Every now and then, a theme in a Myth in the Mojave podcast echoes in my consciousness so long and so often, that I have a transcript made.
This podcast is one of those, because I have so many conversations with people who want to be in closer contact with their intuition. I’m convinced that the major hurdle is one of recognition: we have so many voices talking in our heads that we’re rarely quiet enough to hear it. How can we focus? Do we really want to hear our intuition, especially if it means we must change?
Here’s the link to listen to the podcast “Truth in a Dark Time.” Scroll down for a written transcript.
Truth in a Dark TIme
In “A Ritual To Read To Each Other,” the poet William Stafford writes, “Though we could fool each other, we should consider—lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.”
Many of us long for a stronger connection to the wise intuitive voice that knows the way and truth in our lives. So why don’t we always hear it? How do we fool ourselves? Two fairy tales—“The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “Vasilisa the Wise”— provide some clues.
Transcript of Myth in the Mojave Podcast Truth in a Dark Time
Aired November 30, 2017
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Myth in the Mojave, 30 minutes of storytelling and conversation about mythology and why it’s important to our lives today. I’m your personal mythologist, Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are a part of this story circle. I’ve been doing a lot of work with individuals lately. In fact, I developed a new tool for it, called “The Story Oracle.” It involves a divination deck of cards that I’ve created that reference nine stories that seem to come up an awful lot when I’m talking to people about transitions, and decisions, and challenges, and opportunities in their personal lives.
It’s interesting because we are obviously all individuals and living very specific lives with particular details, and yet we’re enough alike and the passages that we have to go through, the things that we have to experience on the way to becoming who we are, are similar enough that we can turn to the same sets of stories and find interesting answers and insights. I have these nine stories, and I’ve been talking to people about their lives and noticing how different and also similar the problems are that we face.
One of the themes that has really been weaving through these readings lately is the desire to connect with the real, legitimate inner guide. You may call that “Intuition.” You may think of it as a higher self or ancestral wisdom, but when we have to make decisions, we frequently want to know what is really truly right for us and to hear that, hear that inner voice. Which means that we need to know how to tell ourselves the truth. One story that comes up a lot in this context is Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
Now, I told this story on the program before, and you can find the full-on version of it in the archives at Bandcamp, but in brief, the story is about a kingdom or an empire that’s ruled by an Emperor who was completely obsessed with his wardrobe, with his clothes. One day, a couple of swindlers come to the city where he lives, and they tell everyone that they’re weavers and that they weave the most beautiful, incredible fabric that you’ve ever seen, and that this fabric has a particular magical quality: that anyone who looks at the fabric and can’t see it is a fool, so it’s invisible to anyone who is basically an idiot who shouldn’t have their job.
The Emperor hears this and clearly wants a suit of clothes from the most beautiful fabric that’s ever been woven, and considers that this magical quality would come in really handy for somebody in his position. He’d be able to tell whether or not any of his ministers are actually incompetent. So these two swindlers are hired by the Emperor and they proceed to take his money and buy materials to put on their so-called “looms.” Then they pretend and act like they’re weaving. The Emperor sends one minister in to go and check on their progress.
Of course, this man cannot see a thing because there’s nothing there to see, but he plays along with the swindlers, and the swindlers help him out by describing the cloth so that he can go back and make a report to the Emperor, and then, this happens again. Another man is sent, and finally, the Emperor goes with his whole retinue, including the two men who’ve already been there before and who’ve already made the decision to be quiet about the fact that they can’t see anything and simply play along, and the end result is that the Emperor has a suit of clothes made from this fabric, a suit of clothes that he then wears in a very important public procession through the city.
All of the citizens are gathered around to see this procession, and of course, they’ve all heard about the fabric, and they’ve all heard about the magical quality, so they’re all really anxious to see whether or not they can actually see it, and very anxious to find out which of their neighbors are actually fools. The Emperor is parading through the city streets without any clothes on, naked, until a child calls out, “Hey, but he’s not wearing anything.” The parents initially try and shush him, but others in the crowd hear this, and this empowers people one by one by one by one to finally take this on, and suddenly, the whole citizenry is yelling out, “Oh, but he has nothing on.”
The Emperor down in the streets hears this, and he thinks maybe they’re right, but the procession has to go on so he keeps on walking, and that’s the end of the story.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is not about only one thing. Like any good story, there are many ways to read it, and there are lots of different life situations you can ponder with the aid of this story, but in the context of telling ourselves the truth and how do we tell ourselves the truth, one of the things we notice is the story is about appearances. It’s about the clothes, the clothes obsession of the Emperor and how everyone else goes along in order not to appear foolish, in order to not lose their jobs, so everybody is concerned with how they look in one way or another, and then it takes a small child to tell the truth to out the Emperor and everybody else actually, because they were all playing along.
We admire this child. The child has the frankness and the openness, the lack of artifice that goes along with being young, and yet, the child has very little at stake in this situation. I mean, the child has nothing to lose, and so of course, since it costs him or her nothing to tell the truth, it’s relatively easy to do. If we think of the characters in this story as characters that can be found in the “Kingdom” so to speak, of our personal psyche, then we have an Emperor, we have the weavers, we have the child, the parade is going on, and we can see all these characters as conversing and perhaps creating the content of our personalities as they speak. We can see this problem that we have, discerning the truth, hearing our real guide, the wise guide, our intuition, as a problem maybe contacting the child, or as a problem that the adults in our psyche have telling the truth because they, we, it fear losing whatever it is that we have at stake in our present situation.
Whatever we have at stake or whatever we imagine that we have at stake, and discerning the difference between those two is key.
Everyone watches the Emperor parade in his fine, invisible clothes without saying a peep. The child outs him. The truth is passed through the crowd, gains momentum and volume, until the Emperor who’s walking along with pomp and circumstance hears it, and he says, “The procession must go on. The procession must go on.” Now, who is it in your psyche, and we can just assume that maybe we all have this in common, in our personal psyches, our personalities that has that attitude? “The procession must go on.”
What do we do? Because there is a social dimension in a community procession, as well as a personal one. What do we have to do to let the parade go on? What do we have to ignore in order to let things proceed as usual? That’s a question that each one of us has to answer individually. I would say that on the personal level, the way I see it, it’s primarily my ego attachment to the way things are, my ego that says, “Gee, I wish things would be different.”
“I want this situation to be different. I want this to be better, and that to be better, and this to be better, and that to be better, but I don’t want to change. I don’t want to change anything. In fact, I don’t even want to make any changes.” It’s totally illogical, but isn’t that what we do, and so, then, I’m never going to hear the voice of the child because I’m never going to question what it is I’m afraid of changing.
Culturally, we’re doing a similar thing, I think, but I’m going to come back to that in a minute. Now, if you’re disconnected from that inner wisdom, the inner wisdom that we each have is much harder to live your life, so on the personal level, you may decide now that when you suspect that you’re not really telling yourself the truth, when you suspect that you have convinced yourself that there’s a magical fabric with a magical property, you might ask yourself, “What do I have at stake in my current situation? What do I not want to change?” All of us as individuals, disconnected from our inner wisdom, spinning out fantasies for ourselves leads to and supports a collective delusion, which is what we seem to be living and also potentially taking apart right now in this dark time.
William Stafford wrote a poem about this that I want to read to you. It’s titled “A Ritual To Read To Each Other.” It goes like this, ”
If you don’t know the kind of person I am,
and I don’t know the kind of person you are,
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world,
and following the wrong god home,
we may miss our star,
for there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break,
sending with shouts,
the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike,
and as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders,
the circus won’t find the park.
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs,
but not recognize the fact,
and so I appeal to a voice,
to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk.
Though we could fool each other,
we should consider
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark,
for it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.
The signals we give,
yes or no or maybe should be clear.
The darkness around us is deep.”
The darkness around us is deep. The collective implications of our silence, of our unexamined investment in the status quo, and our imaginary stake in the way things are now, continues to grow. What does it take to tell the truth? This seems to be a question that more and more people are seriously considering on the cultural, political stage as well. I see this #Metoo as one example.
We could say that there are more people, and especially women, it appears to me, who are honestly assessing their stake in this mess and their vulnerability, and choosing to tell the truth, to tell their truth, and when we do this, we liberate each other. When we do this, when we play the role of not a child as in “childish,” but the child, as in someone who is discerning the true investment in the procession and is willing to risk losing something that’s really not worth much.
I mean, let’s face it, to be minister to an Emperor who only cares about his clothes, that sounds about as vacuous as what we’ve got going on in the White House here in the United States right now, doesn’t it? Is what we’re protecting worth protecting? I think that one of the reasons that women are coming forward now is that more and more of us are really accepting our place or lack of place in this society. When you let yourself admit that you’d probably be thrown under the bus without too much provocation by many other members of your community, suddenly, it’s a little less frightening to risk the hailstorm that might fall on your head if you tell the truth.
Now, I call this podcast “Truth In Dark Times” and I’ve mostly been talking about the truth part, and the reference to the dark is layered. I am thinking about the shadow, about our personal shadow, that fear of investigating what we think we might lose, and I’m talking about the cultural shadow under which we are living right now. Both of those shadows, the shadows that allow us to stand on the street cheering at an absurd parade.
I’m also thinking about this time of year, the end of the harvest, what the Celtic people called “The Season of Sleep,” the slide down into the longest night of the year that will end on a Winter Solstice, December 21st. That move into the dark is gradual, and so is the return to the light.
When we hit that solstice on December 21st, it’s not going to reverse. We’re not suddenly going to have long days with the sudden explosion. It will be gradual. It’ll be gradual, minutes added to each day, and I suspect that this is and has been the process of contacting and investigating those personal and collective shadows, the personal and collective dark too.
We can just take a little piece off at a time. In this time of year, when we’ve got more darkness, more literal darkness, we’re invited to slow down, to turn inward. The outer world sends us signals that we can respond to. In fact, you might ask yourself if you’re resisting that invitation to stop running, stop distracting yourself. You might ask yourself if it’s the Emperor who’s insisting, that you stay busy, that you keep defending, pushing, making things happen.
You could try stopping and letting go, and seeing what comes in. Our stories and other wise teachers have told us that when you go into the dark, you discover light. The images that we hold and the stories that we tell ourselves about our situation determine the possibilities, and this image of light in the dark on this theme of truth and truth in the darkness calls to mind another story that I shared with you recently, “Vasilisa the Beautiful.” Again, this story can be read in many ways, but as you might recall, you have a young woman who is sent into the deep, dark forest to go to the home of the Baba Yaga, a fearsome, scary, old, witch, crone to ask her for fire. That is light.
That is consciousness, and Vasilisa is guided on this trip and in her interactions with the Baba Yaga by a doll, a doll that was gifted to her by her mother, which is I would say her intuition, this inner voice that we want to contact, that voice of truth that helps us stay on our path and survive the challenges that we face. Vasilisa listens to the doll. She goes to the Baba Yaga. She passes the test of the Baba Yaga. This Baba Yaga is a very interesting and mysterious figure.
I think she’s best understood as a face of the earth mother goddess, and a particular type of earth mother goddess, the goddesses that are initiators that initiate us into the mysteries of life and death, that show us powerfully the connection between life and death, how one is necessarily dependent upon the other, and by extension, how all creation is an act of destruction, and destruction one of creation. Now, this is a mystery of the deep feminine, and understanding about process. Not product, but process. The process that the earth is continually going through, and the process that everything on the earth is continually going through, and certainly, a process that we as human beings are going through on both the material and the psychic level. Vasilisa is initiated into this mystery, and she’s given a little piece of the power of it, in the form of a skull with fiery eyes, fiery eyes that burn with such intense light, they light up the darkness.
The Baba Yaga very suddenly sends Vasilisa away to walk back home through the dark forest in the middle of the night, but she’s got the light of the skull’s eyes. This skull turns out not to just be a particularly good headlamp. When Vasilisa gets home the following evening and is about to go into the house of her stepmother and her step sisters, and this stepmother and step sisters have betrayed her, they wanted her to be dead, which is why they sent her to the Baba Yaga, when she gets home, she’s going to throw the skull away, but it says to her, “Keep me. Keep me. Take me with you.”
Just as Vasilisa had listened to the doll, she now listens to the skull and takes the skull in the house. The skull sits in the corner, and the fiery eyes watch the stepmother and the step sisters all night, and in the morning, when Vasilisa wakes up, they have all been burned up, reduced to ash. Ashes by the way, ash is a material that then is reused by nature to become something else. Destruction is creation. Creation is destruction.
Whatever you fear that you may lose when you make that journey into the dark, into the darkness of your own psyche, into the darkness of the woods, into the darkness of the crone’s magical, weird house, however you want to see it, there is a guide, and there is a truth, and there is something new that will be created out of whatever you think has been lost.
That’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth in the Mojave for this week. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments about today’s program, and feel free to share this program with others that you know who may be interested in it. I want to express my gratitude to the members of the Myth in the Mojave community on Bandcamp for their invaluable financial support of this program. It’s the dollars and more, my friends, so thank you.
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Thank you so much for listening. Please tune in next time, and until then. Happy myth-making, and keep the mystery in your life alive.
