Mystery, Muse and Mythos: A Conversation with Bill Plotkin

Video Transcript:

You can alright and you can let everybody in hello and welcome people are popping in all right we're going to dive right in [Music] yeah we're gonna we're gonna begin by welcoming everybody from all around north america and i know some people have registered from europe and australia

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And israel that probably will be watching this uh at another time they're probably sleeping now and they're gonna get the recording as will all of you my name is tracy forrest and i'm the director of spirit hollow and i am welcoming you to this amazing opportunity to be with bill plotkin this evening and to begin i'm going to turn it over to robert patton who is the the spirit

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Hollow board president spirit hollow is a non-profit so go ahead robert and you can begin thanks tracy i want to start with um the opening from the lord of the rings movie the world has changed i feel it in the water i feel it in the earth

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I smell it in the air much that was is lost for none now live who remember it i'm robert patton the board president for spirit hollow a small non-profit retreat located on unseated mahikin land in the southern vermont mountains we have been doing our small part for almost 25 years to assist in rewilding humans and

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Helping them connect reconnect to earth and soul we are pleased once again to host a conversation with bill plotkin psychologist wilderness guide and author of soul craft nature and the human soul wild mind and his newest book the journey of soul initiation i began with the opening words from the

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Mythical world of the lord of the rings they seem appropriate to our topic of myth inspiration and mystery strangely to me they echo those of our guests tonight quote i believe the root cause of the crises and challenges of our time all our current case cascading environmental and cultural collapses is a widespread spread failure in individual human development

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This has been true for so long and in so many societies that most people today are unaware of this breakdown in the natural sequence of human maturation dr potlane has also said that the world is in need of mature mentors and initiators to support young people to grow into visionary visionary artisans of cultural change

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The new leaders who will guide humanity through the transformation that is that the greater earth community wholly depends upon inspired by dr plotkin's work and informed by our own apprenticeship in the animus institute's soul craft apprenticeship and initiation program spirit hollows director tracy forrest

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Last year developed and introduced earthcraft as some are immersive for young adults noting that we denisons of the so-called first world have lost the rights of passage that once transitioned adolescence to adulthood or worst have reduced such rights to parodies in the form of senior prom and spring break not only do we not support youth

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In their maturation process but we also live in cultures in culture that itself is largely stuck in early adolescence this results in an almost complete lack of initiated adults and an even fewer true elders earth craft is grounded in the powerful tools the dr plotkin and his guides have developed

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Over the last 40 years in a safe supportive community participants in earthcraft learn wild mind methods of holing and self-healing engage in many soul craft practices and the way of counsel spend much time out in the forest listening to gaia and are supported in completing unfinished developmental tasks from childhood and early adolescence

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In order to gain authentic belonging and self-love participants through joanna macy's work that reconnects honor and transform their despair and are encouraged and inspired to go forth with tools to create a soul-centric life imagining and enacting their particular ways to help regenerate our world

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The hope is that these young people may find their own deepest resources and truest paths eventually becoming mature mentors and initiatives initiators in their own right who will in turn guide the development of the next generation of visionary artisans and soul-centric leaders this is earthcraft's second year and we are delighted now to have a first year and a second year class

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Dr park plotkin was part of our initial kickoff for this program last year and we are truly grateful to for his time and participation in our kickoff this year and thank all of you for your donations that make it possible for more young people to participate in this program to become those mentors and initiators for future generations

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And for the good of the greater earth community we note that we there are participants here from around the world israel united kingdom australia and all across north america we are also fortunate to have some of the inaugural participants of our earthcraft

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Whom tracy will introduce before we begin the conversation between her and bill who will describe briefly how this work with earthcraft has affected their lives here then is mystery muse and mythos a conversation with bill platkin and tracy forrest welcome everyone

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I hope you enjoy the discussion tracy thank you so much robert walks among them and you do so i'd love to invite two extraordinary young women to share just a little bit about their experience at earthcraft in our first round of it and then we'll move into the conversation with bill so

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Vicky why don't you begin and then we'll go to emily hi guys can you all hear me okay okay awesome uh so yeah i'm vicki um and i went to earthcraft last summer with tracy at spur hollow um and the the models that she used from bill plotkin um i they helped me a lot um the four facets of human wholeness um getting to learn more about that um it

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Really taught me a lot about myself in ways i really kind of wasn't expecting um and it really helped me to like reflect on um you know the different parts of myself my north and south and east and west and to realize what um areas of my being i was maybe neglecting not listening to um and you know what areas of myself that needed uh you know a little more love

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And um getting to work on those uh with tracy at sparrow hollow it was um it was really helpful and um i i've never really done you know um work like that before um so in depth um and it just really it taught me a lot about myself um and you know getting to like sit together and counsel or like going off on our retreats into the woods when we

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Get our vision fast and just you know kind of getting to sit with my wounded child or um you know whatever parts of myself that were coming up um it really just taught me a brand new way to engage um with my being and has helped me um you know kind of view myself as a whole and to love all of it and to hear all of it and to um yeah i guess just

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Um keep a track of what i'm lacking or um yeah i guess sorry i'm ranting a little bit but it was really such an amazing experience um yeah thanks vicky and vicky's gonna return um this summer for a second round yes

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Great and then i just want to hear from emily hi everyone um i also went to earthcraft last summer um and it was um a priceless experience um i just no i'm i'm still young and i feel like i'm very much in the beginning of my spiritual journey and having models and guides that are as

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Incredible as what was given to me there is just such a gift and i feel so like blessed and lucky to have experienced it um i think two of my favorite things from aircraft um was working with my nga and um my sub personalities um i think uh

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Doing work on my sub personalities um helps me understand um on a deeper level why i am the way i am and why i behave in certain ways or why i react in certain ways or why i express myself in certain ways and um being able to work with my personality really helped me to

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Um you know kind of like pinpoint um uh i guess like the source of um what was happening inside of me um and just understanding better um why i coped in certain ways um and then working with my nga was also really

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Um incredible for me because um when we were at earthcraft we did um a shamanic journey and um in that journey i met uh my sga and even though it was probably less than a 30 minute like an hour long experience that happened a year ago um it still sticks with me um i i call on my nga all the time when i need support

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Um and when i um i feel like i need uh some healing my nga has just been a really awesome um guide for me and a lot of the the models and tools that and workshops and experiences that we had during earthcraft um it really was a gift and i feel so

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Appreciative to have um experienced it yay thank you so much so the nga is the nurturing generative adult for those of you who wondered what that was and that is in the north of bill's model of the four facets of human wholeness in his wild mind wheel map

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And so i'm just gonna introduce you all to my amazing teacher who's inspired and pretty much set my life on a well it dissolved my life a little bit and then has helped me to shift and change and shape shift into who i'm becoming which is somebody who is much more than ever in service to the earth community and in particular to the young ones

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So without saying much more i'd like to welcome bill plotkin here to this conversation impossible dreamer cocoon weaver welcome yeah thank you tracy great to be here with you i'm so excited about your earth craft program this summer great to be here yeah yeah so having heard a little bit

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From these two young adults who um are being affected by their nurturing generative adults in their and their four facets of wholeness and working with their sub personalities when you drop into your deepest self and hear the muse what does she what is they what are they saying to our young ones and not just these two but those who are coming up in this coming

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Of age in this time of great crises and hopefully great opportunities as we move through this great unraveling and into the great turning what would you offer to them yeah thanks that'd be a good place to start first i want to thank emily and vicky for speaking so beautifully and eloquently about your experience appreciate that

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So um the muse the other day um gave me kind of an angle on our work that i never quite used before so maybe i'll be able to um express this and maybe it'll be useful but um she um the muse uh said something like you know it's all about belonging so um it's something like this that

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Um i guess we could say something like i might say that what makes life rich and fulfilling um has to do with the way we belong to the world and to the extent we belong and the ways in which we belong and so then you said well you know you can frame

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Uh the work we do at animus in terms of four kinds of belonging okay so here comes four kinds the first one that probably most people think in terms of and is certainly most relevant to young people is social belonging um it's foundational that we all have this longing to have to be some part of some kind of um group social circle clan family

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Um maybe movements and and so on um and uh it's just foundational to being human and being alive and really not just human um all creatures uh have this need and desire and ability to belong and um so but it's it's for humans it's it seems like it's getting harder

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And harder more and more difficult to feel a really deep sense of belonging and all kinds of problems social psychological uh economic political etc stem from a lack of a really deep sense of even just social belonging and there's two aspects of belonging that i want to emphasize here

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And one is um we could call it social acceptance that you don't have a deep none of us have a deep feeling of belonging unless there we've got some friends and family and so forth teachers and um who are glad to see us and uh and and treat us as if you know we're one of them we belong with them um

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And um and that's again that's getting harder and harder to to generate this experience of just social acceptance but there's a second part of social belonging that's equally excuse me that's equally important and that is authenticity

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Personal authenticity that we want none of us feel like we really no matter how happy people look to see us when we show up we don't feel like we belong unless we have this experience that i'm showing up as the real me if you're accepting me and i'm and i know i'm a fraud i don't feel like i belong i think i i just have the feeling like i pulled one over

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Excuse me over on you so this sense of personal authenticity is a central piece of social belonging and that's gotten even harder than social acceptance because um we've as a culture let's just say western culture we've lost a lot of the basic capacities that allow us to discover

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Who we actually are even on a social level and um and to express that and to embody that and so some of the work that we do at um animus and that you do there at earthcraft and other programs you were just speaking up is various practices that help us discover more about who we really are

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So the four facets of wholeness are ways of looking at innate capacities that everybody's born with that our contemporary counselor doesn't help us develop them to any degree especially two of them um two of those four facets and then i think you were calling them sub personalities which of course i use that term too

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I been coming to prefer the phrase inner protectors we have these inner parts of ourselves that are so afraid of not being socially accepted that they get us to act in ways that aren't particularly authentic so we got to get to know those inner protectors and love them and thank them for all their work and so forth okay so that's social belonging so foundational

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To anything else in life and difficult to come by and again a lot of our work is to help people with that but there's another kind of belonging that is actually more foundational than even that and um we could call this ecological belonging or a sense of belonging to the earth community and

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I believe in a healthy society well healthy or not every human is born with that sense of belonging to this greater earth community this greater web of life but because of our contemporary societies and their various pathological dimensions thereof um children often have lost that um by age three four five and so on um

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And this uh this sense of ecological belonging is this basic rooted experience that i have a kinship with every other species of animals plants mountains rivers clouds and so on that i am related to everything that i am from

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This earth i've emerged from it through my mother but i'm from earth and a deep sense of i belong here i'm related to all the other beings um and if we if we don't have that if we lose that in childhood and i believe unfortunately most contemporary people do lose it there's just restlessness and anxiety that's at the core of our experience of

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Being live and guess what that anxiety or restlessness or sense of not really being deeply at home in the larger earth community that makes social belonging more difficult and we might keep we might we might have a tendency to think that um if i don't feel a deep sense of social belonging i just have to keep working on the social level which is

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Partly true but the this sense of earth belonging which for people who have lost it in childhood i call that ecological awakening so essential experience and i know uh tracy you work a lot with that too okay so there's a third um level of belonging that

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Is built on the foundation of both ecological belonging and social belonging and um this has to do with the primary work we do at animas valley institute and you could call it soul belonging soul it's um it's a deeper more mystical uh experience of

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Belonging both to the earth community and to the social community and what it is briefly probably everybody listening knows this pretty well already but what i mean um by this kind of belonging soul belonging or soul encounter is um that we discover through initiatory process

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We discover what um indigenous people might call original our original instructions or individual personal original instructions and which is to say the the particular place or niche that i was born to take in the larger earth community so that my my deeper identity is not

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Cannot be defined socially it's actually defined and rooted in my particular need place in this community of many many species and psychological systems and and so on and the way we come to uh discover that an initiatory experience is through metaphor and so we we call it our mythopoetic identity one of mine is has to do with the name that's on the screen here with

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Me and possible dreamer um that one of the roles i've been given by life is to um dream impossible things especially when it comes to the human development dimension of cultural regeneration okay so just really briefly um i'm going on longer here than i wanted to at the start um just really briefly the a fourth kind of belonging

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Is to this time of cultural regeneration and joanna macy and others refer to this as the great turning um it's a great turning from what i would call a patho adolescent conformist consumer society or the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining or even better life enhancing society and so all of us who are aware of what's

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Going on in the world these days which is not really everybody but everybody in this listening today for sure um we're aware that we were born in interesting times um very very difficult horrendous times in some ways but also a time of great promise and possibility and i believe something that all of us here certainly listening today and and so many others we know

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We have a deep desire a passionate longing to belong to that movement to find our place in making a difference for future generations i've come to see my life more and more as primarily serving uh people from seven generations or so from now and rooted in ancestors from their work and their love from way way back so okay there it is that's what the muse

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Whispered but i did a much more long-winded version of what she did but these these four kinds of belongings we all long for i love that i'm i've never heard you say that in that way that so the muse definitely maybe you want to say a little bit what is the muse you know that's a term that that is used in animus um and i think we all have a sense of what

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The muse is for us but maybe you could just kind of describe what the muse does for us and how that one guides us or what they whisper to us and how can we get in touch with that yeah okay um the muse is essentially our deep imagination it's a that creative part of us that my conscious self my ego is not in control of at all but i my ego can learn to access

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What he she they um have to say and so um for me it's she and she is tuned in to the deeper currents the um she her element you might say is the darkness uh which is simply the unknown i don't mean anything like bad or evil but she's the fruitful darkness she's in touch with that fruitful darkness and um

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And when anybody is involved with a truly creative project you know most all of us would say you know i didn't make this stuff up it just came through me and i just took notes and there's this creative um current or flow that uh shows up at some times and sometimes it doesn't it can be really painful when

00:28:57

You know you have like a writer has writer writer's block and so on so um the muse is that facet of wholeness that i associate with the west on the of the cardinal directions and um she's that's one facet of wholeness the muse that is most suppressed in the contemporary world that um you could say that our contemporary conformist consumer

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Society wouldn't even be possible if it wasn't for such a widespread suppression of our deep creativity it's our deepest longings for life come from there carl jung everybody knows who he is the uh depth psychologist in some ways the first uh depth psychologist if you don't car count freud um he his muse was such an important part

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Of his psyche of his life that his word translated into english for his muse was soul that's what carl jung meant by s-o-u-l he meant his what he would also call his anima the inner feminine part of himself that was his muse um so yeah

00:30:18

That's what that's what um then oh i should add one last thing the muse has a you know various faces you might say are dimensions and one of them is that she is the guide to soul she's our inner uh guide bringing us to the depths when we are psychologically prepared for that journey right

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And carl jung translated it as soul and you have a much different your own unique definition of what soul is that is really about being having an ecological place in earth so maybe this would be a good time to talk about that [Music] i know just just kind of following your

00:31:07

Thread and then go in there so yeah all right um yeah i wrestled with this word solo for a long time um being a psychologist and training um as in my training um i've read lots and lots of people on soul and they basically all tend to mean different things it's such a slippery all-purpose kind of word to me so many

00:31:33

Things but my particular interest has to do with individual purpose and meaning and through that helping people and myself of course um discover what our greatest passion is for life uh greatest creative longing and to let that longing shape-shift the conscious self the ego so

00:31:59

That was my primary and still is of course my primary interest um the deepest personal meaning um and i'm saying this to answer your question because um at first people might think i've changed the subject that i've i've defined soul so differently that i'm really talking

00:32:20

About something completely different but no um one of the patterns of the way the word soul is used no matter what someone's definition is specifically is that it has to do with depth purpose meaning okay so i believe that each one of us each human like everything else on this planet and in the cosmos comes into this world

00:32:45

With original instructions with a particular purpose a way of enhancing the life of the larger earth community and so another way to say that we're each born [Music] with the potential and the destiny to take a particular place in the world to to fulfill or occupy a particular niche and it's not just

00:33:11

Uh human it's it's greater it's psychological and that is what gives us our greatest purpose is in other words another way to say what our purpose is is that our destiny is it is to take a particular place in the world to fulfill or occupy a particular role or niche so i've come to simply define the soul of anything human and otherwise as its unique ecological niche sometimes

00:33:40

I'd say it's unique psycho-ecological ecological niche just to mix it up sometimes it's our echo poetic or mythopoetic place in the world and the journey of soul initiation is um the uh usually multi-year process initiatory process

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Of not just discovering what that niche is but letting that place that ecological niche have its transformative effect on our ego so that we are actually shape-shifted into a being that can actually successfully embody that that niche yeah and

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So it seems to me like every other being on earth just comes in and takes their place and knows their niche and doesn't question why am i here and what is my purpose and and that humans maybe it's our consciousness have to go through some sort of arduous journey in order to rediscover that niche like when i'm in the garden and i see a fruit you know a tomato come to fruit i

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Think this is it's crowning achievement and its whole purpose has been to deliver this fruit that's it's that's and it's done that with its full being without question and so how come we as humans have to go through and so few of us actually can make it to stage four when that journey of soul initiation that descent to soul can happen

00:35:25

Why is it so arduous for the human i don't know if it's um necessarily arduous okay or so rare it's rare in the contemporary world absolutely incredibly rare um it's disappeared from most all western and many ways eastern spiritualities we still find it in um intact indigenous nature-based peoples in at least africa and the americas um

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But it's disappeared for so many contemporary societies um so now it has become very rare and arduous um but even in a healthy culture i think i'm reading what you're saying tracy um it's still there's still this really difficult challenging potentially life-threatening experience that you

00:36:18

Have to go through okay so on that level i hear you um why is it so dangerous and difficult even if you live in a society where most everybody goes through it successfully um it's because yeah it has to do with the nature of our human consciousness that we have this this little part of our psyche that we call the ego and i don't mean that's anything bad about it when i use that

00:36:45

Term i just mean it's the part of us that are aware that's that knows that we know that's that has this um self-reflexive awareness um and so uh in order to to develop you know as a species to develop the powers that ego consciousness gives us it's

00:37:08

Also it's a worse curse of course in burden but you know that's how it works in life apparently that um our greatest curse is our greatest potential power um so in order to develop our ego as a species we became conscious of ourselves as individuals and so that in childhood

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An essential piece of our dimension of developing as a human is to uh cultivate this individual sense of our capacity of consciousness and so in our first few years we have to forget our original instructions we have to separate away from mystery or god or spirit

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Or the divine in our consciousness in order to develop this sense of our self as the child of these two particular parents and a member of this family and a member of this clan or tribe or community um and and we we developed this ego based consciousness and in a healthy culture we do it in a really good mature

00:38:20

Way and we discover our personal values and interests and special skills and our orientation and our uh gender orientation and our way of being social or not and and so forth and our way of uh understanding romance and and what uh our life is about um and so our ego

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Becomes identified with this social familial ethnic uh identity as it should and it's absolutely essential um and then at some point in a healthy society with a person who's developing well probably in the mid teens could be a little bit later could be a little bit earlier we have this

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Growing troubling feeling or awareness that there's something more to life it's not just about endlessly uh developing our social persona our way of belonging in a social circle network and so forth and there's got to be something more and deeper and and this is built into our human

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Psyches it has to be suppressed for that not to come through and it is suppressed in most contemporary societies um but we're kind of you might say we're kind of set up by life to be asking these deeper questions maybe somewhere around the mid-teens and if we're not met by true elders and initiators it just doesn't go anywhere we misunderstand

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What's going on um so um and then when the initiatory process starts we have to separate ourselves from that initial identity which it by the way the initiatory process only starts for people who've been successful enough with their

00:40:28

Um early adolescent their their social development it's not it doesn't work for people who are never achieved a sense of authentic social belonging and so to separate ourselves from something that worked that works so well that's really really really difficult and and some indigenous societies who go through something like this initiatory process their own version of it which by the way we have not copied any

00:40:56

Of them we're discovering your own western way to do it and i um for example if you read meladoma somay's account of his people the dagger of west africa he says he speaks of course only of the boy's initiations that a certain number of the boys don't physically survive the initiatory process can be so arduous

00:41:21

And challenging that it can be life-threatening uh that's true for contemporary initiation journeys but at animus valley institute you know given that we live in a litigious society you know we're not going to stay in business if we have people die during initiate processes so we can't use as as powerful of um

00:41:47

Practices that we might have otherwise we're not going to risk anybody's lives but it's still psychologically and socially economically the initiatory process that we use uh potentially devastating for you know an eventually good outcome right and i think i've heard you say that probably

00:42:15

80 to 90 percent of people in western cultures are stuck in the psychological stage of early adolescence and so that means we don't have maybe we don't have that many people that even make it out of stage three the oasis where they're in early adolescence developing their social belonging and

00:42:39

Their sense of authentic belonging and authenticity and so that's that's a that's a thing right there's very few people can make it to stage four and we can't make anybody make it to stage four because it's something that happens through the the maturation the completion of enough

00:43:00

Of the tasks of those first three stages of development and it's mystery isn't it who who who says now it's time because we don't even have any elders to recognize that they might be on the cusp of that um that it has to be something that people are drawn to yeah yeah so the um maybe most of you know this the the model of human development we use

00:43:25

Has eight stages two of childhood two adolescents two of adulthood and two of um elderhood so stage four is laid out what corresponds to psychological late adolescence that most contemporary people never reach and that's where the journey of soul initiation takes place in that fourth stage also called the catholic cocoon stage um

00:43:54

And uh so on the one hand yeah most contemporary people never reach that stage but here's the good news is that it's not that hard to reach if you have people who understand what it is as guides in your life and supporting you to do the work to get there it really isn't that hard

00:44:16

Uh the the fact that so few people reach your reach that stage is mainly a um [Music] a result of a society that does virtually everything you could imagine to suppress it to suppress the kind of uh human development that get us there but

00:44:38

It's nothing it's nothing really mystical the the kinds of things we need to do to get there it's really very basic it's not stuff we invented at animas valley institute we just um you might say have channeled some maps and models that help us understand what um what the territory is but the kind of practices we use you can find in many

00:45:00

Many places including western society but um here's one thing that might help people understand something um there's a tendency i believe in western education in the healthier versions of western education to help young people discover what their innate gifts are and to help them

00:45:30

Further uh develop those and to put a lot of emphasis on that development like someone might you know have a innate brilliance for music or um innate capacity for certain kinds of uh sports um or for creative writing or so on or for empathic

00:45:53

Abilities or um or social leadership and so on um so our western education at best tends to again help young people identify those things and really help them hone those natural abilities and that's great but there's the other half of it that maybe isn't as well supported in the western world and that is to help young people discover what their

00:46:20

Greatest weaknesses are that's so essential because then a teacher a guide a mentor a coach can help them develop those those weaker facets which they're going to need in order not only to be well-rounded but also to develop the other dimensions of their special gifts and they'll never reach stage four the

00:46:47

Cocoon stage the the initiatory stage probably unless they've also developed their weaker facets so um yeah don't remember what you asked but hope that was helpful i don't remember either um but it was helpful yeah the emphasis on just the the gifts um and also social purpose or job or occupation

00:47:14

Isn't necessarily the same at purpose as what we're talking about right when we're talking about soul purpose with a deeper purpose or what earth dreamed us to be what those original instructions are in that kind of mytho poetic way so maybe we could talk about about that difference in kind of purpose and how we could have a very fulfilling vocation in stage three and we could even stay in that for the rest of our lives but there

00:47:42

Might be something else calling us that we keep shutting the door on we're not resourced enough to take that journey or we're not ready to cross that threshold of confirmation so could you maybe talk a little bit about the different kinds of purpose yeah great thanks um purpose is a really hot item now um in the especially in the the privileged domains of western culture everybody wants to

00:48:10

Find their purpose and of course i'm not meaning to make fun of it um because we're all designed every human being is designed to connect with something again meaningful um sense of destiny and so on but when we're in stage three which is psychological early adolescence we call it the oasis the healthy version is the oasis

00:48:40

Purpose is necessarily understood and defined in terms of a social role or a vocation or a career and so if you check out all the various movements in the world now that are or the coaches that are helping people find their purpose they're talking about a career essentially or a social role which is

00:49:06

Exactly appropriate if your clients are in stage three which most of them are but after we get uh into the cocoon stage and later then purpose is never again definable in terms of social role or vocation you don't have a vocational or social

00:49:31

Or career purpose anymore you have a um ecological purpose which is understood mytho poetically which is to say you come to learn something about like the archetype you are or the um collection of versions of archetypes that you are or what your personal myth is not again in a social vocational sense but um

00:49:57

Like um or what's your ecological niches um and that becomes your purpose for the rest of your life or at least through adulthood is to um embody that gift and the way you embody that gift is through what we call a delivery system

00:50:19

That um for example my the first mythopoetic image i received when i was 30 was the image of weaving cocoons and i came to understand that whatever i did in life i was only fulfilling my purpose if i was helping people including myself weave

00:50:42

Cocoons of transformation the kind of transformation that like caterpillars go through in order to become butterflies the butterfly being the adult the caterpillar being the early adolescent the chrysalis being the late adolescent so um let's see i'm did i lose my thread or what's that going oh not really you're talking about

00:51:12

The deeper purpose and the multipoetic image that helps us not do a job but present a whole delivery system or many delivery systems that are not about um i'm an author i'm a vision quest guide i'm a teacher i'm a whatever it's i'm a cocoon weaver and that is kind of where you're going maybe

00:51:38

Um yeah so after soul encounter um which is a glimpse of uh really being hit by the lightning bolt of the of an encounter with your methodic image that um after that um and after you move into early adulthood which that transition that passage called soul initiation

00:52:04

Then for most people you need to develop or choose a career or a discipline a delivery system it could be an art craft a profession a social role and so on which is a way of delivering your gift to your people given your personal strengths and weaknesses and personality

00:52:32

In your particular time and place delivering that gift to your people and that could look like so for example you could say that if you're looking at my life from kind of a social level you could say my life purpose is to guide soul craft programs or to write an author

00:52:55

But that isn't my purpose at all right it's to weave cocoons and those being a psychologist for example is one of the delivery systems i've used [Music] yeah and soul encounter is a unique part of the journey of soul initiation the descent to soul however

00:53:20

We might have in say stage three early adolescence we might have numinous encounters which feel like mystery or somebody has touched us with a little bit of here's a little um breadcrumb of what maybe you're here to do but it isn't necessarily a soul encounter unless we are in this deeper uh journey of soul initiation and are prepared psycho spiritually by mystery for that

00:53:49

Journey could you talk a little bit about soul encounter and how that fits in um yeah i think um i think part of what you said was that you know we can have still encounters it's possible to have so encounters before we're in the cocoon stage however not quite because right not quite we don't really know what it is and i think

00:54:13

It's very rare anyways but there's certain famous examples like thomas berry the um geologist the um cultural historian who wrote many books was one of my teachers and so many people's teachers a teacher he wrote the dream of the earth for example he had uh

00:54:40

And again i think this is unusual a deeply numerous numinous experience when he was i think 11 or 12. um and it changed his life and his whole that for those who don't know the story he went into his backyard in north carolina when he was 11 or 12 and crossed a creek or something and there was a field on the other side and and there were these um flowers maybe lilies i'm growing

00:55:07

And he was you might say totally undone by the beauty of that spring meadow and as he grew throughout his teen years he had the sense that um whatever supported the health of a meadow like that was good and whatever undermined the health of a metal like

00:55:30

That was not so good and it became uh his sense of what he was doing in life but my sense is that he had that numerous experience when he was on that cusp you know in puberty between stage two and three between late childhood and early adolescence but in a sense it didn't really become a

00:55:53

Soul encounter until he was older until because when he was younger he you know he i think he said that he he had basically two choices enlist in the army or go to the um seminary so he went to the seminary um but as he developed through stage four um then that experience at age 11 or 12 became the soul encounter

00:56:23

But you were asking maybe more generally about soul encounter what i mean by it's it's an experience right um and it's like a lightning strike often totally that's one way you know what was that and i don't want it and that makes no sense and how can i figure it out and i doesn't really i can't figure out what that means right away and it's an image often

00:56:47

Right or a metaphor or an a dream or a speaking bush or something coming out of the bottom of the canyon and offering you a gift or a message those kinds of experiences right so yeah yeah i can take all kinds of forms um it can come through a dream uh you can come through a waking vision that comes out of nowhere

00:57:14

It can be an encounter with some and flushed other being like my first one was an encounter with both a spruce tree and a yellow butterfly um and for some people it's it's an insight about the pattern your life makes on some really deep level that you're at a moment in your life

00:57:38

Be in the cocoon stage where everything suddenly makes sense and you understand on this deeper pattern that's coached metaphorically or mythologically and so it can take quite a number of forms but invariably when it happens it's um it's like life has pulled a rug out from underneath you and the old story

00:58:04

That you've been living doesn't make any sense at all and there's a sense that that what you've been burdened or what you've been given to bring to the world is a burden that's that's way too big for you you could never actually do it you you start hoping that uh soul or mystery really meant this vision for somebody else and it just got the wrong address i hope it's not mine

00:58:33

Because i i couldn't possibly do that um so it's that kind of it's a sense that your your life has been destroyed or violated and in some ways you have to start over because not only is it a different identity but it's a different category of identity to that point in your life your identity was always in terms of a social role or a romantic relationship or a religious belief or a career

00:59:02

Or a member of a gang or a club or religion in the church and so forth um and now it's nothing like that it's the the sense that you could ever identify yourself in any deep level in terms of any social role or vocation is gone and uh that's a terrifying thing especially if you're living in a society that has never spoken about those things

00:59:30

And you know it just happened to you when you go to a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist and [Music] they try to rescue you from the experience yeah yeah and i think i've read in the journey of soul initiation that if we do take that journey if we are called and

00:59:52

We are hopefully have some guides or some some some understandings about them what's happening to us and somebody doesn't pull us out of the journey that the journey of soul initiation is very subversive it's actually you said somewhere in the book a cultural a culture in a disrupter so would you say that the the dominant culture um is

01:00:18

Not only actively suppressing the south facet and the west facet of our wholeness because they are too they they really rock the patriarchy or they really rock the dominator culture what if we have a lot of people going on the journey of soul initiation wow what's that going to do to the culture i mean it's just what do you think about that yeah yeah um

01:00:46

First you don't even have to be in stage four to be a a cultural disrupter there's all kinds of beautiful movements uh around the world that uh if you're a healthy stage free person you want to change this culture because it's a death dealing culture yeah um so there's lots of um groups that you know a person can join to help in the

01:01:14

The project of cultural destruction but when you're um when you've gone through the journey of soul initiation you essentially have discovered what you were born to do in this life and everybody like every species a member of any species every human is born to provide a gift to the world

01:01:38

The more than human world not just the human world to provide a gift that is life enhancing that's the way life works everything every species is not only that's still around it's not extinct not only life sustaining its life enhancing and that's how life evolves is everything helps everything else to evolve

01:02:02

Um so um let's see um to lose my thread there where was i going um well i think we talked about we're talking about cultural interruption and rush disruption and if we are soul initiated then we are actually com becoming true adults we're not just like a bunch of adolescents running

01:02:28

Around you know as we can see what that's done for the world you know look and just look out at what's happening if we have enough true adults and therefore eventually true elders it is going to be a shift and a radical shift in the way that we um see the earth and and each other as an and on our part as one one being in the earth community not the top

01:02:56

Head of all that is where we destroy what's what else isn't human yes beautifully said yeah when we discover um the gift that we were uniquely born to provide the world to enhance life that's really deep-rooted capacity for life enhancement and if we do that if we embody that in a um life-destroying culture then obviously

01:03:26

Whatever we do is going to be subversive is going to be undermining of a life-destroying culture without our having decided to uh to do that or not and this is one way to understand why the ceremonies of and practices of soul initiation have disappeared from cultures hundreds actually in many cases in most cases

01:03:53

Thousands and thousands of years ago because you you can't have a um uh an authoritarian society where a very small number of people are uh placed in a position to get very wealthy where everyone else is serving that you can't have a dominator society when you have any significant number of initiated adults

01:04:19

And so when uh healthy cultures were contacted by dominator societies the first thing they did is they murdered the elders and the initiators and they you know forbade the uh children of the conquered people to speak their own language and to have their own ceremonies in order to

01:04:49

Do whatever is necessary to make sure no one grows up yes and to make sure perhaps that we are cut off from the living body of earth that we don't know our place of belonging that you sorted out the conversation with that we are cut off and that we think that we are here to dominate earth and to extract everything and to you know do the kinds of things

01:05:14

That have gotten us to the place we are and i also feel like circling background to that belonging even that belonging that would happen in the first two stages of feeling like i am a earth creature i am you know i am one of i you know little kids want to go around and lift little things up and look underneath and say hello to them i have this beautiful memory of my own little daughter at three in the

01:05:41

Spring the trout lily's coming out and her dancing around saying hello trout lilies welcome trout lilies and that's the kind of thing that that that we that we've been disconnected from um and and cut off from and so that the ecological awakening the equal awakening that you speak about that that many people have lost that is i think i've heard you say that that's more important even than

01:06:10

Than the journey of soul initiation at this particular juncture in this crisis time is that accurate uh well i believe that's true and psychological awakening is um it's foundational to a later initiatory journey and um if we just had let's see one way to understand ecological awakening is a

01:06:34

Move that's a passage a life passage that moves someone from an egocentric early adolescence to an echocentric a healthy early adolescence um and uh um i guess i'm a little bit tired today i'm losing my throat again but yeah that that we if we could get people 50 of people

01:07:08

Or less to really really reconnect with the the veil being lifted and being in earth and being a creature and a part of the earth community that that would help us make that shift yeah the need to make right that turn like get that turn over to the life at least sustaining culture yeah at least yeah um yeah if we had even a large minority

01:07:38

Of people say for example in this country who are ecologically awakened who had moved into a healthier early adolescent stage then our consumer conformist society wouldn't even be possible it would collapse because there would be enough people who would be aware that we're destroying

01:08:02

The world uh we're just destroying life in this world and um that would be enough of us who could not uh abide by allow for the undermining of um habitats and the water and the air um and the

01:08:26

People would be there would be a large enough percentage of people who are aware of the loss of uh diversity and we would in mass on mass they would say no no to this and so ecological awakening would allow us to move from a life-destroying society to a life-sustaining society and the life enhancement part would require that

01:08:53

A certain percentage of people would go through the initiatory journey into true adulthood right right so that right now i think i've heard you say that we need bridges now um between the life destroying culture the life sustaining and like we can't just jump from where we are boom over

01:09:16

Here now we're in this life-enhancing world that we need these bridges that that initiated adults are starting to create and you talk about visionary ecologies i think is the word you use and i'm just curious and you talk about mystery schools and these are i feel like ways of seeding toward where we want to go maybe you could just speak about that for a minute

01:09:43

Yeah um it's very exciting for me possibility that um this notion of vision ecologies it's the idea that when you have um a bunch of people who have gone through the initiatory journey and have entered true adulthood then each each true adult which um one of the phrases i used i think maybe robert used earlier is um visionary artisans of

01:10:14

Cultural evolution which is to say we've found the gift that we were born to to give to the world and we have been our psyche has been uh profoundly transformed by that experience and um and so we're starting our this really deeply creative project through one or more

01:10:37

Delivery systems but what happens is that um the true adults start collaborating together on projects because you can have that much more of a powerful uh creative outcome in your life if you if

01:10:58

You have in most cases if you have partners colleagues and so people whose mythopoetic identities have some resonance with one another start to to work together and it's that kind of thing that that transforms the society organically that i've come to believe that it's not actually possible to sit down with the most

01:11:22

Mature uh minds and hearts that you could hope for and with the strategic minds create a truly mature healthy self-centered community or culture you can't do that cultures are something that grow organically i mean even the word culture implies that it's something organic and that grows um

01:11:50

And so uh the way to grow a healthy culture is to uh support human development so that people eventually become psychologically prepared for the journey of soul initiation go through it find their greatest gift mythopolitically understood to offer the world

01:12:14

And to interact with other true adults and elders and over a number of generations the society begins to shift um from in our case from a egocentric dominator culture to with some a good deal of luck and focus into a um partnership um echo soul-centric healthy mature culture but that's going to take generations to

01:12:44

Get there and we're at a time in the world as everyone knows here that we don't know if we're if we're going to get the chance to do it we don't i mean it's even possible we may go extinct as a species i personally don't think that is the case but there may be such cultural um decay over from during the rest of

01:13:06

This century that [Music] the primary uh life focus may be survival um we just don't know wow i have so much i want to talk to you about but i know it's already 8 15. and um so people i want to ask you one final thing though before i um let people ask a few questions if you want to throw a question in the chat

01:13:31

Window uh jonah who is here will um ask bill a few questions uh the ones that are thrown in there but weber impossible dreamer this is my kind of question for you is how is mystery working you now in these days ever since the publication of this book last year you know you've been doing this work for over 40 years and in some

01:13:58

Ways it appears that this book and this work is kind of the crowning of your life's work i mean maybe there's more coming of course this is like a this feels like a crowning moment and i'm wondering if when you publish that book would you say you stepped across a threshold a new passage um and and or is it something else that's happening for you and

01:14:25

How how how is your center of gravity shifting as you're moving into your older years yeah you got a several hours for that cancer right i know right that's a big um i i kind of made a deal with mystery about four or five years ago i said i'm not done with my late adulthood stage and just some

01:14:55

Among other things i need to write this this next book um and i i need to to be in the artisan stage to do that um so after i wrote it and did five or six months of promotional work with it um i did my center of gravity i did feel it shifting and it was and is very disorienting

01:15:23

[Music] because um there's this sense that um just feeling turn away from that that life the my delivery systems that it's not my life isn't primarily about that anymore and so my awareness and my heart are have been shifting to um

01:15:49

This question i think i alluded to before which is what can i do for the future generations which is to say how can i support the the soul of the earth community um and i think part of

01:16:14

The this kind of initiation for me has been feeling even more fully than i've had in the past in my life my grief and despair yeah for the world for um i spent most of august and september grieving wildly every day and as joanna macy has been saying for so

01:16:43

Many decades in order to reach our deepest levels of empowerment we have to embrace our grief and our despair it's not either it's both um but that felt like a really big initiation and getting coveted at the same time it was very helpful as far as i know my symptoms were very

01:17:08

Minor but with too much of a story to explain why that was i'm not even sure about that but um so so yeah i'm still coming through that passage where the shift is from a further development of my delivery systems to what something like

01:17:33

My longing is to give everything i have away so i have nothing left before i die that's that becomes the deeper longing now and you've given so much and continue to to those who are touched by this work and um just so grateful for what you've brought to this to this ailing world and this magical world

01:18:00

And it's it's yeah go ahead thank you so much for saying that whenever anybody says that to me i always quickly add it's not like i was i was suffering or sacrificing that um the work i've done has been a source of endless joy and i just feel like the luckiest person in the world yeah yeah and i think all initiated dance would say the same thing it's never a

01:18:25

Sacrifice it's it's always a great blessing way yeah thank you for saying that so um jonah are there any questions that we could offer too yeah and then just another invite if you do have a question pop it in the chat um so this one from nancy grace can you say a few words about the importance of nighttime dreams

01:18:55

At this particular time and what you're seeing coming through dreams recently that relates to the changes we need to make on behalf of life that's a great question i don't know how much useful i have to answer that um uh assuming you're you mean on night time dreams for people in general um

01:19:21

It's something i've seen over the years you know people often have soul encounters through their dreams they're shown something about their mythoplatic place in the world but in terms of um patterns and dreams more generally now i don't know if i would have anything really informed to say about that um although i know there are people who are

01:19:48

Tracking those things maybe you're one of them nancy but um great question wish i could say more about it appreciate perhaps just been impossible dreams in general and the importance of allowing our nighttime dreams to uh be voices of mystery and our muse perhaps oh yeah um so you won't be surprised that animus we

01:20:14

Take a what we call a soul-centric perspective on dreams robert bosnack is a great example of someone who does that too but we have a somewhat different approach and the way i um hang out with dreams is that unless proven otherwise or even suggested otherwise

01:20:39

That a dream is not so much information or message um although it can be that too it's primarily an initiatory experience for the conscious self which is say the ego or the dream ego the the me and my dreams so it's like the dream maker whoever that is probably a close colleague of the muse and the soul the dream maker every night

01:21:08

Is creating you know three or four or five worlds for me the ego in order to um change me to shape-shift me in some kind of way it's it's creating just the kind of scenario that if i let myself be fully there emotionally and somatically and let it let the dream do its work on me

01:21:31

That it will help shape-shift me shape shift me into someone who can um more effectively offer my gift to the world so i in short i see dreams as initiatory experiences and when we sit and try to interpret them we basically shut down the initiate the initiation aspect yeah dreams are super powerful

01:21:59

Um so there i'll make up my own question because there's no more in the chat um you mentioned muse and the myth poetic identity but how would you describe mystery like what is mystery yeah boy what simple little questions um well mystery is

01:22:26

My preferred word many of the people also prefer to um the divine or spirit um but you know what what is um this mystery um some people like my partner janine marie huggin um she likes to think of mystery as the great vast imagination that has been spinning the

01:22:54

Story we call the universe story from the beginning that might have been 13 or so billion years ago or not that there's this it's like this great it's like the original artist the big artist that is um [Music] weaving and telling the big story and all the individual

01:23:22

Stories including our own individual stories that are part so that great evolutionary imagination that's that's how i think of mystery super yum um so carolyn griffith is asking is eco awakening something that can be ongoing perhaps a spiritual path in and of itself yeah great question i think that's

01:23:49

That's true i think i would say it's something like that that eco awakening is kind of a beginning but remember it's really a reclaiming of something lost that we had we were born with that sense of feeling like we're related to everything which is you watch little kids playing it's as tracy was saying it's obvious um so eco awakening is a reclaiming it's getting us kind of back on the track we

01:24:17

Of um being a human animal that we were shoved off of but it really is beginning that um as well after echo awakening we begin again to experience the world as animate everything is alive everything is breathing everything speaks in its own

01:24:39

Way and that's a that's a journey that just keeps or at least can keep unfolding we can get to deeper and deeper levels of the mystery of our kinship and our capacity to communicate with the others and uh so it doesn't whatever starts with echo awakening doesn't have to end at any point it's just

01:25:02

Um we just keep merging deeper and deeper into this web of multiple diverse magical species and habitats and ecosystems awesome so debbie is asking is the source of imagery in shamanic journeys or um deep imagination the same as nighttime

01:25:32

Dreams um well um probably from the same source huh from the muse the deep imagination um they say that i would want to say the muse and the dream anchor or very close colleagues uh the least and so with the deep imagination and what i mean by that and i think what most people mean by it is it's um those creative images including somatic

01:26:02

Images that well up from the depths um and that in some ways we the ego we're in service to that we're we're the servant um it's something that's very un-american and unwestern that the ego is not in control it's the adolescent heroic ego that is what we're

01:26:25

And largely um growing beyond uh and so that we understand ourselves our ego self as a servant and partly we're a servant to the views and our own news the one we're associated with and we're a servant to the life of the watershed or the ecosystem we live in and we're a servant of the ancestors who

01:26:53

Dreamed us many many years ago and we're a servant to the future generations of all species who are really rooting for us big time right now so to what you kind of circling back to what you said earlier this sense of both our our dreams and working with our

01:27:13

Four facets and our subs really is allowing our ego to be prepared and shaped to be that servant yeah yeah preparing us um for that descent to soul initiation um but we're never done developing or cultivating our facets of wholeness or learning to love and thank our inner protectors

01:27:40

That's not something we do just before only before the cocoon stage that with every stage of life we need to be more whole and more healed than in previous stages in order to face the greater psycho-spiritual and you know social interpersonal political challenges that we face in the world

01:28:06

Um you might think you know some people might think you know i really can't get on with my life until i'm totally whole and fully healed and of course we never we never get there we just and the demands for the need the requirements for pulling and healing are just actually go up with each stage

01:28:29

Each stage being more challenging than the last one thank you one more question so from lakshmi um could you please clarify how equal awakening can be contextualized with the oriental cosmic conscious experiences oh great question um i started writing a an article on that

01:28:58

Several years ago and 10 000 words later it wasn't done yet so but it's a really great question that um apparently i'm trying to make this short obviously but for some people that cosmic consciousness experience or the transcendence experience some people would call it enlightenment it brings about ecological awakening for people

01:29:27

You can get to ecological awakening without transcendence but for some people and some would even some spiritual teachers would say that a mature form of transcendence will will enliven our um our experience of the of the earth community will will open our consciousnesses to the anima sea the animate nature of everything and uh recently i heard what's his name

01:29:56

I think he's a biologist andreas webber say he he he wants to talk about enlivenment uh as something more essential than enlightenment um but anyway it seems that trent the transcendent experience of oneness or nonduality um is often reported in the contemporary world without any kind of um eco awakening but sometimes

01:30:23

They too seem to happen together yeah and we're coming to an end but i've heard you talk no i haven't heard you talk i have heard i've read in thomas barry that he says that at the crisis point we're at the crux point we're at that we need incendence the the journey down not the journey out although we need both to balance us as humans that this i love

01:30:51

That word of insending going down into our own depths and into earth and how earth is dreaming so maybe you could leave us with something about that yeah yeah thomas barry the the uh marvelous uh great-hearted um christian monk who ended up saying he's the one who coined that word incendence and he said what we need now is

01:31:19

Not so much transcendence but incendence we need to go down um even more than we need to go up not that you can't do both and so he coined that term in sentence and he meant essentially what i mean by the descent to soul i was blessed with three days with thomas when he was in his early 90s

01:31:48

And when he went moved back to north carolina to live near where he grew up and there's three incredible days of conversation mostly me listening and um at one point i said thomas you used this word in sentence maybe only once in your books and it's uh so meaningful to me um could you

01:32:16

Tell me more about what you mean and he looked at me a little puzzled and that what a beautiful look on his face and he said bill it's what you mean by soulcraft and he knew what i meant because he uh one of the greatest gifts i've ever gotten in my life is he wrote the uh forward to my first book [Music] thank you well it's 8 30

01:32:48

And i promised you 90 minutes so i would love to if you want to switch to gallery view and see the beautiful people who are here in the meeting bill you could just take a look around at some of these faces and know that we're going to stay on for a few minutes after you know bill takes his leave if anybody wants to ask us any questions about this earth craft program that we are

01:33:15

In the midst of crafting and so we will stay on but just wanted to like see let everybody see that they'll see who's here with our wings and our hands and our hearts yeah thank you great to see you all i appreciate your

01:33:35

Coming to hang out this evening yeah great to be with you and thank you tracy key turner so much um for the work you're doing and for being who you are um and for um bringing earthcraft to us thank you bye take care take care yeah so if anybody wants to stay on and

01:34:00

Ask any more questions um we'd be happy to answer them and thank you so much for coming as this the donations you made are going directly into the scholarship fund for our young adults for the earthcraft program and just from this event we raised two thousand dollars so that's really awesome that adds to about four or five thousand dollars that

01:34:24

I have for scholarships because our deep desires to provide this to anyone who's called without them having to worry if they can afford it or not and so you know our call is is we need to reach the young people who most benefit from this program and are eventually going to build out in the next few years a gap program a longer program where young people can come and immerse for up to 10 weeks to have a true

01:34:52

Mystery school kind of experience so please consider sharing um earthcraft with any young people who are from like say age 17 to 24 who might really benefit from a deep immersion in these models that come directly out of animus and also joanna macy and also on the sacred land that spirit hollow is

01:35:18

In southwestern vermont tucked in the taconic mountains um so that's our that's our little bit and you can you can find out more about earthcraft by going to spirithallow.org and earth craft um and you can share that link with young people and tell them we want them and we have money to help support them so

01:35:43

We have a couple people here who are building this program with us and maybe you all want to um wave your hand we have jonah roberts here and ryan long and kimbers is here north star and so any of us are here to answer any questions you might have we won't keep you too long but

01:36:04

Please feel free to um at this point you could unmute yourself if you wanted and ask a question in the meantime i'll pop on and just say that um i know emily's here but i'm gonna say the the group last year it it felt like it blew these young people's minds and hearts wide open like it's not just talking about models in depth psychology and

01:36:37

We did so many magical things like going down to the to the to the field at night and did this singing journey together where we were like one organism singing with the fireflies like we went out into the forest and did we do a truth uh journal truth yeah super powerful way to access our grief and fears and sorrows for the

01:37:06

World it just like pops the can right off because nowhere do people have that opportunity to really do that in a safe container um lots of deep counsels for everyone to truly be heard in their struggles and longings there was one one young man who at the end of the week was crying saying that this had saved his life

01:37:31

It was just so beautiful to see these ones just honest pouring out of their souls so i know your star or ryan probably have things to add to if you all don't have any question yeah well i can i just want to follow up the one thing on that that i found so inspiring was how powerful these tools are when given to young adults at the biologically

01:37:57

Appropriate age that in a healthy culture they would be having these encounters and so many of us when we've come to these tools and found the guides that's the necessary other half of being called by mystery is to have way showers and elders in a community that facilitates the transformation into the ecological awareness and finding our niche and you know so many of us it took you know if

01:38:24

We ever get to stage four um the right conditions that are so rare to find in a society that is so deeply sick and to see when we gave you know these young ones these tools and resources and a supportive community how quickly they just leaped in wholeheartedly and so vulnerably and authentically just grasping at everything we gave them and running with it and it was really beautiful to see

01:38:53

The potentiality of what society could be and to have a little microcosm to start practicing and facilitating ways in which we do live in a community that fosters the young ones through these thresholds and so thank you for all coming to this and supporting that that's our roles as elders and olders is not only the guide but in any way to try and make these programs accessible so it means the world to us that you all

01:39:19

Showed up for this and supported us so just want to thank you all and we just appreciate you uh spreading the word about this program here because it can be difficult to get the word out about these sort of things and we just want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible and in as many years as possible because i think if enough people hear about this we're going to be able to reach a really broad range of of people um

01:39:45

We've had participants come per spirit hollow programs from around the country and really around the world last year at the earthcraft program we had a participant come from california we had one come from st louis in the past we've had people come from puerto rico from chicago all over and i just love thinking about the impacts that these people can have in their communities when they return and so it's really about spreading the

01:40:16

Word about um how we can play positive roles in our communities you know really holding ourselves and understanding our own individual uh whole beings so that we can bring our best selves back to these communities and have positive impact there so thank you for your participation your donations and for spreading the word

01:40:40

That's just a huge part of it yeah does anybody have any questions or anything you would like to share before we come in for a landing or not it's okay but we're happy to answer anything that we might be able to miriam i was just saying thank you and good night i'm going gonna go make dinner yes okay all right see you soon i'm still in

01:41:20

Montana by the way nice to see you bye yeah all right well uh last call and and please know that if you are you know interested in pursuing more animus valley institute work it's um animus.org a n a wait a n i m a s dot org and we offer some of animus's programs at spirit hollow so keep your eye if

01:41:50

You're in new england and they're offered all around the world too so hopefully you can access a soul craft immersion or a wild mind immersion or our animus quest and delve into those realms of mythos and mystery and muse that bill was speaking of tonight so all right everybody thank you so much really appreciate it and what a beautiful evening

01:42:19

Many blessings thank you thank you you