Soulcraft Musings

Friday, May 29, 2026

A Map to the Next World

This is Part Five 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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Developmental Stage is Everything — Part One

Part V

At Animas, we have, for 45 years so far, been fathoming, deciphering, and drawing a map to the encounter with Soul. And navigating by it. Soul as ecological niche (see Parts III & IV of this essay).

Central to our map is the reminder that developmental stage (life stage) is everything — the most essential consideration on our journey to the Next World.

Developmental stage is everything because the only way we’ll arrive in the Next World, a multi-cultural world of healthy human communities, is by remembering what’s required to grow a true adult and a genuine elder from birth.

Briefly, what I mean by “a true adult” (aka a soul-initiated adult) is someone who consciously and effectively embodies the unique eco-niche they were born to inhabit, which enables them to deliver their singular gift to the more-than-human world (the world that includes but extends far beyond the human village). A genuine elder is someone who, following their many years of true adulthood, occupies their ecological niche without effort, freeing them for the elder task of caring for the Soul of the more-than-human world, an endeavor with even greater scope, depth, and fulfillment than that of adulthood. An elder cares for the Soul of the world by defending and nurturing the innocence and wonder of children, mentoring early adolescents, guiding late adolescents on the journey of soul initiation, mentoring adults in their soul work, supporting the evolution of the culture, and maintaining the balance between the human village and the greater Earth community. The latter two roles are enacted not individually but communally — by councils of elders. Such councils are what healthier communities have instead of politicians. A true elder is not the same as an “older,” an aging uninitiated person, even a kind and wise one, as blessed as we are to have many of the latter among us.

True adults and elders have become rare in our world.

True adulthood and elderhood — as I am describing them here — are stages of human development that don’t even exist as possibilities on the maps of modernity, of Dominator World. This includes all Western psychologies, Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, and contemporary understandings of all spiritualities and religions. Nature-based, full-spectrum, full-lifespan, multi-generational human development — including the encounter with Soul, which is the portal to true adulthood — disappeared from our collective maps thousands of years ago.

Consider some of the elements needed for a child to someday become a true elder, the kinds of support children need to grow into their full-spectrum humanity — daily support from parents, family, community, and the greater web of life, support that is spiritual, psychological, emotional, dietary, educational, ceremonial, and mythic — support that enables them to eventually arrive in a healthy early adolescence (now quite rare), which is so much more likely when they grow up in homes with soul-initiated parents (even more rare), which usually depends upon genuine elders and adult initiators having supported the individuation of those parents-to-be. Then reflect on the kind of fierce and loving support those healthy early adolescents (of any age, teens or older) need from true adults and elders in order to reach the very different and distinct developmental stage of late adolescence (the stage of the journey of soul initiation), support that includes but is far more extensive than a rite of passage [12]; and the initiatory contexts, ceremonies, and practices — designed and guided by true adults and elders — that support those late adolescents to eventually be shapeshifted by Mystery into true adults themselves. And ponder the decades of visionary action and life-enhancing soulwork to which those initiated adults must devote themselves in order to finally ripen into real elders.

The best and deepest way to grow healthy children begins twenty or more years before they are born by supporting their future parents to become soul-initiated adults before they conceive children.

Developmental stage is everything because, at any given point in life, the specific kinds of support a human being needs to grow whole depends on what stage of life they’re in and which developmental tasks from their previous stages remain most incomplete. Developmental stage is everything because the way we experience the world depends upon our life stage. What we want in life and from life and what we long to contribute to life changes, naturally, from one stage to the next. The way we individually experience social, political, and environmental collapse in this century — and the ways we’re motivated to respond — varies profoundly based on our life stage (as well as on our socioeconomic, racial, political, and religious position and our personal wholeness and healing, among other factors). The kinds of initiations that are possible and relevant for us as we grow and mature are entirely a matter of life stage.

Developmental stage — and how we understand those stages — is everything, particularly when it comes to drawing a map to the Next World and when it comes to creating the kinds of healthy human communities we will need if we are to ever reach the Next World.

Forty-five years studying human development has led to my estimate that perhaps as much as 95% of contemporary humans in Dominator societies never mature past the psychological stage of early adolescence and that only a few percent ever reach true adulthood, much less genuine elderhood. This is tragic. And unnecessary. And not the least bit surprising in Dominator World.

A functional map to the Next World must be one that supports us to address our most unfinished developmental tasks from early and middle childhood as well as from early adolescence. There’s a considerable amount of incomplete psychosocial development for most all of us as a consequence of “growing up” in egocentric Dominator societies. Our own unfinished tasks might include the recovery of our capacity for innocent present-centeredness, the ability to psychologically and socially see and appreciate ourselves clearly and compassionately, the revival and deepening of our innate love affair with the other-than-human world of nature, our wild enchantment with our own human nature (our animal bodies, our five senses, our deep imagination, our full-bodied emotions, our capacity for heart-centered thinking), a keen and nuanced appreciation of our people’s mythology and history (including the social, tribal, and racial oppressions and the liberation movements that are inextricable elements of that history), and the honing of the essential psychological and social skills needed to thrive as a member of a (healthier) human community. Our developmental opportunities and needs include the healing of multi-generational trauma that was so tragically and brutally inflicted by humans on fellow humans — and continues to be inflicted.

This foundational developmental work eventually prepares us to embark on the journey of soul initiation (“e-niche-iation”), a journey that takes place during the stage of psychological late adolescence (regardless of our chronological age when that stage begins, if ever). Late adolescence is complete upon our passage into the stage of early adulthood.

Maturation into true adulthood requires what I call nature-based full-spectrum human development (NB-FSHD). The Soulcentric Developmental Wheel is one component of our Animas model of NB-FSHD. [13] Next week, I’ll introduce you to the Wheel.

References

[12] Effective rites of passage are invaluable support for humans of any age when they are in the process of transitioning from one life stage to the next, but far more important for maturation is what happens every day during those life stages, which is to say what happens between the passages — or, at least, what ought to happen. Dominator World has lost not only effective rites of passage but also most of the structures of healthy culture that support their people to address the developmental tasks of their stage and, in that way, to eventually reach the next passage.

[13] See Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World.

Photo: The Great Work of Growing Whole [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.