Nature and the Human Soul Conference
Day 3, Jan 21st 2012 Saturday
Bill Plotkin and Fr. Richard Rohr
Hyatt Tamaya, New Mexico
1,000 Attendees from around the world
My Notes and Musings (there are a lot of them today)
8am Bill Plotkin
Confirmation might end with a leave taking.
Cocoon/tomb-wound
When you emerge, your ego is an agent for mystery.
Purpose: facilitate experiential encounter with soul - your unique place meat to take with earth community. Finding your path to destiny. The iniatory process is not a straight line, its windy road. Inception is the point of entering into that process, a type of imitation. Only mystery determines when we make the shift. In every moment of our life, we are in some part of some iniatory process that ends with an iniatory passage.
There is no recognizable form of the caterpillar in a cocoon, it liquifies, caterpillar soup. There are cells in the caterpillar, called imaginal cells, which know how to transform into a butterfly, imagining flight.
Wanderer incessently crossing borders psychologically, spiritually, geographically, doesn't now exactly where to look. On her own looking for clues and destiny. A hide and seek - looking inside for it and in the outer world. Putting yourself in places to be exposed.
Developmental tasks:
1) Leave the home of adolescent personality and social scene. Bye.
2) Hello. Exploring mysteries of nature and psyche. Striding deeper and deeper. How? Its really difficult in western society. How do you put psychological distance between yourself and mainstream american society?
What can you do/how can you wander given the limitations (population density etc.) A small % of college students are in stage 4. [I know I have been since I made the decision to transfer to College of the Atlantic when I was 20 and major in Human Ecology] In stage 4, the center of identity expands, a human among other humans.
Have to spiritually self-reliant. Wandering great distances geographically because we are often alone.
Relinquishing attachment to adolescent personality. Relinquishing one part of life without yet knowing what is coming next. Somehow, you have to get across this territory.
- Need to spend time addressing developmental defects from previous stages. Soulcraft work is where its at. Its counter-therapeutic. Its not therapy anymore. Therapy can be counter soul-craft.
- Adress any addictions like obsessions, the addictions that are keeping us stuck and attached
- Sacred wound work. Each of us is born with a particular vulnerability where we will be wounded. Something that wounds one person wouldn't another who didn't have that particular vulnerability. Its a wound that cannot be healed and isn't meant to be healed because its the entry to the depths, to the soul, to opening and allowing mystery to penetrate. The ego is not the problem - the problem is a rigid, immature ego. The goal is to mature the ego so it can be flexible enough and grow down into the soul. Its a psychological or spiritual sense of vulnerability, fragility inside.
We tend to experience ourselves as victims, but the core wound is a different kind of wounding, sacred, numinous.
Core vulnerability, 1 or more wounding events. The places that are most tender hold great treasures. The wound becomes sacred when we can go back experientially. Starting in stage 4 it becomes possible and even necessary to go there (don't go before stage 4)
To relinquish attachments to adolescent ego:
- learning to choose authenticity over acceptance (in stage 3, it was learning to balance acceptance and authenticity. In stage 4, its practicing authenticity over acceptance, whenever possible)
- Making peace with past. What is left incomplete? Who do I need to forgive that I haven't yet? Take care of it now. [I know, I need less and less social acceptance as I move through this stage]
- Learning the art of misidentification. You misidentify from the life of the earlier 3 stages. How? Practicing meditation and being in the present moment. Developing a witness that is not attached to the previous life. Because parts of your personality are going to get really scared as you stride deeper and deeper, but as things come up, you have these skills of non-attachment.
Exercise: Leaving Home Walk on the Land: Wander aimlessly until you have a sense of mystery in and around you. You're surrendering, submitting yourself to the extraordinary mystery. Then wander more until you're drawn to another non-human that feels to you as if it too has left home. Be with this. Praise it for the way it is for its having successfully left home. Then tell it out loud your own deepest feelings about your own leaving home. Talk about ways you've left home (or about ways you've never left home and having been polishing your adolescent personality if that is the case) Listen at the deepest level to what is calling you toward something else. What do you really want in life? Even if it requires you to leave what you have now. Dare to claim it and wait it. Meet back in break-out groups to share at 10:20 in one hour.
[There was first a little road to the right, with footprints, or a place farther ahead that looked intriguing to me. I had to wander down that little road to the right, just to make sure it wasn't the right one. There were too many footprints and it deadened. So I went back toward the original place of intrigue in the distance, wandering through the brush to get there. Another road to the left came up that looked interesting, but I didn't need to take it to find out it wasn't right this time. I knew. And I kept going straight. I climbed a hill. At the top, I spotted a golf ball lying far from the field of golfers below. Was this the non-human object I was called to talk to, the one that had left home? Litterally it had, but it did not feel right. I bent down and picked it up. The words on the golf ball read: "Top Flite. Tour Range" so I pocketed it and continued touring the range. A few minutes later, I saw an abandoned road sign on the ground. Was this my object that had left home? Again, no strong feeling. The sign, however, said, "Keep Right" so I did. And I saw to my right about 100 feet ahead, what appeared to be a metal frame. I walked toward it, and came to a dumping site in a pit, strewn with metal carcases, barrels, and broken bottles. It reminded me of an abandoned foundation I used to adore exploring across from my house as a child. I walked around it seeing if any object in particular called to me. Then I realized, it was this spot of land itself that was calling to me. It was the land itself that had left home. The essence of this land had gone beyond the abandoned objects piled on it. The land stretched deep into the earth and far into the distant mountains. The land mingled with with the air and went up to the clouds. The energy of the land had left home in the sense that it had gone deeper and was not just the land of things dumped on it, but the land that spread all around nourishing itself from the undamaged parts of the world still in existence, gone deep into itself for validation and knowing of who it really was. The wound of abandonment was only a part. The metaphor of this place began tying into my own and mirroring me, talking to me: To bring beauty to where there are scars and dump piles and feelings or appearances of abandonment, in the spiritual sense, through either the physical transformation of abandoned objects into art (as I have done in various art/land art projects throughout my 20's or through shifting/transforming the unseen and intangible places of abandonment to beauty/healing. My longing is to make this my life, to embody this somehow - but I don't yet know how. I do have a sense of peace, just being with you, land, knowing that we are where we are and thats simply all we can be right now. I have a desire to keep entering into dialogue with nature, opening up, being receptive. You have more to teach me, the metaphor that is nature and how that mirrors myself. Life as an actual unfolding of mystery.]
11:30am Bill Plotkin
We are always leaving home. Allow yourself to be completely gripped by mystery.
The 2nd task of the wanderer: Exploring mysteries of nature and psyche. Stage 4 is, as much as possible, a withdrawal. (Stage 5 is back to society with a gift to embody, back in a different sort of way)
Subtask: Aquiring and using soul craft skills. Techniques for soul encounter. That we might have a glimpse of the image at the center of what we were born with.
Soul Encounter: an experience of the mystery that you have a unique relationship with. A revelatory vision of the image or story you were born with to live into the world. Glimpse of the primary theme. The largest conversation you can have with the world. The promise it will kill you to break. You know you have to embody this.
[Mine has something to do with Web - to connect the dots, to draw the lines of relationships, to catch the drops and support them, hold them, transform/heal them, relate them into something that gives them wholeness and beauty. Over the summer, was given in a dream, the assignment Web. Then talked to a spider weaving its web about a month later and wrote a poem about it, glimpses coming, but still not clear]
Skills: Dreamwork: (not interpreting) but it wants to change/crack the ego open. We do our best to assist the dream and be open to the dream doing its work on the ego.
Self-designed ceremony - if the mystery has called and you feel like answering back.
3 steps: 1) my ceremony is starting, draw a circle and step in 2) an action that says to the mystery what you want to say to it, generally a yes, I am willing to surrender and be at the mercy of that which the mystery has told me. Your knees will likely get week if its a good ceremony. Another way you know, is if the results are unexpected, a surprise, something that helps you wake up.
- Vision Quest
- Poetry/music/dancing
- sacred sexuality
Cultivating relationship to all of life:
- solitude
- nature wandering
- shadow work
- praising the world
- art of being lost
- befriending the dark and death
- developing relationship to spirit
12pm Richard Rohr
Ritual substituted for reality in religion, example: confirmation - even the expectation that it would really change you has been lost in the church. Very well disguised egocentrism - this is not any soul awakening or encountering its just glorified self-interest and its still "all about me"
We are being led and guided by forces, but you only receive that guidance if you open to it and expect guidance! If it is not a gift to the bigger than you, than it is not a gift to the community.
You expect to be used, you expect to be an instrument, and you allow it!
You do not rush toward closure and answers. You awaken subtlty, allowing and hearing the little sublets. To balance saying with not saying. To balance knowing with not knowing. To be at peace with not saying and with not knowing. You won't move to further stages if you don't have this peace with not knowing. Spiral dynamics and Ken Wilber.
When you move from one stage to the other, you have to go through a dark night because you don't know the next stage and you're going into it not knowing.
You have to have compassion for those who still "need to know" and be able to detach yourself enough to not care what others think of you. That is the bigger response. Being able to distance yourself enough to be okay with them not being able to hear you. You are able to hear them and feel compassion for where they are at and not need to change them.
If you really are initiated, you are able to turn your wound into a sacred gift.
People that don't or won't struggle with their core wound, won't go deep.
What you do with your core wound, which invitees you to the rest of your life, but never goes away.
2pm Bill Plotkin
Poem by William Butler Yates (poem about his soul encounter) written in his late 20's or early 30's. He also wrote a book called "A Vision". This poem is called, "The Song of Wandering Angus" It predicts what Yates did his entire creative life. Angus is the Irish God of Love, Beauty and Youth (not a cow!) Hazel is a magical tree, suggesting a magical place.
A time in your life when there is a fire in your head and you go out to the magic place that opens heart and belly and there you go fishing in the depths. At a magical time, dawn/dusk. Called by your true name. The true name. Poet spent the rest of his life plucking apples from the sun and the moon.
There are 3 phases of descent.
How do you recognize an encounter with your soul?
Soul Encounter Traits:
- experienced during a non-ordinary state (fast, dream, illness, substance - plant allies in sacred ceremonies)
- experience is very deeply moving (not just interesting) tend to feel a violation of who you thought you were.
- Uncanny, erie, numinous, mysterious,
- shakes whole world to its foundations
- accompanied by synchronicities
- evokes profound emotions of hope, gratitude, joy and grief (grief for all the years lived without knowing) and fear for living with the burden
- boundless desire to live its and equal terror to do so
- to embody the image, would serve the whole community
- ecstatic, rapturous, beyond reason, lifts us out of ourselves
- relationship between this soul encounter and earlier unexplained mysterious experiences (the same theme that showed up then)
- you get a confirmation vision/dream/encounter about a month after the first encounter
- they end up being confirmed by the joy that comes through living them!
Exercise: Stage 4 practice: Outside. Bring journal. Prepared to offer gift. (Fears: nothing will happen and something will happen) could be a poem, tears, expression of yearning or joy. Consciously cross a threshold upon entry and return. Human crossing into sacred consciousness. A consciousness of mystery. A crossing such as crack, stream, branch, rock.
3 taboos during sacred practice: In the sacred time between thresholds, no eating, no speaking to humans, no human shelter.
Wander aimlessly until you feel called by something, that really catches your attention! a place or thing. Once you feel called (if nothing calls, just have presence wandering) Wait until you're chosen. Observe the thing that chose you for a length of time. Record senses. Might offer a gift. Go very humbly. Then, introduce yourself out loud using words or sound. Tell this other being or place the deepest truth you can possibly tell right now about yourself. Why you've been wandering around waiting to be called. Might speek about your greatest doubts, questions, fears, yearnings. Can also speak in body language, song, poetry. Then tell the other about it. Describe its features and what it is about it that has interested you or repelled you. Keep going that way until it interrupts you (with a sound, strong emotion, etc)
Doing this is different than fabricating metaphors (like the last exercise for me) This is actually waiting to see what it has to say to you, not your mind fabricating metaphors. Have the conversation. Don't interrupt it. Keep going with conversation. Finally, express gratitude. Then cross over your threshold again. You're not necessarily going to learn anything about yourself here. Be back in breakout groups at 3:30.
[I wandered into an arroyo. Things like trees and rock mounds keep seeming interesting but not really grabbing my attention, so I kept going. Then something made me wander down little hill/mini canyon where I noticed miniature arches carved by rain in the earth. 3 arches. I peered in one, and saw what was calling me. A little round ball of earth that looked for all the world like it had a face, like Buddah. Senses recorded: awe, birth, some discomfort, fear, difficulty finding a comfortable place to sit and keep eye contact because of shifting sand and feet falling asleep, childlike, bringing back memories of childhood making miniature landscapes and houses, rough, cool sand down back, tiredness. Oooh, delight. Throughness. Entering. Penetration. Solid. Still. "You are out there and I'm talking to you out there feeling like you are also in my soul, in here. You are outside and inside at the same time. The line, the barrier, between us is imagined. When I put my hand into the archway and close my eyes, I can feel energy. It is only when I touch physical earth of the archway that I forget and think there is a barrier because I feel a barrier with my body.
Afterwards, writing about it, Little ball of dirt budda face, you pulled me over to talk. I offered it the two golf balls I found on previous wanderings. 1 golf ball said: Top flight, Tour Range. The 2nd golf ball said, "Practice, top flite, infinity" They symbolized for me the gift of willingness to wander and "Tour the range" and to practice constantly having presence and conversation with infinity, or mystery. At the end, when I was saying my gratitudes, and looking for another gift to give or words for a poem, I was instructed to take back one of the golf balls, the one that said "Pracitce, top flite, infinity" as a remembrance for the practice and the experience.
My threshold was a crack in the road.]
4pm Bill Plotkin
Stage 5 "In the beginning, all you have is a dream" The shift between south and north hemispheres, starting the 2nd half of life. The youngest person in the western world Bill has seen at this stage was 25.
First half - world is in service to us. In the 2nd half, the ego is in service to the soul and the world. We are serving the world in a way we are only able to after soul initiation. Shortly before soul initiation, still experience soul as voice inside yourself or in nature, that voice, intuition, not sure why you have to do it, but you know you have to listen. After soul initiation, the world is reversed and the mature ego recognizes its in service to the soul, mystery. Its the greatest fulfillment.
Poem: "Revelation Must be Terrible" by David White
"You thought you were just going to keep learning stuff?"
"knowing you can never hide your voice again"
Soul apprentice at the Wellspring
Its a mystery bubbling up from the depths, coming to our consciousness now. Apprenticing to those mysteries and to a craft that will allow you to deliver those waters to your people.
Danger: you could become so enamored by these insights, dreams, etc. that you don't do anything with them. Or Danger: you start building your irrigation ditches etc. and get caught up with building the delivery systems to the point that the ego gets inflated. And you lose track of where the wellspring even is.
Delivery system: craft, art, career, profession. A job is not a delivery system until you realize the soul gift you are delving.
The soul doesn't care what delivery you use, it just says "embody me"
Tasks: Determine 1 or more delivery systems that will work well enough for you and your gift. You say, "Give me a clue for my delivery system" Soul says, "Thats not my job" You have to figure that out, maybe with the help of muse or mentors. Some things you don't know how, you just know.
The soul provides: Knowledge, abilities, values, the skills, talents you are just born with, no explaining why. Soul initiation is when an answer fully claims you and you accept your calling. There is a radical simplification of life. Problems that aren't relevant anymore, simplify.
Task: How do I transform my personality so I become an effective vehicle for soul?
A sacred wedding between soul and ego. A match made in heaven. Ego says, "Without you, I'd have no idea what my purpose is in life, soul you have given me that gift of embodying you, soul"
The specialty of the strategic mind is implementation not in knowing what to do or how to be in control.
Soul says back, "I am completely incapable of embodying myself in the world. I don't have the hands and skills. You can make me real. I wouldn't be without you."
Task Cont.
Continuing exploration of relationships to soul. Still heading down in soul encounters.
Exercise: Come back at 5:30, sunset is at 5:24.
Let yourself be pulled to non-human being that feelings like a wellspring of itself. Something that is manifesting. Look, feel and intuit its soul powers. What are the truths it makes everyday with its own body? Tell it about what you know about your soul image/story/power (or that you don't know and how you feel about that) What are you naturally good at? What are your qualities that people are inherently drawn to? What kinds of situations do you keep attraction? What life stories do you keep telling?
[I wander to a beautiful cactus who holds the setting sun in its arms. Cactus with Gold flowers. Beauty. Preciousness. Open arms, but prickly. Blooming. Opening. Holding light. Cradling rays along spines. Surviving desert dryness, heat, cold, wind. Surrendering and lifting up at once. Moving ever so slightly with the breeze. Unique.
I try to answer the questions in the exercise: stories: These are the ones I told in my spiritual autobiography for the Center of Action and Contemplations Internship Application. The stories of growing up in a loving family in nature in the Maine woods on a farm with horses, of transferring to a small liberal arts college on an island in Maine and majoring in Human Ecology, of taking 6 months off to volunteer at a camp hill community that turned out not to be the spiritual healing I wanted/expected but a spiritual growth experience that challenged me greatly and which I feel grateful for, trip to Chile to make land art in the desert, Lots of Travling, The intensity of grad school, the need to do something creative and study something creative and totally challenge myself there despite the stress and pressure, Falling in love twice and what that taught me, and now the CAC internship has to be added in. The patterns I see myself going through - lots of ups and excitement, followed by periods of withdrawal/recharging/refinding direction. Soul/image/story/power/what I know of it: That it has to do with the place I'm most vulnerable to being wounded in: [abandonment, lack of validation/affirmation/attention/lack of validation for my intuition/feeling worthless/loss of identity/not capable] Something about bringing beauty to those places or through transforming those places. That its more than just the physical transformation of abandoned objects, but that it goes deeper than that into the transforming of unseen wounds. Maybe? I'm not sure. My dream about mindfulness vs. mindlessness. Web/connection. Communion with a spider building its web. The reminder to be the connector of the web and not the one caught. People have always said I'm good at bringing people together and holding friend groups together, creating situations that bring people together. People have admired my adventurous spirit (which to me, just seems natural and is not something I'm being brave about, its just the way I am. Travel sense and enjoyment. Sense of timing and pacing and focusing in creative projects.
Not much time left, sun is going down.]
5:35 Richard Rohr
"You can't see until you're there. Until you see what you want to deliver, you just get caught up in the delivery systems. You've made the means, the end. Its a constant temptations, to make the medium the message - and often times, they're not the same thing. Stage 3 people accessorize the medium, protecting and defending it. Stage 3 church is preoccupied with minutia.
There's some work here. Preocupation with "Is my delivery system better than yours?" and no asking if there's any soul even to deliver!
Don't be too sophisticated about your delivery system either! Don't dismiss it immediately. Be prepared to be surprised. And don't judge a book by its cover. Sometimes there is a soul in there in that person. Instead ask, is this person a loving person? Is this person a happy person? If you're flowing, you're flowing and it doesn't matter what label or identification you have.
Appeal to courage, integrity and authenticity.
Yes, an individual journey. Its individuation that leads you down to a place thats communal and connected to all, that goes deep enough to connect you to those outside of your delivery system.
Any person operating from soul level bears fruit no matter what they do.
Its gonna happen and you know its gonna happen. If you have discovered your soul, it will be drawn out of you, others will notice it and help to draw it out of you.
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