Michael Meade: Well I
hope you're right about that. Now,
connection is a movement of the soul, so information would be kind of a
movement of the mind. Information is the
most superficial form of knowledge, and it's mostly mental, whereas connection
is soulful. So I would be very happy if
we were moving toward an ancient connection, because then we could reconstruct
community, which means - the middle of the word community is unity, and
community is when people are in healthy and meaningful ways connected. And that's very much what we need, we live in
a culture that is disconnected from it's own soul. That's why it's so disconcerting what's going
on in politics and all, where you see disconnection.
Then, in a way, you see a kind of non-full
connection that happens through social media, and the internet, and computers
and all. Everyone desires to be
connected, and yet that's not a full enough connection. The connections that are meaningful have soul
in them. The places we love that are the
places we feel the most connected to, and that kind of a deep and loving
feeling is soulful connection, and that's what makes a person feel secure in
the world, and valuable in the world, and mostly the modern world lacks deep
connectivity.
Rob Kall: So how do
people get soulful connection and deep connectivity?
Michael Meade: If you
take the core idea that I'm saying, that everybody is not empty inside, that
from before birth, they used to say, "A person is the body that is wrapped
around a soul that is wrapped around story."
So this idea that there is a story unfolding from within, that each
individual story has it's own genius from being alive and something to give to
the world. Once you really get that
idea, then a person becomes more secure in who they already are. But modern culture, people tell young people
"You have to become something," whereas the old idea there already are
something.
The purpose
of culture, which means "to cultivate," was to bring out of each girl and each
boy what what's already in there, and when that comes out, the connections and
associations become kind of obvious.
Like I'm a story person. I've got
my deep connections to stories when I was thirteen, and I've been trying to
live it out more fully ever since. I
find that when I work with youth, and I work with girls and boys all over the
culture, is that they're all trying to awaken to who they already are. That's the purpose of education, that's the
purpose of mentoring. The more a person
gets that, the more they feel connected to themselves in the deep sense of the
soul, and then from there it becomes an obvious how to connect to both nature
and culture, and in that process, it becomes evident what other people a person
is most soulfully connected to.
Rob Kall: I'm hoping
that in this interview that you can tell a story. This is what you do, brilliantly. Is there any chance that you can tell a story?
Michael Meade: OK. Let me consider a story that connects to what
we're talking about right now.
Rob Kall: Let me
throw a couple things at you. 1.
Connection would be interesting, another would be, a lot of my listeners
and readers are activists trying to make a difference in the world, trying to
make the world a better place. Some of
them are revolutionaries.
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