Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World

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,

The Wheel portrays human development as the process of preparing to discover soul, cultivating a relationship with soul, and embodying soul. This is why I call it the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel.

What's so great about being human? It might be this: The ability to know that we know gives us the ability to know ourselves, the ability to know that we exist and that we exist in an astonishing universe. It gives us the ability to fall in love with every thing and with eternity. If we are the only beings who know that we know, then we are the onl

in the case of the human soul, a niche is highly differentiated both psychologically and ecologically. The human soul is a psycho-ecological niche, a niche whose essential features include the capacity for conscious self-awareness as well as social and ecological attributes. We humans occupy both a noosphere and an ecosphere. This is an essential f

What I mean by place is similar to what ecologists mean by niche, which refers to the position or function of an organism within a community of plants and animals. A niche consists of a set of relationships with other creatures and with the land and sky and the waters. It's a particular node in a living web.

Wisdom traditions worldwide say there's no greater blessing than to live the life of your soul, the source of your deepest personal fulfillment and of your greatest service to others. It's what you were born for. It's the locus of authentic personal power — not power over people and things, but rather the power of partnership with others, the power

Another useful way to speak of soul is as story. Psychologist Jean Houston, for example, speaks of the larger story each person is born to live. This larger story — much deeper than your prosaic personal history — expresses the ultimate meaning of your life, its true significance, in the same way a myth communicates truth or gnosis. To be living th

For four hundred years now, Cartesian thinking and language have gotten us into all sorts of difficulties — scientific, religious, spiritual, and educational. I'm joining the many others who are practicing an alternative way of thinking and speaking within psychology, philosophy, and ecology.6 So, for example, rather than say that we humans are phy

If it weren't for the existence of the ego, we wouldn't wonder about our true place. We would simply take it. It's our egos that do the wondering. Without egos, we would take our place instinctively, as everything else does, and like everything else, we would not know that we knew our place. And yet, if we didn't wonder about our place, if, that is