Soulcraft Musings

Friday, August 21, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XVII

This is Part Seventeen of a 20-plus-part essay on making and following a map that might get us to the Next World, and on what it means to leave one world and eventually reach another, and on what it’s like for a community or a society to be between worlds, perhaps walking that long road for several generations. Think of this as a draft of an essay I’ll be working on for a while — or eventually a short book. Let me know — through Substack — what resonates with you. To fully understand or contextualize today’s part, you might want to read, reread, or at least scan the first three parts. Link Below.

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Wholing and Self-Healing

Earlier in this multi-part essay, I proposed that nature-based full-spectrum human development is core to any functional Map to the Next World. In particular, I introduced a model of eight eco-soulcentric stages of life that differ radically from the egocentric stages that most contemporary people traverse in Dominator World. I noted that there are both a nature-oriented task and a culture-oriented task of each of the eco-soulcentric stages. Dominator cultures actively inhibit their people from fully addressing any of these tasks, especially the nature-oriented ones and especially for the first three stages (early childhood, middle childhood, and early adolescence), which results in most contemporary people becoming permanently stuck in an egocentric version of early adolescence that I call Conforming and Rebelling. (See Parts V, VI, and VII of this series and also here. For a full exposition, see my book, Nature and the Human Soul.)

However, in addition to addressing developmental tasks, full-spectrum maturation summons us to a second complementary lifelong project: cultivating the innate wholeness of our human psyches, what we at Animas call the four facets of the Self. “The Self” (with that capital “S”) is our shorthand for the domain of the human psyche that includes and integrates all four of our facets of wholeness. Each of these four facets is a bundle of psychological, social, and spiritual resources, the cultivation of which enables us to do well with whatever we are called to in this life.

As with the stages of life, I’ve come to understand the inherent qualities of the four facets of the Self by mapping them onto nature’s own templates of wholeness (the four cardinal directions, times of day, seasons). (See the outer ring of this diagram). These four facets of wholeness comprise our original human capacities. We name them the Nurturing Generative Adult (north), the Innocent/ Sage (east), the Wild Indigenous One (south), and the Dark Muse-Beloved (west). See Wild Mind [44] for full descriptions and methods for self-assessment, but here’s a very brief overview:

Our Nurturing Generative Adult is empathic, compassionate, courageous, competent, knowledgeable, productive, and able to provide genuine loving care and service to both ourselves and others. Through this North facet of the Self, we contribute our best and most creative parenting, leading, teaching, directing, producing, and healing. The Nurturing Generative Adult is resonant with archetypes such as Leader, benevolent King or Queen, mature or spiritual Warrior, Mother, and Father.

Our Wild Indigenous One is emotive, erotic (in the sexual sense), sensuous, instinctive, and playful, and is fully at home in the human body and in the more-than-human world. This South facet of the Self is every bit as wild and natural as any animal, flower, or river and experiences a kinship with all species and habitats. The Wild Indigenous One [45] is resonant with archetypes such as Pan, Artemis/Diana (Lady of the Beasts), and Green Man (Wild Man).

Our Innocent/Sage is both wise and innocent, clear-minded and lighthearted, wily and extroverted. This East facet of the Self is fully at home with the big picture, light, enlightenment, laughter, paradox, eternity, and the mysteries of the Divine and the upperworld. The Innocent/Sage wants to lead us up to the realm of pure consciousness beyond distinctions and striving. In addition to the Innocent and the Sage, this facet is resonant with archetypes such as the Fool, Trickster, Priest, Priestess, and Guide to Spirit.

Our Dark Muse-Beloved is imaginative, erotic (in the romantic sense), idealistic, visionary, adventurous, darkness savoring (shadow loving), meaning attuned, and introverted. This facet of the Self revels in night, dreams, destiny, death, and the mysteries and qualities of the underworld. The Dark Muse-Beloved wants to lead us down to Soul and wants us to be continuously dying to our old ways while giving birth to the never-before-seen. In addition to the Muse and the Beloved, this facet is resonant with archetypes such as Anima/ Animus, Magician, Wanderer, Hermit, Psychopomp, and Guide to Soul.

Cultivating these four facets of wholeness is not specific to any one of the eight eco-soulcentric stages of life because the cultivation of wholeness is a task of every stage. [46] As we grow from one stage to the next, in order to succeed at the tasks of our new stage, we need to be more resourced than we were in our previous stage. Life is always challenging and always in ever new ways. The process of wholing is a never-ending journey.

In addition to mapping the four facets onto nature’s templates of wholeness, we’ve done the same with our four human windows of knowing: heart-centered thinking (north), full-presence sensing (east), full-bodied feeling (south), and deep imagination (west). [47] Heart-centered thinking is a whole lot more compassionate, creative, and independent than the merely logical, analytical, deductive mode of thinking more common in Dominator World. Full-presence sensing contrasts with senses that are dulled by disinterest, disuse, and stultifying cultural activities that take place indoors and in denatured outdoor environments. Full-bodied feeling means not just our emotions but also our somatic sensitivities, including our awareness of our internal organs and the positioning of our limbs, our “muscle sense,” as well as that “feeling in our bones” we often get about particular social gatherings, city neighborhoods, or natural habitats; not to also mention our sexual passion, our capacity to perceive interpersonal vibes, and our general sense of corporeal well-being, malaise, or dis-ease. Full-bodied feeling contrasts with a kind of deductive thinking about things that can masquerade as “feelings.” Deep imagination, with its symbols and metaphors arising unbidden from the nether lands of our psyches, is not to be confused with the relatively shallow ideas and fantasies mustered by the everyday strategic mind.

Most of us are born with one or two of these windows naturally easy for us to develop and the other two or three possibly quite challenging. To be fully human, we need to cultivate our capacities with all four windows of knowing.

Within Dominator World, all four facets of wholeness and all four windows of knowing (at least in their robust and vital forms) are neglected and often actively suppressed through mainstream systems of education, parenting, religion, economics, pastimes, and entertainment — and through the paucity or absence of ecocentric ceremonial activities that generate real community. This suppression of our innate wholeness is especially true for the south and west facets and windows (which egocentric male consciousness misunderstands and dismisses as “feminine” but are essential facets of the Self for humans of all genders, bodies, and psyches).

Our innate facets of wholeness and our four windows of knowing and how to cultivate them are vital elements of the map to the Next World that we are sketching at Animas Valley Institute.

Cultivating our fourfold wholeness (“wholing”) is also foundational to our capacity to Self-heal. By “Self-healing,” I mean our capacity to utilize the innate resources of the Self to experience and express our love and gratitude for the parts of our psyches known as subpersonalities (a term borrowed from early-twentieth-century Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, founder of psychosynthesis) or, as I have come to prefer, our Inner Protectors. These are the parts of our psyches that, when we were little, generated our emotional and social survival strategies — strategies that enabled us to make it through the challenging and sometimes dreadful familial, social, racial, religious, and/or cultural realties we were born into.[48] Our Inner Protectors include our inner critics and inner flatterers (north); our inner conformists, rebels, victims, and entitled ones (south); our inner addicts, escapists, and blissheads (east); and our Shadow and Shadow Selves (west). (See inner circle of this diagram, and see Wild Mind for full descriptions.) Through Self-healing, we learn to wholeheartedly appreciate our Inner Protectors who literally saved our lives, even though they did so by limiting our options, capacities, and prospects.

On our way from Dominator World to the Next World, the individual and community practices of wholing and Self-healing will be essential.

Next week we’re going to look at the relationship between our Inner Protectors and psychological trauma.

References

[44] Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013).

[45] My name for this facet has understandably raised some culturally sensitive eyebrows (not that I shy away from raising eyebrows on certain topics). I will clarify. By “wild,” I mean the part of us that is wild like a wildflower is wild: terrestrially natural and embodying our original human nature, not domesticated, not bred or educated to be functional in and content with synthetic social and vocational roles of Business as Usual — in other words, not overly adapted to Dominator World. By “indigenous,” I mean terrestrially indigenous (an Earthling, emerging from and belonging to our original and primary home, Earth, and therefore fully able to experience in every moment our kinship with all other forms and forces of terrestrial life), not necessarily ecologically indigenous (originating or occurring naturally in a particular watershed or bioregion) nor culturally indigenous (a particular people or tribe inhabiting a specific bioregion from the earliest times or at least from before the arrival of colonists). Every human psyche, including each modern-urban psyche, is born with a facet that is, in this sense, fully indigenous to Earth — and holds as foundational and sacred this experience of kinship with all of life. So, I mean “indigenous,” in this context, to refer to our innate ecocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing — in contrast to a specific ethnicity. The anthropologist Wade Davis suggests that to imply that “some of us are, and others are not, indigenous to the planet … is both incorrect and the wrong message to send to our children. Nurturing a spirit of place, displaying fidelity to land and water, and embracing with conviction the obligations of stewardship ought surely to be aspirations, indeed imperatives, for all people and all human societies. As the poet Gary Snyder wrote, ‘We must all become Native Americans, whatever our ethnic background, if there’s to be any hope for ecological and cultural vitality on our shared Turtle Island.’ Snyder did not have in mind cultural appropriation; he was talking about the urgent need to change the way that we as humans inhabit this planet.” (From Beneath the Surface of Things, Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2024, p.156.) Last, I hope it goes without saying that, by “wild indigenous one,” I don’t mean to imply that native peoples are wild in the way that racist colonizers contemptibly meant when referring to “savages.” Nor do I imply that colonizers or their offspring (like me and most people reading this) are ecologically or culturally indigenous the way that people with intact place-based traditions still are. And yet let’s keep in mind that the ancestors of all of us humans everywhere were indigenous in all three senses — if we go back far enough, and often it isn’t very far at all.

[46] You could call the cultivation of wholeness a third task of each stage, and in a way, it is, but in a healthy culture, the cultivation of the four facets is largely achieved simply in the ways that such a culture supports its members to address the nature-oriented and culture-oriented tasks of each stage. In other words, it takes a decent degree of cultivation of all four facets to succeed with the two core tasks of any of the eco-soulcentric life stages. People in later stages support the younger ones to address the two core tasks of their stage by modeling methods that utilize all four facets of wholeness.

[47] The phrase “windows of knowing” derives from the extraordinary work of Eligio Stephen Gallegos. See his Animals of the Four Windows: Integrating Thinking, Sensing, Feeling, and Imagery (Santa Fe: Moon Bear Press, 1991).

[48] Collectively addressing, interrupting, overcoming, and replacing those dreadful realities are, of course, additional essential elements of healing and wholing for individuals, families, and communities. Personal “inner” work alone is not sufficient for full healing and wholing.

Photo: The Work of the Whole Self [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.