Читать книгу Wild Mind - Bill Plotkin - Страница 10

Introduction

Re-Visioning Our Selves

Let the day grow on you upward

through your feet,

the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,

until by evening you are a black tree;

feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,

the new moon rising out of your forehead,

and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits

like rivulets under white leaves.

Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.

You have never possessed anything

as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned

from the first outcry

through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

— DEREK WALCOTT, “EARTH”

It’s time to take another look at ourselves — to re-enliven our sense of what it is to be human, to breathe new life into ancient intuitions of who we are, and to learn again to celebrate, as we once did, our instinctive affinity with the Earth community in which we’re rooted. We’re called now to rediscover what it means to be human beings in a wildly diverse world of feathered, furred, and scaled fellow creatures; flowers and forests; mountains, rivers, and oceans; wind, rain, and snow; Sun and Moon.

It’s time to take an ecological and holistic look at the human psyche, to make a fresh start with Western psychology.¹ In an era when the revealed interdependency of all things is radically reshaping every field of knowledge, what might we discover about the human psyche — the totality of our psychological capacities, both conscious and unconscious — when we consider that we, too, are expressions of nature’s qualities, patterns, and motifs?

We’re being summoned by the world itself to make many urgent changes to the human project, but most central is a fundamental re-visioning and reshaping of ourselves, a shift in consciousness. We must reclaim and embody our original wholeness, our indigenous human nature granted to us by nature itself. And the key to reclaiming our original wholeness is not merely to suppress psychological symptoms, recover from addictions and trauma, manage stress, or refurbish dysfunctional relationships but rather to fully flesh out our multifaceted, wild psyches, committing ourselves to the largest story we’re capable of living, serving something bigger than ourselves. We must dare again to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor our kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape ourselves into visionaries with the artistry to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.

BECOMING FULLY HUMAN

Emerging in the late nineteenth century, Western psychology was seeded in that era’s prevailing practice and philosophy of medicine. Psychology’s focus was on diagnosis and treatment of symptoms, diseases, and “mental illness.” It was, and in many ways still is, an attempt to identify what could and does go wrong with the human psyche when scrutinized outside its cultural and ecological contexts: neuroses, psychoses, personality and attachment disorders, manias, depressions, obsessions, and addictions. With few exceptions — such as Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, James Hillman’s archetypal “re-visioning” of psychology,² and the new field of positive psychology³ — there’s been too little consideration of what is inherently right and inspiring about human beings. There’s been insufficient tending to the process of becoming fully human — an active, deeply imaginative, contributing member of what cultural ecologist David Abram calls the more-than-human world,⁴ a world that includes human society as a subset of a much more extensive Earth community.

Western psychology’s established ways of understanding ourselves have unintentionally cramped our abilities to grow whole and to fully mature. The agenda of mainstream psychotherapy has been, from its beginnings, remarkably limited and, consequently, limiting. What if, for example, our primary human need and opportunity is not to endlessly attend to our emotional wounds and the eradication of perceived psychological disorders but rather to fathom and flesh out our natural human wholeness and to embody this integral bounty as a gift to others and our world?

Conventional Western psychology has focused on pathology rather than possibility and participation, and this renders it incomplete… and in many ways obsolete.⁵

In Western culture, we’ve enclosed ourselves within continually mended fences of excessive safety, false security, and shallow notions of “happiness,” when all the while the world has been inviting us to stride through the unlocked gate and break free into realms of greater promise and possibilities. Our psychotherapy-fashioned fences have affirmed our flaws and failures and corralled us within psychosocial prisons of our own making. Our mainstream educational and religious institutions likewise have suppressed our human potential and magnificence, or at least failed to evoke and foster our brilliance and virtuosity, our capacity to truly mature and to help make our world a better place.⁶

OUR INNATE HUMAN RESOURCES

Our human psyches possess, as capacities, a variety of astonishing resources about which mainstream Western psychology has little to say. By uncovering and reclaiming these innate resources, shared by all of us by simple virtue of our human nature, we can more easily understand and resolve our intrapsychic and interpersonal difficulties as they arise. We need not be as dependent as we have been on the psychological, social, and professional resources of others — clergy and counselors, family and friends, psychotherapists and psychiatrists — or on the neurological reconfiguration services of psychopharmacological chemicals, whether prescribed or elective.

The alleviation of personal troubles is, of course, important to all of us. But the significance and relevance of our innate psychological resources — largely unrecognized, unvalued, and uninventoried by Western psychology and culture — go well beyond the alleviation of personal troubles. Our untapped inner resources are also essential to the flowering of our greatest potentials, to the actualization of our true selves, and to the embodiment of the life of our very souls. These natural faculties are what we must cultivate in order to actively protect and restore our planet’s ecosystems and to spark the urgently needed renaissance of our Western and Westernized cultures. And these innate human resources are precisely those that enable each of us to identify the unique genius and hidden treasure we carry for the world — and, in this way, to participate fully and consciously in the evolution of life on Earth.

These resources — which I call the four facets of the Self, or the four dimensions of our human wholeness — wait within us, but we might not even know they exist until we discover how to access them, cultivate their powers, and integrate them into our everyday lives. Reclaiming these essential human capacities of the Self ought to be the highest priority in psychology, education, religion, medicine, and leadership development. Doing so empowers people to wake up, rise up, and become genuine agents of cultural transformation — and, in the bargain, experience the most profound fulfillment of a lifetime.

The recognition and embrace of these inherent human strengths, capacities, and sensibilities turn much of Western psychology on its head. Our entire approach to understanding and quickening human potential and addressing personal problems shifts radically.

For example, many of the behavioral patterns that mainstream psychology labels as psychopathologies (such as anxiety, depression, manias, phobias, personality disorders, and the tendency to hear or see things other people don’t) are not necessarily problems in themselves. How do we know when they are and when they’re not? What if most actual pathologies are primarily symptoms of underdeveloped psychological resources — inborn capacities of the Self that await cultivation within everyone? Psychological symptoms may best be relieved not by directly trying to eradicate them, impede them, or mask them but rather by developing our innate resources, the unavailability of which may be the primary reason these symptoms appeared in the first place. Perhaps we exhibit psychological symptoms not so much because we’re dis-ordered but because we’re deficient in our embodiment of wellness, health, or wholeness.

When we eliminate symptoms without cultivating wholeness, we still have an unwell, unwhole, or fragmented psyche that will soon enough sprout new symptoms that express, in yet another way, the lack of wholeness.

Here’s an analogy from ecology: When an ecosystem has been damaged — say, from logging, overgrazing, or chemical-dependent mono-crop agriculture — and then you leave it alone, invasive species typically show up and take over. If you then attempt to simply suppress or eliminate the invasives — whether through pesticide application or heroic weeding — you’re not strengthening the ecosystem but rather merely suppressing a symptom called “weeds.” In contrast, if you tend the health of the ecosystem — for example, by improving soil quality or planting native species — the invasives find a less suitable landing site and the ecosystem is more quickly restored to its natural and mature wholeness. Likewise, when we tend the well-being of our human psyches — by improving our social and ecological “soil” and cultivating the “native species” of the Self — there is less opportunity for the fragmented or wounded elements of our psyches to take over; the psychological “space” is already occupied by the facets of a more fully flourishing being. We’ve placed the emphasis on promoting health and wholeness rather than on (merely) suppressing pathology and fragmentedness.

We can douse our psyches with pharmaceutical pesticides and thera- peutically weed them, but a much better approach would be to enhance our psychological, cultural, and ecological soil and to cultivate the capacities of our native human wholeness.

A second limiting assumption of conventional Western psychology — in addition to the idea that the symptom is the problem rather than an indication of a problem — is that our difficulties are solely or primarily a result of troubles within individual psyches (or, even worse, within individual brains).⁷ But in recent decades, we’ve come to understand that our psychological health relies profoundly on the health of the world in which we are embedded — the psychosocial well-being of our families, the maturity and diversity of our human communities, and the vitality of our natural environments. Indeed, the very meaning of the phrase psychological health is interpersonal and ecological and cannot be coherently reduced to something merely subjective, internal, or neurological. Behavioral patterns that some might perceive as psychological disorders are often understandable and natural reactions to a disordered world. Most personal difficulties are symptoms of problems in our relationships, families, societies, and ecosystems.

When a large proportion of people in a given culture have significant psychological troubles, as is demonstrably the case in the Western world today, these people are not to blame. Their culture is. And yet their culture is constituted by the collective actions of its members. It is the responsibility of all capable individuals to help make their culture whole and vital. Those who are most capable in this way are those who are most whole in themselves.

How can we most effectively grow whole and participate in the revitalization of the whole? This book offers an answer.

In these pages, I introduce a map of psychological wholeness, a map that is nonarbitrary and comprehensive precisely because it’s rooted in nature’s own map of wholeness. The Nature-Based Map of the Psyche serves as a guide to becoming fully human by cultivating the four facets of the Self and discovering both the limitations and the gifts of our wounded, fragmented, and shadowed subpersonalities. This map of the psyche has been in development since the 1980s and has been field-tested and refined by psychologists, counselors, life coaches, educators, clergy, parents, initiation guides, and leaders of wilderness rites in their work with thousands of people of all ages.

For those of you who are psychotherapists, philosophers, professionals in another related field, or simply interested in learning more, I’ve used this book’s endnotes primarily for ideas and references that may be of particular interest to you. Also see the website www.wildmindbook.com, especially the page “For Professionals.”

REWILDING PSYCHOLOGY

Beyond its focus on pathology rather than possibility and participation, another feature of conventional Western psychology that renders it incomplete and largely obsolete is that, like mainstream Western culture more generally, it is alienated from the greater Earth community — especially from nature’s untamed powers, qualities, species, and habitats. This is a core insight of the developing field of ecopsychology.⁸ What makes us human is not merely other humans. We evolved over millennia in response to the challenges and opportunities encountered within a wildly complex web of ecological relationships in a thoroughly animate world. The ways we think, feel, perceive, imagine, and act have arisen in attunement to the rhythms of the day and the turning of the seasons and in intimate relationship with myriad other life-forms and forces. Although in everyday Western life we might feel cut off from our wild Earthly roots and relationships, it nevertheless remains true that the deep structures of our human psyche — the underlying patterns, universal archetypes, innate capacities available to us all, and, yes, even the distinctive ways we are psychologically wounded and fragmented — have emerged from this living web.

What insights, then, about our human psyches appear when we return to Earth, when we remember that we are related to everything that has ever existed, when we reinstall ourselves in a world of spring-summer-fall-winter, volcanoes, storms, surf, bison, mycelium, Moon, falcons, sand dunes, galaxies, and redwood groves? What do we discover about ourselves when we consent again to being human animals — bipedal, omnivorous mammals with distinctive capacities for self-reflexive consciousness, dexterity, imagination, and speech? In what ways will we choose to live when we fully remember the naturalness and ecological necessity of death? Who will we see in the mirror when we face up to the present-day realities of human-caused mass extinction, ecosystem collapse, and climate destabilization? And what mystery journey will unfold when we answer the alluring and dangerous summons now emanating from the human soul, from the dream of the Earth,⁹ and from an intelligent, evolving, ensouled Universe?

Beyond insights into the nature of our humanity, what will we discover — or remember — about the most effective methods for cultivating our human wholeness once we liberate psychotherapy, coaching, education, and religion from indoor consulting rooms, classrooms, and churches? What happens when we rewild our techniques and practices for facilitating human development — not by merely getting them out the door and onto the land or waters, but, much more significantly, by fashioning approaches in which our encounters with the other-than-human world are the central feature? What happens, in other words, when we allow nature itself to be the primary therapist or guide, while the human mentor or adviser becomes more of an assistant to nature, an agent or handmaiden of the wild?

We have a vital opportunity now to shape a new Western psychology that acknowledges humanity as, first and foremost, natural, of nature — not separate from it. It’s time to rewild psychology with ideas and methods rooted in the rhythms, patterns, principles, and other-than-human encounters of greater nature. We seek a Western psychology firmly planted in both wild soil and the soul of the world, at once both an ecopsychology and a depth psychology, one that emboldens us to serve the greater Earth community and to enhance the life of all species, and that does not merely tempt us to use nature for our own healing, self-centered benefit, or egocentric profit. A mature ecotherapy does not attempt to decrease our anxiety, outrage, fear, grief, or despair in response to the ongoing industrial destruction of the biosphere; rather, it helps us to more fully experience these feelings so that we can revitalize ourselves emotionally and, in doing so, enable our greatest contributions to a cultural renaissance. This is our current collective human adventure, which theologian and cultural historian Thomas Berry calls the Great Work of our time: “to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”¹⁰ It is what ecophilosopher Joanna Macy refers to as the Great Turning, “the transition from a doomed economy of industrial growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world.”¹¹

The Great Work of our time calls us to something greater than personal happiness and something more than mere refinements in politics, economy, religion, and education. At its most fundamental level, the Great Work necessitates both a revolution in our understanding of what it is to be human and a revival of our abilities to realize our potential and to transform our contemporary cultures.

It’s time, then, to redraw our map of the human psyche, a revision germinated not in notions of symptoms and illness but in our innate wholeness and our foundational and organic embedment in the natural world.

Toward these ends, this book introduces a holistic and integral ecology of the human psyche that encompasses the best insights of existing Western psychologies but also stretches far beyond them, extending our appreciation of the psyche’s untapped potentials and its inner diversity, intricacy, and structural elegance.

The Nature-Based Map of the Psyche highlights our positive, life-enhancing resources and perspectives and extols them as foundational to our humanity. The accent is not on our fragmented parts or wound stories, or how our psyches stall out in neurotic patterns, or how we might merely recover from trauma, pathology, or addiction; rather, the accent is on our wholeness and potential magnificence, how we can enhance our personal fulfillment and participation in our more-than-human world, and how we can become fully human and visionary artisans of cultural renaissance.