Soulcraft Musings

Friday, July 10, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XI

This is Part Eleven 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.

This multi-part Musing makes up my second posting on Substack. It would be great help in this launch if you would become a Free Subscriber. (You can use the “no pledge” option when you click on the link below and then “Continue without pledging.”) Join the community: Click Here. After you subscribe, do check your email (including spam folder) to confirm. Thank you.

The Next World and Human Evolution: An Expanded and Amplified Capacity for Imagination

In the Next World, we will be different kinds of humans. Our consciousness will be altered in some significant ways from what it had been in both the Animate Partnership World (former and current versions) and in the current Dominator World. Our experience of the world will be appreciably shifted as well. It’s not like we’ll experience the world the way we do now but just be doing a better job fitting in, a better job loving each other and all of life. Rather, we will be different kinds of humans living in a different world. Full stop.

What will be different about us in the Next World??

As with all other species at all times, we humans are on an evolutionary adventure. There has been much speculation for a while now that a new human species is in the process of emerging, and the new wrinkle will not so much be in our visible anatomy but in an alteration in our mode of consciousness. The philosopher and imagineer Geneen Marie Haugen suspects, more specifically, that at the heart of this shift in consciousness will be an expanded and amplified capacity for imagination.

To grasp the importance of an amped-up imagination, Geneen invites us to recall that the human is, as far as we know, the only creature with the ability to imagine alternative futures — and to create them, using symbolic language and opposable thumbs. This has been true of humans from the beginning, but now this faculty acquires a significance more pivotal than any previous development in Earth’s evolution and, conceivably, in the universe’s. Geneen points out that we now have the opportunity to use our forward-seeing imagination not only for our own sake but for the benefit of all species.[24] This capacity and its ramifications may be key features of the Next World.[25]

In 1988, Thomas Berry wrote, “We now in large measure determine the earth process that once determined us. In a more integral way, we could say that the earth that controlled itself directly in the former period now to an extensive degree controls itself through us.”[26] For better or worse (and so far it is unmistakably for worse), humanity has become the dominant (and dominating) presence on this planet. “We have become a geological force,” writes evolutionary cosmologist Brian Swimme. “Because of us, the ice caps are melting. Because of us, coral reefs the size of mountains are dying.”[27]

For this reason, our capacity to imagine the future generates far greater consequences and opportunities than ever before. We are now imagining not only for ourselves but also for and with all earthly creatures and habitats. A highly skilled and nuanced imagination — exercised by not just a few but by the majority of humans — now acquires the most fundamental significance for both survival and flourishing. As a species, we must go beyond all previous functioning of our human imagination. Geneen proposes that we must now learn to imagine not only with the Others but also with Earth Herself. We must become capable of wisely and creatively acting on behalf of Earth as a whole, as her agent or handmaiden — not just on the behalf of particular ecosystems or bioregions. Visionary action of this sort does not derive from our conscious strategic minds; it emerges only from the depths of our imagination.[28]

A deepened and amplified imagination may be the principal human power made possible by our life stage of adolescence — in particular by the way this developmental period has been lengthening and differentiating over the past few hundred years or more. All of us now take this post-pubescent life stage for granted but we didn’t even have a name for it until the dawn of the twentieth century. The American psychologist Stanley Hall, in 1904, was the first person to employ the word “adolescence” to refer to a distinct developmental stage.[29] The Western scientific perspective is that adolescence allows for additional neurological and cognitive development before what is rather casually referred to as “adulthood,” thereby supporting social and occupational preparation for the cultural and vocational roles of modernity. But here is one of the many instances in which it is vital to distinguish biology from psychology. Our species may always have had a biological stage of adolescence, but the modern psychosocial version may afford the opportunity for new dimensions of human development.

Microbiologists tell us that our genetic coding is 98.6 percent identical to that of chimpanzees and that the other 1.4 percent mostly dictates the duration (specifically, the slowness) of our juvenile development (neoteny). In other words, a core feature of what differentiates humans from other primates is the relatively long, pre-adult phase of our individual development.

It appears that adolescence is still a very much evolving stage of growth, a psychosocial stage gradually distinguishing itself from both childhood and adulthood. As the millennia unfold, we humans are maturing slower and, on the average, living longer. Now, a hundred and twenty years after we first distinguished adolescence clearly enough to name it as a distinct developmental stage, we’re still discovering what it’s for, what this evolutionary unfolding makes possible, what it portends. Rather than a psychological regression or a sign of biological error, modern adolescence might be evidence of an evolutionary trajectory, a momentous advantage we’ve not yet benefited from — and are just beginning to understand. The survival of our species might very well require a deeper understanding of adolescence and what it makes possible. Longer juvenility enables, but does not compel, fuller maturation.

Let’s consider what healthy adolescence entails, psychologically and socially — and spiritually, too. First, recall that the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel describes two very different consecutive stages of healthy (ecocentric) adolescence (both of which contrast dramatically with the much more common, egocentric versions of modern early adolescence, the latter beginning with the stage I’ve labeled Conforming and Rebelling[30]).

The first of these two ecocentric stages, the Oasis (early adolescence), is a period of immense creative, social, and sexual fire, with the developmental task of consciously shaping our own authentic way of belonging to and contributing to the supercharged post-pubescent social scene, one that has become increasingly diverse, complex, and multi-dimensional in modern times. This act of early-adolescent self-creation, if done well, requires truly immense imaginative capacities. I mean, consider the complexity of the challenge: We must fashion a social presence that authentically expresses our true values, interests, emotions, style, sensibilities, personality type (for example, on the introversion-extroversion continuum), our level of intelligence of several kinds (emotional, logical-mathematical, linguistic-verbal, musical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, animistic, existential), sexual orientation, gender identification, ethnicity, spirituality, and personal strengths and weaknesses. Yikes! Furthermore, we’re tasked with shaping one or more versions of ourselves that are not only authentic but that also garner some degree of social acceptance, especially within our chosen peer group. None of this is easy. Most contemporary humans, in fact, struggle mightily with this task or fail outright. Most end up shaping themselves in a way that achieves adequate social acceptance but embodies little if any personal authenticity. Conformity ends up winning over genuineness. Impersonation becomes the most common social mode, and not just among teenagers. As the current egocentric early-adolescent social scene (by which I mean most all of modernity) increasingly diversifies and becomes decreasingly compassionate and tolerant, people have to draw ever deeper on their imaginative capacities to succeed at the developmental task of this life stage (which, to repeat, most contemporary humans never mature beyond). This requires a deeper and amplified imagination.

So far, in today’s post, we’ve considered only the first half of adolescence. Next week, we’ll explore the relationship between imagination and the very different and even more challenging (but rarely reached in Dominator World) stage of late adolescence.

But before signing off today, I want to note, musingly, that, implicit in this discussion already, is a curious possibility: Modernity’s cultural, social, and psychological pathologies might be creating ideal conditions for the further evolution of the human imagination and, consequently, of the human species. The more our societies become shallow, intolerant, fractured, and transactional, the more difficult it becomes to create a personal presence that is authentic as well as socially acceptable (the task of early adolescence), consequently requiring a deeper and more nuanced imagination to succeed. Barry Lopez speculated in a similar direction: “If [our] species is to achieve its aspirations for justice, reduced suffering, and transcendent life, and if it is to prevent the triumph of machinery that it so clearly fears, an unprecedented level of imagination is required.”[31] In other words, it’s possible that the catastrophe of Dominator World and the global polycrisis it has spawned could turn out to be an unsuspected catalyst for human evolution. This would hardly be the first time an Earthly species unintentionally precipitated its own evolutionary transformation by generating its own calamity. (I’ll offer an example next week.)

This is not, of course, to imply that we ought to feel fortunate about the Great Unraveling. There’s nothing to celebrate about the immeasurable suffering and losses of our times. And, given our current circumstances, human extinction might be as likely as human evolution. We can’t help believing there must have been a better and easier way. But maybe there wasn’t. Crisis engenders transformation. Destruction paves the way for creation. Stellar implosions (supernovas) form the elements that become the building blocks of rocky planets and life. Viral pandemics boost a species long-term resilience against future pathogens. Fractured bone often becomes denser and stronger than the original. The Wall Street crash of 1929 led to safety nets like Social Security. Some trees and plants require extreme wildfires to release their seeds into newly fertilized, ash-rich soils.

References

[24] See Geneen Marie Haugen, Awakening Planetary Imagination: A Theory and Practice (San Francisco: California Institute of Integral Studies, ProQuest/UMI, 2015) and Geneen Marie Haugen, “Council of the Wild Gods,” Kosmos Journal (spring 2019), https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/council-of-the-wild-gods.

[25] See also: Augustin Fuentes, The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017); Stephen T. Asma, The Evolution of Imagination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017); Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

[26] Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth, 133.

[27] Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 102.

[28] Haugen, ibid.

[29] Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education.

[30] See Nature and the Human Soul, p. 213.

[31] Barry Lopez, Horizon (New York: Vintage, 2019), p. 305.

Photo: Woman Under Tree Looking at the Stars and Milky Way [Photo]. Adobe Stock by Anton

To read previous musings click here.