Teacher training as soul initiation

Applying the insights of Bill Plotkin, Chris Bache and Domo Reshe Rinpoche to 21st century praxes of education and teacher training

When I think about the kind of training a teacher needs in this difficult 21st century, I'm not thinking about "professional development points" or webinars. I'm thinking about the deeper preparation that a human being needs to be able to guide others on the path of learning how to be a positive contributor to the Earth community.

In one of my earlier Spirit of Education posts, I pointed to the possibility of education as an initiatory experience. Initiation (whether in an indigenous culture, a religious order or a discipline of higher education) is always led by adults, often elders, who were themselves similarly initiated, and who have the appropriate skills to lead others on the same path.

This is all well and good, but it makes for a very conservative culture, that teaches each generation how to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors.

In the 21st century, we know we can't keep doing the same old, same old. We have to strike out and learn—or teach ourselves—how to do it differently, and hopefully better than previous generations.

I am all for self-education, and this is a time when opportunities for independent learning abound. But how to discern what is important, true and necessary from all the shiny baubles being constantly sold to us on the Web?

Having a teacher you can trust, who has been on the path ahead of you and can offer some guidance, can save a lot of time—and we truly don't have a whole lot of time to figure out how to live better on this Earth, as humans in community with all life.

The important thing for me is that we are not being told what to think, or even how to think, but rather shown how to prepare ourselves to step across the threshold of the future, and begin to think for ourselves—and not just with our minds, but with our hearts, with our whole multifaceted beings.

One of the guides I have been following for a while is Bill Plotkin, founder of the Animas Valley Institute. Plotkin, a psychologist by training, has developed an elaborate map of the psyche, which you can find laid out in his books Soulcraft, Nature and the Human Soul, and Wild Mind. He has spent most of his life guiding others in what he calls "the journey of soul initiation," which is also the title of his latest book.

Plotkin observes that in modern Western society most adults are developmentally stuck in a protracted stage of Adolescence, “due to the modern degradation of childhood, resulting in turn from cultural deterioration, including too many immature parents and educators.” He points to “the scarcity of true Adults” as the “root cause of our current crisis” and the reason that our culture is so dysfunctional and destructive.

A true Adult, Plotkin says, is “someone who knows why they were born, who knows who they are as a unique individual participant in the web of life, and who creatively occupies their distinctive eco-niche in their everyday life as a gift to their people and the greater Earth community.” A true Adult becomes “a visionary agent of evolution,” which “in an ego-centric, patho-adolescent society like ours,” he says, is “an agent of revolution.”

Yes! Instead of producing workers prepared to docilely take their place at an established corporate desk or biolab or factory, what if education invited young people—and people of all ages—to think deeply about how they could contribute to the urgent task of helping humanity evolve into a better relationship with the Earth, and then supported them in envisioning and crafting new social structures in which that relationship could unfold and bear fruit?

In Plotkin's view, the "the journey of soul initiation" is not so much about finding a vocation as about finding one's true calling in Life.

At the Animas Valley Institute, Plotkin employs ancient indigenous methods of solo vision fasts and group rituals to lead people in moving from the carefree, egocentric stage of adolescence into the more sober, focused stage of adulthood. It’s not an easy journey, by any means.

“The journey of soul initiation brings about the death of our Adolescent Ego and our Adolescent worldview—and the Adolescent Ego does not go gently into that good night,” Plotkin says. The immature Self must dissolve, in the same way that a caterpillar dissolves on the way to becoming a butterfly.

True soul initiations are risky. Not risky like adolescent hazing rites, where a pledge is tested to see if he can survive something stupid like drinking too much alcohol; risky in the sense that one is invited to go beyond the Ego, to transpersonal realms of the psyche that merge with the Anima Mundi and indeed with the entire Cosmos.

A modern American teacher who did this on his own is Chris Bache, who spent many years as a mild-mannered professor of theology at a state university while also, on his own time, taking himself on a deep spiritual journey via high-dose LSD.

Am I suggesting teacher training should include LSD? No. But Bache describes how he became a better teacher through his deep spiritual inquiry into the nature of reality and the human role in the Earth community. For him, LSD was an accelerator; as he documents in LSD and the Mind of the Universe, what he learned in his 73 trips over 20 years was more than most humans learn in several lifetimes. But it was painful and risky. He might have lost his mind.

Eastern traditions like Buddhism have developed a long initiatory process of sitting alone and exploring the inner realms of the psyche.

In The Way of the White Clouds, Lama Anagarika Govinda recalls how his Tibetan teacher, Domo Geshe Rinpoche, was able to give his students a sense of the "power" of "belonging to a higher state of consciousness....Such power," Lama Govinda says, "can only be created through a life of meditation and becomes intensified with each period of complete seclusion, like the cumulative force of the waters of a dammed-up river.”

Somewhat paradoxically, the goal of this practice of solitary meditation is to take one's place as a fully aware and open-hearted member of the Earth community.

“One should look upon all beings like upon one’s own mother or one’s own children," Domo Geshe Rinpoche says, "since there is not a single being in the universe that in the infinity of time has not been closely related to us in one way or another….Imagine the Buddha merging with you, taking a seat on the lotus-throne of your heart….Do not think of your own salvation, but make yourself an instrument for the liberation of all living beings.”

Merging with All That Is involves a breakdown of the individual Ego, necessary in order to move from Adolescence to true Adulthood, in Bill Plotkin's terms.

Plotkin sees this as a process of evolution on the macro, cultural level as well. “In the Western world," he says, "we are now, as a society, in a Cocoon. Our sociocultural structures have been dissolving for quite some time. This Dissolution is a necessary phase in cultural transformation—just as it is in individual initiation."

Is he talking about what Jem Bendell and others call "collapse"? Yes. But it's a transformative, productive form of collapse that leads to a more mature and caring relationship with our world and with all members of the Earth community.

Plotkin imagines soul-initiated Adults and Elders as "imaginal cells" that can help our "egocentric dominator society...metamorphose into a mature partnership society,” ready to take our place in what Thomas Berry called the Ecozoic Era.

Obviously, the more mature Adults and Elders we have in our society, as teachers who can turn around and help others on the journey of soul initiation, the faster we’ll be able to create a life-enhancing human culture on Earth.

Domo Geshe Rimpoche would sit in solitary meditation for months, even years at a time, seeking enlightenment. At this perilous moment in human history, it does not seem like we have that kind of time.

But think about all the time that we require young people to devote to their formal educations. Years and years! Imagine if we began to make use of that time with a different kind of intention—to help students explore their soul purpose and to develop the gifts that they will be able to contribute to making life on Earth better for all.

In upcoming posts, I'll share more about some of the other true Adults out there doing the essential work of moving us, individually and culturally, towards the Ecozoic Era that Thomas Berry prophesied.

Just as Paul Hawken recognized the vast distributed energy of small social and environmental justice organizations in his book Blessed Unrest, which inspired him to get them working together in his global Project Drawdown, I think it's time for the many small groups working towards human spiritual development to recognize each other and join forces; to break out of the cocoon and spread our wings together in joyful and meaningful flight.

Just waiting for the butterflies! Photo by J. Browdy