Soulcraft Musings

Friday, September 4, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XIX

This is Part Nineteen 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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Double-Negative Versus Positive Approaches to Human Developement

Double-negative interventions are designed to reduce or eliminate upsetting and harmful conditions such as emotional woundedness, trauma, anxiety, depression, addiction, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, poverty, homelessness, cultural and geographical displacements, climate disruption, and political corruption. I refer to these as double-negative because their intention is to reduce or eliminate (that’s the first negative) an upsetting or harmful condition (the second negative). When successful, we experience relief from something distressing, but this alone doesn’t further our individual or community development. We, at best, return to “zero” or “neutral” from a “negative” place. We haven’t enhanced our wholeness, wellness, or resiliency.

Examples of approaches that are primarily double-negative are conflict resolution, trauma recovery, conventional psychotherapy, 12-step support groups and other addiction-recovery methods, and many aspects of social and racial justice movements, socioeconomic support programs, and political reform. The thorn is removed, and that alone is a very good thing.

Positive strategies, in contrast, aim for enhancements in human development, human potential, and healthy community, not just the healing of wounds and the righting of wrongs. Double-negative approaches are for sure helpful and often necessary, but positive approaches go a good way further by directly supporting wellbeing, maturation, full-spectrum human blossoming, and community enrichment. The cultivation of our full potential is too often neglected in conversations about and projects in support of human development and community enrichment.

Examples of positive approaches are the cultivation of the facets of our innate human wholeness (“wholing”), Self-healing (which, unlike healing that is managed or administered by others, always incorporates, by definition, some wholing), support for addressing the nature-based (ecocentric) and soulcentric tasks of human development (including the tasks of the journey of soul initiation, for those who reach the psychospiritual stage I refer to as the Cocoon, aka, late adolescence), the honing of social skills, the nurturing of our imagination, our creative life-enhancing projects (our soulwork), our social and environmental activism (e.g., for restorative justice or ecological revitalization), mutual aid networks, the cultivation of kinship groups and healthy communities, and the practice of gratitude and helping. Positive approaches have the added benefit that they can reduce or eliminate woundedness or pathology without having to address wounds directly. This is because, often enough, our woundedness is primarily a consequence or by-product of our lack of wholeness. Through the cultivation of wholeness, sometimes psychological and social wounds disappear because the conditions that spawned them, sustain them, or exacerbate them no longer exist.

Modernity is much more comfortable with double-negative methods in healthcare, education, psychology, religion, and community building. Positive methods, such as nature-based full-spectrum human development, are a direct threat to modernity. Growing whole eventually results in true adulthood, and true adulthood is very bad for Dominator business-as-usual. A focus on healing and prevention (both are double negatives) is much more tolerable to modernity than the fostering of individual and community wholeness and self-reliance, which would be considered subversive. For change agents, paradigm shifters, community weavers, and social architects, the cultivation of wholeness ought to be a core practice of culture interruption.

Mainstream modern healthcare is largely a double-negative industry. Mainstream modern education is partially designed to dull students in the course of preparing them for the soul-suppressing jobs and roles that keep Dominator culture running. By suppressing nature-based full-spectrum human development (through educational systems, religious organizations, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices), Dominator World engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and tedious work.

A double-negative approach to personal and community betterment is also commonly seen in contemporary religions and other morality-based systems. The goal is to reduce the acting-out of such human faults as greed, deceit, vanity, power-over, violence, and war. Religious organizations teach moral rules (through sermons and classes that warn against sin, selfishness, and fighting), preach and practice accountability (largely through confession, purity codes, and rules that proscribe certain behaviors), promote spiritual habits (like prayer, self-reflection, and fasting) that limit bad behavior or unacceptable desires, and run charity projects (to counter greed and reduce the suffering of the poor). All of these are double-negatives — and sometimes helpful. Sometimes not so much.

In contrast, the trail to the Next World requires positive approaches such as wholing, Self-healing, wellness, ecoliteracy, the cultivation of human potential (for example, emotional intelligence, social skills, creativity, physical aptitude, the celebration of social and racial diversity, the arts, mythology, cosmology), initiatory mentoring, and the fostering of visionary artistry — more generally, nature-based full-spectrum human development.

But there are at least two challenges for the design and implementation of positive approaches. First, is that the tyrants and robber barons of Dominator societies will eventually resist, obstruct, and outlaw these once they’re too successful (visible) because human wholeness leads to a diminishment of tyrannical power and control. Full-spectrum human development is bad for business — and for raising armies. Second, to support people to develop what’s missing in their human development, we need a framework or a model to help us see what’s missing, and these are rare.

There’s a striking asymmetry here between double-negative and positive approaches: You don’t need a model to be able to notice what’s wrong (e.g., greed, deceit, vanity, power-over, violence, or war). Anyone can see these because they are what’s happening — in our streets, in our homes, and for sure both in and perpetrated by our large corporations and governments. In contrast, we don’t generally see wholeness and full-spectrum human development because they are largely absent. We don’t generally notice what’s missing. So, without models of full-spectrum human development, we’re mostly limited to double-negative approaches: stamping out the bad, minimizing what we don’t want. As in a punishment-centered approach to raising children. Spare the rod, etc.

Models of wholeness are rare in modernity, in part because they are very difficult to derive from merely careful observation or scientific research. It’s hard to empirically discover that which is rare or absent. What we’ve done at Animas, as an alternative to empirical research and theorizing, is to create models of human wholeness based on nature’s own templates of wholeness. The models suggest what kinds of wholeness might exist (or ought to exist), where to look for wholeness, what features and facets of wholeness to wonder about and assess in ourselves and others. What is possible. What we can aspire to. What we could get good at cultivating.

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The double-negative versus positive distinction is not the same as the upstream versus downstream distinction often spotlighted in the realms of public health and healthcare. The latter is a reminder that it is easier and more effective to address problems at their root (attending to the conditions “upstream” that result, metaphorically, in people falling in the river) than to do so downstream (where elaborate and costly operations are needed to rescue drowning people). Examples of upstream interventions include nutrition programs, sanitation projects, homes for the unhoused, addiction prevention, addressing income inequality, and taxing harmful products. Downstream interventions include acute care, emergency services, chronic disease management, emergency shelters, addiction recovery programs, and much of psychotherapy. Both upstream and downstream approaches are double-negative interventions — the attempt to reduce or eliminate problems. It’s just that it makes a whole lot more sense to do that upstream where the troubles and losses are less significant and easier and less costly to address.

But there is also a positive version of upstream-downstream in which it is easier and more effective to address opportunities upstream — for example, through nature-based full-spectrum human development supported at home, in schools, in religious organizations, by healthcare providers, and in communities more generally. Supporting children with their eco-soulcentric developmental tasks is a much better idea than waiting a decade or more and then helping people in their twenties and later address their incomplete or neglected developmental tasks from childhood — as well as attending to all the social, psychological, medical, educational, and vocational diminishments that stem from developmental delays and challenges. But, especially in our current times, it’s both possible and necessary to do both.

What do you imagine your community would look like and feel like when it placed its emphasis on positive, wholeness-optimizing, upstream ways of raising and educating children, supporting adolescents, and enhancing community life more generally and that utilized downstream and double-negative strategies only as needed?

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

Photo: The Garden Within [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.