Soulcraft Musings

Friday, September 11, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XX

This is Part Twenty of a 25-plus-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 First of the Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World: Ecocentric Communities, Part I

So far, in this multipart essay, we’ve explored a number of elements of our Animas map to the Next World. Several of these are features of what I call nature-based full-spectrum human development, including a model of eco-soulcentric life stages (the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel), the cultivation of Wholeness (the four facets of the Self), Self-healing, the journey of soul initiation (including the Descent to Soul), and the four windows of knowing (especially deep imagination).[55] Additional elements of our Map to the Next World that have been explored in this essay include resacralizing our relationship to the land (cultivating animate consciousness), an ecological and mythopoetic conception of Soul, the relationship between consciousness shift and world change, humanity’s recent discovery of the one-way arc of time and its effects on human consciousness, the perspective that we will arrive in the Next World not as individuals but only as communities, some ways in which the journey to the Next World might be a process of evolution/ speciation for homo sapiens, and collectively awakening to the dream of the Earth.

Today I want to introduce another major theme of our map: two distinct phases of humanity’s current migration to the Next World. First is the transition from our current egocentric life-destroying societies to a variety of ecocentric life-sustaining societies and then, second, the passage from ecocentric life-sustaining societies to soulcentric life-enhancing cultures. These two phases call for very different kinds of projects and communities. We can’t get directly from here to the Next World. We must build a bridge, and life on that long, multi-generational bridge will be different in essential ways from both Dominator World and the Next World.

The life-destroying societies we now live in are generating staggering declines in both biodiversity and human diversity (the latter especially through cultural genocide and loss of indigenous languages), and spawning extreme habitat loss, climate disruption, and the poisoning of the land, waters, and air. The first phase of the journey to the Next World is the building of life-sustaining communities out of the ruins of the egocentric Dominator World. These ecocentric societies will serve as a transitional state between what we have now and what we’ll create in the Next World. We might also think of these bridge communities as lifeboats.

The first phase of the migration lays the necessary foundation for the second. But we won’t reach the Next World until we complete that second phase. The fulfillment of the first phase — the generation of diverse life-sustaining societies — will be a major accomplishment but this will “only” be a resting place along the long road from Dominator World to the Next World, somewhat like the Israelites’ extended sojourn in the desert on their trek from Egypt to the Promised Land.

Unlike the second phase of the migration, the first doesn’t require a significant percentage of true adults or elders. What it does require is a significant percentage of ecocentric humans. Any healthy early adolescent (of any chronological age, 12 through 100 or more) knows how to live ecocentrically, and ecocentric living is the heart of life-sustaining societies. [56] Ecocentric parents and teachers invite children and teens ever deeper into the enchantments of the natural world, and they design and deliver community-supported education in, for example, eco-literacy, Earth festivals, gathering wild foods and medicines, gardening, sustainable and sacred hunting, and cultural burning or natural fire management. Humanity already possesses the associated knowledge and know-how for building life-sustaining societies: designing Earth-honoring versions of healthcare, energy generation, architecture and construction, financial systems, governance, law, environmental protection, religion, and spirituality.

To form such transitional ecocentric societies, we’ll need to design and create certain kinds of social systems and structures that intact indigenous traditions did not/ do not need and that healthier cultures of the future won’t need either. Healthy nature-based traditions don’t need systems and structures that are designed to address social challenges they don’t have — challenges like people who are alienated from the other-than-human world, people who do not experience every day a kinship with the Earth community, who grew up in families with few if any true adults or elders, who are challenged to think critically for themselves, who are distracted or hypnotized much of every day by digital screens and social media, whose attention spans have shrunk to a handful of seconds, who struggle with multiple and deep-seated traumas, who live in villages that are far from being locally self-reliant, or who cannot tell the difference between an elder and an older.

Mature, life-enhancing human societies of the future will, likewise, not have any these challenges. They’ll have other trials — like coping with the loss of biodiversity or with the consequences of twentieth and twenty-first century climate disruption, obtaining adequate water and food, and defending themselves against any persisting imperialist, dominator societies. We have all of these challenges now, of course, and we will have them during our coming transitional times, too, but these will likely persist into the Next World, as well.

Over the next several generations, we’re going to need transitional social structures and systems that enable us, as communities, to reconnect with and contribute to the greater web of life. The common themes with all of these systems and structures are ecocentrism and localism. Next week, we’ll take a look at several specific examples of such structures and systems.

References:

[55] For definitions of each of the phrases in this sentence, see here.

[56] This alone suggests that, in contemporary societies, we have relatively few healthy adolescents — even healthy early adolescents. But this obstruction in personal development is especially evident among people currently in positions of political and economic power. We might want to muse on why we have so many psychologically unhealthy leaders. Why, in fact, are many of them the most emotionally and morally disturbed humans on the planet — malignant narcissists, sociopaths, kleptocrats, and fraudsters? We might wonder what kind of person would be enticed by the lure of tyrannical power, in the first place, and what additional corruptive effects such power has on their egocentric early-adolescent personalities and psyches. Consider that, in a healthy culture, no one moves into a position of significant power until they are a soul-initiated adult — in part because the existing adults and elders promptly spot any youth trending in the direction of tyranny and then intervene (with healing, wholing, and initiatory practices). Consider that, in a healthy culture, there are no tyrants beyond the occasional early-adolescent petty variety.

Photo: What Grows from the Ruins [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.