Animas Valley Institute —
Guiding the Descent to Soul Since 1980
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Life Passages
[Collage]. Doug Van Houten
©
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The Scarcity of True Adults, Not Just Elders
Friday, April 5, 2019
It’s becoming commonplace to observe that contemporary societies have very few real elders — plenty of olders but not many people of wisdom capable of effectively caring for the greater Earth community. This might sound harsh to some, as if it is disrespectful to our senior citizens, but this does not make it untrue. And yet, a diagnosis of “very few real elders” — as much as this is a shattering critique of any culture — is not nearly as devastating and incisive as observing that a given society has very few true
adults
.
When too many of us don’t grow into true adults, our cultures deteriorate into not-fully-human collectives — immature and dysfunctional societies. Contemporary Western societies are clear examples of this — with the U.S. perhaps in the lead.
“Very few true adults” is such a radical cultural and personal critique that almost no one has been able to bring themselves to plainly say it and mean it and spell out the implications.
[1]
But if we consider it carefully, even for a moment, we see that the scarcity of true adults is, naturally, the explanation for why there are so few real elders. It is the passage from psychological adolescence to true adulthood that has become so
challenging
and so rarely traversed —
not
the passage from adult to elder.
It’s not as if what we see around us are hordes of true adults piling up like frenzied sports fans against the entrance gates to elderhood — and just somehow not being able to break through. No. The bottleneck is with the psychological adolescents (whether in their teens, twenties, forties, or later), and they are getting
stuck in their development
long before they reach the entrance gates to adulthood. The reality is that most contemporary people are lost and
languishing
on a vast deserted plain on the far side of which arise the gates to true adulthood — and few of them find their way across that plain. There are four primary reasons they don’t: They are not psychospiritually prepared for the journey. They do not have the skills to navigate the crossing. They wouldn’t know how to get through the gates even if they found them. And there are very few true adults and real elders to help them find their way and to navigate the rigorous passage. Indeed, this last
reality
is precisely why the land between the village and the gates to adulthood has become a vast deserted plain and no longer the lush and alluring wilderness it had once been.
The journey does take significant preparation. Our contemporary societies — our conformist-consumer cultures — do not help psychological adolescents with this preparation. Quite to the contrary. And most people do need support with both the preparation and the journey itself. This support takes the form of initiation processes and practices offered by true adults and elders. This is what we have lost — not only our initiation rites but also most of the adults and elders who could guide them.
When the time is right, it is not especially difficult for true adults to make their way into elderhood. The trail through
this
passage is relatively easy to navigate, even if harrowing to experience. It’s the journey from early adolescence to adulthood that, in all intact cultures, has always inspired and necessitated complex, arduous, and often lengthy initiation ordeals and practices.
[2]
And there’s good reason for this: The features of our psyche and of the world that we must claim and incorporate in order to become an adult are precisely what we had to ignore in order to first become fully human — in order to become an authentic and socially accepted member of our human community, the latter being the developmental goal of childhood and early adolescence. Our work at Animas is, from one perspective, an elucidation of what those essential features are and why our psyche had to resist their assimilation by our ego until the time was right. The journey of soul initiation brings about the death of our adolescent ego and of our adolescent worldview — and the adolescent ego does not go gently into that good night.
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References
[1] Those who
have
said it include Robert Bly in
The Sibling Society
.
[2] The reader might wonder if these statements about adolescents, adults, and elders are true for traditional, indigenous cultures known to the West. It is a good question, a difficult one to definitively answer because Western and other egocentric cultures have damaged or destroyed healthy, mature cultures everywhere in this world. There are few, if any, that have survived intact. (See, for example, Andrew Bard
Schmookler
,
The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution
.) There’s a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle when it comes to healthy cultures: If they have been seen (contacted) by a Western observer, they have already been altered in such a way that they are no longer intact, or will soon be. If a person who cares about cultural health stumbles upon an intact, mature culture, the only ethical course is to say nothing about them. That said, we might note well-publicized instances of relatively intact healthy cultures self-described by Black Elk (the Lakota, in North America), Malidoma Somé (the Dagara, in west Africa), and Martín Prechtel (the Tutujil Maya, in Central America); and anthropological accounts of certain Native American peoples (especially Hopi and other Pueblo peoples), and by writers such as van Gennep, Paul
Shepard
,
Wade Davis, and Mark Plotkin.
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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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