#4
Eco-Awakening as an Artifact of Egocentric Culture
This is the fourth part of a seven-part Musing (one per week).
Friday, June 8, 2018
In healthy, mature (ecocentric) cultures, nobody ever goes through eco-awakening. People from healthy cultures never experience this life-passage from egocentric to ecocentric awareness because, as children, they never lose their innate communion with the wild, self-organizing world. They have no need to be awakened from a culture-imposed slumber or trance. They were not subjected to family lifestyles, educational systems, religious indoctrination, or cultural ways that suppress their innate experience and celebration of their connectedness with everything. They never lose their original communion with all of life, the foundational experience with which they were born. Never having been in the egocentric stage of Conforming and Rebelling, they have no need to be liberated from it.
In contrast, mainstream Western culture indoctrinates children and teenagers into a worldview within which they rarely experience their inherent membership in a world or a story beyond Western, anthropocentric, conformist-consumer culture.
Although eco-awakening is an artifact of egocentric culture, it is nevertheless among the greatest blessings imaginable if and when it occurs. It’s a person’s entrance to a multi-dimensional, vibrant, connected life of full belonging to the world. It’s a massive shift in experience of what the world is, a major life transition, a profound awakening. And it’s a
necessary
transition for progression to later stages as described in the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel.[1]
