A Map to the Next World, Part VII

Soul Canyon: Where Mystery Dwells [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

This is Part Seven of a 20-plus-part essay on making and following a map that might get us to the Next World, and on what it means to leave one world and eventually reach another, and on what it’s like for a community or a society to be between worlds, perhaps walking that long road for several generations. Think of this as a draft of an essay I’ll be working on for a while — or eventually a short book. Let me know what resonates with you. To fully understand or contextualize today’s part, you might want to read, reread, or at least scan the first six parts. If so, click here.

My Substack postings will appear more or less at the same time on our Animas Valley Institute weekly “Soulcraft Musings,” which you can access here. I encourage you to join this free Animas list because our Musings include the voices of other Animas guides as well as soul-and-nature-oriented verse from familiar poets and others who may be new to you. Also, joining our list will provide you free access to several previous years of Soulcraft Musings, to upcoming Animas program information, and links to The Animas Commons, our online community with frequent events you can drop in on.

In the two most recent parts of this long essay, I wrote about why developmental stage is everything if we are ever to reach the Next World. More specifically, nature-based full-spectrum human development is everything.

With an ecocentric and soulcentric understanding of human development as a foundation, I can now disclose that my primary intention for this essay as a whole is to paint a picture that might help you grasp the kind of thing we are doing at Animas Valley Institute. Because it’s not easy to grasp. It is, after all, at odds with the mode of consciousness marshaled and shaped by modernity. This makes our work challenging to describe — or accurately decipher — even if my vocabulary is perfectly clear and my sentences impeccably formed (something I aspire to). A natural tendency for many people is to try, consciously or unconsciously, to understand our work as a version of something they’re already familiar with, something that is part and parcel of Dominator World, including aspirations that are on the fringes of but still within the bounds of that world, such as the Rebellion Against Dominator World.

You might wonder, for example, if what we’re conjuring at Animas is some variety of shamanism, rites of passage, the hero’s journey, or wilderness-based psychotherapy, or perhaps nature-based healing, a type of Jungian analysis, a new or old version of vision quests, or a novel way to transcend the ego, solve personal problems, build an ecocentric community or civilization, or help people better adjust to — or even be happier in — the flatland of Dominator culture. But it’s none of these. It’s something that doesn’t exist in Dominator World, and this is not a coincidence because its absence is the very defining feature of Dominator World. If the kind of thing we’re doing at Animas became a significant presence in contemporary societies, Dominator World would come to a rapid end (but it would still take a long time for us to reach the Next World).

If at Animas we’re not doing one of those more-or-less familiar things (even if counter-cultural), then what are we up to? By now in this essay, you have of course guessed it, but the point of my saying it explicitly is not simply to come clean with you but to emphasize that what we’re doing is not a version of any of the more familiar endeavors you might have suspected.

What we are up to at Animas is creating and following a map to the Next World.

That said, let me be clear about two things: First, the Next World is not the same as the transitional ecocentric societies that we will need to design and create on our way to the Next World. This is a crucial distinction. (More on those transitional societies in a later installment of this essay.) Second, we’re not attempting to design the Next World itself. Only a map to get there. The Next World cannot be designed from this one. The Next World will become what it is through the soul-rooted lives of humans in constant ecstatic interplay with the soulwork of all other Earthly species and ecologies, which is to say through enough of us joyfully embodying our original instructions, our innate ecological niches, by which, as you know by now, I mean our Souls.

But we can say this: There are two ways in which the Next World will be different from Dominator World, one being a kind of homecoming and the other an unprecedented trailblazing. First, the Next World will be a return to some features of all previous human worlds that were life-supporting. In particular, as was apparently the case for most of our human past (keeping in mind that we’ve been homo sapiens for approximately 300,000 years), we will once again experience the world as wholly animate and sacred, and we will be living once more in resonance with our original instructions, both our individual and collective original instructions. This is to say we will again undertake, through childhood and adolescence, the series of initiatory odysseys that eventually result in true adulthood and genuine elderhood. Second, reaching the Next World will be a one-way irreversible passage forward into a never-before-experienced mode of being human, our evolutionary adaptation or diversification into a kind of human that has not existed previously, a kind of human that Geneen Marie Haugen calls homo imaginans. (I’ll have more to say later in this essay about this new mode.)

This second feature of the Next World — how evolution shapes us — is not something we get to choose or fashion with our strategic minds. It has been chosen for us. In contrast, the first feature is up to us: We must consciously design new, contemporary (but not “modern”) methods for human children to eventually become soul-initiated adults. That design is a map to the Next World.

With our nature-based maps and models as essential resources, my Animas colleagues and I have created methods (practices and multi-day experiential immersions) to mature the ego in a way that modernity’s approaches to human development don’t even attempt — or even recognize as a possibility: supporting contemporary humans on their journey of soul initiation. The goal of our work, in other words, is a deep-structure transformation of the psyche that elicits our most creative response to our current critical, liminal moment in the unfolding of life on Earth, a moment in which Dominator World is collapsing. Collectively, we stand on the threshold of a future that is being shaped not only by those of us who can see beyond our time — as Terry Tempest Williams has inspiringly put it — but also by those of us who can see beyond our current world, or at least to its edges. A map to the Next World cannot be found on the map of modernity.

A map to the Next World, after all, comes from the Next World, a kind of retro-causality. You could say that it’s a ladder put in place for us by the future ones, those who are rooting for us to someday make their embodied lives possible. The ladder is waiting for those of us capable of finding it. The map is the ladder.

* * *

An ecological, more-than-human concept of Soul — as a being’s unique eco-niche — is one example of a core idea or image you won’t find anywhere in even the most progressive, depth-oriented corners of modernity^[1] — because it flies in the face of Dominator World’s necessary illusion that we somehow exist separate from the greater Earth community, as if we were self-conjured creatures.

A related idea, also exotic, is our Animas understanding of true adulthood, which earlier in this essay I defined briefly as the conscious embodiment of the unique eco-niche we’re born to inhabit. More thoroughly, our map to the Next World identifies an initiated adult as someone who (1) experiences themself, first and foremost, as a member of the Earth community (and secondarily and derivatively as a member of a particular family, ethnic group, culture, etc.), (2) has had one or more visionary, mystical experiences of their unique ecological niche in that more-than-human community (in other words, one or more soul encounters), (3) has been shape-shifted by those experiences in such a way as to render their ego (their conscious self) capable of embodying that unique niche as a gift to their people and the Earth community (in other words, has gone through the life passage of soul initiation), (4) has cultivated competence in one or more specific delivery systems for embodying that niche, and (5) is in fact embodying that niche, every day and in most everything they do, as a gift to their people and to the Earth community (whether or not doing so happens to have anything to do with a “job” they might be “paid” for). A soul-initiated and soul-embodying person is what I mean by a true adult. Being one makes you an agent of evolution — and, in an egocentric, patho-adolescent society like ours, an agent of revolution as well, which is to say an inherent interrupter of Dominator Culture. All true adults are visionary artisans of cultural evolution.

The journey of soul initiation is not a rite of passage, and it is not what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey” with its three phases of “departure, initiation, and return.” Rather, it is a complex developmental process of many years involving the search for Soul, encountering Soul, and then the shapeshifting of the ego by that encounter. The journey takes a person from the end of one particular life stage (ecocentric early adolescence, which I call the Oasis), across the life passage I call Confirmation into a second stage (soulcentric late adolescence, which I call the Cocoon,), through the Cocoon and then across the next life passage of Soul Initiation, which is the start of the life stage of the Wellspring (early Adulthood). The most significant element of the journey is the Descent to Soul, a months-long or years-long psychospiritual expedition into a precinct of the underworld I think of as Soul Canyon. In contrast to the three phases of Campbell’s hero’s journey, the Descent to Soul has five distinct phases, which I call Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis, and Enactment.^[2]

You might wonder: In order to become soul-initiated, does everyone, once they’ve reached the psychospiritual stage of soulcentric late adolescence, need to go through an arduous initiation process of a year or more that is shaped and guided by adults or elders? My take is that the vast majority of humans do in fact need such support, primarily because this particular initiation requires the death of most everything a person has previously understood about themselves, about the world, and about life. Most people would not choose such a journey voluntarily or, even if they did, would not succeed at navigating it on their own. This is the likely explanation for why all intact nature-based cultures of the past appear to have had such initiation rituals and traditions, as do the few enduring today. It’s not likely these initiation practices would be ubiquitous among nature-based cultures if they were not generally necessary. Also, no contemporary Dominator societies have, in their mainstream, initiation practices of this sort — nor do they have many initiated adults. Probably not a coincidence.

Nonetheless, I know of many individuals in Dominator World who managed to find their own way through the psyche-reshaping ordeals and ecstasies of the journey of soul initiation. I’ve written and spoken about several examples of such self-guided, multi-year journeys, including those of W.B. Yeats, Carl Jung, Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, and Brian Swimme, as well as many others not so well known.^[3] My own journey was largely self-guided even though I had vital adjacent support along the way from several wise mentors.

The present-day occurrence of unbidden, self-guided soul initiation, though rare, suggests to me that the possibility and naturalness of soul initiation is built into our human psyches. As is its recoverability. Soul initiation is an essential milestone of our personal unfolding and of cultural regeneration, and it can take place even without the support of an enfleshed guide and even within the soul-suppressing contexts of Dominator World. Rare but possible. The individual human Soul within Dominator societies has been waiting thousands of years to be remembered and reclaimed by us.

^[1] I’ve found one near exception: Although he didn’t use the word soul in this context, the late Earth poet and bardic naturalist Stephen Harrod Buhner offered the closest thing I’ve yet seen to my definition of Soul when he observed that we humans “are expressed as a unique ecological communication when we are born.” See his extraordinary Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception Into the Dreaming of Earth (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company), p. 232.

^[2] For a full presentation of the Descent, please see my book, The Journey of Soul Initiation. You can also see a diagram of the phases of the Descent into and across Soul Canyon here (scroll down).

^[3] For accounts of a variety of soul initiation journeys, including my own, see my books Soulcraft, Nature and the Human Soul, and The Journey of Soul Initiation, especially the latter. Also in the latter, I offer an in-depth account of Carl Jung’s initiatory journey, including a framework for understanding his Red Book that deviates significantly from perspectives offered by Jungians and other depth psychologists (including that of the Red Book’s editor, Sonu Shamdasani). For an overview of Brian Swimme’s journey of soul initiation, please see this video of my public conversation with him.

This post is Part Seven of a 20-plus-part essay on a journey to the Next World and on a map that might help get us there. We’ll continue with Part Eight next week. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this article helpful, please restack it to share it with your followers.