Different Drummer

“A false sense of security
is the only kind there is.”
~ Michael Meade

Outer trouble and the inner need to grow
conspire to set us on a path
of awakening and initiation.
~ Michael Meade

“I believe God — and to me “God” is just shorthand for the ineffable divine presence — has only one question for us at the end: “Did you become yourself?” We have a seeded self that begins to germinate at birth. Our true goal in life is to become that self.

My complaint is that the World Wide Web, with all its horizontal strands, lacks a vertical dimension… Take social networking. The problem is that it’s not really social enough. “Social” suggests being together, being companions in life. The story comes not just from horizontal experience. The dramatic part appears when it goes vertical. A person rises above others or falls down below everybody else. The realms above and below used to be called “spirit” and “soul.” Spirit lifts the person up, whereas soul pulls a person deeper into life… When people talk about “connection,” they’re really talking about soul. The real connections are not surface connections. You can have many friends on Facebook, but your real friends are those who know and support your deep self and will remind you when you’re losing touch with your own soul.

What is often missing in modern mass culture is this depth of connection. When you see a culture dividing into simplistic polarities — which is all of our politics nowadays and most of our religion — what’s going on is a loss of soul. People who are in touch with their soul know what they’re supposed to be doing in the world and what their way of contributing to life is, in the same way that people know what music they love and what food they enjoy — not just life-sustaining food, but food that has flavor, that makes you feel nourished, even inspired. The U.S. has become mired in spiritual materialism. People are substituting material accomplishments or possessions for the things the soul loves, such as music and meaningful speech. The soul even loves suffering when the suffering produces realization. In a mass effort to find superficial comforts and avoid suffering, the whole culture has lost soul. Everyone needs some help learning who they already are. That’s the root of genuine education and the task of real culture.

I’ve found that I’m happier and closer to the rhythm of my own life when I play drums and sing. When I can’t, I start to have a broken step and fall out of rhythm with myself. Of course, playing music is not simply about how well you do it. I watched American Idol because I was curious what Americans were idolizing. I love the fact that it’s about song and voice, but that gets turned into a contest to determine who’s got the best voice. Meanwhile every voice is unique. The best voice is the one you have. Not that you don’t improve it, but you improve it by learning what it is and what it has to contribute to the symphony of life.

At the Apollo Theater in Harlem, every Wednesday night is amateur night. At an amateur night in 1934 a seventeen-year-old girl took the stage planning to dance, but the act before her was a dance duo that was so good that she felt she couldn’t follow it. So, while standing onstage, she decided to sing instead. That girl was jazz great Ella Fitzgerald. She had never sung in public. She didn’t know that she could sing! But as soon as she stepped onstage, the core story of her life awakened, and she began to sing. I happened to hear her in person when I was growing up in New York, and anybody who has ever listened to her understands that hers is a natural gift coming from the depth of her soul. Ella Fitzgerald was one of the greatest singers of modern times, but she has passed on. As the older generation of singers dies out, a new generation takes its place. There is not supposed to be an end to it. The music has to be re-created through the living bodies and souls. It’s up to those who are alive right now to find their gifts and allow them to come out.

The local myth of public schooling is that everybody should receive the same education. That’s not all bad. It helps people break out of the socioeconomic class system. Another good thing about school is you get away from home! [Laughs.] It gets you out there, and you make friends who eat different food than you and have different ideas and practices. There is a value to that. But the local level of myth is also limiting. At the deeper level education means to “lead it out,” and real education happens when the uniqueness of the student comes out. It’s not just about achieving good grades. Most real teaching occurs when young people get into trouble, because it’s a chance to guide them toward the purpose of their life. Everyone needs some help learning who they already are. That’s the root of genuine education and the task of real culture.

I was invited to give a talk in Portland, Oregon, where young people had gathered from all across the country to participate in a community-building project. For nine days they volunteered to feed the homeless or clean up public parks or paint houses in low-income neighborhoods. There were about 1,500 of these kids working together. At the end of each day they came back to a big warehouse and ate dinner... Finally it was getting late, and I said, “OK, I know everybody is eager to dance. I am too. And that’s the point: to be in the dance of life. When the band starts, and you go out there and dance, I want you to do one thing, which is to understand who you are in the midst of the dance. No one else is dancing the same way that you are. So be in the big dance of life, but also be yourself in the big dance.” Then the band came on, and there was spirited dancing, and it was just beautiful. I was sitting on the side of the stage, watching, and the young people started coming over and lining up in front of me. They were dancing and saying to me, “I’m showing you who I am.” They’d gotten the message. Hundreds of kids lined up to say, “This is my dance!” We are in the dance of life together, which includes famines and natural disasters; which includes pointless wars and human cruelties. And we’re each dancing our own steps in the midst of all of that. That is what school is supposed to be: learning to enter the dance of life and to be oneself in it…

I’m thinking of a Vietnam veteran who came to a retreat attended by vets from Afghanistan and Iraq… This particular Vietnam veteran had a big soul and couldn’t hide it or the wounds that affected it. Before being drafted, he’d wanted to be a singer-songwriter. When he was sent to Vietnam, he saw and did things that changed him. On one occasion he was ordered to pick up body parts and put them in bags. He was eighteen years old. You can imagine the smell, and the raw emotions, and how that can break a person down pretty quickly. He had to pick up the shredded body parts of the enemy, the people who, hours before, were killing his friends. Afterward he lost his sense of smell, and he hasn’t smelled anything since. He was so traumatized that he couldn’t play music for thirty-odd years. Finally he started playing the guitar and writing songs. At this event, for the first time ever in public, he played a song about how the war kept “coming back on him.” He had a hard time doing it, but he was blessed with a deep, Johnny Cash voice and a soul that wouldn’t give up its youthful dream. It was fantastic. Since then he’s been recognized for his talent, and he sings at veterans’ gatherings and in coffeehouses.Out of the experiences that scarred him so deeply he made songs that help others with similar traumas in their lives.

I find it odd that I am still identified with the so-called men’s movement… It was an attempt to provide opportunities for men to engage their souls in a deeper way through poetry, stories, songs, and rhythm. It was about imagination and depth of feeling, things that are often missing for men and increasingly for everyone in the culture. The other focus of men’s work was initiation. In the old cultures you didn’t simply grow into a man; you were initiated into manhood. The idea was to create conditions in which men could experience true awakenings and revelations about themselves… I was using poetry and song and stories to say to men that we need to be in touch with these things in order to be in touch with ourselves. Only then can we properly be in touch with everyone else. It was not about men’s empowerment or gender battles. It became that, because it went out into the social arena. But the core of it was soul work. It’s the same work that I’m doing now with young people, both girls and boys, and veterans, both women and men. There are more and more women coming back from battlefields whose stories need to be heard as well. Life is the battle to become ourselves while healing our wounds and giving our gifts.

Here’s the dilemma: people can’t initiate themselves. The only way I can reveal myself to myself is if someone else is protecting, supporting, and challenging me. The person who’s undergoing the initiation has to feel safe enough to let go and challenged enough not to stay still. When the function of the ego, which is to protect the self, is taken over by others, we can go into a deep descent and find elements of our own soul. If I try to initiate myself, I’m either going to make the temperature too hot, so to speak, or too cold. Initiation needs caring others who know what temperature is right for me. This is a real problem in a culture that thinks, I’m going to do it all myself.

Something else you need is nature. In traditional cultures initiations don’t happen in the village. They happen in wilderness. Initiation is going to bring out your nature, which is connected to greater nature. But you also have to be connected to a living, meaningful community. It all has to come together. The goal of initiation is to get individuals involved in the community in a way that’s meaningful to them and inspiring to others… What happens in mass culture is that we have substitutes for the elements of real culture. We have substitutes for everything. We have a substitute world almost! [Laughs.]

Everybody’s carrying inside them an archetypal or mythological sense of what the world is supposed to be, but our culture offers only substitutes for all of it. Pornography is a substitute for the actual, lived experience of love and pleasure. Battles over possessions and power substitute for the real battle to awaken the dream of the human soul. Mass culture distorts our instincts and inclinations. Some people are natural fighters, so they become soldiers. But soldiers are the opposite of warriors: soldiers do what they’re told; warriors do what they feel is best for everybody. When I work with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, I try to help them make the distinction between the soldier and the warrior. The warrior isn’t looking for war. A warrior looks to be of service to something beyond him- or herself. What’s happened is that the culture uses that willingness to serve its own narrow ends. Warriors would, under necessary circumstances, sacrifice their own health, comfort, and even their lives for the freedom of others, but that’s not what is happening. Most of the soldiers coming back know this. Most people who have been in any war know it.

When you take the willingness to sacrifice and aim it in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons, you get damage, and not just to the individual. That damage is inherited by future generations. For healing to occur, the truth has to come out, and by “truth” I don’t mean which side was right. That’s the small argument. The truth is that souls were hurt, and healing is required for the individuals as well as the collective. I have tremendous respect for those who go into battle, because it is a courageous thing to do. And it is not mindless. Politics aside, when people commit themselves to any kind of meaningful struggle, it’s something to be respected. I feel the same about anybody who loves. To love is to face fear and to be wounded. It takes courage to fight for anything, even a misguided cause.

The big story isn’t history. That’s just another substitute for the life of the human soul, which is the real story. In the long run it’s the poets, not the newspapers, who have the news. The news is a superficial exchange of information that can never tell the whole story. The poets tell us we’re in this great, ongoing dance that includes opportunities to fight and love and fall down and get back up. Hopefully we have the occasional chance to do our particular dance in the middle of all that. To experience life fully is to experience more pain and more beauty than anybody signed up for. To go into the world as one’s true self is an act of courage. That’s why I say that if younger people observed more older people who had the courage to be themselves and stand for ideals that are meaningful instead of standing for the small, mean arguments that are taking over the culture, then young people would find it easier to awaken to their own dreams.

Young people need authentic experiences. We are authentic when we’re living the story we came here to live. This is true of everybody, but with young people it is critical, especially in our substitute, technological, materialistic culture. The people who are most valuable in a culture aren’t those who avoid all trouble, those who never slip up or fall down. The most valuable people are those who fall down and become deeper and figure out how to grow from their descended place. Many would-be leaders never admit mistakes, but real leadership comes from people who did it wrong, made a mess, but then came back. When times get hard, you don’t want leaders who have never taken risks. You want leaders who have survived mistakes and then figured out where the beauty is, where the meaning is, and what real courage is.

I call it “authentic authority.” If people can figure out who they are, at their essence, then they can act out of inner authority. The root of the word authority is author. So genuine authority is creative, not abusive or overly dominant. It is alive in the moment. Most people’s experience of authority is of false authority: dominating, collectivized authority; legalized authority; doctrinaire authority. Genuine authority actually arises from one’s creative depths. There are more ways for older people to be authentic today than we had in the sixties. That might be the most promising thing in the whole culture.

I got an invitation recently to work with a group of people who do hospice singing. They are mostly women over forty-five, and they gather in groups of two and three and sit with people who are dying and sing beautifully to them. I sat in a chair and listened to them and imagined I was dying, and it was like hearing angels. So here they are, many of them over sixty, and they have found their voices. Even more, they have found a way to use their voices. Several of them described how they had loved to sing when they were young but had never really done anything with it. Now they’re singing to people at the door of death. They’re called “threshold choirs.” From my point of view they are no longer olders; they have become elders.

Sometimes I act like an elder, and sometimes I act like a youth. Sometimes I just fall asleep, which both the young and the old tend to do a lot. [Laughs.] To me being an elder isn’t a continuous state. It’s an eruptive condition, an imaginal state. They say being young is a state of mind. So is being an elder. I hope that occasionally I do act like one. But I am also holding out for intermittent outbursts of youthful dreams.”

~ "Michael 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." ~ Huffington Post