MY DISSOLUTION — WHAT STAGE AM I IN?
Dissolution, following Bill Plotkin, happens between stages of development. As he writes, the purpose of dissolution is to “destabilize our everyday Village Consciousness and assist us to die to who we thought we were.” (Journey to Soul Initiation p. 98) We have to die to who we thought we were in order to make room for a new identity in the new developmental stage.
I have long thought, contrary to Plotkin, that there is both a human centric developmental wheel and a ecocentric one. Plotkin believes there is only an ecocentric developmental wheel, but I believe there is a difference between a 50 year old human centric adult who offers their gifts to a human community, and a 50 year old spiritual early adolescent who just mindlessly participates in the consumer conformist culture and has no real bigger purpose. At the same time, Plotkin’s insight about the ecocentric developmental wheel is so important because most theorists of human development completely miss the role of the human amidst the more than human world. I believe with Plotkin that our truest, deepest selves are oriented towards our alignment with the cosmos, the divine and the more than human world, however these terms might be defined.
So what stages of development am I between that I would be going through a dissolution? My view of myself for the past three years has been that I am an Early elder in the human centric wheel and an Early adult in the ecocentric wheel. That’s a big difference of two stages. I see/saw myself as an elder in the human centric wheel once I had retired from daily control of my business and felt myself withdrawing from wanting to pass on my human oriented wisdom. I cared far less about everyday things like how well the marketing funnel was working, teaching people how to run an organization or how to keep track of money in ways that made sense. I just didn’t care that much. I thought that marked an end to my human centric late adulthood.
As for my place on the ecocentric wheel, I have a target audience and small community of people interested in my Animist earth based Judaism. I write and teach. While I don’t care about making a name for myself, which would be a developmentally appropriate concern for an early adult, I certainly am not yet in a position where I can switch from being a primary provider to helping others spread these ideas—that would be the hallmark of being a late adult.
So what stages of development am I between that I would be going through a dissolution? My tentative conclusions are twofold. One is that I am sinking deeper into being an Early Elder on the human centric developmental wheel. I notice my consciousness is shifting more towards wider, cosmic concerns rather than ones oriented towards me in my human limitations (think ego or small self). But more than that, even when I found myself caring less about passing on my wisdom about how to run human organizations, I don’t think how I presented myself really changed. I was still buried in suburbia, which for me is the bosom of consumer conformist culture, I talked about the same kinds of things to most of the people I knew as I had before, and I just looked the same except for perhaps a little shaggier.
But now I find myself in a tug of war about this presentation. It’s still my comfort zone, but when I go there, I now find myself dissatisfied. There’s a voice inside that says this is not who you are anymore Jared, just stop it. That’s a new voice. It’s clearly the identity that my dissolution seeks to undermine so it can die. Who will I be on the other side of this dissolution? I have some ideas, but I really don’t know and that’s really a distraction from the focus on having my existing identity dissolve.
As Plotkin writes “You are a seeker but cannot decipher. You can cooperate but you can’t make it happen. You are not a solver [what we would like to do JG] but that which gets dissolved. (Journey to Soul Initiation p.71)
The second thing I think is going on is a bringing together of my ecocentric and human centric selves. 2 stages is a big, big gap, an unsustainable one I suspect. There’s no real accelerating a stage—it’s not like you can make up your mind to work through a given stage in the next six months and then go onto the next one. For early adulthood, for instance, it takes the time it takes to make the contribution you need to make before you start to feel dissatisfied with that contribution, before the stage starts to narrow and you find a restlessness to grow towards the next stage. So I suspect what is happening for me is rather a shift towards being more oriented towards the ecocentric wheel and letting go of the human centric wheel.
Maybe. All of life is a certain kind of mystery, and during periods of dissolution I think our job is to give ourselves over to that mystery and let it takes us where it will.
