Michael Meade says: "It's not the end of a world that is happening. It's the end of a world view that is happening." We are all (potentially) initiates, questing for a new world view.
In older traditional indigenous cultures initiation or rites of passage were integrated into the culture to facilitate periodic human metamorphosis through the stages of life from birth to death and elders were the facilitators of initiation.
According to these older world views, birth is the emergence of a soul into a cosmic moment. Life is a great gift. A child is the embodiment of a soul and every life comes with gifts. But the soul, from the get-go, needs help and support in order to thrive because the world is a tough place.
In contemporary industrial / post-industrial culture the need for initiation has fallen by the way because modern values are acquired values that increasingly reflect an environment that rewards a competitive spirit, and, for the most part, they are culturally specific values. Darwinian thinking, though obsolete, is ingrained in how our culture conducts itself economically and politically.
Within mainstream culture there are, increasingly, counter-cultures that value transformation and there are more people (maybe you are one of them) who are seeking opportunities to initiate, but due to the lack of initiated elders, contemporary initiation is very different from traditional initiation. Even though initiation is not what it used to be, an essential foundational rite of passage guaranteeing the continuity of a culture, there are some elements of any affective initiation that have not changed.
Meade says that, to make up for the lack of a ready pool of elder-wisdom and collective initiated experience, we have to take the initiative to reawaken our sense of the presence of the ancestors . . . if we seek self-transformation. Meade describes an older culture's world view of ancestors as the "dead who aren't dead", or the "living dead". Of course the ancestors are more than just the collective wisdom of those who came before us. Ancestors are energetically very real and sometimes visually present for these older cultures. This is hard for us to wrap our heads around, but ancestors have many ways of manifesting to those who are born into cultures that never down-graded or dismissed the ancestral underpinnings of a soulful, prayerful and ritual-based life. We, on the other hand, are very poor and needy in this regard. (Other ways ancestors manifest are via visions, dreams, synchronicities involving the elements and sacred objects at critical moments in life when the way forward is blocked and through synchronistic encounters with animals and people.)
Elders in older cultures were / are respected because they have experienced loss and setbacks and yet they are still here. Not all elders, but elders in general are likely to possess at least some of the knowledge that we need to continue, by which I mean make it to the next initiation.
It is not the elders who initiate us. It is life and the ancestors that initiate. Elders facilitate initiation. They may be healers. They may have the medicine we need, but they themselves do not heal. It is the medicine that heals. It is the ancestors that heal us, and it is the ancestors that initiate us. This is a mystery. If we want to initiate we must step into a liminal space to make ourselves available to the ancestors.
Initiation is like a small death. We die to the old way,or the old world view and come back more alive than we were before, essentially living larger. The modern world needs more life in it and it needs more initiated people who are living larger. An initiated world view assumes the necessity of periodic transformation. And those people who manage to transform through initiation will be qualified to create a culture that honors both its elders and its ancestors.
(Article changed on Oct 02, 2024 at 7:49 PM EDT)
