Soulcraft Musings

Friday, July 17, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XII

This is Part Twelve 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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Late Adolescence: Cultivating a Dynamic and Nuanced Imagination

Last week, we explored the ecocentric stage of early adolescence (the Oasis) and how this life stage — which is still evolving — can expand and amplify our capacity for imagination. This week, we turn to the next stage, late adolescence, and its profound significance for human evolution and for our prospects for reaching the Next World.

The relatively few contemporary people who succeed at the developmental tasks of early adolescence — shaping a personal self that is both authentic and socially accepted — soon enough find themselves in the life passage I call Confirmation that prepares them for the profoundly different stage of late adolescence, which I call the Cocoon. The Cocoon is the stage of life in which we most embody the archetype of the Wanderer, the seeker of depth and meaning, the stage in which the the journey of soul initiation takes place. This is the ecstatic and harrowing odyssey into the shadowed underworld, into the mysteries of nature and psyche. The developmental task of late adolescence is to remember, reclaim, and be re-membered by “the truth at the center of the image you were born with” (poet David Whyte’s phrase) or what we at Animas refer to as a person’s mythopoetic identity. Encountering this intensity of truth confounds and blesses us with a much deeper layer of authenticity than was possible in the early adolescent ecocentric stage of the Oasis. This multi-year death-rebirth journey of dismemberment, revelation, and metamorphosis requires even greater imaginative skill than the relatively two-dimensional Oasis.

In the Cocoon, we must utilize our imagination not so much to conjure authentic social or vocational versions of ourselves (as we did in early adolescence) but to fathom the depths of our individual human psyche as well as the depths of the more-than-human world. When the Wanderer recurrently encounters, say, spiders in synchronistic ways while wandering in wild places and in their night dreams as well, it is the Wanderer’s capacity to access their deep imagination that enables them to sense what these eight-legged ones are saying about themselves and about the world, to communicate with them, to request guidance from them, or to design and enact a ceremony that might lay the cornerstone of an apprenticeship with them. Our agility with deep imagination, even more than our equally awesome human capacities to feel, sense, and think, is what the underworld journey depends on. Success with the tasks of the Cocoon requires a dynamic and nuanced imagination, one that springs from our depths and is in cahoots with the more-than-human world. This life stage — late adolescence — also provides the opportunity for further cultivation of this capacity for deep imagination.

The Cocoon stage — and the journey of soul initiation that happens within it — is key to our next phase of human evolution because the Cocoon is the portal to true (initiated) adulthood, and true adulthood is what enables a human person to most effectively employ their deep imagination for the enhancement of Earthly life. Yes, a well-developed strategic-rational-logical mind is also necessary in order to serve life, but it is far from sufficient. Without the deeply cultivated capacity to dream — to envision, to muse from and with the depths of the human imagination, to access the dream of the Earth — the solo-flying strategic mind, no matter how intelligent, gets hopelessly lost and may become truly dangerous, as in homicidal, genocidal, or ecocidal. Apart from being dangerous at times, the strategic mind on its own is often of limited use. For example, it isn’t possible for the strategic mind to “figure out” a truly comprehensive solution to our contemporary polycrisis any more than it’s possible for an individual to figure out how to generate real meaning and purpose as well as life-enhancing service. Modernity’s over-reliance on figuring things out is precisely what created our polycrisis in the first place. In a healthy late adolescence (something now rare, as I’ve been saying), our uniquely human deep imagination is cultivated far beyond what most contemporary humans ever experience. And then, in true adulthood, our imagination is placed in service to life. Not against it as we see in Dominator World — for example, with those mavens of the tech world who may be outrageously creative but unhinged from both nature and Soul.

The strategic mind enables a soul-initiated person to design and employ delivery systems for their Soul’s desires. But only our deeply imagining Muse can discover what our Soul wants us to do or to be, in the first place. Without imagination and the journey of soul initiation, the strategic mind is flying blind. It knows how to build beautiful and impressive things, but its creations too often lead to ruin.

Evolution (which is to say, Mystery) may have rendered the stage of late adolescence fully attainable by all contemporary humans. In principle, that is. As communities, we must do our part in order to benefit from this mere possibility. We must create social systems and structures that support us — especially our children and youth — to address the developmental tasks of the two ecocentric stages of childhood and the two ecocentric stages of adolescence. (See Parts V and VI of this series for a review of those tasks.) Doing so enables an individual to eventually reach true (soul-initiated) adulthood and to embody their innate capacity to authentically and meaningfully serve life. Again, how to do this cannot be figured out. It cannot be rationally determined. It is more like a remembering — a remembering of our individual “original instructions,” what we were born to do, which can only be understood mythopoetically and ecologically, not in terms of culturally-defined vocations or social roles. Through the journey of soul initiation, we become a human capable of partnering with evolution — not rationally deciding what to do but remembering what we were born to do and then being shapeshifted by the world in a way that enables us to do it, our mature soulwork. Initiated adulthood is a time of soulwork in synergistic partnership with other humans and with the greater web of life. Our opportunity, perhaps our destiny, is to become conscious partners with and agents of evolution, not strategic shapers of it (which is not possible).

References

[32] See my book, Nature and the Human Soul, for a complete description of both stages of ecocentric adolescence — and also the two stages each of childhood, adulthood, and elderhood.

Photo: [Collage] Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.