

(09:25):
the definition of genius. Each person comes into the world
with the genius quality or genius spirit in their soul
that is at the core of their heart and at
the core of their being. And then what happens. Because
we are born into the realm of time and space,
we forget this thing that is coming in with us,

(09:49):
so we don't know about it. Our families don't know
about it. The family doesn't know the gifts or the
aims or the destiny of their own children. It's set
up that way because of eventually the children will leave
home because there's a missing thing. They cannot find it
at home. They have to enter the world in order
to awaken this thing that turns out to be inside.

(10:11):
Calling is when the person goes out into the world
and has an experience of awakening, which is called the calling.
It calls a person into a greater sense of self,
into a greater sense of meaning, into a direction that's meaningful.
But that calling is calling to the genius that's already

(10:32):
in there. I think that's essential to understanding it. The
calling may seem to come from the outside, but it's
calling to qualities that already exist in a person. And
that's why it's so meaningful and so profound. So this
is one of the oldest ideas. And so if we
begin with the notion that each person, each soul born,

(10:54):
is unique, each person is unique. That means they're going
to have a unique blend of talents and capacities, gifts
and aims, and the calling is trying to awaken that.
When a person responds to the calling. They are bringing
something to the world that isn't already in the world.
Their unique creative capacity, their unique genius qualities, and you know,

(11:19):
things that make not just them meaningful, but there are
gifts given to the human community, and it makes everybody
more meaningful. And so I'm not sure you asked the
thing about how ancient cultures would have seen the calling.
What I'm talking about when I say genius is the
spirit that we're born with. That's from the pre Roman culture.

(11:41):
So and then you can find that there's a beautiful
story from the Mayan culture about the boy is born
and he's given the name Bodare, which in its old
translation means gifted, it means purposeful, it means talented, it
means destined. In other words, he represents all children born

(12:03):
that have the qualities in them. And then what happens.
A person has to wander into the world and and
in a sense, in counter circumstances that awaken these qualities
from within. That awakening is responding to the call.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
And are there writings that you define as a subject
matter calling in perhaps Greek or you mentioned Maya. I
think of the Maya texts the Pupavu, which describes the
twins but perhaps has some fragments of calling in it.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Okay is a good example. It's a very unusual book,
very mysterious book, but it has in it a creation
story where, uh, they have the multiple gods like a
lot of ancient cultures. Did modern people think they didn't
have the notion of the singular god. But that's a
complete misunderstanding. They had a diversity of gods that were

(13:07):
secretly one deity. That's the real old idea. But anyway,
the Mayan gods, like one of them is Heart of Heaven,
Heart of Earth. Those are the names they have. They
create the world what we call the world, and particularly
the earthly world of mountains and rivers and streams and
forests and all that kind of stuff. And then when

(13:28):
it's finished, they feel like there's something missing. And it's
Heart of Heaven who starts to try to figure out
what's missing. And he comes to the conclusion that what's
missing is two things. A being that is conscious of
being part of creation, and also a being that is
grateful for the gift of life. And so then he

(13:52):
begins to try to create that kind of being. He
makes three tries at it. The first try he tries
to make it out of mud, and then a heavy
ring comes and the beings melt. The second one they
make it out of sticks, and then what happens is
those sticks become very rigid in their hearted and hard headed,
and they keep, they keep creating technologies that are offensive

(14:15):
to the animals and the plants, and so finally Heart
of Heaven has to bring a heavy rain down to
demolish those sticks. And the third try they try to
make it out of corn, and of course corn is
the sacred element in Mayan cosmology, and so it's then
those corn people who wind up having this realization that

(14:39):
they have a gift of life, that they are gifted,
that life is a gift that exists in them, and
the implication is uniquely but also that has the realization
that creation itself is meaningful. And so then the idea
is we have all descended from them. So that part
of the story, to me, it's connected to the may

(15:02):
tale I was telling where the boy is considered to
be gifted. Oh there, he's the gifted one, but he's
really everyone. And so I think it does show up
in the pulp o Bool which is a wild magical mythology,
but it shows up in the creation part of the
Pulpa bull and so so creation stories which exist all

(15:23):
over the world, and most cultures have more than one
creation story. Even the Bible has two creation stories in it,
as if to say there cannot be one story of creation,
that creation is itself an expression of diversity and multiplicity
that requires more than one story. And so there's a
way in which understanding human life requires that we understand creation.

(15:50):
And because of this, if a person is gifted and
aimed let's say they're aimed at being a musician, or
aimed at being a poet, or aimed at being a
or aimed at being an inventor, that that's what is
waiting to awaken in them when it awakens that person.
Each person that awakens that way will bring something to

(16:11):
the world that is not already in the world. In
other words, we become co creators, or we join the
creative energy of the world. And of course everyone until
modern times understood that creation wasn't something that happened back there,
and we're in the afterglow of it. Creation is ongoing
every day. The forest rises and falls all the time,

(16:34):
the trees that were the tallest become the fallen down,
breaking down elements from which the next forest comes. We've
been living in that mystery of recreation all along, except
modern people have separated from that for various reasons. And
in that separation, modern people have found themselves separate, separate
from the creative energies that exist inside each person. All

(16:59):
the people weighing for the next election to fix all
that is broken now are going to be waiting for
a long time. It's a matter of reimagining culture and
recreating it. And if everybody is gifted and aimed, then
no one has to be a hero and fix it
all or pretend they're doing that, because it's going to

(17:20):
be the awakening of the creative energies in the gifted
people that are uniquely all around the world. That's what
changes the world, not a single idea and certainly not
a committee meeting. What changes the world. They used to say,
change the soul, change the world. And what they mean
is each soul is capacity to bring elements of change

(17:41):
and recreation and beauty and healing to the world. And
that's I think why the whole dynamic of calling is
so important, right now we as an old saying that
in dark times there's an acceleration of calling, when the
structures are all breaking down, they're no longer in the way,

(18:02):
and there's more calling kind of enters the world. We
change this world by each of us responding as best
we can to our own calling. And as near as
I can tell, no one lacks a calling, because no
one lacks a soul.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
But Michael, in the muck and the mire, in the
despair that we feel, how do we recognize the calling?

Speaker 3 (18:28):
So if this stuff was simple, it wouldn't have been
so readily forgotten. It's a bit tricky. If the person
is unique, then the calling can be unique. And so
but here's an old idea. It's a kind of an
old rule that by say twenty two years of age,
each person has a genuine experience of the core depth

(18:49):
of their own soul, or else they die. It's an
old idea that is to say, everyone is gifted when
they come into the world, and in many stories, everyone
is aimed at a destiny, and everybody, by birthright is
going to have at least one experience of what that

(19:10):
is inside them. That is this combination of genius qualities
and calling that leads to a meaningful life. And so
people always say why do you know that? And of
course you know you have to go to personal experience
in a way. I mean, you can know what's in books,
but you know it in your own body and soul
when it happens to you. So when I was thirteen,

(19:32):
my thirteenth birthday.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
My.

Speaker 3 (19:36):
Aunt my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday.
And I had learned from sad experience not to say
what I wanted because I wasn't going to get it.
We're a poor family, and if I said what I
wanted and I didn't get it, we're all that much
more depressed for a while. So I just said it
doesn't matter, I don't want anything. But my aunt asked
me what I was interested in, and at thirteen, I
was interested in history. I was trying to understand what

(19:58):
the hell happened here. I was going up in a
poor neighborhood where everybody had lost their dreams and it
was kind of like despairing in a way, and I
wanted to understand it. And I thought from what I
had heard, history could explain it. But actually it can't.
So my aunt goes off to the bookstore to get
me a history book. First person in my family to
go to a bookstore, so further I know. And she's

(20:19):
very short, and she asks where the history books are,
and they point to an upper shelf and she goes
and reaches up, gets a book, they wrap it, she
gives it to me. I start to tear the paper off,
and on the cover there's like a young guy sitting
on a flying horse shooting an arrow into the air.
And I go, whoa this And my aunt goes, oh,
it's the wrong book. Give it back, and I'm going, no,
I want this book. When like tugging, and then I

(20:42):
ripped the rest of the paper off and it says
Mythology by Edith Hamilton. So thirteen years old, I am
given the right wrong book, which is the language that
I'm intended to learn about and live with. I read
the whole book that night, almost the entire book, and
I literally, in this you know house in the in

(21:05):
this New York city, in a poor neighborhood, I'm going,
this is it, This is it. I don't have to
grow up to qualify. I don't have to be not
a poor person to qualify.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
I don't have to go to school to qualify. I'm
just finding this language in which I qualify to be
part of the whole meaning of the world. That's what
happened to me. But my family actually didn't know, what
are you talking about? What is that book? You know?
You ran? Is right?

Speaker 2 (21:33):
You know?

Speaker 3 (21:33):
And then I go to the teachers in school and
tell them. They say, what this makes no sense? So
I have this knowledge now, this which is a tune
to me because I'm going to turn out to be
a star teller. And so the right wrong book just
landed there at a time when I had enough self
awareness to realize, oh, this is totally meaningful to me.

(21:54):
But it probably took me twenty years to realize what
that meant in my life and also to get it
confirmed by others. So here's the other thing. Everyone has
a gift or a mixture of gifts and abilities, and
everyone has a calling, but those gifts have to be
confirmed by someone outside ourselves. It's just part of the

(22:15):
understanding of human community that all on ourselves on our own,
we won't trust ourselves, but as someone we respect says, yeah,
you're pretty good at that. Like I had a friend
who could just picked up a guitar and could play music.
I mean, I never did figure out how he did it.
It was like a gift he could just play, but
he didn't really own it because he was insecure about it.

(22:39):
And then when he finally met an advanced guitar player
who said to him, you're pretty good, that was it.
Then he knew that with his gift. So it's our gift,
but it has to be confirmed by someone outside of ourselves,
and that gives us the hint that what is gifted
to us, which means that we are intended to give
that gift is also a gift for others. It's a

(23:00):
gift for the community, not just for one self. And
that's why I say, if we want to change the world,
the more people that awaken to what their gifts naturally
are and what they're calling should be, that's how the
world changes. Someone over here is figuring out how to
purify streams and lakes, and someone over here is figuring

(23:21):
out how to heal certain illnesses with natural means, and
someone over here is figuring out how to negotiate conflicts
that seem unresolvable. And when the more that's happening. The
more people are responding to those callings that are aligned
with their energenius, then all of a sudden, it's starting
to change from below, and then you get ready to

(23:44):
change the structures and the political dynamics. So I think
it comes down to, as the ancient people said, the
individual psyche. And that's why I keep talking about calling
so much.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
We're gonna take a short commercial break to allow our
sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with
my guest today, Michael Meade discussing your Calling. Will be
right back. My guest today is Michael Meade. He is

(24:57):
a storyteller at expert in mythology and anthropology, noted for
his work with ancient civilizations, and the program today is
Understanding your Calling. It sounds like in the story of
your thirteen year old discovery of this book on mythology

(25:17):
is a wonderful representation. But it sounds like you're saying
that when we incarnate, we are given signs and were
prepared in some way to receive the calling. Is that
a good interpretation?

Speaker 3 (25:33):
Yeah, That the world will collude with the personal life
so that that which already exists within us gets awakened,
provoked and awakened. A lot of stuff happened to me
when I was thirteen, six months after I got that book.
I'm growing up in a counter rough neighborhood. I'm in

(25:53):
local gang. We called it a crew, and we with
the younger crew, which trying to imitate the older guy
who who were the hoods, you know, And we're running
around acting that out to one degree or another. And
we used to go to this movie theater on Saturdays,
but we didn't have any money, say we would sneak in.
We had all kinds of ways to sneak into this theater.
And one day we're in there and I have to

(26:14):
go up to the bathroom. It's upstairs in above where
everybody's sitting. And I'm on my way up to the bathroom.
I'm still thirteen and thirteen and a half now, and
all of a sudden, there's two guys in front of me,
and two guys behind me, and two guys on my side,
and they're all bigger than me, and they're going with me,
or really I'm going with them. Now we get to
the bathroom, they throw me onto the floor next to

(26:34):
a urinal, and now there's seven of them, and they're
surrounding me and they've got like knives and a couple
of them have sharpened monkey wrenches, and I realized who
they are. They're this group called the monkey Wrench and
they're known for doing lots of harm and they are
going to hurt me. And it turns out that it's
because his friend of mine, who had lost his mind

(26:55):
kind of, he had some crazy reasons, started calling them
names and everything, and they couldn't catch them, but they
caught me. And so I'm there, you know, looking when
people are going to do home, they get it like
a stare in their eyes. And I didn't know it
until then, but I saw it, and I realized that
I'm going to get really hurt. And looking at a
psychology psychologically now I realize what happened is my ego departed.

(27:18):
Just thought I don't want to be around for this.
And what happened is I started telling a story, laying
there on the floor, thinking I'm about to die something
in me. No rehearsal, no preparation, no plan, just starts
telling a story. And as I do that, their eyes
lose that glare and literally their hands go down and

(27:41):
the weapons are now, you know, hanging down. And then
eventually the leader of the group says, well, all right,
you know we're going to let you go, but you
tell your friend never talk that way about us again.
So now not only have the language of myth, I
now have become a storyteller in a life of life
or death situation. And the same thing happens. I go

(28:03):
right back to my gang the guys and say I
found something stronger than weapons. And I tell them and
they go, oh, we got to go get those guys,
And I'm saying, you're missing the point. They didn't hurt me,
and they didn't because I told them a story. There's
something stronger than just attacking each other with the weapons.
But everybody they ignored me, and I had another piece

(28:25):
of the story, but I had to have that confirmed
later too. So I'm trying to say that everybody has this.
Not everybody has dramatic stories like that, but everybody has
their story. And hidden inside a person's story are certain
occasions when this inner quality awakened, but it usually doesn't
get confirmed because the culture has forgotten about it. So

(28:48):
even though it's tricky and not easy, I say to people,
go back over your life storily story, especially teenage years
and adolescent and look at anything that was surprising. Sometimes
what happens is the young person realizes what their gift
is and they try to share it with the family
that had different intentions for them. They didn't want a musician,

(29:13):
or they didn't, you know, they wanted a doctor or
whatever it is, and so it gets becomes latent, it
gets repressed. But you can go back and find these moments.
And so that's what I did. I went back and
I found those moments and realized and when you find them,
they keep getting bigger. In other words, I go back

(29:34):
to that story of being about to be I think,
really harmed or killed by really rough guys with weapons.
And then it explains to me. Why how many years
later was it? I don't even know how many years later.
I was about maybe thirty years old when the first

(29:54):
book I wrote, The Water of Life. They paid me
some money for it. It was like a total surprise.
And I had this, you know, because I'd never written before,
and I had they paid me a lot of money actually,
and so then I had this money, What am I
going to do? And I decided to start a nonprofit
to work with violent youth. So yeah, so I for

(30:17):
decades have worked with gangs and street kids and prisoners
and people who wind up getting caught up in violence
because I have some understanding of it, but also because
I had that awakening and that kind of circumstance.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:32):
So I'm trying to suggest that when we find these
places where our own gifts become revealed and we have
moments of awakening, they can keep expanding that. You know,
I understand more about that experience now than I did then.
It's gotten bigger inside of me. It actually gives me courage.

(30:53):
I can go into a situation that's not clear and
there's fear and everything, and I can draw on that
because there's something that happened to me. It's not an
abstract quality, it's actually a lived experience.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
What about the individuals who are working in the nine
to five existence who have no awareness for the calling?
Is it subtle hints? Is it events that are shown
to them that they need to wake up and consider
another vocation?

Speaker 2 (31:27):
What do we how do we work with that?

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Well? One thing I like old saying, and one of
them is sometimes the obstacle is in the way, and
sometimes the obstacle is the way, in other words, a
person's working hard day and night, Like I was doing
that as a young father and a husband with four children.
And then because people say to me, well, even if
you have an idea what it is, how do you

(31:52):
find the time? You can't make money at it. You
have to And so I was a young father with
four kids. I had to make money. And I knew
that part of my calling involved language and ideas and stories.
And I would get up an hour and a half
or two hours before the kids. And anyone who has

(32:12):
had kids know that as they get older, go into school,
they get up earlier. So I was getting up earlier
and earlier because I needed an hour and a half,
better two hours, if I could get it before everybody
was up. If I could do that three days in
a row, I'd be okay. I was nourishing and feeding
my psyche. I was feeding my imagination while I was

(32:32):
also feeding the family. And so I was told you
have to pick one or the other. Either you're going
to be you know, you're going to work and be productive,
or you're going to be some creative person who you
know scrambles for existence your whole life now you can
combine the two, and once you get a feeling for it,
you know that you have to nourish it. And even

(32:53):
that one and a half hours early in the morning
was enough nourishment to keep me going. And then eventually
you just bump into things. You bump into things like
things are all into connected. And so there were occasions
I had started telling stories, but you know, I was

(33:15):
just some weird guy telling stories, and then I just
made a certain connection and something I said at a
given point caused some other people to go that was
really insightful. Where did that come from? And on you
come and teach this stuff that you're working on at
this conference. And the next thing, I was working at conferences,

(33:37):
and pretty soon I quit the nine to five job
and I became an itinerant storyteller.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
That brings up another topic, which is genius. And I
think you you talk as though we all have this
genius capacity in us, which I find is radical because
I think some people may not recognize their own genius
and just kind of go through the sledge. But talk

(34:06):
about genius for a minute, and it's important.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
So it's this idea that there is a spirit inside
us that has gifts and qualities that are already existing
in us. Like at thirteen and a half, I can
come up something in me. I'm vacating, I'm fleeing the situation.
But something in me can come up with a story

(34:30):
that compels these guys with the weapons to just forget
about the idea of hurting me. That's the genius thing
to do. And then you realize it's not like a
genius me, I'm a genius. It's a quality in the person.
And so then it's a mixture of gifts, talents, and abilities,
but also style. So I become a storyteller. And people

(34:55):
always say, well, what's the key to storytelling? The key
to storytelling is style. A person learns their own style,
they're totally convincing. If a person learns all the tricks
that you use on stage and all, they may not
be convincing at all. The style, the word style is
not superficial. It means something inscribed on the soul. And
so there's a style inside a person that's part of

(35:17):
the genius. For instance, if you love like a piano music,
you know just so profound and there's so many great pianists,
but the really great ones. You hear a few bars
and you know who that is because their genius is
coming through. Yes, they they're great piano players, but their
unique way of playing that sonata is what you feel.

(35:39):
And so it's a unique mixture of things that gives
a person gifts that they can give. In giving the gift,
the genius gifts in giving them, it doesn't diminish the gifts.
It increases them. But I want to say something else

(36:01):
about it, because this is an all pure light and
all the doors open and everything's cool, right, Because the
word talent is it comes from a German word that
means the weight used to measure gold, the weight they
put on the scales to measure the amount of gold.
So genius is also called the golden qualities in a

(36:22):
person like the guy who can play the guitar as
soon as he picks it up, or or the person
who has a naturally good voice, or the person who
has an instinctive but also uniquely qualified way of connecting
to animals. That's a genius thing. And should they become
a vet, yeah, probably, But it's even more genius than

(36:42):
that because they're connecting to the spirit of animals and
so on. And so forth, and because ancient cultures really
revered that kind of connection. But the word talent is
a weight, So that means, for instance, if a person
has genuine talents and they're not conscious of them or

(37:02):
practicing using them, or learning how to express them, then
what could have been a golden thing that lit up
the room and lit up their own psyche becomes a
weight on their soul. For some people, the reason they
are depressed is because they're not expressing their own genius.
So the world is very rarely neutral. So we're either

(37:26):
growing our soul and becoming a better version of ourselves
or we are shrinking from life. That's the way it goes.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, and that's I was just thinking right now that
a lot of people are so depressed that they are
shrinking and they're unable to get out of the muck.
And h is it that the soul works to get
this person out and reveal the calling or how do

(37:57):
how do they how do they move forward?

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Well, the old ideas are that the soul is here
to transform. So I had mentioned spirit. Genius is like
the spirit, but genius lives in the soul, So genius
and soul are not the same. Thing in cosmology, spirit
and soul. Genius is a spirit, you can call it ether.
Genius is a spirit. Spirit is connected to fire and
air and it wants to rise up. And soul is

(38:22):
connected to water and earth and it wants to descend.
And so a person's psyche is a mixture of spirit
with its assentsional aspirational qualities and soul with its intrigue
with going deeper and getting more connected to the earth,
to the animals, to nature, to other people. And so

(38:44):
the way out is both spirit and soul. Sometimes a
person is stuck and they can't you know, they're feeling
the weight of the world. The weight of the world
is coming down on everyone now. People traditionally have not
felt the weight of the world the way we are
feeling it for a number of reasons. First of all,
nature is rattling at the same time culture is unraveling,

(39:08):
and so we're in this thing where where nature is
in trouble, just as human nature is in trouble. That's
a heavy thing. Typically you could think of nature as
balanced and so on, but nature's lost some of its balance,
partially because of humans losing their balance. But now because
of mass communication, we know what's going on. Young people

(39:32):
are growing up into the knowledge that nature is in
trouble and that culture is what do you call that,
divided and polarized. They're growing up into that atmosphere, and
that's why it's so important that calling and genius be
kind of become better known. So a young person goes, well,
I'm not going to find a career that for my

(39:54):
whole lifetime. You can't do that anymore. Things change too fast.
They say, the average young person is going to have
five or six or seven careers. The people, all the
people that were just studying whatever that is how to
work with digital stuff, and that was going to be
their job, they just all lost their job because AI
is going to replace all that. Everybody has to start

(40:15):
over again. That's the world we're in.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
But the benefit is when these other avenues remember piece
you and I are old enough to remember, someone would
study and go to school, or they would get an apprenticeship,
they would get a job and do it their whole life.
That doesn't happen much anymore. Everything's changing so fast. So
then where do we get stability, centering and aim from.

(40:40):
It has to be inside and we have to remember
the old stories that said that inside everyone is this
genius combination that is set up for a calling that
awakens the psyche spirit and soul that leads to it
a life, a meaning, and a potential destiny mention one
other thing. The Greek term for geniuses dimon dai mon dimon,

(41:05):
and so it's a very similar idea that everybody has
this unique dimon or inner spirit, but when we don't
live the dimon, it becomes a demon. The unlived inner
spirit changes from spiritual guidance to demonic entrapment. It's it's not,

(41:26):
it's not, there's no neutral. To be alive is to
either be expanding the inner life of the soul and
the spirit, or to be diminishing and becoming less alive,
less courageous, feeling less meaningful, and feeling more trapped.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
our sponsors to identify themselves and will return with Michael
Meade discussing you're calling.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
My guest today is mythologist, anthropologist, and storyteller Michael Meade
coming to us from Washington, and we're learning about our calling,
what if that means, and how do we put it
into effect. The Hindus developed a system called the Yugas.

(43:02):
I'm sure you're familiar with the basics of it, and
right now, apparently we're in Kelly Yuga. The darkest period.
Is this calling some of the is it focusing on
the next phase and helping us come out of this
dark period?

Speaker 3 (43:22):
Well, big heavy stuff to yugas and all, you know,
I forget how long a yuga is.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
It's ridiculously thousands of years.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, So one way to look at that is it's
so big that counting doesn't matter too much, you know.
The other way is to see it is that we're
in the darkness for quite a while. And this is
rough for people that have been brought up to think
that democratic elections can change everything. You know, we now

(43:51):
know that we can't even trust the elections the institutions.
That we're in this period of darkness, which includes collapse
of institutions, and so the things that used to protect
us now are turned against us. And so I go
to these really old ideas like, for instance, one of

(44:12):
the old descriptions for the human soul was the light
found in darkness. So when we're in the dark ages,
we have to find the light inside our own darkness.
One of the great things that happened in the Western
world is in our lifetime is ideas and practices from

(44:33):
the Eastern world came to the West. In the Eastern
world they've always thought one ugu lees to the next yoga.
It's in a cycle. In the Western world they think
it begins with time and then the end of time comes.
It's a very limited idea in the West. But when
you bring in the Eastern idea, you get this expansive

(44:53):
sense of cycles. But the cycle, the big cycle, is
not the one that we have to understand necessarily. The
cycle inside ourselves becomes the thing. How do we how
do we find light inside our own darkness? When the
outside world doesn't provide, you know, pathways that make sense,

(45:17):
or or the guidance that we need, or the sense
of a center that makes meaning out of everything, then
we have to fall back on ourselves. And the Eastern
world was all about that. In the Eastern world, they said,
what we go out in the world looking for already
exists inside us. And that's the same thing was found
in the West, and the idea of the energenious. What

(45:40):
we're looking for is inside, but we have to go
outside into the world in order to encounter the kind
of difficulties that break the the kind of spell of
the ego down so that we can really fall deeper
into ourselves and realize that what we're looking for is inside.
And so I think in the call of Yuga, the

(46:02):
idea was, as I recall from the Vedas, that in
the Cali Yuga even the spiritual practices don't work as well,
and so they say in the Cali Yuga, you have
to go deep inside. So there's a story from the
Vedas where there's this king who in this case happens
to be a philosopher as well as a ruler. We

(46:26):
don't necessarily have that in the modern leadership, but anyway,
and so Uh, the king was so interested in philosophical
ideas and genuine learning and oh my god, truth that
he would have this this spiritual uh kind of guru
come and talk to him on a regular basis. A

(46:46):
part of the week of the of the ruler would
be visiting visits from the guru, and he would ask
them the kind of questions that you know you've encounter
and find within yourselves when you're struggling to learn and grow.
And so one day the ruler says to the guru,
so if the sun were to go out, where would

(47:08):
the people find the light that gave them the courage
to go out and do their work in the world.
And the Gurut said, well, they would get it from
the moon. And so then the ruler said, but what
if the moon failed to appear? And then the guru said, well,
they would get it from the stars. And then the ruler,
who's not giving up on his proposition, says, and what
if the stars failed to come out? And then the

(47:30):
Guru said, then they would turn inside and they would
find the light in their own deep self and they
would go out into the world with the courage of
that light. Wow, that's a five thousand year old recipe
for what we have to do now. The lights are
failing the things that we saw as guiding lights. Right

(47:50):
now in America, the idea of democracy is wildly under attack.
And democracy depends upon the individual human soul, and so
that's where we have to find it. And then we
have to go against things that we were taught in
the sense of realizing what we're looking for is inside

(48:11):
and there is a Western version of that.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
The Greeks called it the.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Diamond, the Romans called it the genius. We have that
in our own western kind of tradition, and now's the
time that we needed, you know. So I went from
being awakened as a storyteller by the threat of a
gang to working with armed gangs in Chicago and la
and various places. And after I was working in South

(48:39):
Sude of Chicago, working with street gangs, and they love stories,
and so I would come back every couple of months
and tell them stories. And then I would come back
after a couple of months and they'd say, you know
so and so, yeah, he died, you know so and
so she'd kill herself, you know that one you know
is in jail. And I was just breaking my heart.
These are fifteen, sixteen year old kids, and I started

(49:03):
to have that despair of what does it matter what
I say, you know? And and I told them that,
I said, I feel like overwhelmed by by the tragic
loss of these of your young lives. And they said, no, no, no,
we wait for you to come back and tell us stories.
You can't you can't stop. And so I realized that

(49:26):
there was really, uh that that's what a calling is.
You don't stop because it got hard, you don't stop
because your heart was broken again. And so then I thought,
how can I talk to them? Like I realized, I'm
talking to these young person I come back a month
or two later, they could be gone. What do I
say to them in a very brief way that could

(49:49):
be genuine, meaningful and impactful. And I started to say,
did you know you're a genius? And they would go what.
The word genius is well known in Western culture, and
so saying it means something says he what do you
mean I'm a genius? And I would say, well, I've
known you for a little while and I see the
way you behave you got this kind of genius? That's
how it looks to me. And they say, well, what

(50:10):
does it matter? And I said, well that genius could
take you out of this situation you're in. It's bigger
than the situation in a way, it's bigger than you,
bigger than you think you are. And the next thing,
they're all wanting to know about genius. And so that's
what got me realizing that same message has to go
to people who are more fortunate and less oppressed. Because

(50:32):
we need our genius capacities in order to change the world,
but also in order.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
To yield it.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
It sounds like though, when the soul is recognized and
you are working to follow the calling, things kind of
not only fall into place, but there are high and
low periods that you encounter. How do we work around that?
How do we stay in and how do we lock in?

(51:01):
And I guess is the word the two things? One
would be more of a philosophical psychological thing, and the
other thing has to do with practice, And so the
first thing is the old two things, maybe two ways
to say it. The old meaning of ambition was not
to be driven to be better than others. The word
ambit means to walk the circumference of the realm, So

(51:26):
real ambition is to walk the entire circle of the psyche,
and that turns out to mean the highs and the lows.
In alchemy they call it circulazio. And what they mean
is throughout life a person is going to go through

(51:46):
almost predictable steps of getting higher in the sense of learning,
in the sense of joyful experience, the sense of awakening.
But then there's going to be an alternative dissent that's
required also where a person goes into the darkness and
into the qualities of injury and woundedness and into the
sense of despair in order to find their way eventually

(52:10):
back up to the higher So they would put the
idea of the highs and lows into either the ambit
of the psyche, learning the whole realm of the person,
or in the ups and downs that are part of
expanding the soul. So despair, for instance, which means to

(52:30):
lose all hope despare. It's a French hope is spr
despere to be without spr hope.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
But the idea was when we lose all hope, it's
not the end. Underneath the initial superficial experiences of hope,
there's a deeper kind of hope. I call it the
second level of hope, which is connected not to wishfulness,
but it's connected to deep imagination. There's an old saying

(53:01):
that a person doesn't know how to see the world
until they've been in despair in the darkness, Like the
King and the.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
Guru.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
The light we're looking for is down in the dark,
and eventually we get more used to going down there
and it becomes a quicker movement down and then coming
back up. That's one thing. The other thing is, once
we have a way to go, a path, a path
with heart, a genius, path, a calling, there's so many
names for it, we need to practice to sustain it.

(53:35):
So I'm mentioning that with the youth in Chicago, the
gang kids, and they're saying, you can't give up. We
depend on you to come back and tell us the
stories they were telling me. I had a practice and
I had to keep practicing it. I can't give up
my practice because I'm now feeling injured or or scared
or sad goes go into the practice. And so in

(53:57):
order to first problem is you don't have genie. The
second problem you haven't found you Jesus genius. The second
problem as you found it, and now you have to
figure out how to live with it. How do you
integrate it, how do you find a way to give
it that's meaningful, and how do you sustain it? And
so I always wind up these days besides saying this

(54:18):
paths everyone has called to a path. That's an important
old piece of knowledge. But a companion piece is to
stay on the path. We all need a practice or
practice is and then so then we go back to
ancient India, where they would say, well, there's two main
roads of practice, and one is the path of contemplation meditation,

(54:41):
looking inward and looking for a stillness and center inside.
That's a great path, a really meaningful path. The opposite
path is the path of expressive arts, the creative path
of expression, the exact opposite, where a person is taking
what's inside and pouring it out into the world. Often

(55:02):
a person needs both paths, or you need to go
back and forth, or you need to find your own combination.
In other words, it isn't a binary choice. Most of us,
like as a storyteller or whatever mythologists, I find myself
just find ways to be quiet and sit with the
images in a story, because when I do that, they

(55:23):
start to inform me. They start to literally give me
ideas and understandings of what that aspect of life is about.
And so most meaningful pathways will include some kind of
practice of contemplation and some kind of practice of expression.
And in ancient India they would have on altars or shrines,

(55:46):
they would have both elements there. So first we have
to find the genius, get some sense of the calling,
take have to find the courage and take the risks
to step into the world not as what everyone else
thought we were, but as what our soul knows we are.
And then in order to sustain that, find practices that

(56:08):
support it and give us places of refuge but also
sources of renewal HM.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
As we conclude, Michael, what does a society look like
with a large population of people who are following their calling?
I'm just curious, is there is it?

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Do you have a thought for that?

Speaker 1 (56:30):
Or can you can you can you recommend a period
of time where it looks like there was a majority
of people that were following the calling.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
I think it's always been a mixed bag. It's always
been some of the people just think, hey, this is
about nine to five or or this is you know,
just this that and the next thing, and you're lucky
if you can retire and all that kind of stuff.
And there's there been the other people going, are you kidding?
You know? I wouldn't even be here except I just
love music. Someone or every time I hear the sound

(57:03):
of an animal being wounded, I'm going to go there
and help them, you know, And those people It's not
always been that everybody got it, and apparently it's not
always been that everybody had to get it for it
to be meaningful. In other words, the culture changes when
a proportion of people awaken to things that are meaningful

(57:23):
and begin to live it out. What that proportion is
I don't know, but it's definitely less than fifty percent.
It might be way less because the people that are
living day to day using conventional ideas are really writing
on the ideas and experiences of other people. When the
ideas and experiences of other people rise to a greater

(57:44):
height and descend to deeper levels of understanding, the everyday
people are pulled into a greater like by those that
are already living it. Think of the Renaissance, right, So
I think that's how it works, and so I think
that the way I'm imagining it now, we are in
such desperate straits because of this thing of climate crisis

(58:09):
and cultural crisis happening at the same time. It means
that every calling is meaningful, and it means that if
enough people did awaken in ways that just have to
do with their own naturally endowed gifts and naturally ways
of entering the world and being meaningful, then that shifts

(58:29):
it for everybody.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
And so.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
The old idea that might have started with that is
the human soul wants to transform, It wants to expand
and grow throughout life. Throughout the life. We're not supposed
to be similar at the end of the way we
were at the beginning. We're supposed to be this awakened version,
version of ourselves that brings out things that already exist
inside that turn out to be meaningful, not just for us,

(58:56):
but also for other people. And so when that happens,
then what if someone like you know, I'm a storyteller,
mythologist kind of guy. You know, I'm not running for office.
I'm not going to run for office. I can't operate
within the limitations of a political structure. I have that
freedom of imagination. But yet there's someone else right down

(59:19):
the road who is called to act out not just
being an official, but being a statesman or a stateswoman.
So what happens when the callings start to happen is
people are going in ways that are meaningful. Younger people
or other people are watching someone do something meaningful, and
if they're really compelled by it, it usually means their

(59:39):
calling is similar. And so the next thing, you get
natural education, which is mentoring where a person gravitates towards
someone who's further down the road that their soul wants
to go on. And the next thing you have people
being pulled along by other people. And we're in a
state now where every gift is meaningful because the wound

(01:00:00):
are in all parts of nature and culture.

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
Wow, amazing, Michael, wonderful. Great to have you on the program.
How can people learn more about your work? Give us
your website and you I can't. I think your YouTube channel.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
Has a name. I can't remember. It's not Michael Mead,
it's something else.

Speaker 3 (01:00:20):
I don't know either. But so we have a podcast
called Living Myth where every week there's a free podcast
and I usually use it to look at modern circumstances
through the lens of myth. So there's that, and it's
free every week, and you can just find that google
Living Myth. The website is Mosaic Voices all lowercase, all

(01:00:44):
one word dot org there, yeah, and then you can
find free essays and recordings and books and all kinds
of things that are on the website. And then the
YouTube I think is also is it Mosaic Mosaic voices
dot org. It's also the YouTube name, and we're increasingly

(01:01:07):
putting on stuff on YouTube, primarily primarily because it is
now the greatest platform for education of young people.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
Right before we started I mentioned your teaching or lecturing
or storytelling. Are you doing that primarily through your YouTube
channel or are you doing that live? Can people see
you at locations we do?

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
It's on all on the website. We do live online
events and many of them are free. You can just
cut you know, they play all over the world. People
come on for free, and then some of them are
you know, more detailed, and so you can pay a
little bit to get to those. But the podcast is
free every week and then, and there's many online free

(01:01:52):
events as well. We're trying to get Living Myth out
into the world as a kind of medicine.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Excellent, fantastic, real pleasure having you on the program, and
I really appreciate you.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
Thank you, and great to be with you, Cliff and
be well.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
I want to mention that Michael has made most of
his talks free. You can see him on YouTube at
Mosaic Voices or just type in Michael Mead as Meade
and you can hear more on the Calling, but he
has a number of other very early talks that he

(01:02:35):
gave as a storyteller, and in some of them he's
joined with Robert Blye. This was when he was part
of the Men's Movement, which he's not really.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Focused on anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
I don't know what happened to the Men's movement after.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
Robert bly passed away.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
There were others in the movement as well. And years
ago when I was a program director here in San
Francisco for the Whole Life Expo, there were a few
people that were representing men, Men's movement, men's feelings and
the emerging identity of men hoping that they are working

(01:03:16):
with him. So they don't keep everything closed up so
you can't express yourself. You just invite all kinds of
emotional problems and physical problems. They've shown that if you
are uptight and anxious and you can't talk about it,
it's not good.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
It's not good for you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
So and this was part of the movement for men
to begin freely expressing themselves. So anyhow, Michael Mead is
a treasure and if you ever get to see a
chance to see him live, he is fantastic. And I
was really happy to him on the program so and

(01:03:56):
I hope you enjoyed him as well. Hey, I want
to mention Chris Duns coming up in a week and
he is going to present more information on the book
he's writing, but also our discussion will be on these
unusual sculptures of Egypt and these are the megalists I

(01:04:17):
talk about all the time. And if you didn't get
his first book, Advanced Machining in Egypt, this topic is
covered in this book and we're going to review it
as the book must be twenty years old, but he
made some outstanding observations as an engineer, and this is
how we advanced our under advance our understanding of ancient

(01:04:41):
cultures is the level of sophistication in the artwork and
the reliefs in the sculpture, in the buildings, temples and
pyramids that we see from these ancient cultures. And what
he discovered in these megalists is just outstanding. We're going
to bring up and discuss it next week. So don't

(01:05:02):
forget Chris done in our program next week on Earth Ancients. Hey,
I also want to mention that we have a tour
coming up in Egypt. It's our Grand Egyptian Tour number seven.
It's gonna be April twenty eight through May tenth. This
is not to be missed because we're gonna go off
the beaten path and visit some very very old kingdom

(01:05:24):
cities that aren't described very much, are not discussed, but
the artifacts that are left are just amazing. They're huge
blocks of stone. There are temples, there are sculptures, and
the majority of this tour is visiting sites that are
a megalithic in origin, megalithic and relief and in sculpture,

(01:05:49):
and it's what I've been wanting to do for a
while and I think you'll have a great time. For
more information and all the details go to Earth Ancients
dot com, forward Slash Tours, look for the band on
the Grand Egyptian Tour with Mohammad Ebrahem, and I think
we're also going to have a couple of experts, including

(01:06:11):
Armando May who is part of the Stars team, swing
by and do a talk on what he's been up to.
He'll be in Cairo at that time, and so we
definitely want to have him come by and speak to
our group on just what some of the latest discoveries are. Again,
for all the information and all the details, go to

(01:06:32):
Earthacients dot com forward slash tours. One thing to remember,
one thing that's critical to remember. Most of these tours
are ten to twelve thousand dollars ten grand. Our tours
are less than half roughly five grand, not including your
flights to Egypt, which you can get very inexpensive for

(01:06:55):
a very cheap rate. But we cover the interior flights
abodots to Cairo, Cairo to wherever the buses the special visits.
Mohammed Imberhem is our host. He is an expert, and
we will see things that you don't do not see
on a regular tour, and are again fifty percent less

(01:07:18):
than what most people pay. This is why our tours
fill up really quickly. So get on board Earth Ancients
dot com forward slash tours. This is a tour to
see the true ancient pass What we are seeing is
not dynastic Egyptian. This is the Prediluvians. These are the people,
likely from the place called Atlantis, likely from advanced cultures

(01:07:43):
that were destroyed during the cataclysm. And what we see
is mind blowing monstrosities of sculpture or relief and so forth.
So come out and join me earthasients dot com, Forward
slash Tours. All right, that's it for this program. I
want to thank my guest today, Michael Meade. Come you

(01:08:04):
tell us from Washington State. As always a team of Geltour,
Mark Foster and Faya out in Pakistan.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
You guys really roged. I really appreciate your help.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
All right, take care of you well and we will
talk to you next times. Sus some stamps