Soul Encounter and Eco-Awakening: Two Essential Realms of Awakening Neglected in Contemporary Spirituality, Part I
by Bill Plotkin
Friday, March 25, 2022
This is the first part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).
…There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.
Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away.
Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.
Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen
nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.…
~ David Whyte [1]
There are several realms of awakening. There are many kinds of profound shifts in consciousness that result in enduring or permanent changes in perspective, identity, self-image, values, lifestyle, worldview, and world. Most transpersonal theorists, spiritual teachers, and practitioners of the contemplative arts assume the realm of transcendence (conscious experience of or as Spirit or the Ultimate Mystery) is 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.
Many 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, transpersonal development, or waking up [2]; more on this later.) A second 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 (defined below). [3]
This Musing series is focused on two particular varieties of awakenings because they are rarely experienced and rarely considered in contemporary life, and because they are arguably the most relevant and urgent in our time of radical, global change, more essential and beneficial now than the transcendent variety of awakenings. One 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. The second is the fourth realm noted just above, the experience of what cultural historian and eco-theologian Thomas Berry [4] called inscendence, the encounter with soul, which is as spiritual and transpersonal as transcendence but essentially absent from current maps of transpersonal experience, overlooked by the dominant religions and most contemporary spiritual practices, and rarely experienced or discussed in the world today despite being perhaps the single most valuable and urgent realm of awakening in our times.
Not coincidentally, these two varieties of awakening both have 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.” (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” refers to 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 both soul encounter and eco-awakening so rare and so challenging to evoke — and so utterly urgent in these times of cultural collapse and potential renaissance.
This Musings series includes a description of moltings and how they contrast with both kinds of spiritual awakenings. There will be little here about transcendence, this topic being amply discussed in the contemporary spiritual scene, except to note how it contrasts with as well as complements inscendence and other varieties of awakenings.
