There are several realms of awakening, many kinds of profound shifts in consciousness that result in enduring or permanent changes in identity, self-image, values, lifestyle, worldview, and world. Most transpersonal psychologists, spiritual teachers, and practitioners of the contemplative arts regard the realm of transcendence (conscious experience of or as Spirit or the Ultimate Mystery) to be the pinnacle of human experience and development, but I believe there are more relevant, accessible, and beneficial realms of awakening for most people, especially today.
Most of the varieties of awakenings fit into four broad categories. One category consists of the life passages between stages of human development, each such passage a genuine and radical awakening. (Here I mean stages of
psychosocial development -- as implied by the phrase
growing up -- not stages of spiritual awakening or transpersonal development, that which many refer to as
waking up.) A second category involves profound shifts in identity and lifestyle that occur
within developmental stages, especially during psychological adolescence; I call these
moltings. A third category of awakenings incorporates the multiple versions of transcendent spiritual experiences -- such as mystical union, enlightenment, or fully awakening to the "now", to the divine, or to universal consciousness. And a fourth category is comprised of the
inscendent spiritual experiences -- awakening to the unique mysteries at the core of the individual human psyche, specifically the mysteries of the soul, which is the primary focus of our work at Animas Valley Institute.
In this series of Musings, I want to explore one particular kind of awakening, one that is rarely experienced or discussed in contemporary life but is arguably one of the most relevant and urgent in our time of radical, global change, a type of awakening I believe is more essential and beneficial now than the transcendent variety of awakenings. This is the distinct kind of awakening that catalyzes the passage between two particular stages of human development -- the life-shifting experience I call eco-awakening: a person's first conscious and embodied experience of their innate membership in the Earth community.
Eco-awakening has everything to do with our human place in and relationship to the greater web of life that is oddly called, in the Western world, "nature" -- odd because this use of the word itself implies that it's possible to be separate from that to which it refers. "The greater web of life" is the infinitely complex and interdependent community of all Earthly species and habitats -- that which cultural ecologist David Abram refers to as "the more-than-human world," his way of signifying that our everyday human world is a derivative and wholly-dependent subset of a world that is much older and vaster. It is our conscious disconnect from the self-organizing, natural world that has rendered eco-awakening so rare and so challenging to evoke -- and so utterly urgent in these times of cultural collapse and potential renaissance.
To read Soulcraft Musings Inaugural Introduction
click here
