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Transcript · 74 min conversation
Depth Psychology and Soul Initiation
Alexa Firmenich in conversation with Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Valley Institute, on human development, ecological awakening, and the journey to soul initiation.
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Hello everyone. Today on Life Worlds we are going to be speaking about nature-centric development focused on depth psychology and a very particular school that's been started 40 years ago that brings these kinds of practices into the world. I want to take a step back to kick us off and just say that I've noticed a pattern around the world that when I begin to scratch the surface asking people about their eco-awakenings or a pivotal transformative moment that they had in their lives, I started to notice a very common thread, which is that many people would list an experience that happened to them during an Animas Valley Institute training.
And so Animas Valley is an institute that was founded in the 1980s by Bill Plotkin, and they have been, quote-unquote, guiding the descent to the human soul ever since, through a range of different courses and modalities. Over the last 40 years, they've developed some of the most sophisticated and intricate maps of the human psyche, sharing visions of how human societies might mature into true adulthood and elderhood, especially during times of upheaval and transition. And so in this introduction, I want to outline some of the maps that Animas has developed in order to give us a good footing as we head into the conversation with Bill. I just want to say that it's also practically impossible to do justice to the full depths of these maps and how they're outlined in the books, let alone the embodied experiences themselves.
One of which I actually recently participated within in South Africa, which was called their Soulcraft Intensive. So if this is interesting to you, I recommend to dig into the books and get into the content because it's hard to convey, I think, the depth of this in a short amount of time. But so if we look at the core thesis that Bill lays out, he says that the root problem of our collective crises lies in a deep crisis of arrested human development. Indeed, the systematic suppression of the cultural conditions that allow children to grow into their full innate human brilliance. And so he argues that as a result, many people around the world remain stuck in an early stage of adolescence. I mean, I think this rings true, right? We only have to look around and observe today's world leaders and power figures to see textbook examples of adolescent behavior, like bullying and emotional volatility, performative bravado, allergies to vulnerability.
So when this type of developmental maturation doesn't take place, it of course creates profound cultural implications for our culture as a whole. The crisis of education, and I'm using education here in the original sense of the word, which is educare, to draw out, it has so many facets. And what Bill and Animas Valley have been developing are educational systems for people to ecologically awaken. And these are nature-based educational systems. They very much also avoid the pitfalls of cultural appropriation, which is so important today. And so these systems ask questions such as, in an era when the revealed interdependency of all things is reshaping every field of knowledge, what is it that we might discover about the human psyche when we consider that we too are expressions of nature's qualities, patterns and motifs? And given that we humans are as natural as anything else, what might these archetypal patterns, such as the rhythms of the sun or the earth, suggest about how a human life is meant to unfold? And so what I'll do now is I'll briefly walk us through the three main models that show up in his books. The first is called Nature and the Human Soul, and that book outlines eight stages of human development. Defining soul is central here, because Bill's definition of a soul, is maybe a bit different to others you'll hear. In his way of seeing it, a soul is a creature's unique ecological niche. He says that soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one or a spiritual religious one. By soul, I mean a person or thing's unique ecological niche in the earth community, its unique ecological place. And so this soul-centric developmental wheel charts piece by piece so intricately how a person might unfold into their wholeness through these eight stages if the right conditions are in place. And so you'll see that each phase is mapped into nature's own templates of wholeness, mimicking phenomena such as cycles and flows, human archetypes. You may have heard of like the innocent, the orphan, the wanderer, the visionary, the martyr, the warrior, the fool, the sage, and several other understandings of human development, especially found in the works of Carl Jung and other depth psychologists.
And so you can imagine this wheel sort of beginning and ending in the east and proceeding clockwise, which is sunwise. And these stages and attributes are based on, for example, the four seasons. So spring, summer, and so on, four times a day, sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight. And each stage includes two developmental tasks. One has a nature-oriented dimension, and the other has a culture-oriented dimension. Healthy human development requires a constant balancing of these influences and the demands of nature and culture. So for example, in middle childhood, the nature task is learning the enchantment of the natural world through experiential outdoor immersion, and the cultural task is learning the social practices, values, knowledge, histories, myths, and cosmology of our family and culture. It's also important to know that these stages are not tied to a chronological age, which is why Bill can say things such as more than 95% of people never make it to full adult development, even though, of course, the world is full of adults. And the good news, though, is that they say it doesn't take much support to have people catch up. So you can see this framework as a map or story of optimal human development, as well as a set of guidelines for individual psychological healing and holing as well as a design tool for creating healthy human communities.
So in this frame you may ask yourself, well I'm an adult, am I a true adult? According to this it is someone whose identity is linked to the larger earth community so not a race or a specific country or creed but it's someone who has really cultivated their ability to offer their soul or niche to others and that their identity is part of earth versus maybe a more human-centric frame. And one thing I also love about this book is he says that it takes a whole village and a whole eco-soul-centered community to raise a child well, but it also takes a whole village to produce a parent capable of raising a child well. And it takes a healthy, more-than-human community, so nature, let's say, to have a healthy village. And so we can see that the health of the whole is the foundation of health for every individual and human child.
I'll now move on to the second map, which is from his book, Wild Mind. And in a similar way, it moves through, let's say, four cardinal points. And here we're really looking at the human psyche and different resources of wholeness we can cultivate within each frame. So I'll read some of these out to you. And as you listen to them, maybe you can feel in your own experience where you experience the most resonance, the most comfort. So maybe this is a facet that's more developed in you. Whilst in some of these facets, you might experience more awkwardness or alienation, or maybe even judgment. And that might be a pointer that there's something to excavate in that facet of yourself. So in the North, you find the nurturing generative adult. This is an empathetic, compassionate, courageous, knowledgeable, productive facet. It can give genuine loving care to ourselves and others. It's parenting, leading, teaching. This is the leader, this is the king or queen, the spiritual warrior, the mother or the father. And this is partnered with the middle of the night, right? The North is when you have the least light, the least plant growth, the solstice of winter, and therefore this ripening, right? Of the depth of winter.
And so the North is said to be a place of healing, service, and care. If we move now to the East, you find the innocent or the sage and this is clear-minded light-hearted extroverted this is a facet that's fully at home with the big picture with enlightenment with laughter with eternity with paradox the innocent the sage wants to lead us into the realm of pure consciousness beyond distinctions and striving if you think about this this is sunrise right it's that like fresh morning almost clear light energy and this facet is resonant with archetypes like the fool the trickster, the priestess, the guide to spirit. If we move to the South, and Bill will really talk about the South in our conversation, this is the wild indigenous one. This is the erotic, sexual, the sensuous, the instinctive, the playful. This is the facet that is fully at home in the human body, in the more than human world. It's wild and natural as any flower, river, and experiences a kinship, a partnership, a family ship with all species and habitats. If you're aware of Greek mythology, these can be archetypes like Pan or Artemis or Diana. And in the West, and I say animas works a lot with the West as well. And this was my experience in the workshop I did.
This is the muse beloved. So this is imaginative, idealistic, visionary, adventurous, shadow loving. This facet revels in dreams, destiny, death, and the mysteries and qualities of the underworld. This facet leads us down into soul and it wants us to be dying to our old ways constantly while we give birth to new ways of being. And so here you can have the magician, the wanderer, the hermit, the psychopomp, the guide to soul. So when we're in good relationship with this facet of ourselves, everything becomes alive, shimmering in its mystery, its meaning, and its death and its transience and mortality as well. And so the West is the apprentice to death, to night. It wants to draw us down, down, down, and to sacrifice our old ways.
And so the west themes are romantic allurement hidden or veiled meanings and the undoing the dying and the reshaping of things what's also very cool about this map and and i'll move us on to the last one is that each of these four facets or directions comes with its own inner protectors or sub personalities and so these are facets of ourselves that may have been immature are wounded in the past. And whilst they're still, you know, doing their very best to protect us today, they limit our access to our full aliveness. And so we need to really work with them to grow into our whole selves. So these might be the inner critic, the perfectionist, the people-pleaser, the rebel, the escapist, the addict, the victim, the tyrant. Maybe some of these sound familiar to you. I know some of them did to me. Finally, the third map comes from Soulcraft, The Journey of Soul Initiation, which serves as a guide to, quote-unquote, find the poem you were born to be.
It was Bill's first book and is especially focused on stage four of the developmental wheel that I mentioned in the first book, which is The Cocoon. This pertains to late adolescence and the period in which we intensively explore the mysteries of nature and psyche in preparation for initiation to true adulthood. In the cocoon, if all goes well, we're granted a vision or a revelation of our unique place in the world, which is why this stage matters so much. The book outlines five stages of descent to the soul, preparation, dissolution, soul encounter, metamorphosis, and enactment. We shift from being in control to being acted upon. Those of us familiar with Western psychology will recognize themes from James Hillman and Carl Jung here, especially Jung's own journey into descent and the stunning deep imagination journeys he outlines in his famous red book.
And this book also goes into great detail on how to identify a soul encounter, and it shares dozens of practices to do so. All right, deep breath. That's likely enough background from me for now, but I wanted to make sure we had enough grounding to launch more directly into the episode. And additional to what I've mentioned above, in this episode we cover themes such as nature being the principal therapist or guide, the difference between wounding and wholeness, what it would take to scale soul initiation and healthy cultural practices around the world, and my own philosophical inquiries as to whether other species experience their own versions of a soul initiation over to my conversation with bill bill very very good morning to you and thank you so much for for being here with us for being on the show and being on life worlds it's absolutely a joy and an honor to be with you thank you alexa it's great to be here with you i'm looking forward to our conversation yeah as i as i referenced in the introduction i'm fresh off the boat of my own animas experience in the fynbos ecosystem in South Africa. And I'm quite giddy to like be talking about so many of the practices that I experienced and this just deeply rich body of work. And I want to maybe kick us off with something I heard you say in another podcast, especially because of Lifeworlds, wanting to delve into that a little bit. You know what strikes me about the different maps that Animas brings to the world of human psyche, of soul development and so on and so forth? It's the ecological framing, right?
And you said in this other podcast that modern psychology became divorced from ecology. I would love for you to get into that a little bit. What did you mean by psychology became divorced from ecology and why was that sort of deviation or fork in the road maybe not a positive thing?
Well, I think it's more than just modern psychology. It's Western civilization is divorced from ecology experientially and culturally. Maybe all contemporary industrialized cultures, what Rianne Eisler might call dominator cultures, have been divorced from the larger earth community context for millennia, for a long, long time. And so Western psychology, which is only about 125 years old, now has been divorced from the larger context that we don't think of ourselves in Western psychology or in contemporary industrialized cultures more generally.
We don't think of ourselves, we don't experience ourselves as fully participatory members of the larger Earth community. And that undermines everything about us culturally. So one of the ways this plays out is that in Western psychology, we don't, the theories that we have, or more generally the maps and models we have, aren't nature-based. We don't think of ourselves the way nature thinks of us, would be one way to say it. We don't have a nature-based holistic perspective of what it is to be human.
That's largely what we've been doing at Animas for 45 years now, is looking at ourselves as humans, as primarily participants in the larger Earth community, and looking at nature's own templates of what makes something whole and looking at ourselves through those templates.
And one of the things that strikes me, so you have the three books, right? There's Nature and the Human Soul, you have Wild Mind, and then The Journey of Soul Initiation. How do you recommend people to approach the reading of these books and sort of they have overlapping and slightly different frameworks and frames and they make reference to each other internally as well. You know, like I was just going through Journey of Soul initiation and saying, you know, if you want to go deeper in some of these, go back to Wild Mind. So, and I queued up the content in the intro of some of the books, but how do they inform each other or weave into each other? And is there an order with which people should be sort of approaching this body of work?
Yeah, good question. You probably could approach it through any of the books because they all reference each other. ultimately. But the best introduction really would be to start with wild mind, because wild mind addresses an aspect of human development that is, in some ways, the same for whatever life stage a person is in, whether they're in even childhood, certainly adolescence, adulthood, or elderhood. And of course, I mean those terms even differently than most people do in the Western world, including Western psychology, the words childhood, adulthood, adolescence, elderhood. But the wild mind map is, I call it a nature-based map of the human psyche.
And so it's describing the various aspects of the human psyche through the lens of nature's own holistic template. And that template, there's actually three that we combine. One is the four times a day, dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight, and also the four cardinal directions. What do we actually experience in the world in those four directions, which of course depends on where we are on the globe. And the third is the four seasons. So in Wild Mind, what we're doing there is what the reader will find in that book is using nature's map of wholeness to map two kinds of things.
One is what we call the four facets of the human self or the four facets of wholeness. And the second thing are four categories of what we call inner protectors I originally learned the term from psychosynthesis of subpersonalities. And the inner protectors are the parts of our psyche that do their best to keep us safe in a challenging world. And the world is always challenging to a human, but in contemporary societies where we've lost so many of our cultural foundations that support healthy human development, it's particularly risky. Our own families are risky, and they shouldn't be the way that they are.
The next two, the South and the West, are the two facets of wholeness that are most suppressed in the contemporary industrialized dominator worlds. And these two, by the way, are by contemporary standards are considered feminine. So no surprise that they're the ones most suppressed. But in fact, they're not any more feminine than masculine. And just it's part of our Western misunderstanding of the human psyche is to say, well, this is primarily feminine. Anyway, the south facet we call the wild indigenous one. By the word indigenous, we simply mean that all of us are native to Earth and all of us experience our natural kinship with all the life forms on Earth. So we're indigenous in that sense.
Of course, contemporary people are generally not indigenous in terms of having intact culture from pre-colonial times. And we tend to live in places that are not where our cultures are from. So we're not indigenous in that territorial or terrestrial and cultural sense. But we are native humans, all of us. So the wild indigenous one, as I said, fills our natural kinship with all others, all other species. We also are very somatically based in our South aspect that we have good relationships with our bodies. We feel we got the right body. We feel blessed to be somatically embodied in the world just the way that we are.
And emotions that every emotion to the wild indigenous one or part of us every emotion is good and valuable and that we learn something from every single emotional feeling there's no such thing as a toxic emotion to the wild indigenous one and this is something again this is not typical defined in western psychology and then maybe the most obvious example is shame People say, okay, shame is a toxic emotion, but it's actually only toxic when one of our inner protectors, when the category we called our wounded children are feeling shame. shame is toxic for the wounded child part of us but from our wholeness shame is is an absolutely essential emotion because what shame tells us again from our wholeness is that we have just recently violated some core value of our own and that's an important thing for a human to be able to realize that i did something that violated my own values so i can make amends so not being able to feel shame at all is somewhat like not being able to feel physical pain that we will get into all kinds of trouble and injuries and probably not live very long if we don't know that we're doing something with our bodies that is injuring our body it's that part of us ourselves that leads us on the journey downward into the darkness towards the secrets of our souls when we're ready And we are developmentally prepared for that, which most contemporary people never reach that readiness because of what I call systemic human development oppression, SHDO, systemic human development oppression, which I've come to understand is the core oppression in the world and all the other oppressions, racial, sexual, gender, ethnic, etc.
Um class oppressions they all stem from basically arrested human development because our contemporary cultures are designed to um keep us from getting past um what is essentially psychological early adolescence you can see once you get started on any of these maps we just end up with all the others so i'm starting to talk about um stages of life but you asked what book some of my books to start with wild mind is a great foundation because there's an opportunity to develop our four facets of wholeness and further develop it at any stage of life we're never done doing cultivating those four facets of wholeness we're all born every human is born with the capacities to cultivate their nurturing generative adult in their innocent sage the world indigenous one, and their dark muse beloved. But most of contemporary society and education and religion and so forth suppresses all four, especially the South and the West.
There's two points that really struck me in reading Wild Mind and also having participated in a retreat myself. I'll mention both of them and then I'll have a question. The first is the approach towards wholeness versus trauma or wounding is really interesting. And I think that especially in in a lot of modern circles there's a lot of you know this is my trauma this is my wounding and you address those right you address those in the inner protectors and the sub-personalities but the approach is sort of it reminds me a bit of one of my bud of what one my buddhist teachers would say which is the absence of negative states does not mean the flourishing of positive states and what you're sort of orienting towards here it's you know it's like saying you're not broken you're just unripe and if you cultivate these aspects of wholeness in these directions and then you used an amazing ecological analogy which I pulled out where you said you know if an ecosystem has been damaged and you leave alone invasive species tend to show up and if you try to eliminate the invasives you're not strengthening the ecosystems you're just suppressing the quote-unquote weeds whereas in contrast if you're tending to the health of the ecosystem the invasives have less of a suitable landing site and you quickly restore and so the first thing I want to emphasize is the orientation towards wholeness and how like elaborately the book goes into what wholeness is in each direction and how they balance each other out in practices for that. It's quite stunning. And then the next piece that really marked me is, um, you say it in the book and then I experienced it in person when you say, you know, what happens when we allow nature itself to be the primary therapist or guide? And then the human mentor is more of an assistant to nature, or I like this for a handmaiden to the wild.
And so this leads to one of my questions, because a lot of the practices in the courses that are given in person and that you suggest in the book relate to us being in the land and doing certain rituals or walks or conversations with the landscape and letting nature be that mentor. One of the things I found really hard when I was doing it myself is this notion of like, am I just making this up you know you say the more than human world can speak to us through language or metaphor but sometimes I'm like looking for something literal and so something I want to ask you is like as we're sort of as people do these practices or how do you tell what's like a projection of the human and we're trying to lay a layer of meaning onto like a creature just going about its day versus a true encounter with one of these facets of ourselves or our psyche sort of reflected in in nature because yeah the nature component is so unique I think to what you guys do and then sometimes I think I just personally wondered I'm like am I making this up or is this like actually the spider coming to say something.
Yeah, well, really good question, and it's a fundamental one, and it comes up all the time, the difference between perception, deep perception, and projection, because we do tend to project or we fabricate metaphors, especially if we're not used to, shall I say, if we haven't cultivated our capacity for animate consciousness, where everything is alive and everything has its sovereign life, Everything's going about its own life, and nothing is here just primarily for us humans. So when people who haven't grown up in a culture with animate consciousness and with an experience of everything is being alive and going about its own business, and then we have relationships with the others, then we're more prone to, in a sense, use non-human beings as screens for our projections, for what we're hoping for.
And we can end up having, it's like we can end up being, we're really just talking to ourselves because we're projecting something we're hoping for onto and other than human. And so it often takes a while to get to know the others on their own terms. And that's a lot of what our practices are to do exactly that. In one of our programs, it's called Coming Home to an Animate World. It's a program designed by my life partner, as well as guiding partner, Janine Marie Haugen. It's the one animas program that we do almost nothing psychological. It's not about us. It's not about looking inward, and it's not about healing, and it's not even so much primarily about holding. It's about, as Mary Oliver might say, striding deeper and deeper into the world, actually to be with the world and to get to know the others. A term that I've borrowed from another worker in the realm of intimacy, it's Stephen Herod Buhner I don't know if you know Buhner's work yeah yeah very much so yeah he talks about secret kinesis I love that phrase and kinesis of course is referring to movement and in particular he's addressing how in our natural deep humanist we are moved by the whole world we're moved by the other than humans as well as being moved emotionally by humans we're in deep relationship with.
At the bottom of our human psyches, we're all lovers of the world. And we're born as exactly the kind of creature that can fall in love with any place and any being. That's just natural to us. And if we think about, I'm going to invite our listeners here to think about when you fall in love with another human being, maybe there's a likelihood you're projecting at first. you're projecting the parts of yourself that you haven't got to know so well and you're falling in love and actually with some missing parts of yourself and you're projecting those golden aspects of your own psyche onto another that's generally what happens when we fall in love but if we the romance deepens we start to get to know this mysterious other human and we discover that they're not who we first they we thought they were we discover that well there's some things maybe that we find challenging about them but we also discover their deeper nature and we become really and deeply moved by that and the romance can really deepen at that point so you might say that we're discovering the secret kinesis of our lover like who they really are on some deep level And that's true with our relationship with the other than humans too, that as we hang out with them, we get to notice that, for example, our own consciousness begins to shift in relationship to them.
Just like when we're in a deep conversation with another human, our consciousness will begin to shift and deepen. That's true. We're just hanging out with a bird at the feeder or a deer in the meadow or cougar tracks that we're following or maybe they're following us or a particular habitat. Like when we humans know that when we go into, for example, a cathedral or just beautifully designed and built human structure, there's a certain feeling there in certain habitats. Like, you know, the first time anybody goes to, say, the Grand Canyon, there's a certain feeling there and it's very strong. And we begin to get to know that place.
For those listeners who get into the wild a lot, you'll know that there's certain places you go to regularly that you return to because you're falling in love with that particular place and you're getting to know it. And it's hard to put it into words, but there's a certain feeling of that place. Well, that happens with individual species and actually individual creatures if we get to know them. And one thing that we start noticing when we get past the projection or the fabrication of metaphor phase is that what we notice about the other surprises us, whereas when we're projecting, it doesn't so much surprise us. is kind of we're hearing from the other kind of what we had hoped to hear from somebody something or some human but we start getting surprised what we notice about the other and and we start falling in love with the other and noticing how they do what they do like we we start watching the ravens more closely and find ourselves being really curious about their large black beaks. But then more than that, about their language, raven language, that there's so many different sounds that ravens make. And then we notice them flying together and how they seem to be playing all the time with each other and playing tricks on each other and so on. And we get a feeling for the personality of even individual ravens. And that pulls something out of us that we notice ourselves changing. So again, the analogy here that I know all of our listeners will relate to is that when, let's say you meet a stranger, maybe it's not romantically falling in love, but you're some really interesting stranger someplace, and we fall into a deep conversation with them. And we come away from that conversation, having learned some things about ourselves, even though the other never told us anything about ourselves. It's because something was drawn out of us through this deep interaction with another human. And that's how we end up learning about ourselves through those human conversations. Same with getting to know a particular habitat or a particular tree, maybe an all the growth redwood in a particular forest.
We notice that we change just by hanging out with that other, that we learn about ourselves through the others. And by the way, I'm going to take a pause here after this next point. This is true for us as children. All human children do this, that especially when we just get old enough to start wandering alone outside the family home, like at age four, five, six, we start falling in love with the birds and the squirrels and the butterflies and the trees. and the flowers and we start imitating them that's what a normal native little kid does unless they've been that instinct has been suppressed from birth which unfortunately often is the case but otherwise we we start imitating and we start learning about what it is to be human by imitating the other humans that's part of what children do and that that can just deepen as we get older and go into deeper stages that we learn about ourselves through our relationship with the others.
Thank you. That's actually a very, very helpful distinction. And I've had this like burning question in me for quite a while. And I'm so glad I get to ask it now, which kind of relates to this, which is the idea of like human exceptionalism. And as you say, like, oh, this, you know, this being was here to show me this. And it's like, No, everyone's living their life. And if I use the term soul here in the way you've used it in your books, and I've queued this up in the introduction for our listeners, but, you know, soul being sort of a creature's unique ecological niche, right, or that thing that you're here to do, do other species go through soul development or is this uniquely human? Why would we be so exceptional? Like other creatures, it's been shown they have self-awareness, you know, and I started thinking like, well, whales migrate, right?
Or they face ordeals or, you know, salmon's return to die in its birth river. I mean, could those be seen as like more than human initiations? If we're going through all these processes and we're finding our soul and moving through a wheel, do other species have that? Do ecosystems move through that? How do you see that happening?
That's such a beautiful question. My friends and colleagues and I have been wrestling with that one for a long time. And ultimately, we don't know for sure. but I do have some opinions about it. Okay.
It's like, could you see that raven and be like, that raven is way too much in the East. He needs some West energy. I don't know.
My opinion is that the others, the other than humans don't have this kind of problem or challenge that we have. It's also a kind of opportunity and it has to do with our form of consciousness or a mode of consciousness. One of the phrases often used is conscious self-reflection. that we humans are aware that we are aware. That's embedded in the name we've given ourselves, homo sapiens sapiens, twice aware, hominids. So creatures that have conscious self-awareness are creatures that have what we, at least in English, we call egos. And by ego, I don't mean any of the negative things that people usually mean by the word ego. I simply mean we have a part of ourselves that's conscious of ourselves.
And as far as we know, most other species don't have that.
How would we know they don't have that? Like, they recognize each other in mirrors, they have identities, they have names, like, I don't know.
Well, a lot of us humans who've studied this suspect that whales might have that kind of consciousness as well. and that chimpanzees and the great apes might and dolphins might. And people wonder about ravens in this regard and maybe wolves and so on. But the vast majority of species, we're not so sure about. I mean, for me, like for indigenous people of indigenous traditions, all the other beings are kinds of people. Just we're all people and we happen to be the human people. But maybe most species don't have this conscious self-awareness.
Because here's the main way I think we would know, and you kind of alluded to it there, Alexa, a little while ago, is that the other species don't seem to have the kind of, to use a Western psychology term, the kind of neuroses that we have. We are capable of limiting our flowering in a way that others don't. I just borrowed part of that idea from a David Whyte poem, in which there's a line in there, can I remember it? He wonders why we are the one corner of creation privileged to refuse its own flowering. It was a big ouch for me when I first read that line. Why are we the one corner, we humans, why are we the one corner of creation privileged to refuse our own flowering? Because it seems we are capable of refusing our own flowering.
And one way you can tell is that a species that can get in the way of itself and can fail at going through the initiation processes or can fail at becoming truly adult or elder is a species that will end up being unable to sustain the life of its own environment. And in the worst cases, which is exactly what we're seeing now in the last hundred or so years, we've become a life-destroying species. That's not the way life works. life enhances life that's a fundamental principle of life that every form of life enhances the life of its environment.
But some species have gone extinct right so that version even though they they you know contributed to the health and dignity of the whole some species have gone extinct or have caused you know other so it's an interesting one because maybe they failed at that mission maybe that type of blue morpho butterfly you know a didn't make it and the B1 made it. And you've got to wonder, did they not fulfill their mission?
Yeah, we can wonder. Or did they fulfill it and they were done? And there were others showing up who could take over the job in a better way. Because the vast majority of species, it's probably 99% or so, have gone extinct. But they've enabled, they enhanced the life of their environment in such a way that life could take its next evolutionary steps. And so that the species that are alive now have to thank the many, many, many species that have gone extinct, but helped create an environment that made us the ones that are living now possible. So if we humans, if we don't go through a particular initiation journey, because there's all kinds of initiations in life, dozens of kinds. And every passage from one life stage to the next can be thought of as an initiation, but there's all kinds of other initiations as well. Well, there's one in particular that brings us into adulthood. I call it the passage of soul initiation and the journey getting there, the journey of soul initiation. If we don't go through that, we don't become true adults, which is to say we don't become people who know what we were born to do to enhance our human and more than human environment? Because that would be one of my shorthand definitions of a true adult. It's a person, a human, who first has come to experience their membership in the greater earth community as their primary membership, their primary loyalty, their primary family. And second, they've had one or more really intense encounters of their particular place in that community, the earth community, which is a mystical experience, a revelation, a soul encounter, and understanding of ourselves as a certain kind of poem, because the soul encounters are always mythopoetic. And third, I'm talking about true adults is they are people who've honed one or more delivery systems for offering their deepest gift to the enhancement of life.
May I ask a question on that piece quickly? This was a question I wanted to ask later, but it's coming up now. On that delivery system of the true adult, I have two questions about the true adult. This is the first. As you've written about so much, I think as many people are contemplating, the current neoliberal capitalist system sucks in many ways in having people deliver that gift to the world, right? And so what happens if someone's mythopoetic delivery system of their gift of their soul into the world, what if it can't fit into capitalism and therefore it can't be paid for and they have a family and kids and they need to survive?
You know, and I heard you mention another conversation that the gift economy, but not many people live in places, unfortunately, where those sort of localized hubs exist. So I can imagine it must be quite hard to see what you can offer potentially. And it doesn't fit in this unhealthy culture and you still have to get bread on the table. So I would love any thoughts you have on that piece.
Yeah. The first thing to say is that in a certain way, any soul work, any delivery system of a initiated human adult is by definition subversive to contemporary society because it's offering something that enhances life and contemporary society is destroying life. The second thing, this is one of the most difficult things to say. It's kind of emotionally difficult and it's intellectually difficult to really grasp. And that is in doing this work for over 40 years, I've become convinced that there's only a very small percentage of people who ever reach contemporary humans who ever reach initiated adulthood.
It's probably in the 1% to 2% range that the suppression of our native humanness is that profound. That suppression has been developing for millennia. It's the case that very, very few people reach true adulthood. But people in earlier phases, including a healthy psychological early adolescence, which is where most people over age 12, most humans in contemporary society are in for their whole life, in a healthy psychological early adolescence of any age after 12, it's entirely possible to be doing really creative work that really supports life. And then there's the issues that you bring up, Alexa, which is, well, how do you make a living doing that? Yes, it's very challenging, and there's not any really good answers. And there's many people who have found ways to do that, of course, but if they're not initiated adults, they don't have a delivery system in the way that I'm referring to it, because I'm using the phrase delivery system to refer to professions, disciplines, arts, crafts, and so forth that are ways of bringing, of embodying your mythopoetic identity that you discovered and were shapeshifted by during the journey of soul initiation. Before that, we don't have delivery systems the way I mean it. We have jobs or we have social roles.
Like people in psychological early adolescence, I'm saying psychological early adolescence because I'm not just talking about teen years, have social roles. And most of them, most of us in contemporary society have jobs. A lot of people don't have jobs in the sense that they're paid with money to do certain kinds of work, but they have social roles that are absolutely essential and extremely valuable. But those aren't delivery systems. those are jobs and social roles okay how did i do on your first question there you said you had a second one?
Yeah, I do have a second one it shifted a little bit since i've heard you speak um a job is not a delivery system and the delivery system by definition is subversive is what i heard you say i don't think anyone has the answer to how one can make a living with those more subversive ways of delivering things that may or may not look like jobs but i do think it's a big one Because when people go through programs and you're completely shifted and you might give up your job or your locality, I mean, these are, you know, profound shifts you refer to in your books and what people experience. And so I was curious about the sort of ability to implement that in the world. And if you wanted to add anything else, please do. If not, I will go to the second question, but I just wanted to reflect back what I heard first.
I had this question, you know, you've said that versions of this healthier adult, you know, adult or even elder development has happened in other advanced human cultures, right? And you reference a few, but you say, no, we shouldn't talk about them too much because we don't want to also spotlight them, etc. And this is something I've been struggling with for a long time. And I'm glad I get to ask someone who's been thinking about this for much longer than me. If these cultures managed to reach these advanced stages, why were they able to be so damaged and subjugated by less evolved cultures and less mature civilizations, right? If we're sort of wanting cultures to have this pinnacle way of expression, why were they able to be so destroyed by something quote unquote lesser?
Yeah, because of the misuse of power, including the development of technologies and weapons that healthier cultures would never want to have any part of. And so there's a certain kind of power over that can be developed in cultures that have lost their foundations of wholeness and their connection with the natural world and their own deep human nature, which is why the initiatory practices and ceremonies of healthy cultures are so essential. because the elders recognize that our humanity, because of our mode of consciousness, conscious self-awareness, can go wrong, and it can go wrong in really, really bad ways.
And sometimes it seems like we especially have to worry about young males in a culture that, in addition to all their magnificence and beauty and potential capacity, they can go wrong in a certain kind of way. And so the initiation process is really important. And the elders are there in the village square, seeing when the young people are ready to enter the initiatory journey. So one of the really interesting, I guess you'd call it anthropological questions, is why have so many human societies, what phrase you'll use, have succumbed to what I call systemic human development oppression? How does that happen? And I know probably many people have written about this more than I know about.
But one book that I found really, really valuable, read it 30 or 40 years ago, is by an author named Andrew Schmuckler. Interesting last name. The name of the book is The Parable of the Tribes. Have you ever heard that one, Alexa? Parable of the Tribes.
I haven't. I'm noting it down, yeah.
It's real briefly what he did is he said, what would happen in a place like, say, the Middle East, five or 10,000 years ago, where there were tribes living somewhat near each other? And one tribe had something terrible happen in that somehow there was a young male who got into power and leadership in that tribe who never went through the initiatory journey and decided that the more stuff and power they can accumulate, the better. And they developed a certain kind of powers. You might say one of the greatest liability that we have as humans is greed or hoarding. And so let's say that one tribe went bad in that kind of way, culturally degraded.
And in order to amass more and more power, the leader or leaders of this tribe, among other things, eliminated the initiatory practices because they figured out that if you keep the fellow members of your tribe immature, they're easier to control, easier to exploit. And one thing we know, for example, is that traumatized people, which is basically everybody now, are easier to exploit and manipulate than people in their wholeness. And so it serves the immature dominator powers that be to keep their fellow humans as immature as possible, basically as immature as they are, not having gone through initiation.
So Schmerkler is asking the question, what happens to the other tribes in the region once one tribe has gone that way? Because this dominator tribe now wants to use the lands of the other people, wants to enslave the people, wants to steal a certain percentage of their harvest if they're agricultural people and so on. What happens to the other tribes? And basically says there's four possibilities. And one is to defend themselves, they become a dominator tribe themselves. The second one is that neighbor tribe is wiped out completely. The third is that they are assimilated into the dominator society as slaves or otherwise.
And the fourth is that they flee.
And he, I think Schmerkler makes a really, really coherent, cogent case that that is the history of the world over the last 10,000 years. That tribes have fled as much as they can until the point now basically there's no place left to flee. And most all of the tribes, or we would say nations, have become dominator societies. and the whole process has gotten to its completion and now something else has to change and what's changing is that we're among other things we're undermining the capacity of the earth to sustain life as we've known it and that's going to bring about it is bringing about a change and some humans are waking up because of it and people like yourself alexa and those of us at animas and there's amazing visionary organizations and individuals all over the world who are starting to ask these questions, what are the fundamental ways we have to reorganize society in order to learn again how to initiate our young people so that they eventually make it to true adulthood?
I'm going to read that book. I think it's a super important question. And this brings another question. I won't touch on it now because I want to get back to animas a little bit, but I do hold this question about whether Western industrialized colonial culture was an aberration, or whether it was somehow awfully an important part of the developmental journey. And as I was reading the books, and I've held that in mind, I'm like, was this part of our development? Like, do you know, some people say you have to forget to remember. We could talk about that till the cows come home. And I'm currently in Switzerland, so it's funny to say that when I'm here. But it is an interesting question. So if everything goes well, according to your master plan, like, and by the way, I don't know if you can hear the rain moving in, but you've got birdsong, I've got rain. So sorry if that's a little bit loud.
There's a big storm moving in over the lake. How would the sort of implementation of your master plan look like? You know, I've heard you say that you wish to have every primary educational system be nature-based. I know that that means something beyond being embedded in nature in like a forest school, but I think it might be interesting for people to know what you mean by that and then you know how do we begin to re-establish these healthy cultures like is it just everyone's going on an animas you know training but at the end of the day this thing needs to scale as you said it's one to two percent how do we get that to five and then a second linked question is like we're living in an age of poly crisis of of ai that's totally removing in a certain way what it means to be intelligent and human and it's you know totally scrambling our our conception of self and ego and not the way you use it. Do you think that the blossoming of a true adult or elder in today's culture more at scale would look different than anything we've seen before because of the world we're in? So sort of how could we get there in broad strokes and then might we be expecting something quite different than how the Dagara or the Mayans or others had these healthier, healthier cultures?
Yeah. Thank you for that question. I think it Would look very differently for the next several generations, at least, because we have to solve problems now in the dominator world that intact nature-based people didn't have to, because the intact indigenous cultures have true adults. Like 20 to 25% of the people are true adults and 20% or so are true elders. And so they don't have the problem of trying to create healthier societies or communities with very few true adults and elders. So we have to do it over the next several generations in a way that we can't look to intact indigenous traditions for any clues at all how to do it because they don't do it and they didn't have to do it. And we won't have to do it several generations from now once we have enough true adults and elders in our communities.
To clarify that point, Bill, just to understand what you're saying, are you saying that when there is enough true adults and elders, that system just kind of, it's autopoiesis, it just continues itself and you don't have to be so intentional about it. Is that what you're saying?
Exactly. Yeah. As long as we keep initiating the young ones. Because that dominator infection that maybe first happened, who knows how many tens of thousands of years ago, Western civilization is not the only one who's done that. I mean, we find that among traditional indigenous people, we find societies based on slavery. For example, right here in the Pacific Northwest of the US, when the European colonial people showed up, there were some society's tribes here that their economies, so to speak, were based on slavery. Okay, so it's something that is a liability to the human or a liability to any species that has conscious self. awareness. And as you said earlier, Alexa, it's probably part of our developmental journey as a species that we had to go through this problem, and we had to end up exactly where we are.
And there's no guarantee we'll solve it. But if we do, it will allow the further evolution of our species. Barry Lopez, in his final book, Horizon, points out that the kind of cultural circumstances we live in now, which is namely the circumstances in which our cultures are changing incredibly rapidly. So rapidly, Lopez says, that it's become a quaint idea that any generation might have anything of value to offer younger ones. And that's the pathology of dominated societies, because true elders and true adults have all kinds of things to offer the younger generation, but older people who never reached true adulthood, we really don't have that much to offer younger generations. Okay. So the master plan, I've never used that phrase before, but I understand what you're asking.
So I also know that you've written that there isn't like, we won't get there from a strategic mind and everything is very shifting and mythic. So I'm being a big tongue in cheek by having you speak about a master plan because I know it goes against some of the ethos but tongue-in-cheek but you know dastardly master plan to bring us all back to wholeness.
Yeah, exactly the idea that our strategic mind which we often identify with the ego is good for developing plants but it's not good for deciding where to go that part of our psyche doesn't have particularly good ideas of where to go Our deeper psyche, our muse or our soul knows what's worth doing and where we need to go to become life enhancing again. But the strategic mind doesn't do that. You can put together blue ribbon panels of the smartest people in the world and they'll never be able to design a healthy culture because healthy cultures come from the depths, from the dream time, from the myth world. all we can do strategically is create situations where children are more likely to grow into their wholeness and when they become teenagers there are enough people around enough humans around who know how to help those teenagers who are in early adolescence prepare themselves for the initiatory journey that will start in late adolescence which is the stage of human life that most contemporary people in dominator societies never reach. Late adolescence is what people don't reach because late adolescence is where you go through the journey of civil initiation at the end of which is adulthood. So most humans are stuck in early adolescence. So back to your question about the master plan, several generations of creating transitional social structures and systems, which get us from what we have now to eventually communities where there are a significant number of true adults and elders. And so we need to take certain foundational systems of what we understand culture to be now and begin to shift them, all of them, in an ecological direction.
So for example, one of the things that we need to go through that children, that people in healthy intact indigenous traditions never have to go through is what i call ecological awakening ecological awakening is that point in our life where we have the visceral or somatic experience not just intellectual but a somatic experience that we are a might say a charter member of the earth community of the wider web of life and that everything is a relation to us it's all kin it's all relatives and everything is intelligent everything speaks not just intellectually understanding that but actually having the experience of the world as being that kind of place namely the place it actually is the truly animate world so that i call ecological awakening people in healthy intact cultures or communities don't go through that because they never lose it we're born ecologically awakened and then by age five or six certainly once we start going to school it gets suppressed by age six or seven we've forgotten that we can talk to the birds and so forth and so later in life if we're lucky we'll awaken from that amnesia that was imposed by our culture and contemporary people working in this field call it nature connection or Or from the Orient, they might call it forest bathing, and et cetera.
There's various people. Ecopsychology is based on that kind of work. So ecopsychology is a transitional social structure that's already been developing now for 20 or 30 years. But once we get to healthier cultures, we won't call our psychology ecopsychology. We'll just call it psychology because what we mean by eco-psychology is what psychology actually is. So that's an example of a transitional structure, as eco-psychology is. Another one is the recently developing nature-based spiritualities or religions, eco-spiritualities. This is something that intact nature-based people, they don't have anything that we would call religion because there's no way to separate the sacredness from every moment and everything from any other part of life.
There's no religion. It's already separating the sacred as some domain that's different from every moment's experience. But between now and several generations from now, we're going to need eco-religions or eco-spiritualities or nature-based. And we're seeing that in Christianity. We're seeing Judaism. We're seeing in Buddhism. we're discovering how to grow up our spiritualities by rooting them again in the natural world.
Just quickly on that point, and a lot of them had very mystical origins that were deeply, you know, animistic or nature-embedded. And in a way, it's sort of returning to some of those practices that the religion started with. But I'm so with you. It's such a cool development. Anyway, I love what you're about to say. Did you say ecological parenting?
Yeah. Ideally the only people who ever become parents are initiated adults and what we see in the reports we get we've received from intact or relatively intact nature-based peoples is that they have the pattern is they have a way of minimizing the chance that people will become humans will become young people become parents before they're initiated adults as the western psychologist Sam Keane once said, or maybe he got it from somebody else, that before we decide who we're going with in life, we want to know where we're going. And where we're going is what we discovered through the initiation process. And then mating with someone and conceiving children is something we wouldn't want to do until after that. So the best parenting is done by initiated adults and grandparents who are true elders. But until we have communities where that can happen for everybody, we need this transitional system of what might call ecological parenting. How do parents who are in psychological early adolescence or possibly late adolescence do their best at parenting? Well, there are ways to do it. That's part of what I wrote about in my book nature and human soul it's partly a guidebook to ecological parenting.
I was thinking about that as i was reading the books i was like i went if for when i become a parent i would totally i would want to send this to all the parents i know and be like read this it's just really helpful to also gauge where you're at where your child is at it's uh yeah it's a beautiful work of art.
Um, yeah, thank you it's um it's i think it was a deep structure manual for parenting deep structure meaning it doesn't really tell you how to do it doesn't tell you except maybe the few illustrations of specific things you ought to do as a parent it looks at the deep structure what is a child i love one of my favorite questions to ask people is what are children for that's a good question to hang out with what are children for and once we have some good answers to that. That helps us be better parents. So eco-religion, eco-awakening, eco-parenting, more ecological forms of governance. Obviously, we need to have more ecologically valid forms of cultivating food and generating energy and so on. We need more ecologically rooted science and etc. Again, all of these things are cultural systems that intact nature-based people didn't need and don't need, and we won't need several generations from now. But here's one summary way of saying it. The question is, how do we go from life-destroying societies, which we have now, to over the next several generations, if we're lucky, life-sustaining societies, and then get from there to life-enhancing societies?
How do we humans learn to once again become a life-enhancing presence on the planet and become conscious partners with evolution? That's the big question, but we have to go through this interim stage of let's at least get life-sustaining.
A hundred percent and a ho to that. We've sadly reached the end of the time. I wanted to ask a little bit more about soul initiation, but hopefully we can do that in the next conversation. I think in closing, I want to emphasize that the work of Animas, both the books and the workshops, the gatherings, the retreats, they are really powerful maps to how I think, first of all, reading the books awakens, at least in me and I'm sure many readers, like a longing for that soul initiation and what it means.
I love this quote you had by David Whyte in one of them, which is, what's the promise? It will kill you to break that soul initiation. I mean, that gave me shivers. And then also this element that you said in Soulcraft, where you said, Earth so effectively mirrors our soul powers simply because our souls are elements of Earth's soul. And I just want to leave us with that today, which is this idea that we are held in this process, like we can create the containers, the contexts, but mystery or life or God wants us to, this earth soul that's inherent in all of us and moves through us, like there's an impulse to awaken, to initiate, to deepen towards this. And so I think, you know, we can feel quite astray and stranded and lost in today's world.
And for me, something that's been a source of comfort in the work that you've done is there's this feeling imbued in it that like there's a path and life kind of wants us to go through it. And we just have to create the conditions in ourselves to be receptive to that. And so I know we're at time, but I'm just curious, I guess, if you would agree with that, to be honest, because that allows at least me to relax into not having to figure it all out, but it can happen and it's kind of there and the potential's there.
Yeah. Yeah, it can happen. It is there. In some ways, the news is really, really bad that the primary problem in the world is this generations of systemic human development oppression, and therefore the lack of true adults and elders. But the good news is that what we're wanting to address and create a space for is our inherent, innate human nature. It's in us. It's in us. Our wholeness, the seeds of our wholeness is in every single human being. And the desire to move through the soul-centric stages of development are in us.
And there's something that's helping us beyond the everyday human realm, and that is soul or mystery or spirit, or just what Rupert Sheldrake would call the morphic field of the human species. It's there, and there are techniques that we've been developing at Animas and are borrowed from traditions from around the world, and just from the human psyche itself. through our techniques to access those agents of wholeness and maturation that are already in us. And so it doesn't take that much work that people can progress in cultivating their wholeness and developing a better relationship with their inner protectors and addressing the developmental tasks of the soul-centric stages. It's not that hard to do.
And even in early adolescence, if it's a soul-centric early adolescence, that even though we're not ready for the journey of soul initiation, we become aware of something like this. It's kind of a poetic image, but become aware that we are operating on the surface of a really interesting lake. It's like, I call it in Nature and the Soul, the oasis. And it's really interesting people doing all kinds of creative projects there, but we're kind of on the surface of the lake and the surrounding meadows. But we're aware that that lake goes down to some incredible depths, And that lake is the, you could call it the Lake of Seoul. Sometimes I call it Seoul Canyon. And that even people in early adolescence are aware of the depth that we're all operating on the surface of, and that we're grown by, we're inspired by that depth of life, even before we're ready for the initiatory journey ourselves. So in short, yes, to what you just asked.
That is an important note to leave us on i really appreciate that bill it's been such a joy having you here yeah the wisdom that you've built up over the last 40 years is just astounding so i'm a big fan and very grateful for your time.
Thank you, Alexa. It's a joy to be in conversation with you.
So that was my conversation with bill plotkin founder of animas valley institute and an incredible elder in our world and in this space i think one of the greatest contributions of this work can be summed up in Bill's quote, where he says, healthy, mature cultures do not come from the strategic mind, even from blue ribbon panels of experts in ecocentric cultural design. Yes, we can design ecocentric social environmental policies and so on, but the strategic mind is incapable of figuring out the organic, wildly imaginative, multifaceted, constantly shifting mythic structure of a truly mature culture and I agree with him our planet is wildly alive and emergent and our education systems rarely prepare us to be equipped to handle that truth let alone have them mirrored inside of us as our own ways of being so I'll leave it there there are a lot of resources and books to get into and courses you can take and those of us that work in educational spaces I think might be incredibly inspired to think about how we can integrate some of these frames into what we do so I'm wishing you a wonderful rest of your day thank you always for tuning in and it is such a joy to be bringing these these episodes and content to you all.