Soulcraft Musings

Friday, July 24, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XIII

This is Part Thirteen 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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Homo Imaginans

Together, the two stages of adolescence — our prolonged human juvenility — enable as well as require the full blossoming of our uniquely human imagination, our visionary capacity. Over the next few hundred years, the ongoing differentiation and unfolding of adolescence will make all the difference in our journey to the Next World. An enhanced and deepened imagination is vital to our evolution and our human destiny.

“We cannot intentionally create unless we are able, first, to imagine,” writes Geneen Marie Haugen. “Imagination may be the most essential, uniquely human capacity — creating both the dead-end crises of our time and the doorway through them.” [33] The dead-ends are generated by the egocentric and compensatory ambitions of uninitiated humans (those whose meanings are unhitched from nature). The doorways through (and beyond) are created by the delivery systems of initiated adults and genuine elders living and working together and, in doing so, creating and evolving healthier human cultures.

Geneen coined the appellation Homo imaginans many years ago to refer to our evolving human consciousness, our way into the future. “Homo, human, and humus,” she says, “are thought to arise from a shared root — of the Earth. Thus, Homo imaginans might translate not only as the imagining human, but as the imagining Earth.” In the Next World, we may be imagining not only with and for the Earth but as the Earth. Geneen suggests that the defining difference between homo sapiens and homo imaginans is the depth of consciousness and the power of our human imagination. [34] A deeply cultivated imagination is needed to reach true adulthood, but that same capacity is our primary resource during adulthood. And true elderhood.

In 1988, Earth elder Thomas Berry, too, suggested the emergence of a new human: “Because we are moving into a new mythic age, it is little wonder that a kind of mutation is taking place in the entire earth-human order. A new paradigm of what it is to be human emerges.” [35] Embedded in this quote is a point of vital importance: Thomas is reminding us that the human (like all other creatures) is a feature of Earth. When humanity speciates, the “Earth-human order” shifts, not just humans. In the Next World, the Earth-human order shift may be in the way humans embody their deep imaginations on behalf of Earth.

Even now, Earth may be imagining her own future through soul-initiated humans. She might be supporting us to evolve as a dimension of her own evolution. If humanity succeeds at what Joanna Macy refers to as the Great Turning, we will awaken, as a species, to what Thomas Berry calls the dream of the Earth. This awakening might be a defining quality of homo imaginans and a key element of the Next World.

We know that the geo-biological community of Earth excels in its ability to engender countless new forms and species to fill opportunities and needs within its constantly evolving and self-organizing web of life. This occurred, for example, two billion years ago when most terrestrial life took the form of primordial, single-celled, anaerobic bacteria (prokaryotes) living in the oceans. A by-product of their metabolism was oxygen, which, for them, was a poison. They generated such prodigious volumes of it that Earth’s atmosphere became significantly altered and the prokaryotes began to suffocate in their own waste. Then a new form of life appeared — complex cells that fed on oxygen (eukaryotes). Without such a transformational moment, life on Earth might have ended right there.

Now we find ourselves at a similar juncture. We humans are creating so much toxicity and pollution — and radically altering Earth’s atmosphere (and land and waters) — that our own survival is in question. This would be a time, then, when Gaia, in her fecund generativity, would bring forth a new human. (This geological “now” may have begun several hundred or more years ago and may extend several hundred or more into the future.)

Homo imaginans might be that Next-World human — soul-initiated imagineers who serve as Earth’s faculty of forward-seeing imagination, who see the planetary possibilities that their unique eco-niche enables them to see. Crucially, these future Earth possibilities are not conceived by human Egos, not even the Egos of soul-initiated imagineers. Rather, Earth herself conceives these possibilities, and soul-initiated Egos serve as her midwives. The ultimate meanings are not synthesized by human Egos but discovered by them.

This kind of forward-seeing imagination is activated in individual humans by the journey of soul initiation. Only in partnership with our Souls do we have the capacity to imagine in this way.

In the Next World, we humans will cultivate our conscious partnership with evolution, our awakening as Earth’s planetary imagination, as Geneen puts it. We will support Earth to enhance all of life — its diversity, complexity, and resilience. Our primary resource for this partnership will be the soulwork of soul-initiated adults and elders.

Humanity may have already started to partner with Earth in this way through recent visionary ventures such as permaculture; learning about, imagining into, and developing partnerships with mycelium; biomimicry; reconceptualizing or remembering Soul as ecological niche; and sussing out the pan-human deep structure of the journey of soul initiation.

References

[33] Quotes here and below from personal conversations with Geneen Marie Haugen, but these points are also made in her dissertation, Awakening Planetary Imagination.

[34] Geneen Marie Haugen, personal communication, April 2026.

[35] Berry, Dream of the Earth, 132–33.

Photo: At the Wild Edge of Belonging [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.