MY JOURNEY OF SOUL INITIATION PART 4
SOUL ENCOUNTER
Soul encounters, in my experience, are truly mind blowing experiences. They are intended to be life altering, providing the person blessed with the encounter a true north that will guide the rest of their life. As Plotkin writes “You’ll hopefully be drawing on and living the revelation for the rest of your life.” (p.23). But only if you then manage to climb up and out of the soul canyon. In our society, too often soul encounters wind up being “forgotten.” If we can’t assimilate our visions, if we can’t figure out how to have our visions transform us, then our sub personalities wind up suppressing them in order to keep us safe. As Plotkin says, soul encounters are both a blessing and a burden. (p.157)
So what is a soul encounter? It seems Plotkin understandably struggles a bit to define it. This is my reconstruction of his comments. First, soul encounters feel like they come from outside of you. It’s a manifestation of what Christians call grace, something not much understood or discussed in Jewish tradition. They are incredibly profound, earth shattering experiences. I spend a lot of time letting my mind wander in the more than human world and I come home with answers to things I’ve been working on. These answers feel like they come from outside of me, they belong both to me and to the world, and they aren’t soul encounters because they aren’t profound enough.
Soul encounters transform our view of the world. Who we were before isn’t who we are anymore. Plotkin says we become a “visionary partner in an ever unfolding and evolving story.” (p.161) They all have some of the following characteristics
Reveals your foremost ecological contribution
Profoundly moving—reveals the truth you were born to embody
Feel ecstatic
Uncanny, eerie or wildly mysterious
Accompanied by synchronicities between outer and inner experiences
Experienced during non ordinary states
Second wave of profound emotional reaction—joy, hope, grief etc
Boundless desire to embody it plus terror at it
Conviction that it will serve whole community, not just you and a few others
Resonates with other numinous events both before and after
Ultimately confirmed by your joy of living it and fact that it serves the world.
Often communicated by something other than a human. Sometimes touch is involved. (p.163)
It’s important to understand that people can have multiple soul encounters. A single soul encounter (as I’ll talk about in my experience) might be only a glimpse of a part of your soul. You’ll know you have had a full soul encounter when this is your experience. As Elisabeth says “Since this second vision fast, I have never again wondered what is the purpose of my life? This has provided great stability, strength and presence. Now I live with the question “How am I being asked to be earth dancer and in what ways is she being asked to show up through me?” (p.157)
This is a solid vision, one that will guide your life. That doesn’t mean that you know what to do with it at all; that’s the work of the next two phases to start to answer it. Elisabeth didn’t know what it meant to be earth dancer or how to manifest it in the world. Plotkin didn’t know what it meant to be a cocoon weaver or how he would manifest it. I didn’t know what it meant to be Dances with the Rhythms of the earth or how to manifest it. My friend who received a true purpose rather than one of these confusing mythopoetic identities didn’t know what it meant to lead his people back to nature, nor did he know how to do that. This work begins with the next two phases.
Let’s turn to my history. I’m going to talk briefly about four soul encounters. Hopefully this will give you some flavor and maybe some insight about soul encounters and your own experience.
I attended a gathering of shamans in upstate New York when I was in Grad school. There were shamans from all kinds of traditions there, though not any representatives of Jewish tradition, as far as I remember (though I am sure there were lots of Jews there). We were doing a deer dance with one of the leaders, some kind of circle dance where we were skipping maybe. One of the assistants, maybe, a woman, said to me “see the deer” and then dancing, running, jumping with me was a deer (not in ordinary reality). Damndest thing. We danced together, humans and at least this deer with me for a while. Now, this deer has been with me on and off for the last forty years, a steadfast companion. So this was a soul encounter, but definitely a very partial one because I didn’t become “Dances with deer” or something like that, I didn’t orient my life around this relationship and oh boy, I still had no idea of the purpose of my life.
Another soul encounter I had was in the mountains in Colorado. I stopped to hike on the way to visit a friend of mine who was in Colorado Springs for business; I was living in Albuquerque at the time. On the way up, just as I was climbing on a mountain pass, the radio was playing Eric Clapton’s Let it Rain and the heavens opened up and it started to pour. When I got to wherever I was stopping, I hiked some and then played a tape I’d bought for shamanic journeying with Michael Harner. I immediately went into trance (I’m good at that) and found myself being placed in a boiling cauldron of water and all my flesh dissolved and I was a skeleton. Then the drums sounded to pull me out of the journey and I climbed out of the cauldron. Now I’d read Eliade’s book on Shamanism at some point reasonably close to this and I thought to myself, boy that vision was straight out of what shamans experience as part of their initiation—I think this exact form of initiation was in some of the anthropological reading I’d done.
Becoming a skeleton is an obvious symbol of transformation. But again, I didn’t follow this up in any way; I didn’t seek to for instance become a shaman. In hindsight, I simply hadn’t done enough preparation and I wasn’t ready for transformation.
A third encounter was during the culmination of a multi day neo native American ritual experience. Now I wouldn’t participate in such a thing today because it’s cultural appropriation, but I didn’t quite understand that then. We were at An She Sla Pah, a sacred site on the way to Chaco Canyon and we had a fire that burned the entire last night as the culmination of the ritual. Why a fire? Not a clue. I have no memory of the explanation. I remember dancing around the fire, jumping over it (literally, in those days as a 30 year old, I could jump), sleeping some, getting up and dancing some more. As dawn broke, one of those betwixt and between times that are ripe for such experiences, I remember realizing “I am fire dancer.” We ended the ritual that morning with either a council or a sweat lodge. I remember everyone was crying and really into their pain, and I was on this high floating n being “fire dancer”
Now “Fire Dancer” certainly sounds like a mythopoetic identity, akin to “Earth Dancer” or “Cocoon weaver” or “Dances with the rhythms of the earth” I even made some kind of fabric art representation of it I still have as a way to deepen the practice (and I’m not an artist at all). But apart from the fact that I had no effective guidance or mentorship, I didn’t feel like I knew what my life was about. And eventually my subs protected me and I forgot about fire dancer.
My big soul encounter actually happened in a hotel ballroom. This is maybe 6 or 7 years later after Fire Dancer and about 10 years after the deer. Though I certainly believe that the more than human world provides a much juicier context for soul encounters, they can happen anywhere. Bernie Glassman, a Zen master, had his enlightenment experience in the back of a car. I was doing the advanced course of Landmark Education, the successor to EST. We had to declare who we were as a possibility (I probably have the language wrong) and all of a sudden I realized I was “Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth.” I presented it to the leader who promptly rejected it, urging me to dig deeper to really capture who I was as a possibility. He or she (I don’t remember which one it was) was simply wrong; Dances just didn’t fit with the typical declarations they understood and wanted such as I’m the possibility of world peace or whatever passed muster with their mental models.
This soul encounter did transform my life. I was really clear that I needed to figure out how to embody Dances. I knew I was ready to turn over my life to this dancing. And it guided my life for the next few years, a story I will tell in the next chapter when we talk about metamorphosis.
