“If you’re in touch with your soul, you’re worth as much as the world—that was the old idea. The individual soul is in touch with the soul of the world. So, no change at the individual level of the soul, no change at the level of the world.” – Michael Meade

“We are in a soulful crisis about the meaning of individual life,” Michael Meade said, speaking of the current turmoil playing out on the world stage. This crisis is actually threefold, comprised of radical climate change, massive social injustice, and “a crisis of meaning and what’s now being called truth. If the third one isn’t resolved the other two cannot be handled,” Meade said. “You can’t have people genuinely dealing with social injustice if they’re not telling the truth.”

Truth and the Soul

Of his latest book, Awakening the Soul, Meade said he’s “trying to redefine truth, not in its abstract legal sense, but in the idea that we live our truth. The new book is about awakening that deeper soul and I wind up in the book writing about what I call living in truth.”

According to Meade, we are in an initiatory time, which makes it imperative for individuals to awaken to the deep soul within and live in their truth. “There’s a desperate need for the awakening of the individual soul because that will bring innovation, genius, imagination into the picture. Then if there are enough awakenings occurring individually, it can generate a collective or cultural initiation where people begin to value life more. We begin to understand the necessity of the soul more, and begin to value imagination, perhaps even greater than logic,” Meade said.

This awakening of the deep inner soul not only allows an individual know their own gifts, it also allows these gifts to play a part in addressing our current challenges. “If more people were aware of their genius and aware of their soul, more people could be dealing with more problems in both culture and in nature. The soul has answers through the equality of individual people,” Meade said. “Everyone’s inner soul is innovative by essence, because each person is unique. That’s the old idea—nature only makes originals, and right now nature as well as culture is calling on the originality in everyone and that means consciousness of that uniqueness.”

Ending and Beginning Again

“The old Greek idea for what we’re going through is apocalysis,” Meade said, speaking of the current disturbances we’re facing. “It means collapse-renewal. It means ending-beginning. We have to face what’s collapsing—we’re required to do that just by being awake—but we’re in the moment where some things are collapsing.” However, Meade noted that, “less evidently, some things are beginning and renewing. So, I think that’s the first thing to realize: that as bad as it is, according to mythology, the world doesn’t come to an end, it begins again—just the way a person begins their life again through initiation.”

In the video clip below, Meade shared a Native American story that illustrates the moment of ending-beginning we are facing:

“So, we’re in this dramatic moment,” Meade said. “What does a person do? I think there’s a requirement to be able to sit down in one’s soul, or from a Jungian point of view, be able to tap into the deep Self. Because things are wacky. There’s a tremendous pressure on everybody, increasingly so. People are anxious now without knowing why. The antidote to anxiety, in a certain sense, is being in touch with the deep Self. People need practices that keep us in touch with the greater part of ourselves.”

These practices include creative arts and contemplative practices. “The ancient shrines used to involve both of those things,” Meade said. “So, what people love in terms of beauty, art, music; whatever it is that a person loves—gardening, being close to the earth, walking in nature—that falls into the arts and practices we need more as an antidote to what’s happening in the collective psyche.”

Connection Amidst Chaos

Each of us connecting with our own soul, living our inner truth, and finding practices to keep in touch with what we love may help us to create a “change to where people live with dignity and a sense of inner nobility,” Meade said. Such changes “can begin to build respect back in terms of cultural healing. If people realized that what we do with our life affects the world, we can begin to have an initiation that starts in the individual soul and moves into the collective; that empowers the collective to deal with social injustice as well as climate change to a greater degree, because then it would all be fueled by imagination and the soulful sense of being connected to everything in the world.”

Meade spoke in the video clip below of the effect one awakened soul can have on others, through the power of imagination:

“Those who have a sense of soul, or deep Self, are one step ahead of everybody else because there’s at least the intuition that the way we deal with the lack of coherence in the world by finding more coherence in ourselves,” Meade said. “Then if we tap into the deep self, you’re going to have the giftedness that’s in everybody.”

Meade said that his Friday evening program will include songs, stories, and poems about the awakening of the soul. “There will be some kind of story about how it works on a mythological level, and commentary that will consider the state of the world, the state of the collective psyche, and the opportunity it presents to the individual psyche.” The Saturday workshop “will be much more about the idea of initiatory practice,” Meade said. It will address the question of “how do I, as one small person in this big, screaming drama, find things that are stabilizing and sustaining to me, and at the same time, develop paths that are creative and meaningful?” in order to address the third crisis of truth and meaning. “I’ll go into that more deeply, with more stories and more consideration of how the individual soul awakens and moves on the path of its life.”

Don’t miss this soulful weekend Michael Meade!

Lecture: Friday, October 12th
Time: 7:00-8:30pm (doors open at 6:15 with mingling, music before and after)
Location: Library Downtown, 210 E 400 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84111
Cost: free (please become a member)
Includes 1 free CE

Workshop: Saturday, October 13th
Time: 9:00am-4:00pm
Location: University Guest House, 110 Fort Douglas Blvd, Salt Lake City, UT 84113
Cost: $120; before Sept 27th $110 (lunch on your own, 6 CEs). Members additional 10% discount

Get your tickets here: https://michaelmeade.brownpapertickets.com/

~Amanda Butler, M.S.
Blog Manager and Newsletter Manager
Jung Society of Utah

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