MY JOURNEY OF SOUL INITIATION PART 2

PREPARATION

Preparation is easily the most expansive of the of the five phases of the Journey to Soul Initiation. The core goal of preparation is to be ready enough to enter into the dissolution of the early adolescent ego so that we make room for the revelation that is at the bottom of the soul canyon. See the diagram at https://earthbasedjudaism.org/longer-writings/introduction-to-discovering-your-earth-based-jewish-purpose.  Plotkin’s phases are in orange.

So what do you need to be ready to enter the dissolution of your (early adolescent) ego?  You need to be whole enough and to have healed enough. You don’t need to be perfectly whole or healed.  The goal here is to be Goldilocksish, not Goldilocks. Plotkin thinks in terms of a 4 direction Medicine wheel, as the pictures at the bottom of the blog indicate.

Wholing is the cultivation of the 4 facets of the self. (Journey, p. 386) (See the pictures at the end) Plotkin believes that we all have certain strengths and weaknesses. We all have, he asserts,  a strong direction and that the direction opposite it will be our weakest direction. Plotkin strongly believes that we need to work on all of our directions, even though our weak directions will remain weak because our inclination is towards one particular direction.  He gives a slew of different possible practices to cultivate the wholeness of each direction.

Healing is “The process of healing our psychological woundedness by embracing our subpersonalities. (Journey, p.382).  Subpersonalities are “the sometimes hidden fragments of our human psyches each of which attempts to protect us from further injury using childhood survival strategies.” (Journey p.384).  These are what we might call our defense systems.  They need to be honored because they served a purpose when we were children, but they need to be superseded by the different facets of the self (the outer ring in the picture).

Plotkin gives us a five step method for cooperating and honoring our subs

´ Become conscious of inner protectors when they spring into action

´ Thank them for their attempt to protect us and acknowledge role they played in protecting us in the past

´ Letting them know we no longer need their strategies (if this is actually true)

´ Telling them about our more mature strategies

´ Using these more mature strategies

Note that you can’t do this unless you have more mature strategies for dealing with different situations—and that’s what you get from cultivating the different faces of the self.

Healing work is done with each direction individually.  Wholing is done with the collective and thinking about the whole system. The system is based on the medicine wheel with different facets of the self, descriptions of different subs and strategies for both cultivating the facet of the self and working with the subpersonalities in each direction.  Plotkin explores this in great detail in his wonderful book Wild Mind.

We’re going to spend almost three months doing preparation during the program of “Discover your earth based Jewish purpose” that starts after Sukkot. Why?  Because the practices that are connected with preparation are absolutely necessary to be granted a vision of your true purpose. They are also are absolutely necessary in order to have the spiritual maturity to manifest your vision. Preparation practices to heal and whole are things that you are going to do all of your life if you are committed to spiritual development.

We also will discuss Jewish ideas and practices that are at least somewhat parallel to the idea of preparation. I present a Jewish medicine wheel from Mike Comins by way of Gershon Winkler. 

Preparation is something that logically and ideally takes place before we leave home.  Only most of us leave home with far too little psychospiritual maturity.  We’re thrown into college, for the most part, ill prepared for balancing the lack of structure of college schoolwork compared to High School, along with the daily tasks of living compared to the allure of living without our parents’ restraining hands.  There’s a lot of drinking and partying in college freshperson dorms. We’re trying to grow up sexually, vocationally and practically, and it tends to be overwhelming. There’s a reason beyond finances that more than 50% of people don’t complete college in four years.

I had two pieces of really good luck in my initial period of preparation.  First, I’ve always been highly introverted and while that’s a distinct disadvantage in navigating social situations, it’s a distinct advantage in getting to know yourself-- where you are wounded and where you are strong and capable. Second, I had a gap year between High School and College that I spent in Israel on a kibbutz based  program.  I was incredibly lucky to wind up working in the dairy with cows, a job that really, really suited me and for which I received recognition for something beyond my being bright—the Kibbutz appreciated my work, I was entrusted with leading milkings (the only non member who did) giving me a glimmer of my leadership capabilities. 

My second piece of luck in Israel was the trouble with our group.  I’d invented/ invested a lot of hopes and dreams of beloved community in the group.  But we never came together as a group.  We were collectively miserable.  This threw me back on myself.  I knew that I was a mess and I needed healing.  Knowing that you need healing is just a big part of being willing to go on the journey of wholing and self healing.

I’ve done a lot of things to heal and whole over the course of my life. Here I want to track some of what I did before I arrived in New Mexico after graduate school and did a lot of dissolution, something I will talk about in the next post.  I do want to say that I don’t think these phases are as neatly separated as Plotkin paints them.  That is there’s some dissolution during the preparation phase and, at least for me, there were visions that are characteristically part of the soul encounter that were part of preparation during my dissolution in New Mexico. 

I’m going to organize my preparation chronologically and then by direction/facet of the self because I think this will make my experience more coherent to you as the reader.  We humans are meaning making organisms who organize our disparate experiences to create meaning.

 When I was a college student, I participated in a crisis hotline where we were trained in Rogerian active listening (this was my junior year).  The great news about active listening as a skill is that you aren’t trying to fix the other person.  As Plotkin rightly complains, way too much of therapy is designed to get people to where they can be more productive members of our sick society.  It’s a worthwhile goal, but it doesn’t do much in terms of the journey to soul initiation, in the journey to discover your true earth based purpose. I then trained all the new recruits in active listening my senior year, and there’s nothing quite like teaching if you want to learn something.  Learning to listen is a real skill that I’ve sometimes applied to both my human relationships and to my relationships with the more than human world. It helped put a damper on my tendency to ego inflation, one of the subs in the West in Plotkin’s model.

At the beginning of my senior year I distinctly remember going to a party with about forty people, all of whom I knew.  There were only two of us who were graduating on time.  I remember thinking that was absolutely nuts, and I was going to head in a different direction.  This represented a commitment to not settling and not pursuing the easy path (there was no question that going to grad school with a scholarship would have been the east path at that point).

I spent the next few years on hippie communes where I spent a lot of time with the more than human world, again mostly working with cows but also wandering in the woods, working in food processing and the garden.  Food processing might not sound like a connection to the more than human world, but I was deeply connected to the cows and the grass through the cheese I made.  I was deeply connected to the garden through the green beans I froze and the tomatoes I canned.  I read alternative agricultural writers like crazy—this is when I discovered Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka and Wes Jackson.

I learned/remembered deep in my bones that there was some kind of spiritual wholeness possible from my spending time connected to the more than human world. I also knew that I didn’t know how to get there. Unfortunately, neither did anyone else I lived with nor were they really interested.  The members of the commune were way too committed to hiding from the “real world” and drinking, and that wasn’t me as much as I thought the “real world” was sick. The real world might be sick, but so were we.

So I left and went back to a safe way of looking for a spiritual path forward. I enrolled in grad school in religious studies.  Now graduate school, as I later discovered, is really designed as a kind of vocational training to become a professor, and isn’t meant for spiritual seekers, even though many of us were. But it was a safe place, given my academic abilities, to learn about different spiritual paths, seeking one I could walk.  I developed a fairly serious practice of sitting Zen, and I became fluent in Buddhism. I learned a lot about the academic study of what we today would call indigenous societies (we called them “archaic” societies which was a definite step up from “primitive” societies and “savages” which is what they had been called in academic literature).  I learned something about Islam and Hinduism and Christianity but ironically almost nothing about Judaism, although I taught Sunday school for one miserable year.

I want to mention one experience of feeling at home that happened to me in graduate school.  As ever, I continued to read a lot of philosophy, although in religious studies its called “methodology” (don’t ask).  I remember rereading Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, one of my favorite books, and realized how at home I felt with a hermeneutical approach to the world, including philosophical problems. I felt and continue to feel to this day, grounded in hermeneutics. I raise this because wandering is the hallmark of the late adolescent as we seek ourselves and our place in the more than human world. Becoming an adult is partly manifested in this feeling of being grounded, of having found a place within which to take a stand for who we are at our deepest level.  That’s what hermeneutics has felt like for me.

I was fired from graduate school before my last year.  I had a three year scholarship, I was about to complete all my coursework and start on my comprehensive exams.  My professor came to me one day, and I can still remember this 35 plus years later, and said “Your work is more interesting than mine, but I don’t want to work with you.  So you’ve got the year and you should explore your options, maybe go work with Helen Hardacre at Princeton.”  This upset other professors in the department, and we explored a few other options, (transfer to the anthropology department?)  but truth be told I didn’t want to be an academic. I was still a spiritual seeker and I didn’t see how writing a dissertation or being a professor was really going to serve me in my quest for my true purpose. I’d done some wholing and healing, but not enough.  I was 28 years old, and we’ll pick up my history when we turn to the next phase of dissolution.

Let me talk about my preparation during this ten year period in terms of directions.

My strong direction is the North and I’ve got this decided tendency to rescue people.  One antidote to that is to cultivate the north facet of the self, see picture below.  I taught active listening in college and I was a very good teacher’s assistant in graduate school, something I really enjoyed unlike my peers who just did it because they had to or for the money. But overall, this direction got probably the least amount of attention.

South is my weakest direction and I struggle to be in my body and I struggle with experiencing myself as a victim. I didn’t have this vocabulary at all at this point, but my time on the communes connected me back to my body and the land, and I held tight onto that when I was in grad school. I worked some on being a victim doing some transformational work with an organization called Lifespring which no longer exists and was one of the offshoots of the encounter movement. 

East is a direction I definitely strengthened during grad school with my Zen practice.  I remember at one point reciting “emotions are endless, I vow to extinguish them all" which is a common recitation of one of the four Boddisatva vows.  I thought to myself, that’s all wrong, that’s just repressing who we are as humans and I said to myself “emotions are endless, I vow to experience them all”  I certainly haven’t done that.  But this work both strengthened my East direction and informed me that this was not my path. It’s no coincidence that when I spend solo time in the more than human world, including vision fasts, unlike most people I never go to the top of the mountain but am busy exploring the valleys.

I did a lot of West work.  I read a lot of Freud on dreams, I read myths from all different traditions, I even attended a Shamanic workshop with Michael Harner at Esalen institute where I learned to journey to the underworld.

I still had more work to do in all four directions.  The nature of preparation is that we are never done.