Living Dialogues Podcast
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
This weekly program features pioneers in new paradigm thinking in a broad variety of fields. Each show provides a different fact of the vision emerging from the work of many to transform our individual lives -- and our planet...It is a fire-keeping space where together, we can ignite each other's unique creative spark to bring forth both our individual transformation and the evolution of our global community.
If you love exploring the realm of consciousness and transformational thought, this show goes beyond typical interview formats to a deeply analytical, sophisticated dialog of issues ranging from the bio-dynamics of longevity to past-life regression to the origins of belief structures that define our culture. These dialogs function as a kind of “Cliff Notes” for the consciousness revolution.
Duncan Campbell possesses the unique gift of tying world views, insights and philosophies together to deliver transformative revelations to the active and culturally creative listener, thereby evolving consciousness. With such guests as Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, Joan Borysenko, Judy Collins and many more, Duncan engages in mutually participatory and co-creative dialogue evoking a flow of meaning and understanding beyond what any of these individuals can present themselves. Subscribe to this podcast now and join us, as together with you, the active deep listener, we engage in 'Living Dialogues.'
What are the benefits of subscribing to Living Dialogues?
"One of the most important things we can do for our health is to cultivate a community of rich social connections. Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell is one of the best ways I know to cultivate community without leaving your home. Risk taking; getting out of ruts and routines and habits; Experiencing new things, are also valuable. That's what Living Dialogues is all about. Get healthier. Join in Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell." -- Larry Dossey, M.D., Leading physician and visionary
About Podcasting:
For those of you new to podcasting, Click Here to read our "Introduction to Podcasting" Article.
 Write a Review of Living Dialogues Podcast
Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear, May 12, 2008
Reviewer: Sunshiny
from Clarksville, Arkansas
Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview.
Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them.
| Podcast Feed URL: |
Podcast Website:
http://www.personallifemedia.com
LD 056: Sobonfu Some – Part 2: The Gifts of Intimacy, Relationship and Appreciation as Evolution’s Essence
Author: Duncan Campbell
Thu, Jul 17, 2008
Appreciations:
“Thank you Duncan for all the ways that you are enabling people to share their wisdom, and also for holding the torch for everybody to know how to find their way, and for just having a golden heart. I just so appreciate you. It is always so great to talk to you and to see the bright light you always shine on so many different subject matters. So thank you.” - Sobonfu Some
“For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you. It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you. And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.” - Duncan Campbell
“Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear. Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview. Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them. Five Stars!” - May 12, 2008, Sunshiny from Clarksville, Arkansas
Episode Description:
You can listen to and see the description of Part 1 of this 3-Part Dialogue on Program 55 on this site.
In this Part 2, Sobonfu and I dialogue about the foundational role of intimacy, relationships and appreciation in extending and bringing to fruition the initiations we spoke about in Part 1, and finding and living our purpose and how our name has a meaning. This also includes a fascinating and playful dialogue on the cross-cultural understanding of age from Sobonfu’s tradition, illuminating how to access a perception at once wise and childlike that sees and appreciates each new situation appropriately in its essence without judgmentalism. Black Elk, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Angeles Arrien, Henry Miller, Lao Tzu, and others find their way into these shared stories and perceptions.
Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the Dialogues I have had with Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), Angeles Arrien (Program 52), and Coleman Barks (Programs 53-54).
Here are some excerpts from this Part 2:
Duncan: In our prior dialogue we talked about your life and how you came here from the Dagara tribe in West Africa, landing originally in the middle of winter in Detroit, Michigan and the ways in which in that particular initiation you discovered the absence of community when you had to make a life directly here in a strange country and one really quite far removed from the intimacy of the small village life rich in ritual and wisdom of the old ways that you had come from in Africa. And since arriving here many years ago in 1991 you have not only learned English but you've shared the wisdom and beauty of your own experience and initiation and all of its challenges and ups and downs of initiation in several books, including one entitled "The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient Teachings in the Ways of Relationships".
And in that book, given my own calling to dialogue and evolution, I was inspired by your focus on relationships. Because I think it’s a bridge to the deeper sense of community that you teach about and bring forth in your work…..the very multi-faceted deep way that you have talked about relationship as being part of a core of the human experience and one that you have found as Alice Walker put it, somewhat "broken" here in the West when you arrived.
Sobonfu: Right……Relationship really basically is something, its just like air that everybody needs. It’s just something that we all crave whether we are out in the street or somewhere in our private office or even being in the monastery. We all long to be loved, to be seen, to be valued…..acceptance is what we are looking for. When we are accepted we feel a part of something bigger. We feel doorways opening to us that we didn't know existed before. So the road to intimacy in my tradition not only include people, the environment you are in, but also Sprit, the Divine. Because no true intimacy can be without the present sense and the blessing of the Divine.
So as a result intimacy becomes like the foundation stone for each human being to step on, on which the relationship is going to be created. So for me, when I talk about intimacy, when I talk about my relationship, I am always look for what is the bigger purpose for me to encounter this person. What is Spirit wanting me to do here and so forth. However as much as the human ego would like it to be about us, it is not about us. It’s about something higher. It’s about trying to bring a gift out into the world. and that's why we encounter new people. Even if it’s a brief moment or a long-term relationship they all have their purpose. So for me, relationship, spirit, community, all go hand in hand because you cannot uphold a relationship all by yourself. You need the support of community and you need the support of Spirit and so forth.
Duncan: And one of the things I am think of as you are speaking Sobonfu is that in traditional societies all over the world from time in memorial there has been the recognition of the need for the human being to first leave the community in a kind of initiation of aloneness to see certain kinds of visions or images which reveal to the individual what their unique gift is in the world; their unique mission we might say. Before they then come back to be able to share that as a part of the piece of the larger puzzle of the community. And we think in modern times of Black Elk (as recounted in Black Elk Speaks) in his vision quest and his wonderful saying when he came back from his own alone time separated from he community and had his great vision he came back and said: "I understood more than I saw. And I saw more than I can say. And what I can say is that I saw the hoop of my people and the hoops of all peoples surrounding the central mountain, Mt. Harney” (that happens to be the sacred mountain in his particular geographic location of South Dakota in the United States). And then he said as Joseph Campbell put it the all important addendum: “but the central mountain is everywhere”.
And in that statement we see that this journey that human beings have made from time immemorial from the collective embrace of the womb of the mother, the womb of the family, the womb of the community out into a lonely journey of let us say adolescent initiation into the deeper mysteries of the world. And then the coming back into community, in maturity, and being able to embody one could say the sacred marriage of the inner masculine and the inner feminine and then to make a living marriage and to create new life so that the community of beings can continue in the great universal drama. Human and planetary evolution is something that has an inner structure that is similar everywhere in the world. And as each one of us tells his or her story about how they have gone through that great timeless initiation we add to each others storehouse of understanding and acceptance. And oddly enough it is often a gift of hearing someone else's story that allows each of us to accept ourselves more deeply than we have before.
Sobonfu: Right. Absolutely. I think those are the stories that are important because the circle is not always there for people to share their story. So in meeting somebody new and in them sharing their story, in us sharing our story, we have already created a bridge that is safe for each on of us to walk on. And also for us to be able to open and to share what is that gift is that we are bringing. That is what is so beautiful in this time when it’s possible for people to basically be able to travel everywhere, to meet new people and to share their story. And every single time that they have shared with somebody and they have also listened and received this story of the other person something new is born out of them. A new level of their gift begins to shine again. And that is that beauty that we are all searching for in sharing our own story.
Duncan: And that is precisely what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.
After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.
 Download File - 14.9 MB
 Listen To This Podcast (Streaming Audio)
LD 055: Sobonfu Some – Part 1: Welcoming the Soul Home Through Initiation
Author: Duncan Campbell
Thu, Jul 10, 2008
Appreciations:
“Thank you Duncan for all the ways that you are enabling people to share their wisdom, and also for holding the torch for everybody to know how to find their way, and for just having a golden heart. I just so appreciate you. It is always so great to talk to you and to see the bright light you always shine on so many different subject matters. So thank you.” - Sobonfu Some
“For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you. It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you. And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.” - Duncan Campbell
“Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear. Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview. Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them. Five Stars!” - May 12, 2008, Sunshiny from Clarksville, Arkansas
Episode Description:
Part 1 of a 3-Part Dialogue:
Let me begin by introducing my great friend Sobonfu Some. Sobonfu was born and raised in Burkina Faso, the former Upper Volta in Africa, and she is an initiated member of the Dagara tribe of West Africa. Her voice was one of the first in recent times to bring African spirituality to the West. She continually travels the world, conducting seminars and workshops that offer her perspective on birth, pregnancy, community, healing, intimacy, rituals, the sacred quality of everyday life and much more. She is the founder of Ancestors’ Wisdom Spring, and her books include Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community; The Spirit of Intimacy:
Ancient Teachings in the Ways of Relationships; and Falling out of Grace.
As I mentioned in the last of the three dialogues on this site with myself and Coleman Barks (listen to Program 54 and see its Episode Description), we in modern industrial cultures “need to balance both the modern mind’s excessive emphasis on the mental (which can leave us feeling, in the poet Rumi’s words, “empty and frightened” in our fragmented, specialized culture, often lacking a rich, nourishing sense of community), with our indigenous heritage of appreciating the embrace of the earth...We need to develop this dynamic equipoise of spirit and soul in order to develop our own elderhood, as Rumi did in his time, in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century, to create not just a localized sanity, but a planetary civilization which can communicate with and within all of its component parts so we don’t just self-destruct”. In imparting her birth tradition’s ancient teachings, often through the intimate and (to us) amazing yet accessible details of her own lived experience that we describe and situate in these dialogues, Sobonfu, in the words of Alice Walker, is a teacher that “can help us put together so many things that our modern Western world has broken”.
In this first Dialogue we explore the extraordinary (to those of us in modern cultures) initiations which welcomed Sobonfu’s spirit into this world and prepared here for her soul’s unfoldment and revealed to her her life’s purpose and mission. As I mention in this dialogue, the “hearing ritual” which took place while Sobonfu was still in her mother’s womb and which she describes in this dialogue, is evocative of the recent work in the West of the brilliant Jungian James Hillman in his book The Soul’s Code and Caroline Myss in her Sacred Contracts (see Programs 17 and 18 on this site) in how we might discover our soul’s purpose. In Sobonfu’s words: “We had this ritual in my tribe and village because as a human being you always want your life to be a reflection of what you think you are creating and you are forgetting that there is something that the greater universe has in place for you.”
Here are some excerpts from this Part 1:
“Duncan: And I think now that its part of a whole process that seems to be awakening in different countries all over the world, where elders are being called forward from many indigenous cultures at this time. Organizations are being formed spontaneously as it were, as in the fulfillment of ancient prophecies that there would come a time when having lost something really essential in the human soul, we are now having to work together at an international transnational level with many different gifts coming from many different cultures to in a sense put it all back together again, that which has been broken. And some cultures to heal ourselves requires even going beyond our own culture.
Sobonfu: Yes, right! And as you know, many people say, the time is right, I agree. Especially with many indigenous communities that have held on to their own wisdom for so long and the world is changing. And the young people in those communities are not necessarily going to be the ones to unfold this wisdom. And so there is a need to have it be alive somewhere. And also because people are really ready for this kind of wisdom and are willing to receive them in the forms that they come without wanting to change them, dissect them, or make them look like something else. And that is the beauty in it, and of course, you know, each one of these tribes coming have wisdom, it is a conversion of all that bring together the truth. That the human soul and spirit is so craving. Because not just one way is going to make it work for us.
Duncan: And I think that’s the point, yes, for all of us…that we are all of us going through an initiation in a sense of being forced out of the comfort zone of whatever our particular village may be, literally or metaphorically as you were. And in a sense obliged to go out into a wider world and learn another language or several other emotional languages and to begin to weave a real planetary consciousness because it’s the only way that we are going to be healed. And I think of dialogue as an essential element of this. The dialogue between elders and youth in terms of age. The dialogue between elder cultures and you, younger cultures in terms of time on the planet. The dialogue between men and women. Because everyone in this participation has a particular wisdom and a particular knowledge to give including the younger cultures and young people. Things are changing so fast on the planet that elders don’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle, no matter how long they have been on the planet. And so they themselves need this revitalizing rejuvenating connection with the young who carry certain knowledge within them. And the young in turn need a certain kind of mentoring and embrace and respect in being seen by the elders in order to realize their full potential. So it’s such a beautiful but also very challenging initiation that we are being called to.
Sobonfu: Right. Absolutely. And it is an initiation that we have to go through if we are all going to survive. Now, there is no way of going around it.
Duncan: Well and that’s it. There is no way of going around it and so we go through it like a birth canal. We really can’t short circuit it in any way and we come as you put it so beautifully, to find the wisdom and the humor in failure, to find yourself in your core essence when you as you entitled one of your books, you fall out of grace. To find the way the children can be celebrated in community and the ongoingness of life even when you feel the most alienated, lets say, even from your own tradition. For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you. It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you. And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.
Sobonfu: Thank you! I feel the same. I am very honored to have you and the people who are really good and sincere friends, which is something to cherish these days when you find one. So thank you for being there with your golden and welcoming heart.
Duncan: I agree. When you do find a friend, and you find a friendly community it is something to be valued and cherished. And the community that we find that we find in your books, Sobonfu, is one such friend.”
After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.
Download File - 14.9 MB
Listen To This Podcast (Streaming Audio)
LD 054: Coleman Barks: The Soul of Rumi – Part 3
Author: Duncan Campbell
Fri, Jun 20, 2008
"Duncan you are a real national treasure, you make me smile, and I love that you ask me to be on your program...I just love how you come up with ways to tie these insights we discover together. I don't know how you do it. It's inspired..." – Coleman Barks
I described Part 1 (See Program 3 on this site below) of this three-part dialogue with Coleman as follows:
This three-part dialogue on The Soul of Rumi is a great embodiment of the experience and value of dialogue, showcasing Rumi's life and poetry as a perspective of timeless wisdom and inspiration. For those unfamiliar with Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in Turkey, this first program will be a great introduction, and a "feast" for the great many around the world already deeply appreciative of his work. In recognition of the worldwide inspiration for communication created by Rumi in evoking the spirit and experience of unity beyond religious, cultural and ideological boundaries, UNESCO proclaimed 2007 as “The Year of Rumi”. As noted in my prior dialogue with Larry Dossey, M.D. (See Program 2 below), Rumi has remarkably become today -- 800 years after his birth on September 30, 1207 -- simultaneously the most-listened to and revered poet in Afghanistan and the most-published poet in America. His continually growing popularity in the U.S. is due in large part to the incomparable translations by the great American translator and poet, Coleman Barks.
This then is a link to the co-creation of a "dialogue consciousness worldview" that Living Dialogues is promoting and holding space for.
Part 2 was described in these words:
Rumi’s poetry inspires in these dark times when we are trying to create a civilization without elders – that is to say, we are in the process of becoming elders ourselves in times of uncertainty, encountering unprecedented global conflicts and climate change. As I say in the dialogue, Rumi functions as an elder in our human journey as a species, whose words resonate down over eight centuries, across national, ethnic, religious, and language barriers, expressing the unifying essence we all share. In the words of another eloquent member of the species, John F. Kenndy, 45 years ago this month in his historic American University speech proclaiming the world’s first nuclear disarmament initiative, in the name of creating together a planetary peace that would be beneficial for all mankind: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children’s future; and we are all mortal.”
To go forward on this great journey together, we need to develop the paradoxical consciousness which can hold our universal moral values and experience together inclusively and beyond ideology with our human diversity. In that vein, this poem of Rumi serves as an inspiration and touchstone for the spontaneous investigations and ruminations evoked in this dialogue:
Today, like very other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
In Part 3, Coleman and I explore a number of different aspects of the need to balance both the modern mind’s excessive emphasis on the mental, the sky (which can leave us feeling “empty and frightened” in our fragmented, specialized culture), with our indigenous heritage of appreciating the embrace of the earth -- as expressed in the open-ended conciseness of the Rumi poem quoted in the paragraph just above (ending the summary of Part 2 of this ongoing Dialogue). We need to develop this dynamic equipoise of spirit and soul in order to develop our own elderhood, as Rumi did in his time, in order meet the challenges of the 21st century, to create not just a localized sanity, but a planetary civilization which can communicate with and within all of its component parts so we don’t self-destruct. Here are some excerpts:
Duncan Campbell: Well it’s wonderful you know to, end, as it were, on this note of openness, that, this acceptance of the uncertainty and bewilderment again is that kind of razor’s edge of going beyond any kind of duality, you know, between confusion on the one hand and apparent but evanescent clarity on the other. That you’re somehow magically holding both poles together and honoring both and in so doing reaching a higher state of, as you put it, balance, of compassion, or love.
Coleman Barks: Hmm, right, yeah. I think that’s true, it’s a, it’s a shaky walk –laughs- that we do here with our left foot and then our right foot. We explore things in the world and then we meditate on those, and then we, as we walk, the path unfolds. Yeah.
Duncan Campbell: In a sense, you know, some have called it the wisdom of uncertainty of actually embracing the uncertainty as the deepest wisdom and walking forward confidently but not because you know where the next step is going to land.
Coleman Barks: Right. He says there is an excess in spiritual searching that is profound ignorance. And he says, “Let that ignorance be our teacher.” –laughs- you know, so it’s good to have a mystic who says let ignorance be our teacher. Yeah, he also, in terms of this balance thing, he also honors; a lot of mystics praise the sky, the openness of that. He praises the ground, as well. He says, you got to have somewhere to plant your grief seeds, you got to hoe. And he says, try to be more like the ground. The ground has a great generosity and it takes our compost and makes beauty. It takes in the rough clod, he says, and gives back an ear of corn. So try to be more like that, give back better, like the ground does.
Duncan Campbell: I remember that, yes. It was just really so striking when I read it, try to be like the ground is. Give back better than you receive, in other words, whatever seeds fall into your life of experience that you enrich and nurture them and give back beauty rather than bitter fruit or some dried husk.
And I think that’s part of the theme of the masculine and the feminine in a way, that there is traditionally that association of the masculine with the spirit or the sky and the association of the feminine with the soul or the soil. Soul and soil. Soil is mater, matrix, mother, material. Some honoring of form, honoring of incarnation, honoring of things as they are without thinking they need to be somehow transcended. Already there’s divinity in body if we could but release ourselves into it. For me that’s a constant theme with Rumi, this open ended-ness of his. I’m very moved by this. Calling us back into honoring the earth itself and honoring the ground, and to emulate it, to be like it, to have dignity and generosity and courage of receiving toxicity, and finding a way to dissolve it and giving back better than you’ve received.
. . . . . . .
Duncan Campbell: Well one of the things that Joseph Campbell said that really struck me was in one of his conversations with Fraser Boa was that when a culture arrives at the point where it emphasizes the economic and the military to the relative exclusion of other values, it’s always the sign of a late stage culture. (CB: Wow.) And when asked about this by Paul Ray (see Program 37 on this site) and Sherry Anderson, who wrote the book, The Cultural Creatives, when they talked with him oh, maybe 1982, they said: “’Well, what can we do about this Joe?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I can just tell you what’s happening. I can’t fix it’ and then he laughed.” And in another, separate conversation, that Duane Elgin recounted to me that he had had with Joe Campbell in that same time period (see Programs 40, 41, and 42 on this site), Joe responded to a similar question by saying: “Not my job. Your job in this next generation.” And then he laughed as well.
So, you know, Coleman, we’re just in a stage now, where like Rome, I would say the modernist culture centered in America, the global corporatist culture has lost touch, relatively speaking, with that deep source of generativity and I think there’s no mystery in that sense why Rumi, has ironically, become the most popular published poet in America today, because there is that sort of void that’s calling to us. There’s that desire to reestablish a sense of generative balance that you talked about right at the beginning. The need is to “find the Grail” in a new contemporary co-creative and cooperative way, to once again “green the kingdom (the Planet)” from “ the wasteland” (in T.S. Eliot’s poem describing the modern world) that it is becoming. And Rumi in his timeless poetry is calling forth this sense of generative balance from us and we’re collaborating actually with Rumi as an elder spirit of the species from hundreds of years ago. He is perhaps as present or more present today in those of us that hear his call than he was in his own community, in his own time, in the 13th century.
Coleman Barks: Yes, and I think it’s important to take up on a point Joe Campbell was making in that quotation you cited, that we talk about poetry and even ecstatic poetry in this time, when it might seem so extraneous, because it’s important to the inner ecology. It gives the soul a place that it can enjoy living. You know, and it nourishes it. I find as I read these Rumi poems to people in these terrible times, after the 9/11 terrorist attack and before whatever the next one is, that they feel fed somehow by these poems in a way that’s important.
Duncan Campbell: I think that’s the balance that has to be struck if we’re going to go forward, it’s something that I think we can look to the experience of Rome and what happened when that balance was not struck. We may repeat that history or we may be able to go beyond it. But I think that’s what’s up, it seems to be at this point, and I think Joe Campbell really put his finger on it when he said if we lens it exclusively or preponderantly through the economic and military viewpoint – the merely measurable and mental viewpoint -- we’ve lost touch with some crucial and essential part of ourselves. So that when we talk about ecstatic poetry, the word ecstasy itself means “to stand outside of”. To stand outside of is the literal translation of ex-stasis, so we need to train ourselves to “stand outside of” the existing either-or, polarizing paradigm and reclaim some more fundamental aspect of our universal and shared humanity which can be the bridge building that will lead beyond the impasse.
And in the end, we need to remember that Rumi exhorts us not to go to meet on a morally relativistic “field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing”, but to meet in a “field beyond ideas [exclusivistic and polarizing, ideological and rigid] of wrongdoing and rightdoing”, a very different place of open-hearted, open-minded cross-cultural common communication, no longer clinging to our narrow idea of being the only one who is or ones who are “right”, but to learn from one another and to be in dialogue and work together.
After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.
Download File - 14.8 MB
Listen To This Podcast (Streaming Audio)
LD 053: Coleman Barks: The Soul of Rumi – Part 2
Author: Duncan Campbell
Thu, Jun 12, 2008
"Duncan you are a real national treasure, you make me smile, and I love that you ask me to be on your program...I just love how you come up with ways to tie these insights we discover together. I don't know how you do it. It's inspired..." – Coleman Barks
I described Part 1 (See Program 3 on this site below) of this three-part dialogue with Coleman as follows:
This three-part dialogue on The Soul of Rumi is a great embodiment of the experience and value of dialogue, showcasing Rumi's life and poetry as a perspective of timeless wisdom and inspiration. For those unfamiliar with Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in Turkey, this first program will be a great introduction, and a "feast" for the great many around the world already deeply appreciative of his work. In recognition of the worldwide inspiration for communication created by Rumi in evoking the spirit and experience of unity beyond religious, cultural and ideological boundaries, UNESCO proclaimed 2007 as “The Year of Rumi”. As noted in my prior dialogue with Larry Dossey, M.D. (See Program 2 below), Rumi has remarkably become today -- 800 years after his birth on September 30, 1207 -- simultaneously the most-listened to and revered poet in Afghanistan and the most-published poet in America. His continually growing popularity in the U.S. is due in large part to the incomparable translations by the great American translator and poet, Coleman Barks.
This then is a link to the co-creation of a "dialogue consciousness worldview" that Living Dialogues is promoting and holding space for.
In this Part 2
Rumi’s poetry inspires in these dark times when we are trying to create a civilization without elders – that is to say, we are in the process of becoming elders ourselves in times of uncertainty, encountering unprecedented global conflicts and climate change. As I say in the dialogue, Rumi functions as an elder in our human journey as a species, whose words resonate down over eight centuries, across national, ethnic, religious, and language barriers, expressing the unifying essence we all share. In the words of another eloquent member of the species, John F. Kenndy, 45 years ago this month in his historic American University speech proclaiming the world’s first nuclear disarmament initiative, in the name of creating together a planetary peace that would be beneficial for all mankind: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children’s future; and we are all mortal.”
To go forward on this great journey together, we need to develop the paradoxical consciousness which can hold our universal moral values and experience together inclusively and beyond ideology with our human diversity. In that vein, this poem of Rumi serves as an inspiration and touchstone for the spontaneous investigations and ruminations evoked in this dialogue:
Today, like very other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
After listening to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.
Download File - 14.1 MB
Listen To This Podcast (Streaming Audio)
LD 052: Angeles Arrien: Co-Creating New Evolutionary Elders
Author: Duncan Campbell
Fri, May 30, 2008
APPRECIATION:
Duncan Campbell: I just have to say, Angeles, your book is such a treasure trove, and your whole life has been truly a gift. And I want to honor that and say again what a deep pleasure it is to have these opportunities to be together.
Angeles Arrien: Likewise for me, Duncan, and thank you for your extraordinary contribution to radio and to media and really consistently offering a standard of excellence that's rarely found in the field.
You know that's why I also love and look forward to when we have conversations together because they're so rich in dialogue. The experience of time is that we can get a lot of information and dialogue between each other and take everyone to many different places but at the same time people say, "Oh that was so vast, and there was so much to it" or "Oh I remember this" because it also slows down. There's something in your dialogue interviews that I always experience is that there's a timeless quality about it. That the hour is over before you know it, and also that we've explored many different threads and I think that's one of the deep richnesses, that life becomes much more textured.
SUMMARY:
In my preceding dialogues with Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), I stated that: “The great challenge and necessity calling each of us is to go beyond our either-or modern polarizing and myth-less argument culture into artful co-creative dialogue, to realize ourselves as bards and storytellers in our lives, embodying the personal transformational stories which together can weave the next evolutionary Great Story of unification in diversity so needed in our time…Finding the thread that weaves all of the pieces of our personal stories into resonance with a new-old archetypal and universal Larger Story, we can become the “missing piece” of our adolescent cultures: the new elders, giving birth to an elderhood of service at all ages, including the wisdom of the “youth elders” as well as those chronologically older, each engaged in a dialogue of mutual mentoring.
In this dialogue with Angeles Arrien -- in my view the preeminent visionary cross-cultural anthropologist for the 21st century -- we talk further about how to create what I am calling “new evolutionary elders”. It is not simply about being or becoming chronologically older – then one is only an “older” person, not an elder. As Angeles points out in the “sixth gate” of the eight cross-cultural gates we cross on the path into wisdom, we need to avoid or leave behind the ethical compromises seen so often in middle-age, where we are seduced by circumstances and the competitive culture to adopt an ends justifies the means approach to career and economic advancement and identity. Our media reflects, tolerates, encourages, and rewards such behavior.
The elder perspective, by contrast, embodies the wisdom of authenticity, integrity, and honesty with oneself – which becomes a paramount aspect of self-fulfillment -- and supports and gives strong, clear voice to these values in the larger world. Interestingly enough, these same values are also sought by idealistic youth. Both older and younger people are marginalized as less interesting to the consumer-driven culture than those in-between that spend the most money. As such, youth historically have taken little interest in society’s political dialogue, with its obvious deceit and self-interested rhetoric posing as representing the common good, and older people are encouraged effectively to see themselves as a passive and fearful “victim” constituency and narrow interest group that cannot stand up for itself except through allegiance to such middle-aged power brokers.
As has been said, we cannot create a wisdom culture without genuine elders, speaking with respect and authority and real influence in society. For that gap to be filled, we need to become those elders ourselves. How to do so in very practical ways, whatever your age, drawing on both ancient and contemporary experience, is the topic of this dialogue.
Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of this Dialogue:
Duncan Campbell: Welcome to the program. I'm your host Duncan Campbell, and my guest today is my great friend, Angeles Arrien, author of numerous books, and one of the great leading cross-cultural anthropologists in the world. And the book we're going to be talking about is The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom. So, Angie, what a treat it is to have you here on the program.
Angeles Arrien: My honor and privilege Duncan. Thank you so much.
Duncan Campbell: So Angie, there are many things that could be said about you, you have such an accomplished life - your first half of life and your second half of life. I just want to give people some highlights here: that you are an anthropologist, an educator, and award-winning author; you're a consultant to many organizations and businesses including the Fetzer Institute. You lecture nationally and internationally and conduct workshops that bridge cultural anthropology, psychology, and meditation skills; requests for your expertise have taken you to Bali, China, Indonesia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, Canada, and beyond. Your work with multicultural issues in mediation and conflict resolution has been used with the International Rights Commission and the World Indigenous Council. And you've also presented your material on CNN and other media in the mainstream culture. And I have to say since we first met twenty years ago, you have been just a real great friend and teacher and I must say that you're very well loved by the people in the communities that you work in with very good reason because your personal qualities and your abilities to teach from the heart and your vast reservoir of knowledge and very original insights I think just put you in a realm that is so enticing for people to share with you. So I want to begin just by acknowledging that, Angie, and saying what a treat it really always is to have these conversations together.
Angeles Arrien: For me too Duncan it's been wonderful to come in today for this interview because I too have really enjoyed watching the unfoldment of your own career and gifts and talents. And you're just exceptional in your interview capacity and what you have to offer for the radio audiences. It's really high quality and for me I see it as such an honor to be able to come on to your program.
Duncan Campbell: And we should let people know that one of the great inspirations that came to me just before I met you was that it was time in human consciousness to move, we might say, into the second half of life of the planetary species all together. That it was time to move not only beyond our adolescence but even beyond early maturity as a species into a kind of elderhood where we could create a real world wisdom culture. And to do that it was shown to me that we needed to go beyond what you and I have referred to in the old terminology as the “interview” (vs. dialogue) culture, where as with Moses on the mountain a given individual goes up to the metaphorical mountain and connects with God, Ccreator, Spirit, the Logos, whatever we might call it, and gets the direct interview download and comes back, comes back down the mountain and essentially distributes or franchises the material to a willing but not adventuresome audience.
And so that's where, really, the planet has come to and it's time as we see in the last twenty years, at the cusp of this millennium, where people are now realizing that the ability for them and us, each of us, to find purpose, meaning, and fulfillment in the internal mythology of our own lives and to tap into our own inner wisdom is what makes an elder and an elder culture. Not just simply growing older. And this is a critical insight I think.
And an insight in your book because we're now realizing that to go forward, we have to have a series of real dialogues, like you and I are having right now, and those dialogues could be elder to elder, they could be elder to youth, between men and women, between generations, between ethnicities, between cultures, all over the world. It's time for everyone to give their gift to the fire together. And the people who are going to hold the space for that are going to be people who have explored, encountered, and embodied the riches of the second half of life.
Interestingly enough, in our adolescent culture, in our consumer oriented culture where the people who consume the most are the ones that the culture targets most of its media toward, this effectively pushes people in the second half of life to the margins. When they're on the margins as James Hillman pointed out, they can be very reflective and notice the lack of aesthetic beauty in the culture. They also can have a great resource of, we might say, wisdom, accumulated experience, and perception and the key is for them to not allow themselves to be marginalized in the negative sense and disconnected from the larger culture but to discover, as you put it, that this is the actual richest part of one's life, where you really come to your own true authenticity and fulfillment.
So I'm giving that introduction to say how unique your book is in my view. Because there is a lot of literature out there where people are wanting to say, well it's ok to get older, but often don’t believe it, or don’t say so persuasively. I just saw Cher the other day while happening to watch Oprah, and Tina Turner, one of the great entertainment idols, you might say, was on with her. Tina was saying she was really grooving on getting older, and Cher was saying what a drag it was. And it was just so interesting because those are two different aspects of how we can look at getting older. Nora Ephron, to take another example, has a new book out: I Feel Bad About My Neck.
Angeles Arrien: Yes.
Duncan Campbell: She says with her New York humor: “It's kind of sad to be over sixty.” So we have this culture where we try to make fun of and make an accommodation of getting older -- but why don't you dive in right now and just tell us why, in your own experience, and in your beautiful book, you feel the second half of life is really the fulfillment for each of us on our life journey.
Angeles Arrien: Like a three act play, the first act is really the beginning of our life and as we move into young adulthood, and the second half is like a young adulthood through the fifties. And who would want to miss the third act? Because the third act is really from our sixties to the end of life. The third act like in every play brings extraordinary resolution and harvest and we have the ability to create and tie up all of the different characters, and themes, and maybe our life will turn out to be a comedy or history, a fantastic novella, but that's the opportunity, in the second half of life, that's so rich and textured from our fifties on there's a huge shift in ambition to meaning from acquisition to divestiture, from doing to being, from work to service, from Me to We, and wisdom is never age bound. There are many people in their twenties and their thirties and their forties and their teens and their fifties who are quite wise. After fifty, if we're not demonstrating some kind of wisdom, it's less than becoming.
Duncan Campbell: [laughter] Yes, pun intended.
After listening to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.
Download File - 24.0 MB
Listen To This Podcast (Streaming Audio)
LD 051: Michael Meade – Part 4: Running Towards the Roar: Co-Creating the New-Old Mythos of Our Time
Author: Duncan Campbell
Fri, May 23, 2008
Appreciation: “I’m Michael Meade, the author of The Water of Life and The World Behind the World, and I can say this about Living Dialogues: It is one of the few places in this country where you can hear an intelligent, poetic conversation that brings together myth, genuine imagination, the extemporaneous poetic thought natural to people, and the practical issues of the environment and politics – a mixture that is necessary for the re-imagination of this culture. Thank you Duncan for the invitation and the delightful conversation.”
In Part 1 of this ongoing dialogue, Michael Meade and I shared stories and perspectives on the nature and role of myth throughout the human experience, and in so doing demonstrated how we enact and give voice to a fresh contemporary story, together with you, the deep listening audience evoking the new story, as part of our larger mythic interconnectedness. The great challenge and necessity calling each of us is to go beyond our either-or modern polarization and mythless argument culture into artful co-creative dialogue, to realize ourselves as bards and storytellers in our lives, embodying the personal transformational stories which together can weave the next evolutionary Great Story of unification in diversity so needed in our time.
In Part 2, we shared how stories -- telling them, listening attentively to them, learning thereby to see the individual story of our own lives as embodying and resonating with the purpose and mythic meaning illustrated in a Great Story – how all these aspects of story give us knowledge, healing, inspiration, and initiation into a higher life-enhancing and embracing consciousness. We share certain ancient and modern great stories in illustration of this, including the meeting by the well of the 13th century world poet Rumi and his dialogue inspiration Shams Tabriz (see Program 3 with Coleman Barks on The Soul of Rumi below on this site), the Divine Dialogue between the big Self Krishna and the aspirant Arjuna of the Vedic Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, from thousands of years ago, the prophetic poetry of William Butler Yeats (The Second Coming) in the early 20th century, and the anonymous pre-Christian poet(s) who gave us the biblical Book of Job (in the superb translation by Stephen Mitchell – see Programs 13 and 14 below on this site).
In Part 3, Michael and I went into the nature of story as accessing the deep Source we all share, and in the process finding the thread of deep meaning and purpose that runs through each of our lives. It is in this way, finding the thread that weaves all of the pieces of our personal stories into resonance with a Larger Story, that we can become the “missing piece” of our adolescent cultures: the new elders, giving birth to an elderhood of service at all ages, including the wisdom of the “youth elders” as well as those chronologically older, each engaged in a dialogue of mutual mentoring.
As I say at the beginning of Part 2: “The power in storytelling is the power in helping people to understand how to situate themselves in a world that at times for many people anywhere can seem chaotic and without meaning when we experience ourselves as powerless to change the great course of events that affects us all.” Michael describes the challenge we then address as follows: “On the national and on the global stage, it seems to me, things have become more and more literal, less and less imaginal or mythic. Therefore, more and more rigidly polarized people tend to cling now to ideas that don’t hold water, and people tend to cling to beliefs that no longer transfer the living breath of the living waters of the divine or the eternal. So while holding on to these almost empty institutions and empty thought patterns, people then use them as weapons and attack each other.”
Our response to this challenge is an expression of what I term “The Art and Evolutionary Necessity of Dialogic Mythmaking”. As I say in concluding Part 3, “this call to dialogue that has become so imperative right now is the same as the call to the deep story and the sharing of stories”.
In this concluding Part 4, we dialogue about how the modern mind paradigm and its “mid-level” national myths (including America’s dominance in the late 20th century, often dubbed “the American century”) are losing their energy and no longer have the hold on the planetary imagination they once did. This is the arena of what Michael refers to as the “mesocosm” – that place of conflicting cultural and religious myths which lies between the universal Great Stories of the planet, the macrocosm we spoke about in Part 2, and our individual microcosm stories, which we sometimes experience as unraveling to the extent we fail to explore our inner world sufficiently to see them as linked to the Great Stories, but rather identify with our own culture or religion’s limited surface mesocosm stories (which are themselves unraveling as we enter the 21st century). [For instance, as Fareed Zakaria points out in his new book The Post American Century, India, starting basically from scratch just a few years ago, now has 18 of its own TV news channels, each of which revolves around a narrative with India at the center, no longer dependent on the America-centric narrative of the 20th century and CNN. Yet the new India-centric narrative is still at this point a 20th century holdover to the extent it remains nation-centric rather than world-centric.]
To participate in the dialogic co-creating of a genuinely r-evolutionary New-Old planetary-scale and sustainable Mythos, we each need to catch hold of the thread of our own deep story as our mesocsom “gets messy and comes apart”. This messiness is at once the necessary prelude to a genuine re-imagination of our culture and the falling apart predicted in the prophetic vision of W.B.Yeats in The Second Coming mentioned earlier, “where the center cannot hold” and the desert landscape of our old polarized politics gives rise to negative and mendacious campaigning and governance “with its gaze pitiless as the sun”. As this “beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born” once again in yet another election cycle, we are in a potentially “tipping point” historic moment, where if we each take our own story thread to the frontier depths of our integrity and return to the center to reweave together a “protective mythic garment” as in the completion of the old Irish myth -- but this time as a “coat of many colors” -- a renewal in the U.S. of the original real dream of America, in its authenticity, character, and wisdom, can occur. (See Programs 38 and 39 with myself and Joseph Ellis, the “Founders’ historian”, below on this site.)
We are being called upon to hear, live, and tell stories of rejuvenation from our own experience, as is being done out of the view of commercial media in the vital energy margins in many ways, including by people doing hospice work, working with poverty and illness, doing personal depth processing, psychological and spiritual, and as is being done in the public realm by Barack Obama and supporters, co-creating, enacting, and telling a story of hope and possibility that resonates with this land and all lands because it is both new and ancient, a story as I say “which refuses to give in to the lie for personal advantage but actually endorses the truth of our deep reality”.
Here is an excerpt from this Dialogue Part 4:
Duncan Campbell: …There's a lot of racial talk going on (in the U.S. election story of 2008) that’s disguised and it's very debilitating because we have to encounter that old story of America, which is the slavery story and really purge it, I think, considerably more, and ultimately, once and for all, to free the psyche of the country |