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

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.

In contrast to those presented in most other developmental models, the stages of life portrayed here are essentially independent of chronological age, biological development, cognitive ability, and social role. Rather, the progression from one stage to the next is spurred by the individual's progress with the specific psychological and spiritual ta

nature's intention for us is not static. This intent itself has been evolving from the very beginnings of the human story: how we are presently designed to grow whole is not quite the same as how we were designed to grow whole in the past. For example, one of the things I've learned from Thomas Berry is that modern science and cosmology require us

Through psychospiritual adventure, the adolescent comes to know what she was born to do, what gift she possesses to bring to the world, what sacred quality lives in her heart, and how she might arrive at her own unique way of loving and belonging.

What makes you the individual you are is not your autonomy but your interdependent and communal relationship with everything else in nature. But having a specific and unique way of belonging to the world in no way implies that you necessarily know what that place is. Although you were born with the potential to occupy that place, you were not born

Just as the universe evolves through moments of crisis, so do individual humans. Each of the nine life-stage passages on the Wheel evokes a crisis, a death-rebirth transition. And just as grace is an element in the universe's evolution, so it is in our personal unfolding.

As 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 ma

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

When we say “ultimate place” — which is to say, when we are speaking of soul — we are calling attention to the very core or heart of a thing's identity, its decisive meaning or significance, its raison d'être.