Soulcraft Musings

Friday, October 30, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XXVII

This is Part Twenty-Seven of a 28-or-so-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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The Two Halves of Spirituality: Part II

Last week, I introduced and described the two halves of whole and intact spiritualities: an upperworld half and an underworld half — the Universal Transpersonal and the Individual Transpersonal. Either alone makes for an incomplete and possibly malformed spirituality. I also noted that transcendence (the direct experience of Spirit) is inherent in inscendence (the direct experience of Soul), but not vice versa. And why. And we explored how the underworld half of spirituality has been expunged from or suppressed in all Dominator societies, at least from their conformist mainstreams.

This week I want to dig deeper into one of the most essential features of our Animas map to the Next World, a feature that is also one of its most controversial, namely this: The underworld half of spirituality is the single most threatening reality to Dominator societies while the upperworld half, once it has been cut off from its twin, is either not a threat at all or a minor one. Indeed, upperworld quasi-spirituality (or demi-spirituality, or superficial religiosity) has been, in places, successfully used for millennia as a tool of domination.

This, of course, is the primary explanation for why the underworld half of spirituality has disappeared in most contemporary societies and why the upperworld half has not. This is also why the underworld itself has so often been misrepresented and maligned — portrayed as Hell, as the dwelling place of evil, as the place of exile with which psychospiritual children (of any age) are threatened as punishment for any behaviors (“sins”) that might threaten the domination of the tyrants. And it is the explanation for why many elements of upperworld quasi-spirituality are tolerated and, in many cases, supported or weaponized by tyrants.

An example of this weaponization is the Garden of Eden story. In the Abrahamic traditions, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is framed as a sin because it’s considered an act of disobedience against God. In Christianity (but not Judaism or Islam) it is the original sin, no less. Adam and Eve are characters from earlier Sumerian and Akkadian myths, later adapted into Hebrew traditions. (We might wonder if the early tyrant-priests may have altered the original myths.) Through the lens of this doctrine, Adam and Eve chose to rely on their own judgment instead of trusting God. This is seen as an act of pride and hubris: Adam and Eve desired to be like God and to possess knowledge not meant for them. In this view, they violated God’s law. But I suspect that it’s not so much that they disobeyed God but that they behaved in ways that the authors (or the later editors) of the Torah wanted to proscribe among their congregants. It’s not “God” who wants to be the sole arbiter of morality; it’s the tyrant-priests who have sought to obtain, preserve, and increase their power over everyone else. [104] (Important to clarify: I don’t believe that all clergy, or even a majority, are tyrants. Probably only a small minority.) The best way to assure such power is to keep the people in a perpetual childhood or early adolescence. Only a psychological child would believe that knowledge of good and evil is sinful or dangerous (in contrast to absolutely essential for any grown-up) — or believe that somehow the priests just happen to understand “the will of God” better than everyone else. The priests want to convince you that eating the forbidden fruit is a direct defiance of an “all-knowing and loving God” who wants “His” [sic] relationship to humanity to be based on trust rather than self-sufficiency. By eating the fruit, so the story goes, Adam and Eve rejected God’s authority and chose to define good and evil for themselves, leading to spiritual death and the introduction of sin into the world. [105]

Upperworld-only quasi-spirituality can and has been used to impede full-spectrum human development.

We might wonder why some societies would need priests to identify the tenants of morality, of good and evil (“God’s commandments”). Isn’t basic morality what all little kids in a healthy society learn from their parents, older siblings, and extended family? Doesn’t this happen naturally in the course of growing up well, witnessing how older family and community members relate respectfully to other humans and to the rest of the Earth community, and receiving gentle corrections as needed? Why would some parents need priests to interpret God’s “laws”? Sadly, the answer is clear: Because those parents themselves — and their parents going back untold generations — never cultivated their natural morality. Priest-imposed morality, delivered in holy books and in church on Sundays, might be better than nothing in societies in which everyone older than five does not behave respectfully most of the time with all other creatures (which is, in essence, the definition of animism). Priest-imposed morality might be the best you can do in societies that, following cultural genocide, have long lost their natural, pan-species, kinship-rooted morality. How do we reclaim and reassimilate our natural morality? A stopgap is to model it and to teach it, perhaps by way of stories, ceremonies, and community practices. [106] And through restorative justice. [107] But ultimately, we will fully return to natural morality (our “original instructions”) through a few generations or more of nature-based full-spectrum human development. And this is also how we make our way to the Next World.

Back to the Garden of Eden for a moment: According to the Christian version of the story, the serpent deceived Eve and manipulated her into eating the fruit, and then Eve got Adam to do so as well. The serpent is later identified as Satan (“the Devil Himself”) — and Eve as His apparent sidekick/ accomplice. A little misogyny there: Eve as a villain or a pawn of Satan. Perhaps a better reading would understand the serpent (and Eve and also Lilith, Adam’s first wife) as a dimension of our mature Self (perhaps what I call our Dark Muse-Beloved [108]), who helped us wake up, recover our original knowledge and love of this world, and thereby supported us to truly grow up. Eve might be more accurately seen as an agent of awakening, self-discovery, emotional vitality, sensual embodiment, and multi-species kinship, and the serpent as an emissary of divine wisdom (Sophia). [109]

There’s another related and crucial dynamic noted on our Map to the Next World: The Underworld half of spirituality is not fully accessible until we reach the psychological stage of late adolescence, the stage I call the Cocoon, the stage in which the journey of soul initiation takes place, the stage that most contemporary humans never reach. This is because the conscious encounter with Soul (our unique eco-niche) would be a grave threat to the early-adolescent ego; the experience of Soul would pull the rug out from beneath our healthy early-adolescent agenda of fashioning our first individually created identity rooted in social and vocational roles. The encounter with Soul, after all, undermines and subverts our belief that we could ever adequately define ourselves in terms offered by the human village alone.

The reason I say that the Underworld half of spirituality is not fully accessible in early adolescence is because it is consciously accessible in an oblique way: An adolescent human — at least a relatively healthy one — has a natural intuition that their consciousness is riding on the surface of a vast and unfathomably deep ocean of consciousness and that beneath their surface life in society lies a world of depth, shadow, and mystery they can feel, both somatically and gnostically, but not yet penetrate to any depths. People in psychological early adolescence might feel the call to descend someday but the terror of doing so is, for now, much greater than the longing, as it ought to be. And yet they might feel fed and, in an odd way, deeply comforted to realize that their future journey into such depths is a key element of their birthright.

Our inability to fully immerse ourselves in the Underworld half of spirituality until we reach late adolescence is the most direct way to explain why Dominator society does all it can to keep people from reaching that stage of life, the portal to initiated adulthood, why Dominator society is designed to keep everyone forever stuck in an egocentric version of early adolescence, endlessly pursuing compensatory ambitions, attempting but not fully succeeding at fashioning social presences that are authentic (very difficult in modernity) as well as socially acceptable (relatively easy but increasingly challenging for so many). This is the Dominator formula for generating teenagers whose best survival option is psyche-numbing conformity, teenagers who are deeply anxious and depressed (which is to say, out of touch with their own emotions as well as with each other and with the real world of the Earth community), teenagers who’d rather be dead than live in the synthetic arenas of modernity, teenagers who have no idea that another world is possible or have no way to find it, teenagers who are enraged, some of whom will act out their rage, horrifically but not surprisingly, with guns — just like many of their role models do in movies, video games, and real life, just like the horrific violence some of their government leaders, police, and soldiers visit upon domestic protestors, neighborhood defenders, water protectors, and upon both the citizens and the soldiers of other nations, using drones and bombs and poisons as well as guns.

Developmental arrest is exactly what Big Brother wants for you. And of you. Abducted by the Machine. By Conformist Consumer Society. By predatory capitalism. By Empire. By the Matrix.

Psychospiritual immaturity is not an evolutionary flaw in humanity. It is, rather, a deliberate design feature of Dominator societies — and has been for millennia. And we and virtually everyone we know have come of age in and are living in such societies and have been for way more generations than our longest family trees.

In short, the Underworld half of spirituality was successfully expunged a long, long time ago from most Dominator societies, at least their mainstreams, by seeing to it that very few of their citizens ever reach the Cocoon.

Upperworld quasi-spirituality, on the other hand, is entirely possible in early adolescence, including its egocentric versions. I’m referring to the cultivation of a personal relationship with the mystery and holiness of the Whole, which is to say with the Universe, Spirit, Mystery, the One, or God. This is even possible in childhood. Some children, for example, are drawn to religious roles that will provide them a respectable social place of belonging, unlike what may be available in non-religious domains — dignified roles but not necessarily authentic or fulfilling ones.

If it’s true that most contemporary people are in the psychological stage [110] of early adolescence, then most upperworld demi-spiritualities are of course experienced and practiced by people in that stage, which sometimes in some places results in immature forms of upperworld spirituality: egocentric, anthropocentric, and androcentric approaches to Judaism, Christianity, Zen, Hinduism, and other traditions, forms of spirituality where, for example, sexism (or even misogyny) and racism are common; where animism is considered primitive or “savage”; where there is a religious “us” (the in-group) and a “them” (everyone else); where adherents seek to save themselves rather than serve others; where humility and peacefulness, although enormously beneficial to self and society, are emphasized to the exclusion of healthy anger and society-transforming activism; where egocentric religious leaders obtain, preserve, and increase their power over their congregants and are in cahoots with political tyrants and robber barons.

In contrast, when people move into late adolescence, then into the two stages of true adulthood, and finally into the two stages of elderhood, the upperworld half of spirituality further deepens and matures with each stage, as does the underworld half. In the Cocoon (the psychological stage of late adolescence), we experientially encounter Soul as the handmaiden of Spirit, and this encounter radically transforms us (our ego), our understanding of what the world is, and our relationship to the world. During the Wellspring (early adulthood), we learn how to serve Spirit by embodying Soul, which means we walk each day experientially connected to both, drawing from both as the sources of our individual lives, which are dedicated to our unique way of enhancing the life of the Whole. In the Wild Orchard (late adulthood), our partnership with Soul and Spirit deepens as we discover how to contribute to the life of the greater Earth community through our creation of never-before-seen roles, systems, and social structures. In the Grove of Elders (early elderhood), we learn to serve Spirit/ the Whole by mentoring children, adolescents, and adults and by caring for the Soul of the Earth community. In the Mountain Cave (late elderhood), we merge with Spirit and become the living, non-striving embodiment of the ecological niche we’ve occupied all our life. [111]

* * *

It can be deeply upsetting and disorienting — and understandably seen by some as unnecessarily contentious — to have cherished forms of spirituality or religion characterized as in some ways immature. There are four things, however, I ask you to consider. First, what else would we expect in societies where most people never mature beyond early adolescence? Second, diminished forms and understandings of spiritual practice do not by themselves reflect critically on the underlying source and original nature of these traditions. Clearly, there are profound teachings and vital values to be found in the worldviews and practices of contemporary spiritual traditions. Third, it’s entirely possible to embrace these traditions in a more holistic and mature manner. Fourth, it is likely that our religious and spiritual traditions — or the earlier ones in which they are rooted — originally embraced the underworld half of spirituality before that realm of animacy and Soul was purged long ago. There may be great value in efforts to uncover, reclaim, and reintegrate the earlier underworld dimension of contemporary spiritual traditions. If possible. If there are initiated adults with a calling to do so.

References:

[104] We might wonder what kinds of cultural diminishments gave rise to the imperial tyrants, tyrant-priests, and missionaries, in the first place. This is another story — an important and intriguing one. I’ve offered a few ideas in The Journey of Soul Initiation, pp. 353 – 355.

[105] To be fair, there are at least two ways we could read the story of the Garden. Here I am reading it through the lens of Domination, namely that the Abrahamic God wants us humans to be ignorant about good and evil or that the tyrant-priests want us to rely on their interpretations of God’s desires for us, that we ought to listen to and believe what the priests tell us about how to conduct ourselves in life, the right or moral or God-fearing ways, and not rely on our own eyes and ears and our own sense of right and wrong, including our own sense of whether the priests are right or wrong in what they are telling us about how we ought to be (sometimes we do agree with them) and whether they are modelling in their own lives what they are professing (sometimes it seems they do). But a second way to read the Garden story is as a myth (a sacred story) of how we became human, of how we acquired our human sine qua non, namely our capacity for self-reflexive consciousness, our capacity to know that we know. In this second reading, the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a mythic way of referring to our early development of self-reflexive consciousness, some two or three hundred thousand years ago, the consequence of which was exile from the mythic Garden, the before-time when we did not yet know that we know, when we did not yet have self-conscious knowledge of good and evil — or of anything else. This reading of the story this far is all well and good but there is something rather peculiar about the framing: The Judeo-Christian Garden story portrays our human condition as God’s punishment for Adam and Eve having done something they had been forbidden to do. This puts a rather odd moral spin onto our human evolution and our human experience of the world — as if there is something fundamentally awry about humans and as if Earth is something other than an enchanted paradise, and that our deplorable circumstances are the penalty for some kind of misbehavior. What kind of religion would frame humanity in this way? And why? (Compare with Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality: Presented in Four Paths, Twenty-Six Themes, and Two Questions (New York: Tarcher/Putnam.) Also, this second reading doesn’t change the reality that the tyrant-priests have used the story of the “fall” to discourage their flocks from thinking too deeply or choosing too widely for themselves, from questioning the priests’ attempts to control them and, in some ways, infantilize them. But it is essential to add here that there are of course contemporary Christian teachers who understand all this. In addition to Matt Fox, the author who has best illuminated for me both the misuse and the best use of Abrahamic stories is Franciscan father Richard Rohr. See, for example, his The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021). For a concise explanation of how and why Christianity became enmeshed with empire and tyrants — and its consequences — see Father Richard’s video: “Christianity and Empire,” Conspire 2018 (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2018) and these three short Meditations, “Jesus, the Empire, and the Gospel,” “Insisting on Winners and Losers,” and “The Games of Empire.”

[106] See, for example, Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (New York: Scribner, 2024).

[107] See, for example, Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Rev. ed. (Good Books, 2014), Fania E. Davis, The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Healing, and US Social Transformation (Good Books, 2019), Katherine Evans and Dorothy Vaandering, The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education: Fostering Responsibility, Healing, and Hope in Schools (Good Books, 2022).

[108] See Wild Mind.

[109] Compare feminist biblical scholarship such as Julie Faith Parker, Eve Isn’t Evil: Feminist Readings of the Bible to Upend Our Assumptions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023); or the perspective of Gnostic texts, such as Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), Emily K Patel, The Apocalypse of Eve: Forbidden Feminine Wisdom from Ancient Gnostic Texts (Forbidden Mantra Press, 2025), and Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2006); or archetypal/ Jungian perspectives, such as Susan Scott, In Praise of Lilith, Eve, and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden (Olympia Publishers, 2009) and Siegmund Hurwitz, Lilith — The First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Dark Feminine (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1992).

[110] I say “psychological stage” in order to clarify that I am not referring to chronological early adolescence (e.g., ages 12 to 15). Also, I do not intend it as a criticism to say that most humans today are in the psychological stage of early adolescence. This is the result of Dominator cultures, not of individual failures. Most contemporary standards for maturity (e.g., responsibility and accountability, financial and residential independence, emotional self-regulation, critical/ independent thinking, capacity for intimate relationships and nonviolent communication) are valid but all of them are fully achievable in early adolescence. Ecocentric maturity and soulcentric maturity reach into entirely different terrain.

[111] These are, of course, outrageously brief summaries of five complex life stages. Please see Nature and the Human Soul for full descriptions.

Photo: Serpent as Muse Beloved [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

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