Excerpt from the new edition of
The Water of Life
by Michael Meade

© 1992 HarperSanFrancisco
and used with the author's permission

Some of the oldest myths of the origins of life describe this earthly world as a dream floating on the eternal waters of time. Many traditional cultures consider each person to be the incarnation of a unique dream, each soul a living microcosm of the cosmic dream of life. The nightmare version of the world takes over whenever the number of people having bad dreams increases and those genuinely living out the dream of their life decreases. In this sense, humans are the makeweights on the scales where the dream of life is weighed. The dream of life is in the hands of those people who happen to be alive at a given time.

In today's struggles the true enemy—the enemy behind the enemy—is the collapse of imagination that causes people to take stories as literal. The real enemy is the collapse into literalism and fundamentalism and the nightmare of fixed doctrines. The real problem is a loss of faith in the dream of life and the immediacy of the spirit that animates the world.

It's the job of myth to have a story for everything that happens and might happen in the world. In the great body of human stories, legends, and tales there are many myths of the end of the world. The fact that there are many and that they are different from each other holds the clue to the idea that they are stories to learn from, not historical predictions to literalize. The world depends upon this multiplicity and upon diversity and variety; it's true for the ecologies of the earth and it's true for the earthlings, as well. There cannot be a single religion or a single idea or a sole style of governing that works for everyone-not on this earth where each soul carries a living dream across the threshold of life.

We are in a struggle for the presence of genuine imagination in the face of the hardening of ideas and the narrowing of hearts that ensues when people make god one-sided and consider their own beliefs to be literally true and universal. Mythic imagination is a primordial resource of the human heart that combines heart-felt intelligence with a reverence for life in its myriad forms. When times become tragic and dark with uncertainty, what is missing is the touch of eternity and a mythic sense of being woven within the ongoing story of the world.

The fabric of a culture tends to unravel in two places at once, where its young people are rejected and where its old people are forgotten. Conversely, a culture becomes creative where the dreams of its youth are revealed and the visions of its elders are revered. Youth and elder are each visionary states, each mythic conditions more attuned to the threads of eternity than to the strictures of time.

Youth and elders meet where the dream of life-ongoing tries to awaken in the hard-edged world of reality. When a culture rejects the dreams of its youth and forgets the visions of its elders it becomes destructive to life regardless of its heralded ideals. A culture that rejects the spirit of its youth will come to lack spirit and imagination when faced with life's almost impossible challenges. A culture that forgets the necessity of converting "olders" into genuine elders will have leaders who can't learn from the past and, therefore, can't imagine a meaningful future.

A culture deteriorates-regardless of its professed standards of living-when those old enough to know better seek to solve complex problems with force and political manipulation. Those who grow old without finding a genuine sense of meaning in their lives tend to become repositories for fear and anxiety, while those who find an inner sense of meaning and purpose tend to become keepers of medicine and healing ideals.

In seeking to dominate Nature and control life, modern systems tend to divorce people from their own "inner nature." In trying to leave the past behind, people walk blindly into it again. In over committing to that which is literal and seemingly logical, people lose touch with the great imagination for life which ever lives in the soul. This book considers ways to view the conflicts and dilemmas of modern societies against a background of myth and imagination in the way of the Old Mind, the ancient, poetic mind through which each soul seeks to know itself and to find at least moments of genuine human community. What waits to awaken in each person is ancient and surprising, mythic and meaningful. Each person is "mythic by nature;" each a story trying to participate in the ongoing creation of both culture and nature.

The stories that shape this book are "soul stories," dilemma tales that challenge a person's character and understanding and tales of quests that require the entire reach of human spirit and depth of human soul. Behind each tale is the sense that a person must give themselves fully to the adventure of life or fail to find the story they came to life to live. According to the old stories, failing to discover and live the dream of one's life is a fate worse than death.

Amidst the modern rush and confusion something ancient and primordial is trying to catch up with us, an inner wisdom that alone can decipher a path through the mind-boggling dilemmas presented by both culture and nature. Myths involve primordial thinking, through which original ideas present at the very beginning return in order to begin it all again, even as it seems about to end.