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This episode begins with a report on the radicalization of a radio station where extreme political views began to be mixed in with the local weather and local news. Ironically, the name of the town was Normal, as if to underline the sense that “normalizing” extremist movements and disinformation causes any sense of what might be normal to be a thing of the past.

The dramas and conflicts happening locally are also occurring throughout the world as the rise of social media, where anything goes, becomes added to the strong arm politics of gaining power by any means necessary. In the midst of all the misinformation, fear mongering and rabble rousing, people don't know what to believe or who to trust. To be alive at this time means to be a witness, willingly or unwillingly to the upheaval of the world.

The conditions in which we find ourselves are the conditions through which we must find our true selves and the genuine purpose of our lives. If we accept that we live amidst a great metamorphosis that involves all levels of life, we can become more able to tolerate and endure the troubling and tragic events that threaten both nature and human culture. In times of upheaval we are being called, not to return to normal, but to find a greater imagination as well as a deeper understanding about life on Earth.

As things fall apart in the outside world, a deep sense of purpose and meaning seeks to awaken within us. The inner alchemy of the human soul includes a settling self-center, but also resilient resources of great vitality and transcendent creativity. Ancient traditions held that the individual soul could be the source of “vertical imagination” that allows us to reconnect the inner with the outer, the upper with the lower, the older with the younger, each other with one another, and help bring human culture and great nature back into balance.

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