Soulcraft Musings

Friday, June 19, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part VIII

This is Part Eight 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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We Arrive in the Next World Only as a Community

In last week’s post, I offered a metaphor for what we’ve been up to at Animas Valley Institute for 45 years now: creating and following a map to the Next World. I highlighted one particular element of that map: the journey of soul initiation, a distinctive and vital feature of nature-based full-spectrum human development that has been actively suppressed for millennia by Dominator World and all but forgotten by modernity. But the journey of soul initiation is not at all the same as the journey to the Next World.

Soul initiation is a transformation of an individual human. Reaching the Next World is a transformation of a human community. No one reaches the Next World alone or with just their family and best friends. We arrive in the Next World as a community or not at all. For any given individual, soul initiation is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a member of a community that arrives in the Next World. No community, however, will reach the Next World unless, among its members, are sufficient numbers of soul-initiated adults and true elders. That last sentence is at the heart of what I am proposing in this essay.

Children and adolescents of any age (psychological adolescents from 12 to 112) — those who are not soul initiated — can, of course, reach the Next World, but, like people of any other life stage, they will do so only if their community does.

The primary focus of the rest of this multi-part essay will be on how a human community might go about reaching the Next World — and on what approaches are likely to fail.

A child or adolescent in a contemporary soulcentric community as well as a child or adolescent in a community that has arrived in the Next World, are both very different kinds of creatures than a child or adolescent in an egocentric society. This alone suggests why the journey to the Next World, starting from where we find ourselves today, will be a long road: Although many children are now being raised ecocentrically and soulcentrically by eco-awakened parents, this is still a tiny minority. It will take several generations before this becomes the norm.

The early communities that reach the Next World are likely to be small, say 30 to 50 people, or they may be larger (maybe a few hundred or more, or perhaps people of a whole valley or bioregion). It’s conceivable that humanity as a whole could eventually arrive in the Next World as a single mega-community. However, as long as Dominator World is dominating most of the Earth, it will probably be only smaller, isolated communities that have a chance of reaching the Next World, because Dominator Culture will seek to destroy any eco-soulcentric communities that are particularly large or visible — just as Dominator societies have been doing the world over for several millennia. As long as Dominator World remains dominant, small Next World communities will likely have to disguise themselves (like indigenous syncretic traditions of the past that survived by adopting vocabulary and paraphernalia of imperial Christianity) or will reside in remote regions (like the remaining culturally-intact, nature-based traditions on this planet, if there truly are any that still endure).

Can an old world destroy or harm a Next World? Yes, in a similar way that relatively new Dominator societies have been destroying or harming ancient Partnership cultures. But when it comes to the Next World, it’s primarily the possibility of that world that can be destroyed or harmed by Dominator World.

* * *

The Next World will not be a version of any previous world, including earlier Partnership Worlds. [19] We won’t get to the Next World by attempting to imitate a previous or existing culture, or by joining one. [20] We humans, like all other lifeworlds, have always been and still are on an evolutionary journey — a journey forward, not backwards or sideways. Adopting the traditions of any current or former Partnership cultures won’t enable us to reach the Next World. Such adoptions might even derail our journey. In addition to the one-way trajectory of evolution, here’s a second reason: On our way to the Next World, we’ll have to invent transitional social structures and systems that previous Partnership cultures didn’t have and didn’t need because they didn’t face the core problems we face in Dominator World: the ubiquity of egocentric and anthropocentric systems and the near absence of ecocentric systems. [21] (In a later installment of this long essay, I’ll have more to say on these needed transitional social structures and systems.)

No previous maps will work for us. We must make our own map.

Who, then, is our Animas map intended for? Who is the “we” in “we must make our own map”? Our map is designed for all contemporary Western and Westernized peoples who see that it’s time to begin our migration to the Next World. (It may be useful as well for other contemporary peoples of Dominator World.) The deep structure of our map is nature-based, explicitly and in its origin: Its conceptual template is nature’s own pattern language of wholeness. We offer our map as possibly pan-human, which is to say we are deeply curious which communities will find it useful, and which will not and why. The particular humans for whom our map is designed are those of any race, ethnicity, gender, or social class who are in an ecocentric life stage, from early adolescence on. (See Parts V and VI of this essay.) Our map will likely not make sense from an egocentric perspective (in other words, people in egocentric early adolescence). I invite you to try our map as a support for your own individual journey and your community’s collective journey — and see for yourself. Let me know if you discover ways to improve it such that it becomes as pan-human as we aspire to. Although I believe the deep structure of our map would work for all current ecocentric human communities that recognize the need and opportunity to migrate to the Next World, your community would need to draw and refine your own version of this map, fleshed out and embellished with your own language, practices, ceremonies, observances, archetypes, symbols, art, and customs.

But there is more to say here: We all know that racial, social, and gender injustice is a very real and ongoing oppressive actuality of Dominator World. Racism, classism, and sexism — and speciesism, too — are structural realities in many if not most contemporary communities and organizations. A community will never reach the Next World, even with a functional map, if it has not examined and reformed its worldview and practices so as to defend and uphold the dignity of all humans, all species, and all habitats. And that takes an ecocentric and soulcentric community with a devotion to human and other-than-human justice, to diversity, equity, and inclusion. But I don’t, of course, mean inclusion in the privileged classes of Dominator culture but inclusion in an ecocentric and soulcentric community that has been made safe, not for Victims, Rescuers, and Perpetrators (the “drama triangle”) but for mature humans capable of authenticity, compassion, self-compassion, real dialogue, and, more generally, nature-based full-spectrum human development. Our Animas map suggests ways to become humans of this sort — and considerably more. People in eco-soulcentric life stages may be less likely to be racist or sexist, but those of us raised in Dominator World (most everyone) can look forward to a lifetime of uncovering hidden strands of injustice, racism, sexism, and speciesism embedded in our psyches and in our ways of being in relationship with one another and with our more-than-human world.

We arrive in the Next World as a community or not at all, but such a community will have to be ecocentric, soulcentric, posthumanist, and egalitarian.

References

[19] See Parts I and VII of this essay.

[20] This conclusion is resonant with that of Thomas Berry, the “geologian” and lifelong student of cultures throughout the world, who wrote: “We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but “inscendence,” not the brain but the gene.” From The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), pp. 207–8.

[21] These systems, when also androcentric, are commonly referred to as “patriarchal,” but the core problem of patriarchies is not that men hold power and women are largely excluded from it but that most people, regardless of gender — and the societies themselves — are egocentric and anthropocentric (aka patho-adolescent). Referring to such societies as “patriarchal” obscures the fundamental dynamic that must be addressed. An egocentric and anthropocentric society in which power is shared equally among genders would not be appreciably healthier than a patriarchy.

Photo: Flock of Geese in the Sunset Sky [Photo]. Adobe Stock by Steve

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