The Journey of Soul Initiation

Bill Plotkin describes himself as a wilderness guide, eco-depth psychologist, and agent of cultural regeneration. Since 1980, he has guided thousands of people on what he calls the journey of soul initiation, brilliantly described and evoked in this hugely important book for our future. In the Coda entitled ‘Awakening to the Dream of the Earth’, he asks Mary Oliver’s most vital question: how to love this world. In other words, how do we care for the world to create not only a sustainable but a life-enhancing culture? Each of us can care for life in the place in which we live, but the essential message of this book is that we ourselves ‘are born as that answer’ – however, few of us dare to undertake the hazardous journey of soul initiation, ‘costing not less than everything’ as TS Eliot put it, and consisting of a ‘nature-based way to personal revelation, visionary leadership, and cultural renaissance.’ It is important to understand at the outset that Bill uses the term soul as an ecological concept, not a spiritual or religious one. For him, soul is a person’s unique eco-niche, what is most true, real, meaningful, and significant for them, individually, which is embedded in a web of relationships within the more-than-human world: ‘everything is what it is by virtue of its relationships with everything else.’

As Chris Bache and Sean Kelly also argue, humanity has collectively entered an initiatory death-rebirth crisis at a time of cultural dissolution and in spite of our technological sophistication based on a very mechanistic mindset. Ironically at one level but perfectly at another, we have unwittingly created the conditions that require us to take an evolutionary leap beyond our adolescently egocentric conformist-consumerist caterpillar society (I hesitate to call it a culture). (p. 8) I agree with Bill that we are witnessing ‘a widespread failure in individual human development’ where we are cut off from both our inner and outer natures. As such, Bill describes the book as ‘a psychospiritual bomb’ placed at ‘the very heart of the techno-industrial civilisation currently ruining our world.’ Human ‘success’ is currently incompatible with the health of the Earth’s ecosystems. Thomas Berry proposed the evolutionary way forward as a descent by means of a process he called ‘inscendence’, the Great Work with the Earth Soul as our guide.

This is where individual transformation can make a vital contribution to the collective. Bill explains in detail, with many specific examples, the five phases of what he calls the Descent to Soul: preparation, dissolution, soul encounter, metamorphosis, and finally enactment. This all sits within a larger developmental scheme called the Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel, representing stage-specific tasks, gifts, and shifts in centre of gravity with respect to identity. Jung was an early Western pioneer in such a journey as this, where his ego ‘merges with and is reshaped by [his] innate mythopoetic motif or image’ requiring a crisis ‘severe enough that the outcome is uncertain’ (as described in his Red Book). The butterfly is always the caterpillar’s potential, but such a demanding destiny is not guaranteed – we may perish in the cocoon or the chrysalis. (p. xxix) Bill uses the image of a hazardous descent to the bottom of a canyon and, with good fortune, back out to represent the process that necessarily involves dissolution, dismemberment, and disintegration before the ego can be reshaped, reconfigured, and metamorphosed to become rooted in the soul and dedicated to loving service.

Bill sheds considerable light on CG Jung’s initiatory descent into the underworld, undertaken with no guidance but which furnished him with the essential resources to accomplish his extraordinary work. Here he encountered what he named ‘the spirit of the depths,’ surrendering himself to the transformative process with extraordinary courage, and working with — and being worked by — archetypal images through the process he called ‘active imagination.’ His first soul encounter, at age 41, took the form of an extraordinary imaginal download he published as Seven Sermons to the Dead, which I read a long time ago. Bill comments that Jung’s ego transforms as his psychospiritual centre of gravity begins to shift from egocentric to soulcentric, ‘from his Ego being an agent for itself to being an agent for Soul’. (p. 183) My own sense is that this process is currently going on in my own life where I am asking, as we all should, ‘what is ours alone to do and be in life?’ Jung’s second soul encounter was a dream at age 52, a vision of an unearthly beauty and light showing him that ‘one could not go beyond the centre,’ which he called the Self, and which is inherently universal. For Jung, his tower at Bollingen was a place of maturation ‘in which I could become what I was, what I am and will be’ (p. 291) in response to his deep calling. Gnosticism, alchemy, and Goethe’s Faust proved to be his lamps on the path. Jung felt an inner relationship with Goethe since they were both ‘in the grip of that process of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the centuries.’ (p. 334)

Another important figure is Joanna Macy. Bill discusses her two soul encounters, the first of which took the form of a vision of being spreadeagled across a giant turning wheel where everything transforms into its opposite, and she realises that ‘each of the opposites becomes intolerable without the other. Each, when clung to, gives rise to its antipode,’ requiring a terrible openness, allowing the pain to pass through, while the hole in the centre leaves space for not knowing. These insights fed directly into her Despair and Empowerment Work. Her second soul encounter involved a vision of being a stone in a bridge between the thought worlds of East and West, connecting the Buddha Dharma with general systems theory and representing wisdom as relationship, as she teaches through the culture-change framework of the Great Turning. Throughout the book, there are many other powerful living examples of the five phases of the Descent to Soul.

An essential dynamic throughout is surrender to something larger than ourselves and indeed to our deepest longing. Here, life lives us rather than us living life – shape-shifting through metamorphosis, during which ‘our Ego is soul-crafted, with its roots sinking deeper into the Soul as our identity transitions ’from fundamentally social to fundamentally ecological and soulful.’ (p. 244) The final phase (enactment) is represented by the emergence from the canyon into our butterfly identity, which awakens and connects us to the Dream of the Earth. Significantly, the immune system of the caterpillar resists its own imaginal cells (those that are capable of creating a butterfly) in just the same way as the current egocentric dominator society seeks to sabotage, censor, and suppress the emergence of a mature partnership society (p. 344). At this stage, imagination is critical if we are to bring forth a new human species honouring both the rhythms of nature and what Thomas Berry calls the time-developmental model involving spiral progression through space and time. Berry’s ultimate hope is ‘a mutually-enhancing human-Earth Presence’ requiring ‘deep cultural therapy’ and radical reinvention for its attainment. In this respect, Bill’s soul initiation programme is a new and vital form of mystery school facilitating the achievement of true Adulthood and genuine Elderhood as full human maturity. Essential reading for our time.