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by
Bill Plotkin
 Based
on the book Nature & the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and
Community in a Fragmented World.
In our moment of history, perhaps the
most sweeping and radical transformation ever to occur on Earth is under
way.
This “moment” is the twenty-first century,
a lifetime from a human
perspective, yet
a mere dust mote of duration within our planet’s 4.5
billion years of exuberant evolution.
As is so often the case, the opportunity at the heart of this moment
arises from a great crisis. Over the past two hundred years, industrial
civilization has been relentlessly undermining Earth’s chemistry, water
cycles, atmosphere, soils, oceans, and thermal balance. Plainly said, we
have been shutting down the major life systems of our planet.
Compounding the ecological crisis are decaying economies, ethnic and class
conflict, and worldwide warfare.
But entwined with and at the root of all these environmental and social
devastations are epidemic failures in individual human development. True
adulthood, or psychological maturity, has become an uncommon achievement
in Western and Westernized societies, and genuine elderhood nearly
nonexistent.
Interwoven with arrested personal development, and perhaps inseparable
from it, our everyday lives have drifted vast distances from our species’
original intimacy with the natural world and from our own uniquely
individual natures, our souls.
But if we know where to look, we uncover great opportunities spawned by
these crises. All over the world, we are witnessing a collective human
response to exigency, an immensely creative renewal, addressing all
dimensions of human activity on Earth — from the ecological, political,
and economic to the educational and spiritual.
I believe that human maturation is our essential key to creating a viable
human-Earth partnership. A more mature human society requires more mature
human individuals. And nature (including our own deeper nature, soul) has
always provided and still provides our best template for human maturation.
By embracing nature and soul as our wisest and most trustworthy guides, we
can raise children, support teenagers, and ripen ourselves in ways that
enable us to grow whole and engender a sustainable human culture. We can
progress from our current egocentric societies (materialistic,
anthropocentric, competition-based, class-stratified, violence-prone, and
unsustainable) to soulcentric ones (imaginative, ecocentric,
cooperation-based, just, compassionate, and sustainable).
True Adulthood
One of the premises of my new book, Nature and the Human Soul, is that
every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild
world., and that the conscious discovery and cultivation of that
relationship is at the core of true adulthood. In contemporary society, we
think of maturity simply in terms of hard work and practical
responsibilities. I believe, in contrast, that true adulthood is rooted in
transpersonal experience — in a mystic affiliation with nature,
experienced as a unique sacred calling — that is then embodied in
soul-infused work and mature responsibilities. This mystical affiliation
is the very core of maturity, and it is precisely what mainstream Western
society has overlooked — or actively suppressed and expelled.
Although perhaps perceived by some as radical, this premise is not the
least bit original. Western civilization has buried most traces of the
mystical roots of maturity, yet this knowledge has been at the heart of
every indigenous tradition known to us, past and present, including those
from which our own societies have emerged. Our way into the future
requires new cultural forms more than older ones, but there is at least
one thread of the human story that I’m confident will continue, and this
is the numinous or visionary calling at the core of the mature human
heart.
Human maturation is essential to societal transformation because the most
potent seeds of cultural renaissance stem from the uniquely creative work
of authentic adults. All such adults are true artisans, visionaries, and
leaders, whether they live and work quietly in small arenas, such as
families, farms, and classrooms, or very publicly on grand stages. They
are our most reliable agents of cultural change. Nature and the Human Soul
offers a set of guidelines for restoring and refining the process of human
maturation in each of the eight stages of the life cycle so that
increasing numbers might grow into true twenty-first-century adults, into
mature transformers of culture.
Developmental Tasks
The process of becoming fully human — developing as nature and soul would
have it — entails a radical shift in worldview and values. We must
re-conceive every stage of human life, including the psychospiritual tasks
of each stage. These are the tasks that must be addressed for a human
being to progress toward full maturity. In particular, we must learn to
raise children in alignment with nature, preserving the innocence of early
childhood and refashioning middle childhood as a time of wonder and free
play in the natural world (in addition to a time of learning cultural
ways). We must assist teenagers to be as authentic and wildly imaginative
as they can be. We must cultivate full societal support for young and
middle-aged adults to explore and be transformed by the mysteries of
nature and psyche — so that they might take their places as artisans of
cultural change and eventually enter a seed-scattering elderhood of
wisdom, grace, and the holistic tending of the more-than-human world. We
must provide these opportunities for all people, in all socioeconomic
classes, in all societies.
The developmental tasks that characterize the soulcentric stages of human
life each have a nature-oriented dimension as well as a more familiar (to
Westerners) culture-oriented dimension. Healthy human development requires
a constant balancing of the influences and demands of both nature and
culture. For example, in middle childhood, the nature task is learning the
enchantment of the natural world through experiential outdoor immersion,
while the culture task is learning the social practices, values,
knowledge, history, mythology, and cosmology of our family and culture.
In Industrial Growth Society, however, we have for centuries minimized,
suppressed, or entirely ignored the nature task in the first three stages
of human development, infancy through early adolescence. This results in
an adolescence so out of sync with nature that most people never mature
further.
Arrested personal growth serves industrial “growth.” By suppressing the
nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social
values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and
suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other
means), Industrial Growth Society engenders an immature citizenry unable
to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs.
This neglect of our human nature has led to the tragedy we face today:
most people are alienated from their vital individuality — their souls —
and humanity as a whole is largely alienated from the natural world that
evolved us and sustains us. Soul has been demoted to a new-age spiritual
fantasy or a missionary’s booty, and nature has been treated, at best, as
a postcard or a vacation backdrop or, more commonly, as a hardware store
or refuse heap. Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and
with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both.
But it is not too late to change. Nature and the Human Soul suggests how
we might embrace the nature task in each stage of human development and
how we can address the culture task much more thoroughly and fruitfully
than we do in Industrial Growth Society. By devoting ourselves to both
tasks, we can reclaim our full membership in this flowering planet and
animated universe, and become more fully human, both as individuals and as
societies. We can grow unimpeded into adulthood and, eventually, elderhood,
and create twenty-first century life-sustaining societies. 
Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.,
has been a professor of psychology, a research psychologist, and a
psychotherapist. Currently a wilderness guide, ecotherapist, and depth
psychologist, he leads a variety of experiential, nature-based
individuation programs. He is the founder of Animas Valley Institute, in
Colorado, and the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of
Nature and Psyche. Visit him online at www.natureandthehumansoul.com and
www.animas.org
Based on the book Nature & the Human Soul:
Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World.
© 2008 by Bill Plotkin.
Printed with permission of New World Library,
Novato, CA.
www.newworldlibrary.com
www.newworldlibrary.com
or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.
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