Book Notes for Nature and the Human Soul

This book has offered me a unique perspective into the growth process of humans. It has helped me to understand the meaning of adulthood better and what comes with it. I now borrow the term walking a "soul-centric path" from this book, with "soul" meaning: our place in this world, something that lives.

Please take a look at the quotes below. They are particularly insightful.

Here is a rolling (sketchy) list of insights and thoughts related to the book:

• Many people in the West never reach adulthood in the sense that they never figured out what their place in the world really is.

  • Place in the world = Soul = Relationship to self and the world around us = Both!

• The book's been incredibly validating - it's given me a framework to understand why advice from people in different growth stages might not resonate, and why that's okay (this isn't me being arrogant like I worried)

• Big realization: there IS a pattern to the growth process, which actually makes total sense

  • Finally letting myself see growth as having some order to it - not a rigid linear thing, but more like a curved spiral. I resisted this before because I didn't want to oversimplify something so complex and dynamic

• 💠 Major insight about the ego: it's not this one bad thing to fight against, but actually something that can mature from an emotionally immature state into a companion we can work with (it holds so much power!)

• Important reminder to myself: no part of the journey is "better" than another - every stage has its own value and purpose

• This especially helps me understand dynamics with family and friends who are in very different growth processes (or stuck at certain stages but tend to claim authority because they're older)

Link

Link to book here

> Quotes from the book that I want to save and share with you

CHAPTER 1: CIRCLE AND ARC: The Wheel of Life and the Great Turning

True adulthood, or psychological maturity, has become an uncommon achievement in Western and Westernized societies, and genuine elderhood nearly nonexistent.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 2, location 115)

My beginning premise is that a more mature human society requires more mature human individuals. For twenty-five years, I have been asking how we might raise children, support teenagers, and ripen ourselves so we might engender a sustainable human culture. My second premise is that nature (including our own deeper nature, soul) has always provided and still provides the best template for human maturation.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 2, location 121)

A third premise 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.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 3, location 134)

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 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 third 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.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 3, location 135)

soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human maturity. No true adult wants to be a consumer, worker bee, or tycoon, or a soldier in an imperial war, and none would go through these motions if there were other options at hand. The enlivened soul and wild nature are deadly to industrial growth economies—and vice versa.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 8, location 244)

Thomas Berry writes, "We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. ... What is needed is not transcendence but 'inscendence.' "8 This descent, this inscendence, is the journey of soul discovery, which can be engaged only by those who have moved beyond the early adolescence in which our society has stalled. Through an individual's initiatory time in the underworld of soul, she uncovers a dream, a vision, or a revelation that will "inspire, guide, and drive the action" for the rest of life, as Thomas says. "The dream provides the energy for adult action."

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 8, location 253)

Viable cultural systems have always been sourced in the soul-rooted revelations, visions, and dreams of those with the courage to wander across borders into exotic psychospiritual realms, those like Crazy Horse, Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha, and the equally inspiring but (in a patho-adolescent society) less-celebrated visionary women such as Mother Teresa, Hildegard von Bingen, and Wangari Maathai.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 9, location 266)

As a whole, Westernized societies don't seem to have a clue about how to prepare a young person for sexual flowering, social independence, authentic personal expression, soul discovery, or a lifetime of interdependent relationships in the more-than-human world of nature. Traditional rites of passage, stripped of their vitality centuries before, have become empty shells, like the long-discarded husks of departed souls.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 10, location 298)

It became evident to me that the day-by-day process of personal development was a much bigger factor in maturation than the ritual marking of passages between stages.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 13, location 363)

"We cannot intentionally create unless we are able, first, to imagine," writes my colleague, the author and wilderness explorer Geneen Marie Haugen. "Imagination may be the most essential, uniquely human capacity—creating both the dead-end crises of our time and the doorway through them."

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 17, location 458)

Homo imaginens might translate not only as the imagining human, but as the imagining Earth." 17 We might speculate that Earth is trying to imagine its own future through us.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 17, location 462)

What really makes a person an elder has nothing to do with, say, chronological age, number of grandchildren, retirement, or even achievement in a certain craft or career. Rather, it has to do with a way of belonging to the world that is consciously centered on the soul of the more-than-human community.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 25, location 640)

Because this is the stage in which Western societies have stalled, and because our societies are not informed by the deep structure of human development, gender differences have seemed bigger and more definitive to us than they really are.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 25, location 646)

The essential issue concerning oppression is not gender-based or race-based but egocentric versus soulcentric.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 25, location 653)

CHAPTER 2: THE POWER OF PLACE

Your soul is your true home. In the moment you finally arrive in this psychoecological niche, you feel fully available and present to the world, unlost. This particular place is profoundly familiar to you, more so than any geographical location or any mere dwelling has ever been or could be. You know immediately that this is the source, the marrow, of your true belonging. This is the identity no one could ever take from you. Inhabiting this place does not depend on having anyone else's permission or approval or presence. It does not require having a particular job—or any at all. You can be neither hired for it nor fired from it. Acting from this place aligns you with your surest personal powers (your soul powers), your powers of nurturing, transforming, creating; your powers of presence and wonder.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 40, location 960)

Before soul initiation, wherever you go, there you are. After soul initiation, wherever you go, Here you are.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 40, location 969)

An adult is someone who has encountered her soul, retrieved some knowledge of her ultimate place in the world, acquired some practical means for occupying this place among her people, made a commitment to doing so, and is doing it.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 41, location 985)

An elder is someone who, after many years of adulthood, consistently occupies his ultimate place without any further effort to do so. This frees him for something with yet greater scope and depth and fulfillment, namely, caring for the soul of the world. He does this by assisting others to prepare for, discover, and embody their souls, and by supporting the human-Earth system in the evolution of its soul.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 41, location 987)

Sadly, it has become rare in contemporary society to meet soulcentric men and women, those who are clear and passionate about life purpose, who know deep down in their bones the treasures they possess for their people, who truly know who their people are, who most every day can be found joyously engaged in their soulwork, who derive deep satisfaction from their efforts in making our world a more vital and beautiful place, and who experience deeply and abundantly their interdependent membership in the natural world. These are the surefire signs of a soul-initiated person, a genuinely adult human.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 45, location 1093)

cultural anthropocentrism ("the world was created for the use of us humans, especially my class, gender, religion, or nation") encourages each citizen to cultivate a use-relationship with things and other people (egocentrism).

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 46, location 1108)

The primary values of an egocentric society are safety, comfort, middleworld pleasures, and enhancement of socioeconomic status. The safety that is sought includes physical and medical safety, but primarily it is a social safety derived from acceptance and belonging.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 46, location 1114)

The problem is not these goal themselves but what is missing.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 47, location 1118)

Egocentrism is why industrial growth societies are greedy, empires are imperial, and dominator societies are violent. Soulcentrism is why life-sustaining societies and Earth communities serve the greater whole and why partnership societies are life-nurturing.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 47, location 1139)

CHAPTER 3: OVERVIEW OF THE WHEEL OF LIFE

The hero's journey is an intricate interlude, often unfolding over a period of several months or years. It is the labyrinthine adventure of entering the mysterious depths of psyche and nature, experiencing there a psychospiritual death and rebirth, and returning with a new maturity and a life-enhancing vision.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 55, location 1292)

In appraising the merit of any model, the primary question to ask is not whether it's true but whether it's a valuable tool of description, discussion, and action.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 56, location 1326)

serving our community through soulwork.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 59, location 1383)

The only way to cooperate with the process of maturation is to embrace fully the stage you're in (and its tasks). Paradoxically, you have to love the stage you're in, in order to (eventually) leave it.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 60, location 1412)

The passage between any two life stages amounts to a psychospiritual trauma, a death-rebirth experience. There's both a loss and a gain—for the community as well as for the individual. The individual acquires new eligibilities and relationships, but leaves behind old comforts and joys and a familiar world. The community gains a more mature member but suffers a diminishment in the cherished qualities that the less-ripened person had conferred upon family and community.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 64, location 1494)

CHAPTER 4: THE INNOCENT IN THE NEST: Early Childhood (Stage 1)

creating fearful, submissive conformists (immature worker-consumers) is precisely the intention of OT. A plenitude of such conformists is a fundamental requirement for prolonging the industrial growth society.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 101, location 2290)

And humanity is becoming ever more class-divided between the entitled and the disenfranchised, the wealthy and the poor. In addition to being unsustainable, this polarization is socially, economically, and politically unjust. The root cause is the pervasive failure of individual human development, which, at its core, is a cultural failure. Solutions, then, are not merely economic or political; they are also psychological, cultural, and spiritual.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 103, location 2336)

"Positive reinforcement" by any name or euphemism is nonetheless bribery, just as "negative reinforcement" amounts to coercion, blackmail, or extortion, and "aversive conditioning" is still punishment.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 104, location 2345)

Recent research demonstrates that even the use of praise can be contrary to healthy parenting when it is self-consciously designed to reinforce what the child is doing as opposed to a genuine expression of gratitude and admiration.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 104, location 2349)

CHAPTER 5: THE EXPLORER IN THE GARDEN: Middle Childhood (Stage 2)

One of the ways the Explorer investigates his world is by altering his consciousness, his perspective on the world. He does this by, for example, spinning until he gets dizzy and falls, rolling down hills, hanging from a tree upside down, or deliberately surprising himself, scaring himself, or getting a bit lost. He wants to see the world from as many perspectives as he can. He is, by nature, inclined to explore the unknown, experiment with equilibrium changes, and face his fears. These are precisely the sorts of things we'll continue to do in more elaborate ways when older—if, that is, we grow soulcentrically. By the same token, these are the very things our egocentric society teaches us to resist as "adults."

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 116, location 2614)

from a soulcentric perspective, the primary developmental goal in parenting is not raising happy, well-rounded, well-educated, physically sound children. We all want this, but there is a greater goal that reframes all other child-rearing intentions, and which actually enhances the chance of raising happy children. That greater goal is to maintain the vitality of the culture, which sometimes means, as it does now, to thoroughly transform the culture—and to do so in part by raising children who have the potential to become soul-initiated adults, people who will remake our world through their mature, embodied creativity.

~ Nature and the Human Soul (p. 121, location 2712)