Soulcraft Musings

Friday, October 2, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XXIII

This is Part Twenty-Three of a 25-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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The First of Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World: Ecocentric Communities, Part IV: Eco-Awakening

Last week, I introduced the experience of eco-awakening and my proposal that its widespread facilitation is necessary to bring about the shift, on the level of whole societies, from egocentric and life-destroying to ecocentric and life-sustaining, which is the first of the two phases of the journey to the Next World. This week I want to explore more deeply the nature of eco-awakening and how to bring it about.

Eco-awakening is the shift from egocentrism to ecocentrism, a major life passage. Eco-awakening occurs when we have our first conscious and embodied experience of our innate membership in the Earth community. All other affiliations then become secondary and, in fact, derivative of our inherent and foundational participation in the larger, more-than-human world (which is to say, the not merely human world — the world, in other words, that includes the human realm as one element). A romantic partnership and memberships in family, social or ethnic groups, and perhaps a religious community will continue to provide bountiful riches and lend abundant color to our life but, after eco-awakening, these will no longer be primary. The vitality of the Earth community, of which we have always been part, is now our first concern and first gladness and commands our greatest loyalty.

What would our world become (again) if all or most humans (once again) experienced Earth as sacred?

Dan, a Presbyterian pastor, described his eco-awakening, at age fifty, in a summer, high-altitude, Rocky Mountain forest:

I was sitting by a small stream on a starry, moonlit night. I felt a strong, sentinel-like presence from a stand of large pine trees above the stream. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a tourist in nature. The forest was alive, and I was in communion with her. When I heard the trees clearly say with one voice, Now you belong to us! I was shaken. At that moment a great tectonic shift took place within me. I felt a sense of belonging to the whole cosmos, not just a church or denomination. I looked up in the sky full of stars and began to weep, overwhelmed by joy in the admission that I no longer felt the need to save the world. I just wanted to belong more fully to it.

Eco-awakening is a somatic, emotional, and spiritual experience, not a (mere) cognitive one. It is the embodied, heart-stretching, and world-shifting experience of oneself as being as natural, as wild, as interconnected and related, and as magical as anything else on our planet — as much as a fox, a chanterelle, a wild desert stream, or an old-growth forest. People with a general knowledge of ecology might understand this intellectually but relatively few have located and passed through the unseen veil that exiles most contemporary people from an everyday conscious communion with animate nature.

Eco-awakening rocks your world. In that lightening flash moment, you realize you had previously been a kind of refugee, existentially and ecologically homeless. A certain restlessness, anxiety, alienation, and displacement you had experienced all your life disperses like mist in morning sunshine. You feel at home in the world in a deep, rich, and unprecedented way, a way you hadn’t known was missing, hadn’t even known was possible. Each natural thing is no longer an object but a subject to whom you are related and have always been related. Separation has ended. You’ve escaped the conformist-consumer “matrix” and returned consciously to the world into which you had been born, an animate world in which everything is alive, everything speaks, everything is related to everything else.[79]

Eco-awakening is one of the essential developmental milestones in preparation for the journey of soul initiation. Discovering your own Soul — your unique eco-niche in the more-than-human world — cannot happen without the earlier experience of eco-awakening.

Eco-awakening ends the egocentric early-adolescent stage of Conforming and Rebelling and sets in motion the ecocentric early-adolescent stage of the Thespian at the Oasis.[80] In the Oasis, people experience themselves as fully eligible participants in the more-than-human world, enabling them to take a variety of social and vocational roles that are both authentic and useful to their communities. They are social and ecological actors (authentic thespians) in a self-organizing gathering of many clans and species in a fertile and fruitful place (an “oasis”).

Before eco-awakening, we feel disconnected from the larger web of life. This experience of existential homelessness results in a compensatory craving for social acceptance as our be-all and end-all, and we act out this craving by socially conforming and rebelling. After eco-awakening, because we are getting rooted in our greater belonging, we feel relatively little need or desire to socially conform or rebel. Instead, we’re drawn to explore ever more deeply the relational possibilities of our social world and of our original more-than-human home.

Eco-awakening, as sublime as it is, is an artifact of egocentric societies. In healthy, ecocentric cultures, no one ever goes through the passage of eco-awakening. No one needs to because no child ever loses their innate animistic consciousness, their innate communion with the wild self-organizing world. They have no need to be awakened from a culture-imposed slumber, the trance of eco-alienation. They are raised in families and communities where wild kinship is a daily reality. Never having found themselves in the egocentric early-adolescent stage of Conforming and Rebelling, they have no need to be liberated from it.

All human children everywhere and in all times are born as animists. As little ones, we instinctively recognize and treat all animate beings as kin, as fellow persons — not just household cats and dogs, but also squirrels, birds, and butterflies, and even flowers, trees, and creeks. In egocentric societies, however, our innate animacy is curbed and quashed in our first few years. But our original felt kinship with all of life remains in the depths of our psyches, asleep but waiting to be revived.

Although an artifact of egocentric culture, eco-awakening is nonetheless among the greatest blessings imaginable when it occurs. And it’s a necessary transition for any further maturation, including our eventual arrival at the rim of Soul Canyon.

How to Eco-Awaken: Attend to the Nature-Oriented Tasks of Childhood

How do you bring about the life passage of eco-awakening? You devote yourself to the nature-oriented developmental tasks of the two stages of healthy (ecocentric) childhood. These two nature-oriented tasks are the ones most neglected and often in fact suppressed in egocentric culture. The neglect of these two developmental tasks is precisely what results in a child’s disconnect from the natural world, in the first place. This neglect diverts children from the healthy, ecocentric stages of the Nest and the Garden (early and middle childhood, respectively) and into the unhealthy and much more common two egocentric stages of childhood I call Obedience/ Entitlement Training and Primary Socioeconomic Training.[81]

Most parents, educators, clergy, and psychotherapists don’t help children and teens address these two tasks despite how essential they are to human psychological, social, and cultural well-being. Not having received that support themselves, they don’t understand how foundational it is. One generation’s loss becomes the next generations’ neglect. This is the core dynamic of cultural genocide.

But it’s never too late to eco-awaken. Once we reach psychological adolescence, although we cannot return to childhood itself, we can (and must) return to the neglected developmental tasks of childhood.[82]

Cultivation of Innocence, Present-Centeredness, and Relationality

The nature-oriented task of early childhood (birth to approximately age four) is the preservation of innocence, which is, in essence, the capacity for present-centeredness. It is the responsibility and opportunity of parents and other family members to address this task on behalf of the preschool child — by, for example, encouraging, actively welcoming, and guiding the child’s natural curiosity, their full-bodied emotionality, their unfettered sensuality, and their thrill of wild movement, and by recognizing their daily need for nurturing touch and their daily need for play, both indoors and in outdoor natural settings.[83] If your family did poorly with this, it might now be challenging for you to be fully (and innocently) present to your self, your body, others, and the wild world, a capacity essential to human development. In particular, this kind of presence is foundational to relationality and to the skills of empathy and compassion. Without some degree of presence and innocence, it’s impossible to feel connected to anyone or anything.

If your capacity for present-centeredness is only fair to middling, it’s vital to address these loose ends and frayed roots from childhood. Present-centeredness can be cultivated in a number of ways starting in our teens, including through a meditation practice (such as mindfulness, contemplative prayer, yoga, or qigong), transpersonal psychotherapies that incorporate mindfulness practices, psychotherapies that emphasize present-centeredness (like Gestalt), regular periods of attentive and reverent solitude in wild or semi-wild places, devoted play with any of the expressive arts, the practice of presence and innocence in social settings, and last but not least, apprenticing ourselves to infants.[84]

Nature Connection

The nature-oriented task of middle childhood (approximately age four till puberty) is to learn the enchantment of nature through intimate contact with the wild, other-than-human world — the world found in the backyard and in nearby woods, mountains, and seashores. Through outdoor play, children discover that their innate membership in this greater, wilder world is the other half of their birthright beyond family, school, and market.[85]

But, alas, this developmental task is mostly neglected or actively suppressed in modernity, and all the more so with each passing year.[86]

If, in childhood, you had not fully immersed yourself in the boundless enchantments of the natural world — and still have not — begin now. There are many current practices and disciplines that can support eco-awakening, including those known as nature-connection, ecotherapy, wilderness therapy, nature immersion, animal-assisted therapy, forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku), and nature engagement. At Animas Valley Institute, we’ve fashioned our own bundle of eco-awakening practices.[87] You can learn the enchantments of nature on your own (especially with the support of guidebooks) or you can enroll in nature-connection programs, which now exist in a great variety in many places in the world, or you can seek support from an ecotherapist skilled in nature-connection practices.[88]

Experiential educational methods for ecological awakening can be designed for different groups based on age and stage. Eco-awakening education for children (stage 2) will look different in some ways from what would be designed for teens (stage 3) or for stage-3 people in their twenties or later.

For psychologically and physically prepared people in their late teens and later, perhaps the single most effective (and intoxicating) eco-awakening and eco-deepening practice is to wander, preferably alone, for several days at a time, in the least tame places you can get yourself to. This assumes that you have adequate gear, knowledge, and skill, that you have the socioeconomic privilege that makes this possible and the racial, cultural, and gendered positionality that renders this safe enough, that you’re willing and able to take the time, and that you have a way to get there. Extended wilderness immersions have a profound impact on your psyche, your consciousness, your worldview, and your preparation for the encounter with Soul.

Wilderness odysseys, most often in solitude, have been pursued in all places and times by the archetypal Wanderer, including Moses, Christ, and Muhammad in their desert lands, the eponymous Odysseus on the high seas, Alexandra David-Néel in forbidden Tibet, John Muir in the California Sierras, Beryl Markham in the cross-continental air, and even Jack Kerouac by way of the wildness of the 1950s American cross-country roads. In my books, you’ll find stories of many solo wilderness sojourns that were pivotal elements of contemporary soul journeys.

* * * *

Sparking widespread eco-awakening is the most effective way to catalyze a whole-society shift from life-destroying to life-sustaining (the first half of our journey to the Next World). This can be done. Research suggests, for example, that once 25% to 35% of a population becomes committed to climate action, this triggers a rapid societal shift toward ecocentric and biodiversity-supporting policies.[89]

There are thousands of organizations and practitioners around the world dedicated to this very shift in consciousness and to refining their methods. In these times, this is as important as any other project for cultural renaissance. This work is, in essence, what Joanna Macy referred to as the third dimension of the Great Turning: “a shift in consciousness, a fundamental, spiritual revolution where people move from an industrial-growth mindset to deeply valuing interconnectedness with all life, fostering new perceptions, deeper belonging, and spiritual awakening”.[90]

How long it will take to bring about ecocentric societies is anyone’s guess and will likely vary quite a bit in any given region. Egocentric tyrants will do all they can to resist and undermine these efforts. They understand that ecocentric citizens are much less likely than others to get distracted by bread and circuses — and that ecocentric citizens will vote for ecocentric candidates when the latter choose to run and are endorsed by viable political parties. But if enough of us dedicate ourselves to the eco-awakening of others and the ecocentric raising of children …

* * * *

Innumerable commentators have decried the loss of (and great need for) the foundational experiences of both social interconnectedness and nature connection. It’s not a coincidence, then, that these are precisely the core experiences cultivated in the two stages of a healthy childhood and the two experiences most needed and lacking among contemporary people. This underscores that the great crises of our time stem from breakdowns in nature-based full-spectrum human development, and that the long-term, deepest solutions are psychological, spiritual, and communal. What we most need in order to deeply respond to our current global crises — and to adapt to the extreme and compounding changes we will not be able to prevent — is also what each individual needs to be most fully prepared for the journey of soul initiation and, in particular, for the Descent to Soul. Individual maturation and real cultural development are not separate.

References:

[79] What I call eco-awakening has been noted and discussed, in other terms, by a number of authors. The Norwegian ecophilosopher and founder of deep ecology Arne Naess, for example, introduced the notion of an “ecological self” — our identification with “the larger community of all living beings.” See John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess, Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (Santa Cruz, CA: New Society Publishers, 1988, p, 20). And the environmental activist and scholar of Buddhism Joanna Macy has written of “the greening of the self” — the expansion of our experienced circle of identity. See her chapter of that title in Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, ed., Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth (Point Reyes, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, pp. 145–56); see also Joanna Macy, World as Self, World as Lover (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991).

[80] In the stage of Conforming and Rebelling, in which the Ego is experienced as if it were at the center of everything, people tend to have two predominant emotions: fear of not belonging, which leads to a life priority of conforming to the social expectations of one’s group; and anger about others trying to shove them into boxes, which results in a life priority of rebelling against parents, authorities, and social expectations (especially those of the mainstream). In both emotional atmospheres, authenticity is neglected because people are either trying to be what others expect or doing their best to be socially subversive, or a convoluted mixture of both.

[81] See Nature and the Human Soul for a full description of all four of these life stages.

[82] In the Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel, each life stage has two developmental tasks unique to each stage, and these two tasks correspond to two sets of everyday opportunities for individual development or growth. One of the two tasks is culture oriented, the other nature oriented. Movement from one stage to the next requires significant success with (not completion of) both tasks. In our egocentric conformist-consumer cultures, both tasks of both childhood stages tend to be poorly addressed, but the nature-oriented tasks are especially neglected. Consequently and for simplicity, in this essay, I am emphasizing the nature- oriented tasks and opportunities, the ones we have most strayed from as a culture and most need to return to. See Nature and the Human Soul for a description of the culture-oriented tasks as well as a more in-depth discussion of the nature-oriented tasks.

[83] See Nature and the Human Soul, chapter 4, for a more thorough discussion.

[84] See Nature and the Human Soul, pp. 106–8, for a more complete description of these practices. See also my 2015 essay, “A Short Introduction to the Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel: Stages of Life, Rites of Passage, and Cultural Transformation,” https://www.animas.org/wp-content/uploads/Intro-to-ESDW-for-Animas-website.pdf.

[85] Our capacity to address the tasks of one stage depends in part on how well we did with the tasks of our previous stages. For example, cultivating our ability to surrender to wonder and rapture and to fall in love with the other-than-human world — a stage-two task — rests upon our stage-one foundational capacities of innocence, present-centeredness, and relationality.

[86] Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008).

[87] See Soulcraft, Nature and the Human Soul, Wild Mind, and/or The Journey of Soul Initiation. Or join us on an Animas experiential immersion.

[88] For practices you can undertake on your own to awaken and deepen your innate, childlike sense of wonder in nature, see Nature and the Human Soul, pp. 161–63. For a variety of other approaches to nature connection, see, for example, David Abram’s Becoming Animal, Jon Young’s Coyote Guide, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Stephen Buhner’s The Secret Teachings of Plants, and Sandra Ingerman’s Speaking with Nature. For perspectives on ecotherapy, see Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist, eds., Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.

[89] See, for example, Pizziol, V., Tavoni, A. From niches to norms: the promise of social tipping interventions to scale climate action. npj Clim. Action 3, 46 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-024-00131-3

[90] For all three dimensions of the Great Turning, see Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1998) and Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012). Also see here. Elsewhere, I have proposed the journey of soul initiation as a fourth dimension of the Great Turning.

Photo: The Wild Earth Kin [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

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