Center Pole Reflections:
“Who Am I?”
By Randy Morris, Ph.D.
“Into the same river I both step and do not step, I am and I am not.” --Heraclitus
To ask the question, “Who am I?” is to begin the long quest to understand one’s own identity, one’s place in the social world, one’s place in the natural world, and one’s purpose for living. It is an elusive question, though ancient in origin, as attested by the above quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c 500 BCE). Over 2500 years ago, people were asking how it could be true that “I” can be the same person over a life time and yet be in a constant state of flux and change. The moment I step into a river, the water that hits my foot changes every millisecond, and yet it is the same river. The cells of my body are constantly renewing themselves, and yet I am the same person over a lifetime. Who is this “I” with whom I have been in relationship my whole life? What does it want? What is its purpose? For an organization like Rite of Passage Journeys, which aims to support an eco-centric vision of human development across the life cycle, these are crucial questions. I offer the following reflections as a step in the direction of clarifying the basic principles and assumptions that guide our work. I often refer to these assumptions as the Center Pole of Journeys. The image of the Center Pole marks where we stand most authentically as a non-profit organization and as an earth-centric community. A well built Center Pole tells us what we are, and what we are not. To articulate a Center Pole is to encourage and foster a community of learning.
The mystery of constancy in the midst of change, of identity and personality, has been approached in a huge diversity of ways over the ensuing millennia. These complex images and theories of what a human being is, and how they evolve throughout a lifetime, are important for a very specific reason: what we imagine human beings to be, will limit and condition what they can become. For example, if I think that children are basically ‘bundles of desires’, units in an economic order whose purpose is to consume, work and die, then that imagination of what human beings are, will color and condition what those human beings can become, namely, consumers in a capitalist economy. Any human images that challenge or contradict that collective image will be labeled as crazy or, at best, “unpatriotic”. Clearly, it behooves us to have an expansive view of what it means to be a human being. In the history of the dominant Western world, two ways of thinking about human development emerged, two archetypal patterns of thought about the nature of the “I” and how humans change over time. (1)
One was grounded in the thinking of the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) who said that babies are born as a tabula rasa, a ‘blank slate’, upon which experience writes its script. In this view, everyone is born equal (a pillar of democracy) but the cultural circumstances of one’s upbringing – the parents, the siblings, the economic class, the racial and ethnic context, etc. – determine the nature of one’s identity and forever fix one’s personality. The outer circumstances of our lived world act as mirrors to our inner self and we believe ourselves to be what we are told by others. The “I” is primarily composed of ‘introjects’ from the outer world of parents and community into the inner world of personal experience. In the 20th century, with the advent of psychotherapy in the first half of the century and the principles of post-modern social-constructivism in the second half, this view morphed into a position that one’s personality, while significantly shaped by the social circumstances of childhood, can be de-constructed and changed through the application of social conditioning or therapeutic techniques. In some contemporary versions of the tabula rasa, the identity that seemed so firmly set in childhood is so much in flux, so subject to the whims of changing social circumstance and therapeutic intervention, that personality is inherently unstable and a center can neither be found nor understood.
A second archetypal pattern of thought about human development emerged from the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). It was Rousseau who established the foundations of the Romantic movement by asserting that nature was a child’s best teacher and that the proper role of the tutor was to protect the child from harm while allowing him or her to learn nature’s lessons. Instead of emphasizing the cultural conditions that write upon the ‘blank slate’ of personality, Rousseau trusted the inborn temperamental predispositions of the child. We are born with an innate goodness, he said, though it can be warped by the social conditions of family and community. But because that goodness is always there, it can be retrieved at later stages of the life cycle.
In the 20th century, influenced by post-Darwinian ideas that human beings are evolved animals, Rousseau’s emphasis on the innate wisdom that resides in every person came to be understood in various schools of depth psychology as instinctual predispositions, what the psychologist C.G. Jung called ‘archetypes’ or innate patterns of thought, that predispose us to think and behave in certain ways even prior to our exposure to outer conditions. In Jung’s view of the collective unconscious, we can ‘know’ things that we have never directly experienced, the same way a wren knows how to build a nest without being taught. We inherit these instincts, and the wisdom that shaped them over our evolutionary history, as gifts from our ancestors. These archetypes manifest in human experience as symbols and images that generate a kind of ‘hunger’ or ‘desire’ for certain ways of being in the world. They are inborn potentials that yearn to be awakened in the outer world. (2) If that archetypal intent is blocked by outer circumstances, a neurosis forms. The frustration of archetypal intent is a major source of suffering in the human world. But it implies that there is already something there at birth, wanting to incarnate in the world. That archetypal intent contains the seeds of our mytho-poetic identity, a form of identity that is deeper than any outer social role. When fragments of our mytho-poetic identity make themselves known, they are experienced as a ‘call’ from a ‘sacred other’. (3) The images generated by this archetypal intent in our dreams and in our waking life manifest over a lifetime. Our responses to them lead us to develop ourselves with our choice-making powers the same way that an oak tree wants to develop from an acorn. (4) We experience those impulses as ‘destiny strands’, a form of ‘genetic guidance’ pushing us forward into the wholeness of our ‘true selves’. The ‘true self’ is not pre-formed in the psyche and then ‘discovered’ in its entirety at some point in the life cycle. A ‘true mytho-poetic self’ is a construct of the imagination. It develops over a life time of dialogue and inquiry into the depths of the inner and outer worlds, often manifesting near life’s end as a felt-sense of completeness, of a life well-lived in service to the web of life.
Rather than set these two archetypal patterns of human development into an opposition and arguing that one is true and the other is false, that is, rather than fall into the contemporary psychic epidemic of oppositional thinking that has so ravaged our society, let’s look to see what each has to offer our thinking and practices at Rite of Passage Journeys. After all, for them to have lasted this long, there must be some truth to each of them. Let’s generalize for the sake of understanding and refer to Descartes’ idea of the ‘blank slate’ as emphasizing the role of society in shaping the self and Rousseau’s idea of ‘inborn tendencies’ as emphasizing the role of innate instinctual factors in shaping the self. Clearly, both social and innate factors are at work in the construction of personality, but how so, in what proportion, and why is it important to differentiate these factors?
One reason it is important to be clear about these matters is that a lack of clarity can contribute to a misunderstanding of the work of Journeys. In a recent article in Aeon Magazine entitled “The Coming-Of-Age-Con,” (5) the author Cody Delistraty lays out a case that organizations like Journeys are ‘monetizing’ a vague sense that youth can ‘find themselves’ while on one of our trips. (6) He directly quotes the ROPJ website where it says, “We help initiates create the story of who they are and the kind of life they want to build based within the exploration of their own personal values.” In response to this website description of our work, Delistraty writes, “Why should one have to go through a whole childhood of experience and challenges in order to find oneself when a week at camp can help one find it immediately? When viewed in this kind of cynical, exploitive light, the notion of ‘finding oneself’ starts to look even less natural than before. And while contemporary psychology mostly says that there is no singular self, our shifting selves all seem intent on completing one task: exploiting their own development.” Delistraty’s main point seems to be that one can’t find ‘who you really are’ because the whole idea of a ‘true self’ is a complete fabrication.
Let us set aside the author’s snide comment that a week at camp is sufficient to find one’s ‘true self’, when in fact it takes a lifetime of diligent effort. When Delistraty writes that “contemporary psychology mostly says that there is no single self…”, he is saying two things. First, he is emphasizing tabula rasa psychological theories that emphasize the social factors of human identity. (7) The main goal of this view is integration into society, no matter how dysfunctional that society may be. And second, he is advancing a theory of human nature that makes it impossible to turn inward to the wisdom of our archetypal nature and discover there an inborn mytho-poetic identity. Instead, Delistraty seems to celebrate that his way to ‘come of age’ is liberating in its ‘chaotic freedom’. He writes in his conclusion, “Life is a wave of events. As such, you don’t come of age, you just age. Adulthood is only a function of time, in which case, to come of age is merely to live long enough to do so.”
Remember: every theory of human nature limits and conditions what human beings can become. A theory of human nature like the one championed by Delistraty cannot and will not discover a sense of destiny in the biographical events of childhood and adolescence because it doesn’t believe it possible. It is a theory with no depth, no soul and no foundation on which to build a life of meaning and purpose in service to the web of life. In his view, one simply grows older over time.
So how might we view both social and innate factors in a positive light? Under what circumstances should we foreground one of these factors and background the other, and vice versa? A good answer to these questions can be found in the eco-centric developmental theory of Bill Plotkin. Author and Soul Guide Bill Plotkin has been honored by Rite of Passage Journeys as a recipient of the Fred Lanphear Earth Elder Award for his contributions to our understanding of the Journeys Center Pole. He has written a number of books, but the ones most relevant to developmental theory are Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (2008) and The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries and Revolutionaries (2021). In Plotkin’s eight-stage eco-soulcentric wheel of human development, the youth programs at Rite of Passage Journeys are primarily concerned with stages 2 and 3 – guiding youth into discovering the beauty and wonder of the natural world (stage-2) and creating a secure and authentic social self (stage-3). In these stages, the construction of an authentic sense of self that feels ‘at home’ no matter the instability of the outer world, is the goal. In our summer youth programs, the teachers of this wisdom are the trip guides, fellow participants and the natural world. A setting in nature is essential since a full embodiment of a mature stage-3 requires what Plotkin calls an ‘eco-awakening’, an experience that is often felt as a fully embodied emotional/spiritual revelation, in which one realizes that they are an integral member of the Earth community, deeply embedded in the web of life and fully at home in the vitality of the more-than-human-world. (8) So while the social setting is foregrounded in these stages, the advent of an eco-awakening illustrates how the background energies of archetypal intent are already sending up hints of a mytho-poetic identity that wants to be known.
A healthy stage-3 person, no matter their age, is a real boon to society. They are well versed in healthy emotional skills, they know how to navigate conflict, they have a mature attitude toward sex and sexual relationships, they feel at home in nature and are aware of their ecological responsibilities. (9) Cultivating these attributes in our youth and exposing them to a potential ‘eco-awakening’ is helping them to find an ‘oasis’ in the midst of the chaos and disorder that seems to be such an essential feature of this stage of life, and increasingly, of the outer world. Much of the strife of social justice initiatives on behalf of marginalized youth and adults, whether due to economic, sexual, or racial inequities, can be seen as an attempt to establish a healthy stage-3 social identity. Everyone deserves to find their oasis. It is their birthright. Journeys has a crucial role to play in creating the conditions where stage-3 dynamics can flourish for anyone who finds their way to us.
But the individuation process does not stop there. The river flows on. Having found a home in the oasis of stage-3, some people experience a call to something deeper, something that requires them to leave their home and wander in a psycho-spiritual wilderness in preparation for what Plotkin calls ‘a Descent to Soul’. The features of the Descent to Soul are laid out in his book, The Journey of Soul Initiation. Suffice it to say here that a psychology that limits human experience to introjections from the social world is not adequate to account for ‘the call’ that encourages one to leave the comfort of the Oasis and enter into a dark period of wandering in search of a mytho-poetic identity that clarifies one’s unique ‘soul task’. The goal of such a search is to discover and deliver the healing powers of that soul task to an ailing culture in need of a renaissance, to become what Plotkin calls “an artisan of cultural transformation”. To think like this, to have an image of human development capable of encompassing a Descent to Soul, requires foregrounding the innate archetypal wisdom embodied in the human being while backgrounding the hold that the social world has on the sense of self. In stage-4 and beyond, one’s sense of the “I” is increasingly shaped by inner promptings that often contradict social conditioning. The Descent To Soul requires a painful self-confrontation, a dying to old ways of being, a letting go in order to welcome a new understanding of the flow of time and the river of self-identity, that river into which we both step and do not step, we are and we are not.
May these reflections on the Center Pole of Rite of Passage Journeys be in service to creating the conditions where all stages of eco-centric human development are welcomed and can flourish in service to the web of life.
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Endnotes:
1. To write about the nature of human nature, the history of philosophy and developmental psychology in a short blog is to engage in reflection at a very high altitude. Broad generalizations cannot be avoided. My hope is that working out the details will stimulate discussion among our learning community at Rite of Passage Journeys.
2. For those who are curious about the connection between archetypes, instincts and human experience, I recommend reading Joseph Campbell’s remarkable discourse on the psychology of myth in his book The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959), pp. 21-118. A good overview of this topic can be found in Anthony Stevens, Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self (2003).
3. The notion of the ‘sacred other’ as an eco-centric idea can be further explored in the context of the ‘dream of the earth’. See Thomas Berry’s essay, “The Dream of the Earth”, in his book, The Dream of the Earth, (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books), 1988. See also Bill Plotkin, “Inscendence – The Key to the Great Work of Our Time: A Soulcentric View of Thomas Berry’s Work”, in Laszlo and Combs, eds., Thomas Berry, Dreamer of the Earth: The Spiritual Ecology of the Father of Environmentalism, (New York: Inner Traditions), 2011. A deeper understanding of the role of the Sacred in an eco-centric context can also be found in Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul, (Dorset: Archive Publishing), 2013.
4. A well articulated psychology based on the ‘acorn theory’ of human development can be found in the first chapter of James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: in Search of Character and Calling (1996). A sophisticated theory of the role that fate and destiny play in human experience can be found in Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul (2012). I highly recommend Michael Meade’s blog, Living Myth. More information can be found on Meade’s website, www.mosaicvoices.org.
5. The original article by Delistraty can be found at https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-coming-of-age-narrative-is-a-conformist-lie. Responding to the critique of Journeys in this essay is one of the main reasons I am writing this blog. The Journeys website is directly quoted and critiqued in a respected international online magazine and yet the author shows little understanding of what we are doing. We are just a pawn in his larger game. Meanwhile, he is sacrificing the good name of Journeys by trivializing our position and disposing of it with snide comments, misunderstanding and innuendo. That said, the section on Journeys is relatively short and the rest of the article is interesting and worth reading, if only to help understand what Journeys is not.
6. Here Delistraty is accusing Journeys of running a ‘con’ because we charge money for our trips. He calls this ‘cynical and exploitative’ because he claims that we are making money on the illusory promise that a week spent on a trip with us will uncover a participant’s ‘true self’. While technically it is true that we charge money to go on our youth trips, Journeys has a robust scholarship program and has never turned anyone away for lack of funds. We are a very small non-profit that relies on donations to fund over 50% of our operations. As I try to make clear in this blog, Delistraty is operating from an impoverished view of human nature and therefore he cannot understand what is meant by a ‘true self’ nor can he grasp the authentic mission of Rite of Passage Journeys.
7. To be fair, Delistraty does note a distinction between ‘sociogenic personality traits’ and ‘biogenic personality traits’ (p.3). But he does not explore the phenomenology of biogenic personality traits, that is, how archetypes express themselves in lived experience.
8. A discussion of ‘eco-awakening’ can be found in Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation, pps. 35-37.
9. A more complete list of the tasks and attributes of a healthy stage-3 personality can be found in Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, pp. 181 ff.
Randy Morris
Randy Morris, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at Antioch University Seattle where he supervised the Spiritual Studies and Psychology areas of concentration. He continues to teach classes in dreams, mythology, depth psychology and eco-spirituality, and has a private mentoring practice. Randy is President Emeritus of the Board of Directors of Rite of Passage Journeys, and led vision quests for many years. He is editor of the book "Rites of Passage into Elderhood."
