Soul Encounter and Eco-Awakening: Two Essential Realms of Awakening Neglected in Contemporary Spirituality, Part VIII
by Bill Plotkin
Friday, May 13, 2022
This is the eighth part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).
An Underworld and Ecological Conception of Soul
Let us return, then, to my definition of soul and how this enables an understanding of why soul encounter or inscendence is not only entirely distinct from transcendence but also more important and urgent and why it has become so uncommon in the contemporary world. To do this, we will need to cross a threshold into a domain of discourse and experience that in the materialist precincts of the West might be considered “mystical.” This border-crossing begins with a review of how commonplace the mystical is in the lives and existence of other-than-human beings with the hope that it will then seem less surprising, esoteric, or mysterious that such extraordinary realities apply to us humans as well.
What Every Flower, Frog, and Fox is Born With
The mysteries to which I refer here concern, in their essence, ecological place or niche — and in particular the fact that the young of all species are born with an understanding of their place in the world. By place, I do not simply mean geographical location or habitat. Rather, I mean a creature’s ecological niche — its function, role, or “profession” within its community or ecosystem. [1] The young of all species, in other words, already know at birth how to be members of their species. This innate knowledge includes basic-yet-vital items such as how to move around, what to eat and not eat, how to avoid predators, and how and when to mate and with whom. But by far the most important knowledge they are born with is how to contribute to the world their unique skill or offering. They, in other words, are born with what we might call ecological purpose, an implicit knowledge or apprehension of their place or niche in a wildly complex and differentiated world of multiple habitats and countless species. They are born with all the capacities and knowledge they need to at least begin to serve the world in a way no other creature can — including how they can further develop or co-evolve their own niche. They do not have to be taught or go through an initiation process to uncover this knowledge. Although birds and mammals learn a lot of behavioral specifics from their parents and primary social group, most of the capacities that enable them to function as members of their species are innate. The newborn of species other than birds and mammals — 95% of all species — receive minimal to no parenting beyond being conceived and birthed. They are born with all they need to know to have a good chance of survival, to be who they are, and to provide the “ecological functions” only they can.
This is entirely natural and ordinary, but it is also utterly astounding and miraculous, even mystical. The common-but-misguided contemporary Western philosophical impulse to try to explain this reductionistically in terms of genetics misses the most essential point. Genetics might be one element of how this knowledge is transmitted (part of the “mechanism”), but the method of transmission is categorically and conceptually distinct from what is transmitted, and the unfathomable mystery remains that this knowledge and know-how exist and are transmitted at all.
It might be argued that we humans, too, are born with a version of such capacities: for example, our capacity to easily acquire human language. But it seems other species, compared to us, are born with a far greater innate understanding of their place in the world. And, as far as we can tell, they never have identity crises. The fact that we do, and regularly, says something significant about us as a species or about our contemporary cultures, or both.
Many examples of the innate knowledge and know-how possessed by other species are staggering. For example, consider the annual migration of monarch butterflies: They fly immense distances from their summer habitats in the eastern U.S. and Canada to their winter homes in Mexico, or from the northern Rocky Mountains to southern California. They manage this long and complex navigation even though it takes four generations to complete a single migration. Furthermore, they arrive at the very same trees their great-great-grandparents tenanted the year before. They do not learn how to do this from other butterflies. They are born with the knowledge of how to migrate those thousands of miles, through countless habitats and weather systems, and end up in precisely the one spot that is theirs, something akin to finding a needle in a haystack. And, as it turns out, this sort of miracle is entirely commonplace on Earth.
Given that such mysteries are demonstrably true for other species, how could we doubt something comparable is true for us? In the contemporary world, we tend to believe that most everything we know we learned from others — parents, other family members, teachers, books, the internet. And indeed we have learned quite a bit this way. But we, too, like all other species, are born with certain innate knowledge of our unique place in the world, of our ecological niche, of what some older traditions called our destiny or our genius [2]. The problem is that we are not conscious of this knowledge at birth because, after all, we are not conscious of anything during our first couple years. And by the time our conscious self-awareness develops — somewhere between our third and fourth birthdays — we are more than busy with other things to be conscious of, like the enchantment of the other-than-human world or how to be a member-in-good-standing of a particular family and peer group and a particular culture or ethnic or religious group. Learning these things is the natural priority throughout our childhood and early teen years. But — and here’s the rub for us humans — by the time our conscious knowledge of self and world is established in our mid teens, we have strayed a long ways from our deeper, innate, unconscious knowledge of self and world, which is now obscured, buried, unremembered. It’s still there within us, but we cannot consciously access it and we might not even know it exists. Consequently, as soon as our basic cultural and ecological education is complete, it comes time to “remember” the knowledge we were born with: our particular, destined place in the world, our original personal instructions for this lifetime. All healthy, mature cultures provide initiatory processes (much more extensive and categorically different than a rite of passage) to help their youth uncover just that. In the Western world, these initiatory processes were forgotten and lost millennia ago.
