By Bill Plotkin
PUBLISHED IN SPRING 2021
https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/the-descent-to-soul/
I believe the root cause of the dire crises and challenges of our time — all of our currently cascading environmental and cultural collapses — is a widespread failure in individual human development. This has been true for so long and in so many societies that most people today (including most psychologists, educators, and religious leaders) are unaware of this breakdown in the natural sequence of human maturation, a failure now plainly evident — as witnessed in the current epidemics of psychological dysfunction as well as social and ecological degradation. Vital threads in growing whole are missing from the cultural fabric. Too many of us are only troubled guests on this Earth.
Our developmental dilemma stems primarily from our disconnection from nature, from both our “outer” and “inner” natures: the loss of our experienced belonging to and entanglement within the natural world and the loss of our communion with the very core of our own individual human nature — our Soul.
What we have lost, in particular, is the journey of soul initiation — a psycho-spiritual undertaking that connects us in the most profound way to both the Earth community and the source of our deepest humanity. This journey, if revitalized and reclaimed, can transform everything for us, individually and collectively.
This loss is our single gravest human and planetary crisis because the journey of soul initiation is the path to true Adulthood — to becoming a cultural visionary and evolutionary — and true Adulthood is essential to a genuinely healthy, mature culture. This journey will be a core element of any future society capable of growing a flourishing culture in partnership with all other species and life processes of Earth.
Each species has its unique ecological niche, a distinctive role it plays in sustaining and enhancing life on our planet. By fulfilling its role, each species does all it can to sustain, increase, and evolve its own kind. When Charles Darwin spoke of the survival of the fittest, he meant the flourishing of those who fit best — those who cooperate best with their environment and are best able to adapt to changing conditions.
The curious thing is that we seldom apply these insights to our own species — as if humanity might be an exception to the rule, as if we are purposeless visitors in a meaningless world or as if we can take any ecological role we want. But as a species, we, too, have a distinctive niche in the community of life, a particular potential, a role that evolution has shaped us to occupy. Most of us are just not at all sure what that might be. Or perhaps we don’t even consider the question.
Given what is unfolding globally in the early twenty-first century, we might be tempted, in moments of despair, to conclude that our unique human niche must be to perpetrate the sixth mass extinction of life on our planet. This is, after all, what we are in fact doing and what is already well underway — the apocalyptic diminution of our planet’s biodiversity, as if Earth is seeking to renew herself by first clearing the decks through the life-slaughtering genius of our own species. Could this be it? Could we have evolved so as to “cooperate best” with the rest of life by becoming the obliging eco-assassin that annihilates most present-day species, including our own? Really?
I don’t think so. I believe that ecocide/suicide is not our destiny but, rather, our fate if we do not succeed at embracing and inhabiting our true niche (leaving aside for now the question of why we might be the only species capable of not fulfilling its true niche).
Further, I believe we will not be able to inhabit our true niche as a species unless and until enough of us inhabit our true individual niches.
In order to realize our evolutionary potential, most human cultures have to be healthy and mature enough to choose and support such a mission — “the great work” of our time, as Thomas Berry framed it in his visionary book of that title. In order to have such cultures, there must be humans mature and healthy enough to cocreate those cultures.
Such humans (initiated Adults and Elders) are not people who are primarily looking out for themselves (their “small” selves), but rather people who are creatively crafting ways of inhabiting the life-enhancing individual niche they were born for. And that niche is what we discover and what we become able to occupy through the journey of soul initiation. Consequently, in order for humanity to take its true place in the world, enough individual humans must take their true places.
True Adults and Elders are people who know why they were born, who know who they are as unique individual participants in the web of life, and who, in most everything they do, creatively occupy their distinctive ecological niche as a life-enhancing gift to their people and to the greater Earth community.
Humanity now operates with a significantly different mode of consciousness relative to the Neolithic; we exist in a radically transformed cultural context in terms of our knowledge, social structures, economies, technologies, spiritualities, and cosmology.
One of the consequences of these cultural revolutions is a degradation of our shared environment to such a degree that humanity as a whole now faces an unprecedented and ultimate dilemma, namely, accelerating ecocide and possible self-extinction.
We now find ourselves in an initiatory crisis of our own making that will result in either our demise or our metamorphosis. We cannot continue on our current course and we cannot remain as the humans we’ve been. This is a collective circumstance akin to what is faced individually on the Descent to Soul. Not all people or species — or planets — survive their initiations.
We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture…. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation, namely, the loss of what Thomas termed our cultural “survival capacity” out of its own resources.
We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our prerational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but “inscendence.”
Thomas, by distinguishing inscendence from transcendence, was declaring that we live in a time in which the spiritual descent has become essential —to attend to our individual and collective needs for healing, wholing, and tending to our crises and opportunities.
Excerpted from the book from The Journey of Soul Initiation. Copyright ©2021 by Bill Plotkin. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.
