Animas Valley Institute —
Guiding the Descent to Soul Since 1980
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Eye of the Soul [Collage]. Doug Van Houten
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#2
At Home in Our Animate World
This is the third part of a seven-part Musing (one per week).
Friday, June 1, 2018
Eco-awakening is a truly profound moment for the people blessed to have experienced it. It rocks your world. You now realize you had previously been a kind of refugee, existentially and ecologically homeless, disconnected from the very world from which you emerged at birth. (“Emerged,” because, from an ecocentric perspective, we do not enter this world from somewhere else; we are formed by it and from it and for it.) Now much of the restlessness, anxiety, alienation, and displacement you had experienced all your life, without knowing why, disperses like mist in morning sunshine. Now you feel at home in our animate world in a deep, rich, and unprecedented way, a way you had not known was missing, had not even known was possible. Now each thing — “each stone, blossom, child,” as Rilke puts it — is no longer an object, but a subject to whom you are related, someone to whom you have
always
been related. Kin. Separation has ended. You have returned consciously to the world into which or from which you had been born, a breathing world in which everything is alive, everything speaks in its own way, everything is related to everything else. You have returned from your long banishment, awakened from the flatland, the relatively lifeless world of synthetic, industrialized, disconnected, conformist-consumer society. You are free now to be fully and wildly human in communion with the Others — both human and other-than-human — as together all things co-create a self-organizing and ever-evolving world.
Eco-awakening terminates the egocentric life stage I call Conforming and Rebelling, and ushers in the ecocentric stage I have named the Thespian at the Oasis.[1] In the egocentric version, in which people experience themselves as the center of their world, the most common two emotions are fear of not belonging (which leads to a life priority of conforming to mainstream social expectations) and anger about others trying to shove them into boxes (which results in a life priority of rebelling against parental and mainstream social expectations). In both of these emotional atmospheres, authenticity is neglected — because people are either attempting to be what others expect of them or doing their best to be a dissenter or subversive, or some convoluted mixture of these two extremes. In the ecocentric stage of the Oasis, in contrast, people enjoy the foundational experience of being a fully eligible participant in the more-than-human world (both the social and ecological worlds), affording them the opportunity to create versions of themselves that are both authentic and useful to their communities. They become social and ecological
players
(authentic thespians) in a self-organizing gathering of many clans and species in an ecologically and socially diverse and
fertile
place (an “oasis”).
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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
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