When you step further into the story you came to live, not only does the mythic territory open, but the deep self moves and the world of imagination and meaning comes towards you.
Interpretation
Embracing your life's journey allows for deeper understanding and creativity to unfold.
In this quote, Michael Meade emphasizes the importance of engaging deeply with one's own life narrative. As individuals delve into their personal stories, they not only discover new dimensions of themselves and their experiences but also unlock the vast possibilities of imagination and meaning that the world offers. The idea suggests that by exploring and embracing our unique paths, we can cultivate a richer inner and outer life.
In practice
Use this quote during a motivational speech about embracing personal growth.
There's an African proverb: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' Alive means living your own damned life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.
Until, modern times when it became mostly a civic task, education was considered a sacred work. It was sacred because it involved the indwelling spirit in the student and because it required an awakened spirit in the teachers. Spirit to spirit, genius to genius, soul to soul go the true lessons that help young people become themselves. Ultimately, each person holds the key to the story trying to be lived from within, but first someone else must help unlock the mystery of one’s life.
In many tribal cultures, it was said that if the boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped by the skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture. If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth.
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.
Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction - to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.
All the fish needs is to get lost in the water. All man needs is to get lost in Tao.
Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.
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