Awakening to the Dream of the Earth, Part V
by Bill Plotkin
Friday, October 15, 2021
This is the fifth part of an eleven part Musing (one per week).
In the last musing, I wrote about the Imaginal Exchange of Mythopoetic Dream Viruses — aka Mythopoetic Infections. This is what happens in a vision ecology: Never-before-seen, life-enhancing social forms and practices are naturally birthed through the Mythopoetic Infections made possible by soul-initiated humans living and working in close proximity to one another.
Adults and Elders as Imaginal Cells
Each mythos-infused human project arises from nature. After all, Soul as eco-niche is a feature of the natural, self-organizing world. Vision ecologies are the way nature operates through humans to enhance the web of life, the way we most effectively and fully participate, consciously and collectively, in evolution. Our soul-initiated Egos, working together, become synergistic agents of the natural world. As they should be. As they were evolved to be.
A healthy human culture is grown, not made or manufactured or built. A thriving, life-enhancing culture is much more like a self-organizing ecosystem than a machine or a hierarchically structured corporation; it’s more like an organic mycelial network than an assembled apparatus or a strategically structured contraption. Soul-initiated Adults and Elders are the seeds of a living, growing culture. Their intermingling vision projects are its mature forests. The self-organizing more-than-human world of a particular place, along with the sacred stories that grow out of that place, makes up its soil. Evolution-driving Mystery (love) is its rain and sunshine.
Another way to say this is that soul-initiated Adults and Elders are the imaginal cells of a culture. They are the way a caterpillar society eventually becomes a butterfly society. Once there are enough true 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 society, in a Cocoon. Our sociocultural structures have been dissolving for quite some time. This Dissolution is a necessary phase in cultural transformation — just as it is in individual initiation.[1] What percentage of Adults and Elders, as imaginal cells, are needed in a given egocentric dominator society, 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.
Just as the caterpillar’s immune system resists its own imaginal cells — which it sees as a threat and consequently tries to kill — so an egocentric, caterpillar culture will do all it can to resist and eliminate its Adults and Elders. Indeed, this is what dominator societies have been doing for several thousand years. If the map of initiation presented in The Journey of Soul Initiation is effective and widely adopted, the egocentric dominator powers will do all they can to sabotage, censor, and suppress it.
Did Gaia Goof?
Many people have come to think of the human Ego as the most unfortunate and dangerous thing to ever appear on Earth. Ecocidal. They’ve got a point. But I believe the emergence of the human Ego was not a mistake, even if it was the start of a terribly risky experiment. When we as a species learn to take our natural place as a collective agent of the natural world — if we do — the power of human conscious self-awareness will be merged with the creative powers of evolution. This would put human consciousness back in alignment with Mystery (or enable this for the first time, depending on how you see it). This would support and amplify the dream of the Earth beyond what any of us could imagine. This alignment might be tantamount to the conscious awakening of our planet. The journey of soul initiation, widely implemented in most societies, is the way to reach that goal.[2]
Did Gaia goof by creating humans? No, I don’t believe so, but she did take a big chance on us, one that could result in the destruction of most of the life-forms she has generated over the past 300 million years or so — or it might yet turn out to be an unprecedented accelerator of evolution. Humanity is in the midst of a profound initiation journey and, consequently, the Earth is as well. Will we make it through? It appears to be a cliffhanger. It all depends on the collective decisions we make and the actions we take this century. What a blessing and opportunity to be alive at this time!
Adapted from Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2021).
