Episode 81 - Angeles Arrien Part 3 – Co-Creating Planetary Myths for the 21st Century
Episode Description:
“For human evolution to continue, the conversation must deepen.” – Margaret Mead
In this intriguing 3-part dialogue with my deep friend Angeles Arrien, leading cross-cultural anthropologist of our time, we engage in one of the key 21st century projects – the co-creation of new planetary scale teaching, healing, and unifying myths.
We use the term “myth” here in the manner defined by Joseph Campbell -- as a great cultural story that reveals to people how to connect with their individual life purpose and be part of and in service to the larger community. Such stories created in all cultures have a healing function, enabling an individual to understand his or her unique life history and how it is part of an interconnected Larger Story.
C.G. Jung observed with reference to our human species that our capacity for psycho-mythologizing is much greater than our tendency to pscho-pathologize our experience (e.g., acculturated and media-induced perspectives of cynicism, carping criticism, apathy, depression, polarization, lack of a feeling of well-being and of hopefulness, etc.). And I and Angeles say that we are now in a great New Era of transformation, with a basis for deep hope and inspiration amidst the falling apart of the old era.
Central to our ability to co-create mutually empowering and sustaining deep planetary myths and understandings in our time is understanding the nature of dialogue and cultivating a perspective of paradox -- capable of holding the infinitely expanding diversity of creation in a wholistic, open consciousness of appreciation, curiosity, wonder, and practicality.
These are the themes of this dialogue as we conclude our 3-part series with a number of inspirational real life examples, including the Velvet Revolution, Desmond Tutu in South Africa, and other miracles that have occurred in our time, showing that the future is literally ours to choose.
See also my prior Dialogue 52 on this site with Angeles regarding the stages of a new synthesizing wisdom culture as well as elderhood for our time.
“Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.
Contact me if you like at www.livingdialogues.com. Visit my blog at Duncan.personallifemedia.com. ”. (For more, including information on the Engaged Elder Wisdom Dialogue Series on my website www.livingdialogues.com, click on Episode Detail to the left above and go to Transcript section.)
Among others, programs you will find of interest on these themes are my Dialogues on this site with Joseph Chilton Pearce and Deborah Tannen specifically mentioned in this dialogue – as well as generally those with Duane Elgin, Paul Ray, Michael Meade, Coleman Barks, Sobonfu Some,Vine DeLoria Jr., Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Michael Dowd, among others [click on their name(s) in green on right hand column of the Living Dialogues Home Page on this site].
After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey. My thanks and appreciation for your participation.
Transcript
Transcript
“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational. You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification. A breath of fresh air! Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya
In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, I featured a special series of dialogues with myself and other elders in the weeks leading up to and including the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. 2008 elections. Those dialogues can be listened to separately on this site or as gathered as a series on my website www.livingdialogues.com under the collective title “Engaged Elder Wisdom Dialogues”. They address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)
In all my Living Dialogues from their inception I talk in various ways about the call to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out -- required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.
This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative ways of living and sharing together, to engage our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.
And that is 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.
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, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN, ROBERT THURMAN, DAVID MARANISS, DAVID BOREN, GEORGE LAKOFF, TOM HAYDEN, JAY INSLEE, BRACKEN HENDRICKS, BOB GOUGH, VAN JONES, BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, LESTER BROWN, DAVID MENDELL, DEBORAH TANNEN, JOHN GRAY, ARI BERK, SUSAN JACOBY, 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.
P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the appreciations received from you.
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From time a memorial begin with an indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of western visionaries such as Pluto, Galileo, and quite emphasis is David Baun. Mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness evoking a flow of mania a diaflow of logos mania beyond what any one individual can bring through alone so join now as together with you the active deep listener. We evoke and engage in living dialogues.
Duncan Campbell: Welcome once again to living dialogues. I am your host Duncan Campbell and I am truly delighted and excited and deeply pleased to have with me as my guest for this dialogue Angeles Arrien my great friend known to you in many different manifestations as an anthropologists and educator and award winning author of numerous books starting with the Fourfold Way, a consultant one that’s been involved with the United Nations, one who has been invited to dozens of countries literally around the world to share her universal teachings of leadership skills, communication, health care, education, indigenous wisdom and many other insights. Ange is the founder and president of the Angeles Arrien foundation for cross cultural research and education and a fellow at the Institute of Noetic sciences. So Ange once again just a real moment to be able to share another dialogue together.
Angeles Arrien: Yes, I am so excited and delighted to be with you again and also it’s such an honor [x] so I just admire your work so much.
Duncan Campbell: Well thank you again Ange you know that the same that we both mutually approve and for a many years you have been a great inspiration to me since we first met back in 1990 auspiciously in Colorado through a mutual friend at a seminar that you were giving and one of the things that we have discovered in our ongoing paths is that when we do come together from time to time when you speak I hear my own self speaking something that I have been understanding or sharing or teaching for several years and then you have been doing the same and it is just really such a sense of connectedness it is almost like the quantum interconnectedness of the two photons we know
[Laughing]
Duncan Campbell: It’s Just
Angeles Arrien: Little combustion
Duncan Campbell: Yes
Angeles Arrien: And resonance is great.
Duncan Campbell: Yeah. And I thought we might dedicate this particular dialogue to the beautiful articulation you made which has been very close to my heart for several years now of the challenge for all of us to move beyond polarity and either or sinking in to paradox to be able to hold in our mind and in our consciousness multiple points of view in a true sense of paradox so that we can hold a space of unity that allows for many many diverse and sometimes even seemingly on the surface incomparable points of view and to lead of this dialogue I’d like to just remember when I was fresh when in college I was doing a paper for a political science on [x] and his first political discourse and I used as a frontispiece for my paper quotation from that discourse in which he said I preferred to be a man of paradoxes rather than a man of prejudices
Angeles Arrien: What a great statement?
Duncan Campbell: It was a great statement and it really struck me so much that right there is an 18-year-old fresh when you know I put that at the head of my paper because somehow that communicated very deeply to me particularly because in French the word prejudices is pre-ju-jae which literally means prejudgment.
Angeles Arrien: Yeah prejudge
Duncan Campbell: So instead of being open and present to the world as it is in all of its multiple wonderers complexity and diversity which required us being able to hold as base of paradox one has the tendency because of our upbringing or convention or education or religious teaching or whatever to fall into prejudgments so we only see through the lens that we have been conditioned to see and we are not open to the surprise and wonder of the world as it is and that was why we are so for instance to threw away his watch and did all the other things he tried to do to take himself out of the narrow shadow of enlightment thinking which was at the time enshrining reason and he was really a kind of precrusher I think of what we see today in world where we are now more and more many of us becoming drawn to the wisdom of earth based traditional cultures that had a really profound resonance within a wild natural world to complement the complexity of our modern mind and consciousness and as you put it create a synchronistic and syncretic third term.
Angeles Arrien: Yeah third possibility because I thinks it’s so easy to take sides and it’s so easy to polarize and be in opposition and hold fast but I think our challenge now in history is how can we strengthen of the muscle that can hold creative tension without moving to prematured solution and how can we hold paradox and to inform ourselves on what might be the polarities and the oppositions but not take a side to wait for the possibility of something synergetic because that would emerge out of those different polarities and oppositions that would be more fabulous and elegant solution that would serve a common purpose or good that’s greater than either side.
Duncan Campbell: Well you know as you say at that way and what it remains of is conversation and dialogue I had with Deepak Chopra back in 1996 where he referred to this inability to have a mind that can hold paradox as something we have been educated to do because of our felt need in a reason based culture for certainty and he called that he had this wonderful phrase we may laugh actually because of it’s cognate he called it prematured cognitive commitment.
For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell