Soulcraft Musings

Friday, October 9, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XXIV

This is Part Twenty-Four of a 28-or-so-part essay on making and following a map that might get us to the Next World, and on what it means to leave one world and eventually reach another, and on what it’s like for a community or a society to be between worlds, perhaps walking that long road for several generations. Think of this as a draft of an essay I’ll be working on for a while — or eventually a short book. Let me know — through Substack — what resonates with you. To fully understand or contextualize today’s part, you might want to read, reread, or at least scan the first three parts. Link Below.

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The Second of Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World, Growing Soulcentric Cultures: The Imaginal Exchange of Mythopoetic Dream Viruses

The second phase of the journey to the Next World is the progression from ecocentric life-sustaining communities to life-enhancing or soulcentric cultures. This is a radically different goal than the first phase and will take much longer. Several generations or more. The first phase — building ecocentric communities — is a relatively small step on the way to soulcentric cultures. The latter require full complements of initiated adults and genuine elders. They will be the ones to generate mature cultures — not primarily through their strategic minds, as with ecocentric societies, but through their deep imagination in communion with each other, the dream of the Earth, [91] and the dream of the Cosmos. [92]

Mature, soulcentric cultures are not designed; they are grown. Healthy human cultures are like healthy, wild ecologies, the latter being, as Flo Shepherd says, “inviolate, self-willed, self-regulating, self-generating, numinous, and wild.” [93] We can support and assist the flourishing or restoration of wild cultures as well as wild ecologies, but we cannot create either through strategic design.

Life-enhancing human cultures emerge through the lives of true adults and elders conducting their soulwork in harmony with each other and with the greater Earth community — through, in other words, the imaginal exchange of mythopoetic dream viruses, “infections” that generate particular social systems and structures unique to those humans and to the place in which they live. The sacred stories of such cultures — their songs and myths — are not made-up or borrowed but emerge from the depths of the land and the depths of the human psyche. As the late eco-poet, essayist, and farmer Wendell Berry put it,

… Memory,


native to this valley, will spread over it


like a grove, and memory will grow


into legend, legend into song, song


into sacrament. … [94]

This takes time. Generations. And this “delay” makes all the difference for those of us alive now. When we allow ourselves to sink into the full bundle of emotions — grief, fear, anger, hurt, guilt, and others — that arise when we embrace the likelihood that the world many of us had hoped to build in our lifetimes will actually take several lifetimes (and, even then, is not guaranteed), we will soon enough emerge from the other side of that psychospiritual storm feeling a kind of relief and a new kind of resolve. This is the relief that we can now dedicate ourselves, joyfully, to what is actually possible in our lifetimes: building ecocentric life-sustaining communities, communities that will collectively serve as the foundation for the work of future generations who will gradually be generating a diverse array of soulcentric life-enhancing cultures. We have the blessing and opportunity to resolve to do what is possible. This does not make our work any less important. Indeed, we — those of us alive now — have the most essential and most challenging role of the whole journey: turning the corner from life-destroying to life-sustaining societies. This is the Great Turning. It is in our hands. Now. Any future worth striving for depends on what we do in our lifetimes.

But I want to emphasize here that doing our work — building ecocentric life-sustaining communities — is not merely creating the ecocentric social structures and systems I outlined in Part XXI of this long essay, the structures and systems that enable us, collectively, to once again live as good neighbors with the rest of Creation. That’s the outward-facing dimension of our work. But our work in this lifetime also requires us to design and implement the inward-facing social structures and systems that support nature-based full-spectrum human development — including those that support stage-4 people to undergo the journey of soul initiation even though (or because), currently (in modernity), there is only a small percentage of people who are psychospiritually (developmentally) prepared to embark upon that journey. We must begin this soul-initiation sub-project now because it will take several generations before we have enough communities that have incorporated the arts of soul initiation into their communal expectations and rhythms in order to generate, several generations hence, communities with full complements of soul-initiated adults and elders. And then it will take several additional generations for those adults and elders to organically weave Soul-inspired cultures. (“Memory will grow/ into legend, legend into song, song/ into sacrament.”)

* * *

As I also discussed in Part XXI of this series, Rights of Nature laws are essential to transitional life-sustaining societies, but they will not be needed in future soulcentric, life-enhancing cultures because ecocentrism is the bedrock of soulcentric cultures just as it is at the core of the undomesticated human psyche. In soulcentric cultures, kinship with all of life is an innate value shared so deeply it is nearly impossible for members of such societies to act otherwise.

Truly mature cultures (eco-soulcentric ones) are governed not by self-proclaimed or hereditary kings, self-installed dictators, or even elected politicians, but by councils of elders. True elders are not elected; they are recognized. In a soulcentric culture, even a child can recognize true elders and distinguish them from both initiated adults and people who simply happen to be old.

Imagine: future human societies that once again enhance the wellbeing of not only all their human citizens but also the life of the greater Earth community — not because benevolent public leaders are elected by eco-awakened voters but because such societies are led by councils of true elders (who entrust soul-initiated administrators to design and manage community programs). We may be a long way from such societies, but we can get there. In the meantime, as discussed in Part XXI, there are transitional structures we can use, such as citizen assemblies and local forums, structures that support citizens to make collective choices, even if their elected leaders would have chosen otherwise. What distinguishes councils of elders, however — and this is crucial and makes all the difference — is that they do not ask themselves what the majority of the people want but, rather, what is best for the larger Earth community.

To repeat and now go a little deeper, the primary reason that the fulfillment of this second phase will require several generations is because it takes that long to (1) build social systems and structures that support nature-based full-spectrum human development (NB-FSHD), systems and structures such as nature-based primary education (both in schools and at home), organizations that support eco-parenting, eco-religious churches and synagogues, community-supported ecotherapy and wholing services, and organizations that guide the journey of soul initiation, [95] (2) grow enough true adults and elders, by way of those systems and structures, to generate mature human communities, and (3) for those adults and elders to interact over enough generations for life-enhancing culture to emerge organically. [96]

Comparing the two phases of the journey to the Next World (phase 2 includes all attributes of phase 1):

Phase 1

· Ecocentric societies

· Life-sustaining

· A large minority or more of eco-awakened citizens

· Exists now in scattered small communities and possibly soon on town and bioregional levels

Phase 2

· Soulcentric [97] cultures

· Life-enhancing

· Approximately 25% of citizens are soul-initiated adults and 25% are genuine elders

· For the next several generations, probably limited to small intentional soulcentric communities

The great-grandchildren of the great-grandchildren of the young parents alive today might be the first generation to actually live in post-modern soulcentric societies larger than small intentional communities. The unavoidability of this prolonged waiting period may be deeply challenging for those of us raised in modernity. We’ve become accustomed to everything happening faster and faster, with major life projects completed in a mere year or three — and for sure within our lifetimes. But there are no shortcuts to the Next World. It took several thousand years to spawn the planetary muddle we’re in now, and it will likely take a few hundred to extract ourselves. But it’s a blessing to be alive in a time when we can begin our migration and learn to navigate to the Next World.

I don’t mean to imply that our current planetary quandary is due to humanity having failed or having fatally messed up as a species. If it would be accurate to say that we, as a species, made major mistakes during our evolutionary unfolding so far, they might have been unavoidable ones. Mystery (aka, evolution, the imagination of Earth and Cosmos) has bestowed an extraordinarily powerful and unwieldy gift upon us: our mode of self-reflexive consciousness and our associated capacity for imagination, which enable us to envision the future, as Geneen Marie Haugen teaches us, and we might suspect it would take any species quite some time to learn how to responsibly use such a power. We might imagine this learning process to be, in essence, an initiatory journey of many millennia, one that, like all individual human initiations, has no guarantee of survival, one that for sure would require, enroute, a kind of death and rebirth — in this case, of our current way of being human.

References:

[91] Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth.

[92] Brian T. Swimme, Cosmogenesis and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos; and Swimme and Berry, The Universe Story.

[93] Flo Shepard, “WILDerness,” in Wild Duck Review (edited by Casey Walker), Vol. VI, No. 1, Winter 2000.

[94] Wendell Berry, “A Vision.” New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2012.

[95] Organizations that guide the journey of soul initiation will eventually include colleges and universities and, once our human communities have sufficiently matured, high schools as well.

[96] There is one contemporary community of which I’m aware that has consciously begun this long process of becoming soulcentric: the intergenerational SpringhouseSchool and learning community in Virginia, US. They are tending the NB-FSHD not only of their students but also of their staff, board, teachers, and the families of their students. This is beginning to have its effect on their local community. Among the maps they’ve been using, in their now 12 years of existence, are our Soulcentric Developmental Wheel and our Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche. Over the next hundred years or more, growing small soulcentric communities like Springhouse might be a good deal less challenging than growing versions that are town sized or on the scale of watersheds and bioregions. But that, of course, is the long-term goal.

[97] As a reminder, soulcentrism is a special case of ecocentrism. To be ecocentric is to hold the greater Earth community (the ecosphere) as central in importance; this contrasts with both egocentrism (holding the individual conscious self as central) and anthropocentrism (humanity as central). To be soulcentric, on the other hand, is to hold the Soul as most important and as the center of individual existence. When we understand Soul as an individual’s innate place or niche in the greater Earth community, then to be soulcentric is a special case of ecocentric. All human psyches are, at root, soulcentric but an individual is not consciously soulcentric until sometime in the Cocoon stage, which is when the journey of soul initiation takes place. All soulcentric humans and communities are ecocentric, but not all ecocentric humans and communities are (yet) consciously soulcentric.

Photo: The Original Dream [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.