Letters From Bill Plotkin

The Great Turning and the Animas Mission
Summer Solstice - 2006

[We] must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture.  We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity.  None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources.  We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources.  Our cultural resources have lost their integrity.  They cannot be trusted.  What is needed is not transcendence but “inscendence,” not the brain but the gene.

                                                          - Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

At this moment in time, we are in the midst of what is perhaps the greatest transformation ever to occur on planet Earth. The “moment” in question is that which we refer to as the 21st -century, a mere dust mote of time within our planet’s 4 billion years of continuous and miraculous development.  In this tiny interval of 100 years, we the human species will either learn to become a life-enhancing element within the greater Earth community...or we will not.  If we fail, humanity will be reduced to a small number, we will have missed our opportunity (this time around, at least) to realize our destiny as a species and we will have perpetrated the extinction of many thousands additional species, perhaps millions, beyond those already perished at our hands in the past 200 years.

And yet we now behold the possibility of a fundamental and radical shift in human culture from a suicidal, life-destroying element to a way of life worthy of our and the planet’s destiny.

This spring, as part of my research for the book I’m completing, I had the great privilege of spending two days each with two of the foremost Earth elders of our time, Thomas Berry (91, author of The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; and The Universe Story, the latter with Brian Swimme) and Joanna Macy (77, author of World as Self, World as Lover; and Coming Back to Life, the latter with Molly Young Brown).  I met with them privately at their homes in Greensboro, NC, and Berkeley, CA, respectively.  My goals were twofold: to learn more about how they see this time of planetary transformation, and to understand better the nature of true elderhood, a life-stage rarely reached in contemporary society, yet sorely needed at this time.  I asked each of them dozens of questions about their experience of being an elder and about how they see the special obligations of eldering in the 21st -century. Both of these gifted teachers were remarkably generous with their time and with their hearts.  They shared many intimate stories, some of which will find their way into my book.  With their words as well as with their luminous presence, they taught me much about the nature of elderhood and about our way into the future.

Thomas, a lifelong cultural historian, refers to the transformational efforts already under way among imaginative, ecocentric people the world over as the Great Work of our time, which is proceeding in all realms of society, including technology, the arts, economics, education, government, and religion.  Largely outside the interest and coverage of mainstream media, there are countless groups, organizations, and communities creating the infrastructure of not only a new society but also a fundamentally new mode of human being.  If we succeed, this century will be known in the future as the time the Earth shifted from the geological epoch of the Cenozoic (now some 65 million years old, beginning at the time of the mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs) to what Thomas calls the Ecozoic Era.

Joanna, a leading eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar, likewise recognizes the dangerous opportunity now faced by humanity and Earth.  She refers to this revolutionary time as that of the Great Turning, when we have the task of transitioning from what she terms the Industrial-Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society.

Will the 21st -century turn out to be the Great Unraveling or the Great Turning?  Will we succeed at the Great Work?  It’s up to us…you and me and all others who are waking up to the extraordinary challenge and opportunity before us.

My new book is a presentation of the ecocentric/soulcentric model of human development on which I have been working now for 20 years. Sometimes I think of it as a manual for how to grow a true elder starting at birth.  It asks the question, What would the stages of human development look like if we grew, in each stage, with nature and soul as our primary guides?  The model is ecocentric in two ways.  First, the eight life-stages are arrayed around a 4-directions wheel (as opposed to the familiar Western linear timeline).  Beginning and ending in the east and proceeding clockwise/sunwise, the stages and their attributes are based upon the qualities of nature found in the four seasons (east-spring, south-summer, etc.) or, alternately, the four times of day (sunrise, mid-day, sunset, and mid-night).

Second, the psychospiritual task of each stage has both a nature-dimension and a culture-dimension.  For example, in middle childhood, the nature task is learning the enchantment of the natural world, while the culture task is learning the social practices, values, knowledge, history, mythology, and cosmology of our family and culture.  You won’t be surprised to learn that, in Industrial-Growth Society, we have for centuries minimized or entirely ignored the nature task in every stage of human development.  This neglect results in an even greater impediment to individual maturation than our modern loss of rites of passage, and it has led to the situation we face today: most humans on the planet are alienated from their own deeper nature -- their souls -- as well as humanity as a whole largely alienated from the natural world that evolved us and sustains us. Too many of us do not know the Earth or ourselves in any deep way, and, consequently, we are destroying ourselves along with the others with whom we share the planet.

But it is not too late to change.  The book shows how we can embrace the nature task in each stage of human development, as well as how we can address the culture task much more fully than we do in the Industrial-Growth Society.  In doing so, we can grow unimpeded into adulthood and elderhood.

People who are writing about and working toward the Great Turning speak about the changes we need to make in economics, government, and politics.  I agree with most all they say.  But, for me, the fundamental need is for a change in consciousness that can result only from a maturing of the human species, and, for that to occur, each human being must be assisted by their society to mature into their own authentic adulthood and, eventually, elderhood.  There are three reasons I say that this is our most fundamental need at this time.

First, we live in an adolescent world.  Our cultural resources have been so degraded over the centuries that the majority of humans now never reach true adulthood.  An adolescent world is unnatural and unbalanced, and it inevitably develops pathologies unique to adolescence, resulting in societies that are materialistic, competitive, violent, racist, sexist, and, ultimately, self-destructive.  These qualities are not at the root of our human nature.

Second, the most potent seeds of cultural renaissance come from the uniquely creative work of initiated adults.  All such adults are, by definition, true artists, visionaries, and leaders, whether they live and work quietly in small arenas or very publicly on great stages.  In an adolescent society, all initiated adults are, again by definition, cultural change agents.  As Thomas writes, “We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources.” Such a descent is the work of the underworld journey to soul that can be undertaken only by people who have moved beyond the early adolescence in which our society has stalled. The most creative, inspiring work in the world today is being done by such people.  It is time now to create cultural forms to enable everyone to mature in this way.

Third, to succeed, the Great Turning needs to be overseen by the wise guidance of true elders like Thomas and Joanna and tens of thousands of others like them.  The entire human venture must be guided, not by assemblies of adolescent politicians and corporate officers, but by genuine Councils of Elders.

In the course of working on my book, in spending time with Thomas and Joanna and their written work, in conversations with other Animas guides (especially Geneen Marie Haugen), and in guiding programs over the past few years, the nature of the AVI mission has grown increasingly focused for me.  When I founded AVI, in 1981, its mission was to weave cocoons of transformation primarily through a contemporary Western form of the pan-human vision quest. Then, in the late 80’s, I began to create a variety of other soulcraft programs, including a guide-training sequence, all designed toward the same end of personal, soul-rooted transformation.  By the mid-90’s, when my soulcentric/ecocentric model of human development achieved a more articulated shape, I was able to more accurately state our mission as assisting people to make the transition from early adolescence (stage 3) to the Wanderer stage of late adolescence (stage 4, which is the unstated but primary subject of my first book, Soulcraft) and then through the passage of Soul Initiation and into authentic adulthood (stage 5). “Soulcraft” is simply the term I coined for the set of practices, found in nature-based traditions around the world and in Western depth psychology, that facilitate this development from stage 3 to 5.

More recently the framework has further expanded so that now I can say that AVI’s mission is to engender nature-rooted, soul-initiated visionary artist-leaders who will help carry out the Great Work, the Great Turning of this century.  This is not at all a change in mission.  Such artist-leaders are precisely what all people grow into when they are supported to develop from stage 3 to 5.  This is simply a reframing of AVI’s mission within the context of the Great Work of this century upon which the future of humanity and the Earth now wholly depends.

My hope is that each of you will consciously and imaginatively join this unfolding, this work, this century-long moment of transformation.


P.S. Independently of my role at AVI, I occasionally send out selected emails that I receive from others that pertain to the Great Turning  information that seems important to me but that we are not likely to find in the mainstream media. I call this list “People for a Soulcentric/Ecocentric World.” If you’d like me to add your name to that list, send your email address to me at bill@animas.org.