A Map to the Next World, Part XIV

Holding Space for Emergence [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

This is Part Fourteen 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 thirteen 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.

Last week, we explored our forward-seeing deep imagination as our species’ core but as-yet unrealized gift to the world, one that enables us to cultivate a conscious partnership with evolution. We considered some attributes of a potentially emerging species that Geneen Marie Haugen refers to as homo imaginans.

As a reminder, throughout this multi-part essay I’m taking a deep-time perspective regarding both the causes of our current polycrisis (many millennia in the making) and what might be our best long-term responses (over the next several hundred years or more). But this doesn’t mean I believe there’s nothing essential to do anytime soon. Quite to the contrary: We must prepare now for our multi-generational future by creating the foundations for post-modern healthy human societies — and this requires, foremost, a renewed and deepened tending to human development — nature-based, full-spectrum human development. Additionally, in the interim, we must design and build transitional life-sustaining societies and solutions, something I’ll explain and explore later in this series.

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A healthy soulcentric human culture is grown from wild seeds, not strategically designed or built. This is why it will take several generations to bring such cultures to fruition. Our goal is an old-growth forest standing again in a place that has been clear-cut. A thriving, life-enhancing culture is much more like a self-organizing ecosystem than like a machine or a hierarchically structured corporation; it’s more like an organic mycelial network than an assembled apparatus or a software program. There’s nothing artificial about the many kinds of intelligences needed to grow a healthy culture. (AI, which is backward seeing, derivative, and unimaginative, offers little of value for humanity’s post-Dominator, forward-seeing, deep-imagination project.)

Soul-initiated adults and true elders are the seeds that, in the fullness of time, produce a living, growing culture. The intermingling visionary projects of these adults and elders become the mature forests of such a culture. The self-organizing more-than-human world of a particular watershed, along with the sacred stories that grow out of that place, compose its soil. Evolution-driving Mystery (Love) is its rain and sunshine.

City planners, public educators, and ceremonial leaders, to name just three roles, may support the creation of mature societies, but true adults and elders are the indispensable ingredients, the starter culture of hale and hearty human cultures.

Another way to say this is that soul-initiated adults and elders are the imaginal cells of a healthy, mature society.

“Imaginal cells” is the name scientists have given to certain biological agents within a caterpillar’s body. These cells are dormant until sometime after the caterpillar has entered its cocoon. But ever since the caterpillar’s birth, these cells have been imagining the form of the adult creature, the butterfly, which biologists refer to as the imago — hence the term “imaginal cells.” In the cocoon, once the caterpillar’s body has dissolved into a kind of soup, these cells awaken and get busy reconfiguring the elements of the former caterpillar into the body of a butterfly.

As the imaginal cells of a community, true adults and elders are the way in which a “caterpillar society” eventually becomes a “butterfly society,” which is to say the way an adolescent human society eventually transforms into a mature human culture. Once there are enough soul-initiated adults and elders in a human community, their visionary projects link up in such a way that the whole society goes through a developmental-evolutionary unfolding.

In the Western world, we are now, as a mega-society, in a kind of cocoon. Our sociocultural structures have been dissolving for quite some time. I mean, for example, our governance structures (most of which are poorly-designed and now intentionally-undermined democracies), educational systems, family structures, traditional gender identities and roles, economies, religious institutions, healthcare systems, and international relations — not to mention our individual and collective psyches. This dissolution is an excruciatingly painful but necessary phase in cultural transformation — just as it is in individual initiation.^[1]

We might wonder what percentage of true adults and elders, as imaginal cells, are needed in a given egocentric Dominator society (like ours), as it decays and dissolves, before that society begins to metamorphose into a mature Partnership society. Hopefully, we’ll find out later this century or the next — on our long road to the Next World. We know that a healthy and mature society has approximately 25% true adults and 25% genuine elders, but maybe, say, only 5% of each would be enough to set this transformation in motion. What would you guess (and why)?

Some people say that before a large society, like Western civilization or a single Western nation or just a state or city or even a rural town, will have the possibility of transforming into a Partnership society, we will need to go through a long phase, perhaps hundreds of years, in which small intentional eco-soulcentric communities of maybe 50 to 100 people learn how to become mature butterfly communities, and that these communities will then serve as eco-soulcentric seeds or imaginal cells for larger societies.

Taking the above ideas a step further, we might imagine that these butterfly communities and eventual butterfly societies will ultimately serve as the imaginal cells of the next phase of human evolution — from a caterpillar hominid to a butterfly hominid, perhaps homo imaginans. This next step of homo speciation might in turn result in the next major step in Earth’s evolution, which is to say, in our arrival in the Next World.

As a species, too, we are now in a type of cocoon. But this is true, as well, for our whole planet. What percentage of butterfly societies will be needed globally before Earth begins to transform into a butterfly planet?

If we do evolve into a human form of a butterfly species, a journey that will take many generations, this would be a soul revolution for both humanity and Earth. Our previous human revolutions — including the agricultural, scientific, industrial, and digital — were necessary earlier steps, steps that make possible a soul revolution but in no way assure it. Only if our imaginal cells wake up in time, will this next revolution have a chance. The caterpillar must be in its sealed cocoon before its imaginal cells awaken. All initiation journeys are dangerous opportunities with no guaranteed outcome.

^[1] Joanna Macy made this same point about cultural transformation when she reminded us that the Great Unraveling (a dissolution) is a necessary component of the Great Turning (a metamorphosis). See Macy and Brown, Coming Back to Life.

This post is Part Fourteen 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 Fifteen next week. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this article helpful, please restack it to share it with your followers.

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