MY JOURNEY OF SOUL INITIATION PART 1

This is a series of six blog posts where I first discuss each phase of Bill Plotkin’s The Journey to Soul Initiation and then give my sense of how that has played out in my life. I offer this not to toot my own horn, but to give one example of what’s involved in each phase and how long it took me to work through. As incredibly detailed as Plotkin’s work is, I think sometimes it can be hard to understand how it applies to your life or how long you might spend in each phase.  This is an attempt to demystify this process using my own history as an example.

ECOAWAKENING

Ecoawakening is a new core concept in Plotkin’s thinking.  It happens or not during spiritual early adolescence.  Spiritual early adolescence isn’t the same thing at all as chronological early adolescence.  Most 70 year olds, to Plotkin’s way of thinking, are spiritual early adolescents, even if they have had “successful” careers and families and have retired. 

Early adolescents, according to Plotkin, have two core tasks.  One task is to find a social group with which they fit.  The second is to develop some kind of authentic identity, who they are at their deepest level.  This authentic identity has nothing to do with what they are going to do for a living, what their politics will be or who they are going to have sex with.  Rather, this authentic identity has to do with how they will relate with what David Abram calls the more than human world, that is sometimes called the animate world or even nature—though nature is a problematic term if we think of it as something that is wholly outside of us.

Ecoawakening is the shift from an ego or human centric perspective to an ecocentric one where we see individual selves as part of a larger more than human world.  Plotkin writes “Eco awakening occurs when we have our first conscious and embodied experience of our innate membership in the Earth community.  All other affiliations then become secondary, and, in fact, derivative of our inherent participation in the larger, more than human world.” (p.35)

Ecoawakening is a “somatic, emotional and spiritual experience, not a cognitive one” (p.36).  You can’t just think that you are connected to the more than human world—you have to have some kind of mind blowing direct experience of it. 

If you haven’t ecoawakened, there’s hope for you, no matter your chronological age.  If you want to ecoawaken, to shift you primary commitment from the human world to the more than human world, you need to attend to the two more than human world tasks of childhood.  These tasks are to be present to the more than human world and to be enchanted by it. Plotkin gives us a long series of possible practices in order to be present and be enchanted.  None of them are some kind of magic bullet that will force you to ecoawaken.  But it is our birthright to be connected with the more than human world, to see ourselves as part of it.  These practices are designed to help us access our birthright.

Ecoawakening is both a process and a certain experience.  You don’t just go from being human centric to ecocentric one day.  Think of it like Zen meditation.  Nobody achieves enlightenment the first day they sit in meditation—but nobody achieves enlightenment in the Zen tradition without sitting in meditation. This metaphor can be extended to the question of whether you can ecoawaken and then go back to sleep. On some level, of course you can and live a life that looks like you are just like almost everybody else who has never ecoawakened and live human centric lives. But just like a history of serious meditation leaves some kind of lasting imprint on your body and soul, so does ecoawakening.

I hope this is clear enough.  We’ll discuss this a lot more in the class I’m starting after Sukkot this year, “Discover your earth based Jewish purpose.”  Now let me give you my experience with this so that it might help you by giving you a specific example.

I ecoawakened in the winter of 1975-1976 when I was spending a gap year in Israel, mostly on Kibbutz. I’d been primed for this from a summer I spent in Israel two and a half years previously in 1973.  I remember the group of us teenagers (I was 15 and ½ at the time) going on a hike and our guide Giora got us good and lost on the side of a mountain.  Besides being completely scared that I was going to fall off, I remember feeling that the mountain was alive.  I’d also been primed through our groups trips throughout Israel, a land that I experienced as just alive with sacred power.  So primed, but my mind had not yet been blown.

I was working in the dairy and we had some small silos that would be filled with concentrate for the cows.  It being winter time in Israel, it was damp and the grain would stick to the side of the silos.  I somehow got the job of climbing up the ladder into the silo and banging the sides of it to get the concentrate off the walls.  It was a dusty job (the kind that now you’d wear a mask while doing), but I remember being proud that I had a regular job beyond milking that I was trusted to do. So there I was one winter day, I’m 17 or 18 years old, and I’m just cleaned out one of the silos and I was climbing out of it.  I took a break at the top of the silo and just sat down on the top and looked out onto the Hula Valley.  There were cotton fields, hay fields, fish ponds, even out apple orchards.  And as I sat there looking at the land, I knew, I knew, that I belonged to the land.

I didn’t know what that meant at all.  As Plotkin says, it wasn’t a cognitive experience at all.  It was a bodily, emotional and spiritual experience. It blew my mind.  It wasn’t a mystical experience in that I didn’t feel I was one with the land or the divine through the land or anything like that.  Rather I knew that I was committed to serving the land in some sense, though I had no idea what that meant.

Here's the sequel to the story. In a healthy connected society, there would be adults around who had gone through something comparable, and they’d be on the lookout for this kind of experience in the adolescent members of their society. They’d have a conceptual framework to understand and shape the raw experience.  Of course, we live in a sick and disconnected society and there certainly wasn’t anything like that available on my kibbutz. I had no one with whom to share this life changing experience, no one to tell me to nurture my relationship with the more than human world through my relationship with worked land. I was on my own. 

We’ll see that this being on my own is a really common experience for me in my journey. There are some idiosyncratic reasons for this in my personal history.  And I also believe that way too many of us are alone in our journeys from ecoawakening to spiritual ecocentric adulthood. 

This is from the Work that Reconnects originated by Joanna Macy who is a mentor/example  of sorts to Plotkin.