Animas Valley Institute —
Guiding the Descent to Soul Since 1980
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Dreaming Awake
[Collage]. Doug Van Houten
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#2
The Shift from Egocentrism to Ecocentrism
This is the second part of a seven-part Musing (one per week).
Friday, May 25, 2018
In this series of Musings, my references to stages of human development refer to a psychosocial model of human development (“growing up”) that I call the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel. The SDW is an ecocentric and soulcentric model that contrasts significantly with existing perspectives within Western developmental psychology. For example, the SDW stages are essentially independent of
chronological age, biological development, cognitive ability, and social role
.
In the mainstream West, we tend to think of the human life journey in terms of only three or four loosely and poorly defined stages — childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and, sometimes, elderhood, too. But the SDW proposes that there are actually eight distinct stages in a full life, even if most contemporary Westerners never mature beyond the third (psychological early adolescence) due to culturally imposed barriers and detours along the way.[1] By “adolescence,” I refer not to a chronological age range — our teen years — but to two distinct psychological life stages, the first of which is navigated so poorly in contemporary egocentric cultures as to result in a widespread and profound degree of developmental arrest. It’s helpful to make the distinction, as does Jungian analyst James Hollis, between a “first adulthood” of vocational, social, and civic responsibilities and a “second adulthood” of visionary cultural artistry. Hollis’ first adulthood might be more accurately considered a version of psychological early adolescence.
In a healthy or mature culture, we would expect only one
version
of the stage of early adolescence, but in the Western world today we need to distinguish two.[2] The first is egocentric and the second, if attained,
eco
centric. My estimate is that only a quarter of Westerners ever achieve an ecocentric early adolescence.
What I call
eco-awakening is precisely this early-adolescent shift from egocentrism to ecocentrism
. This major life passage occurs when a post-pubescent person raised in an egocentric cultural environment has their
first conscious and embodied experience of their innate membership in the Earth community
and recognizes this membership as their primary place of belonging in the world. This is the moment all other memberships and affiliations become secondary for them and, in fact, derivative of their inherent participation in the more-than-human world (which is to say, the not
merely
human world). Their memberships in a primary partnership, family, social group, neighborhood or village, workplace or corporation, interest group, profession, ethnic group, gender-identity group, religious community, state, or nation might provide them great riches and lend their life abundant color, but these will forever after be experienced as secondary to their membership in the greater web of life, the web that connects them with everything else in the universe. The vitality of the Earth community, of which they have always been part, is now their first concern and their first gladness and commands their greatest loyalty.
What I call eco-awakening is that which Thomas Berry passionately advocated when he wrote that “
a new revelatory experience is needed,
an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process. This awakening is our human participation in the dream of the Earth.”
A 50 year-old Presbyterian pastor describes his eco-awakening, experienced during a multi-day group retreat in a summer, high-altitude, Rocky Mountain forest:
I was sitting by a small stream on a starry, moonlit night. I felt a strong, sentinel-like presence from a stand of large pine trees above the stream. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a tourist in nature. The forest was alive, and I was in communion with her. When I heard the trees clearly say with one voice, “Now you belong to us!” I was shaken. At that moment a tectonic shift took place within me. I felt a sense of belonging to the whole cosmos, not just a church or denomination. I looked up in the sky full of stars and began to weep, overwhelmed by joy in the admission that I no longer felt the need to save the world. I just wanted to belong more fully to it.
As this quote illustrates, eco-awakening is a
somatic, emotional,
and
relational
experience, not a (merely) cognitive one. Many would say it’s a spiritual experience as well. It is the somatic, heart-rending, and world-shifting realization that you are as natural, as wild, as interconnected and related, and as magical as anything else on our planet — as much as a fox or lizard, a sequoia or chanterelle, a wild desert stream, old-growth forest, or glacier-clad mountain. People with a general knowledge of ecology might understand this intellectually but relatively few have located and passed through the unseen veil that exiles most Westerners from an everyday conscious communion with the animate world.
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Soulcraft Musings:
Exploring Soul and the Human Encounter with Soul
Soulcraft Musings are drawn from published and unpublished works by Bill Plotkin and other Animas guides and offer weekly trail markers (cairns) on the journey to soul. Each Musing builds on previous ones but also stands alone, and you can join at any time. You can read previous Musings
here
.
Feel free to share this edition of Musings on Social Media by clicking on the Social Media icons in the header at the top of this email. Or use the "Forward to a Friend" button at the top of this page, or the "Forward the Email" link in the footer at the bottom of this page. If you'd like to post one or more Musings on your own website, please contact us at
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