GT: Hi Bill. To begin, I wanted to understand where you are geographically right now (the conversation takes place via Zoom on the evening of April 12. In Riga it’s 19:00, in Colorado, USA it’s 10:00). As I understand it, you’re at home in the state of Colorado?
BP: Yes. I’m at home a thousand feet above the Animas River and valley.
GT: My compass is working actively now to orient itself, because until now I had thought that the name Animas Valley Institute, which you created and still lead, was related to Jungian depth psychology concepts Anima/Animus! But it turns out—it’s a geographical place.
BP: It is. It’s a Spanish word that translates as “soul.” In this case, in the plural: “souls.” The full name of the river is “River of Souls that Disappears into Purgatory.” That’s what Spanish missionaries called it in the early 17th century. The true origin of the name still isn’t clear. One version says the name arose in honor of Spanish settlers who died while exploring the new land—America. In honor of their souls.
GT: A very fitting place for an Institute of Soulcraft! Tell me, is Animas Valley Institute a real building where you, together with your guides and colleagues, study and create Soulcraft methods for future initiates—or is it only a concept, a kind of ideational base for Soulcraft?
BP: We have an office in the city of Durango. But it’s true—we don’t have one single specific place where we practice Soulcraft, because it happens in the wild. Depending on the program and the weather, it can happen in many different places. However, we do have the idea to buy one or two properties so that we can practice Soulcraft in fixed locations as well. And where are you?
GT: Right now I’m in Riga, the capital of Latvia. We’re finally expecting spring (the conversation takes place late afternoon on April 12, +4 degrees). At these latitudes, the time from mid-February to mid-April is a real test. Not really winter, not spring. Nothing much happens—you have to survive. For many it’s especially hard right now because of the pandemic. On the other hand, we live in a very good place in Riga: ten, fifteen minutes by car and you’re in nature! I consider that an advantage.
BP: Is Riga big? Is it an urban city?
GT: We’re almost a million. Maybe Lithuania’s capital is bigger, but that’s fine. We’re definitely bigger than Estonia’s capital (both laugh). Bill, I have to admit that I feel like a child in a candy store who’s allowed to take everything he wants. That’s about having the chance to talk with you personally, knowing how discreet you are about your public presence. Personally, I’ve been planning to go into the advanced Soulcraft programs for the third year in a row, because we’re lucky that guides trained personally by you come to the untouched nature of Latvia’s western coast, to the village of Lūžņa, and lead these programs. To be honest, I’m an enthusiast—I’ve discovered a lot. It’s similar for others too. Soulcraft is speaking to more and more people here. But tell me, what feedback have you received from your guides after the programs held in Latvia?
BP: Not much, because I myself have a heavy workload. Still, Sage Magdalene (the lead guide for the programs in Latvia) has told me how much she has fallen in love with Latvia, that specific place, and the people. It inspires her, and I can see that. That’s very important. As I understand it, it’s a very remote place, untouched by civilization, yes?
GT: Yes, I see it as a paradox. I was born still in Soviet times and I remember well that Latvia’s western coast was the Soviet Union’s outer western border, heavily guarded. No one was allowed there for about fifty years. It turned out to be a big benefit for nature! You can walk for kilometers through forests and along the shore without meeting a single person! You would definitely like it! By the way, are you planning to come to Latvia?
BP: Yes, good question. Because of the current situation, I can’t say anything for sure. However, looking further ahead, thinking about 2022, a visit to Europe—including Latvia—is possible. So now I’m ready for anything; we can start our conversation!
GT: Only a week ago I received your newest book (The Journey Of Soul Initiation, 2021). To be honest—a week is far too little for a thorough reading of this work. Still, I dove in and before our conversation tried to explore it as attentively as possible. It’s not an ordinary book. It’s active! It moved me not only internally, but also externally and physically. It’s a restless book. I would even say—in a sense, dangerous! I didn’t miss the big warning, breathing very close and present—you can get into horrifying trouble with this book! Is that intentional, to awaken courage and readiness? Or to discourage those who aren’t ready for this journey from taking it?
BP: A bit of everything. But primarily the latter. The journey described requires serious and deep preparation. Second, I ring the alarm bell regularly so that people truly understand their level of life development (for the model of developmental phases, see Plotkin’s book Nature and the Human Soul, 2008) that is necessary to undertake this journey—what I call the Cocoon phase. We’re familiar with the term “meaning of life”; in modern civilization it becomes a leading question for almost everyone—what is the meaning of my life, what is my purpose? These are questions that begin in the phase I call Early Adolescence, or Oasis, as well as in the Cocoon phase, which is later and more mature. These are very different life stages. Someone might think: if I’m already having such existential questions about meaning during Early Adolescence, then I’m ready to go on the Journey of Soul Initiation. But for most, it wouldn’t work and the outcome would be fateful.
GT: Now let’s imagine a modern Western man aged 35–40 whose life is in order. There’s a business, a family, a plan, structure. The map and the territory seem safe. But then a pandemic hits, some of the existing structures wobble. On top of that an inner voice appears, calling into expanses previously unrecognized. And then Bill Plotkin says—no, you’re not ready. You still need serious preparation! You—light as a feather! What? You called me an adolescent? I’m not an adult? Look how ordered my life is! Stop humiliating me! I won’t read your book!
What would you say to that person?
BP: I would say—this is meant for you! Right now that voice is calling you in a direction modern civilization lost a very, very long time ago and has forgotten how to reach. To cross that “portal,” you must prepare very carefully. Most people who begin to hear this call are still essentially in the Oasis stage, despite being 35–40 years old. That can be considered the beginning of preparation for the Journey of Soul Initiation. OK, we can also view our “conception” and birth in that way, but that is not the necessary toolkit for crossing this crucial threshold—though it can certainly be seen as an important part of preparation.
The preparation stage itself is also divided into two steps—you must leave the Oasis and begin weaving your own Cocoon, in which you mature for the descent into the depths of your soul—beginning the journey I call Soul Initiation. You see, I’m very sensitive to what you called “humiliation,” because it might seem that in my books I consider much of modern humanity “not grown up” or “immature,” people who can’t hope for anything good.
We filter the concept of “maturity” through a Western perceptual lens. Through that lens, many who decide to go on the Soul Initiation path are at a certain level of maturity. When I say relatively few reach the phase of the true Adult, let alone the Elder, it can sound like I accuse them of “not growing up.” That’s not true. I’m talking about a completely different curve of maturity development. It doesn’t fit Western assumptions and mappings. The Western radar doesn’t detect it. That’s why for many Western readers my standard of human maturity isn’t readable. Those who would consider themselves truly mature for the Journey of Soul Initiation are in fact still in Early Adolescence.
GT: This would be the right place to delve into a very important concept you created that runs through both your books and our civilization—pathological adolescence. Please explain it!
BP: I see two divisions in the Early Adolescence phase. On one side are ecocentric people—those who somatically and in a healthy way feel their belonging to the larger Earth community, meaning they don’t fence off their innate wildness and unity with all life. On the other side are many people in modern civilization who are under the sway of an egocentric worldview. People in egocentric systems don’t feel a direct somatic, deeply personal unity with all life—perhaps they even fear it. And then pathology arises. The longer a person doesn’t get out of the egocentric system, the sicker it becomes—everything is about me; I must compete with others; a dominant “winner-takes-all” worldview so I can get a more advantageous position; you feel entitled to trample others; out there are always threatening groups that want to take something from me; but I belong to the chosen ones; only I may call myself God’s person. That is a typical indication of egocentric pathological adolescence. And unfortunately, many politicians who decide other people’s lives are in this phase and metastasis.
GT: From that it could seem that everything that begins with “ego” is bad and must be fought. But not in your view. Explain your understanding of what “ego” is.
BP: It’s a term interpreted very differently. Sometimes even in conversations with learned and high-level psychoanalysts a coherent conversation fails precisely because of this multiplicity of meanings. I primarily use it to describe the part of the self that is self-aware. The part of the self that knows itself. Essentially it’s the word we’ve given our species—homo sapiens is ego. That’s basically all it is, as I understand it. In that sense you can’t be a truly human being without ego. Self-awareness is unique to humans. From this perspective, the problem isn’t “ego” itself, because we don’t exist without it; it’s impossible to get rid of it. It is. It exists. The problem is the immature ego within us. And that is my and Animas Institute’s greatest task—to help people raise their ego, make it ready for the great and irreversible turning point when it is “transplanted” into soul, into a deeper and wider form of being.
In other spiritual movements, “ego” denotes those human qualities associated with selfishness, stinginess, not sharing, neuroticism, narcissism, etc. That fundamentally changes the perspective of what a person seeks in spiritual practices. Where ego is “selfish,” “narcissistic,” or “stingy,” practices focus on “eliminating the ego.” My work and Animas’ work do the opposite—we cannot get rid of ego, but what we can learn and experience is an expanded field of consciousness in which ego itself can change and grow and enter a deeper connection with our unconscious depths.
GT: That makes me think about what people are actually seeking in spiritual practices—whether it’s only “peak” experiences where people feel they’ve experienced the divine, or the opposite—being in a fantasy-depth space from which it’s hard to return to the surface and reality afterward. Your three-level model (in Dvēseles Mākslas, Zvaigzne ABC, 2019) describes this movement well—there is the upward-moving, there is the ground level, and there is the downward-moving, the depth level. How important is it not to get stuck in one of these?
BP: It’s important to understand that these are not specific places—at least not geographically. They are three different modes or states of consciousness. They are three different identities that each of us has. The upward-moving part of consciousness animates all that is and exists. It’s the Dao, God, the divine, light, satori, angels… Upward spiritual practices are about connecting with this divine space, and in that moment the ego is temporarily destroyed or “turned off,” or—I'd say—expanded so that it gains that breath of illumination. The downward direction leads to our unimaginable depths, which our conscious mind has no idea about, but which contain great value. Thus the “underworld” is almost synonymous with “the unconscious.” People who go on the Journey of Soul Initiation enter this space and meet what each of us can call Soul—the power and field that holds our deepest value. In our programs we help a person reach this deepest and truest unique identity. It has nothing to do with “personality.” I call it finding the ecological niche of your soul—your true unique essence. And then there is the third identity—ego, the surface-world identity. That is the model.
GT: Right now, as the pandemic has been tearing at our consciousness for more than a year, people are increasingly turning for help—specifically toward spiritual practices. That creates a kind of fairground or “Swedish table” effect. The leading motive: save me from my own misery, anxiety, panic, etc. There’s a feeling that a person wants only the upper part—the satori and divine experience—so they don’t have to stand face to face with their darkness and the real questions hidden there. How do you see this situation from the Soulcraft position?
BP: I always have to remind and emphasize that at Animas we can recommend or help only if we know which life stage and phase someone is in. You see, we come back to the same thing—the Western desire to simplify everything and fit it to our understanding of our needs. If in my frame the psychological maturity phase called Early Adolescence means one thing, then for the average person who has inevitably been shaken by the pandemic it might associate with a teen of about 12–13 who has just gone through puberty. And then we are talking about two completely different things.
If you ask me how I see Soulcraft’s possibilities to help people during the pandemic, I say: exactly the same as when there is no pandemic. My task is to help a person understand what remains unfinished in their development phase. My task is to encourage developing what, in the Soulcraft context, I call practices of restoring wholeness—cultivating the four guiding intrapsychic facets that help us experience ourselves in the most creative capacity possible. I have described this in detail in the book Mežonīgais Prāts (Zvaigzne ABC, 2020). Even though this approach is not popular in modern humanity because it deals with the oldest memory and content that exist within us, many people are familiar with the concept of the “archetype.” So many of the things I talk about are not foreign even to those who, for the first time in their lives, have run into the chaos brought by the pandemic and the mental-spiritual challenges that come with it. The practices discussed in Mežonīgais Prāts offer a completely different turn in self-healing than what is usual in everyday Western self-help discourse. Usually in such moments we want to be quickly put back on track so we can continue competing, working jobs that destroy us, and then come again to a specialist so they can temporarily glue our fractured being together with some new miracle pill. That’s also how personal development is understood—I must develop specific skills to outcompete others, get the prettiest girl, the most expensive car, the best position at work—all of these are qualities of pathological adolescence. What we forget is our inner wholeness and balance. To go on the Journey of Soul Initiation, wholeness and balance are the most necessary attributes of maturity—not professional and social skills. To experience true growing up, which is a mandatory requirement in Soul Initiation, you need truly cultivated and expanded wholeness—all four facets, not just one in which you feel strongest. In Soulcraft programs we help people recognize precisely their less-developed facets and together find ways to strengthen them themselves before they leap into the next phases and challenges of their lives.
GT: And that is not always a pleasant process. I experienced on my own skin that Soulcraft is not a campfire and marveling at a beautiful landscape. When I first received the guides’ assignments and went into the dark forest alone and in despair, I understood what it was about… And there is no way back. There is no pill.
BP: There isn’t. This makes me think of the big gap between modern psychotherapy and what we do with Soulcraft. It’s the essential difference between the ability to heal yourself and being healed in the presence of someone else—say, a therapist. You go to a therapist to, for payment, use their tools and methods in healing yourself or solving a problem. What we do in the Soulcraft preparation phase before going on the path of Soul Initiation is learning skills so that a person is able to heal themselves—because where they will go, you can’t take a therapist with you. It is possible to heal yourself by your own power, by developing your intrapsychic wholeness as much as possible—all facets.
GT: And then it becomes a very subjective and unique experience that is hard to put into words. Most often—impossible. When you have reached the stage where you are ready to help yourself and go deeper, you still need someone who understands well where you are and what you are experiencing. You describe this well in your newest book—you need someone who doesn’t treat you as a “client.” And here Bill Plotkin becomes the greatest enemy of modern Western psychotherapy! I’m joking, of course.
BP: (laughs)… I got that, yes. I’d like to expand this a bit so important things are not left out. I do not deny the importance of psychotherapy if a person is in an acute crisis moment. That complicates the work we do with cultivating wholeness before going on the Soul Initiation path. We are grateful to people who, before coming to us, have done a lot of work on themselves in psychotherapy and are more ready for what we call “wholing” in the Soulcraft world. And what you mentioned about a guide who doesn’t treat you as a client needs clarification, because our Soulcraft guides will not treat your ego as the client—the part that says “fix me so I can achieve my social and cultural goals.”
The client in Soulcraft is your soul and your meeting with it—your deepest and most hidden content. And of course in the physical world you do become a client of our guides too, but in a slightly different sense than usual. The primary task of a Soulcraft guide is to help you find your most hidden gift in the depths, which you then embody and offer as a gift to the world through yourself. And in this process your ego grows to such maturity that it can become an agent for your depths—your soul—communicating with this world, the surface-world reality, but now in a changed and expanded form. This is a very difficult task during the journey—to skillfully include our existing egos so they do not begin sabotage against this dangerous and fragile journey into our depths. On the Soul Initiation path, ego no longer has claims if it is being guided rather than trying to sit in the driver’s seat itself. And Soulcraft guides know how to do that. It’s an art. Soulcraft.
GT: I’m increasingly starting to wonder whether I’m ready for something like this at all… Which phase am I in? Late Adolescence? The preparation phase before the downward journey into my depths? These questions begin to create a kind of ache that turns into a longing to linger with this question and this call that has no immediate answer. Even a year ago, with your trusted guide Brian Stafford, we discussed that this is the moment when we meet ourselves in the vise of incomprehensible feelings; at first we want to end them because they are often heavy feelings… We want to push them back into the depths, wash them away with alcohol or other unhealthy momentary compresses, we want them to pass. Why do we want not to respond to these great longings?
BP: Longing… okay, then we must understand whether we’re talking about the same thing, because you didn’t specify the precise elements that characterize this longing. We can long for many things—a new car, etc. Try to explain what kind of longing you mean.
GT: It isn’t related to physical things… It’s a longing for belonging to something larger… as your book says—longing for belonging. We previously discussed a person’s meaning of life, searching for one’s purpose… the feeling that you’re lost, emptiness, the feeling that what has been so far no longer works. As James Hollis says in his work Midlife Passages—with your magical thinking and heroic behavior you can no longer achieve what you long for; you can’t even name it…
BP: Actually, you can. Perhaps specify that sense of belonging. To what larger thing do you long to belong? That could help…
GT: …to level out and be at peace with the power of that emptiness; with the fact that there is truly a space in which you have been alone for a very long time. Partly it’s like a sense of loss—that part of me is gone, but a large part of me has not yet arrived, and until then you must cross a kind of liminal threshold space, a storm.
BP: But you long to belong to what?
GT: To a part of my life, perhaps, about which I know nothing at the moment, but I feel it. And I lack the instruments to get there.
BP: The focus of life goals is different in different life phases. The presence of existential questions is one thing, but their content is another. We can think completely differently about our meaning and goals, say, in Early versus Late Adolescence. A completely different direction appears upon entering the Growing phase. Belonging, in the sense I describe, is the moment when a person is ready for the Cocoon phase—to cross the threshold before entering true Adulthood, which is essentially leaving Late Adolescence. In other words, when the longing for social, professional, or religious belonging passes, then we are ready to go further. In Early Adolescence, if things go according to plan, we develop our social presence; we are authentic, but we long for the world to accept us. If we are authentic and a social group accepts us as we are, we develop healthily. That can be difficult today, because being both authentic and accepted can become a contradictory effort. That’s where the traps of conformism and masks appear, which exclude authenticity. It’s relatively easy to become socially accepted, but harder later to admit to yourself that it happened by lying to yourself—thus admitting you don’t even know who you really are. But there is a longing for belonging that lives even deeper in us. It is a depth that in Early Adolescence is not yet time to descend into. That doesn’t mean you must turn your back on this longing. It is no longer about social belonging, but belonging to a larger context of the world, a wider web of life of which we are only a small part. These are magnitudes that are no longer really expressible in words. “Mystery” is a good word. Cosmological understanding can help too. But does it fulfill this longing? In this fragile moment, we can make mistaken assumptions, for example confusing our social-belonging longings with these deep longings, because our Early-Adolescence psychic readiness does not allow us to process deep longing qualitatively. In Late Adolescence, however, when we are already ready for the Cocoon phase, responding to these deep longings is the decisive turning point to go further. I call it the Confirmation phase, which is necessary to emerge from Adolescence, enter the Cocoon phase, after which comes Growing. The task of Confirmation is to recognize whether a person has consciously formed and is aware of their social identity—work, relationships, group belonging—and whether the person has realized their authentic values regarding worldview, sexuality, self-perception. If that has been done, it means that in later developmental phases it won’t need to be done again; you won’t need to return to it.
And here I want to emphasize that essentially at this point in life a person feels good—socially realized as an authentically accepted being. Great! This is not a person in an acute crisis stage, struggling with addictions or compulsive behavior, or dealing with some other intensified intrapsychic problem—or just as well a surface-world problem. This is a person who has freed themselves from everything that would hinder true Growing. A successful and realized person who is ready for the crisis demanded by the next stage of growth. Only a healthily realized person can let go of all of that in order to enter the Cocoon phase and transform further—grow. I hope that clarified things.
GT: It did. Thank you. Only a question arises—how can a person who is socially realized and has gained belonging as an authentic being now simply and voluntarily give all of that up for the sake of an uncertain, possibly dangerous soul-journey?
BP: It is almost never voluntary. That’s why I want to explain it very slowly and carefully. No one chooses this Confirmation or any other phase as a voluntary ceremony. No one can choose to move through their life stages. You can want it, of course, but you cannot choose it. I like to say that it is chosen by Mystery. In other words, some other force decides that you have done enough in your current developmental phase—say, Early Adolescence—and now we will push you into the next one. Most often when this happens to us, we experience it as a great shock, discomfort, crisis. We don’t want to be thrown out of a life phase in which we have achieved so much and feel good. That’s because each next phase is like unknown territory and requires a new level of consciousness about which we know nothing.
GT: But what happens, for example, when a person, having saved money, read a book about this courage-demanding and uncertain journey into their soul depths, comes to you or your guides and says—I think I’m ready for this and that stage, this and that level, lead me! What would you do in that moment?
BP: That takes us back to the Western habit of seeking a “quick result,” a “fix me quickly” spirituality. That would be appropriate thinking for Early Adolescence. But upon entering the Cocoon stage, nothing will be fixed! Quite the opposite—everything you have invented and built about yourself will be dismantled. We half-jokingly say at Animas that the Journey of Soul Initiation is not therapeutic; rather, it’s anti-therapeutic. Or in the words of the depth poet Rilke—you will be decisively defeated. And that indeed often happens. A person reads one of my books; it creates deep resonance; they come and want to experience what the books describe; but I or our guides clearly see that the person is not ready for what they imagine they want to experience. We always have the option to step back one step, understand where the person is in their development, and then slowly prepare them for the next transition. Whereas, by contrast, some Western life coach, seeing your strengths—or at least what you present as strengths—will say: great, lean on those and you will achieve results. But that is only one facet that would need to be cultivated to achieve the wholeness necessary to descend into your depths and experience Soul Initiation. That’s why I keep emphasizing: in Soulcraft you must always be aware of what developmental stage you truly are in, and which facets of your wholeness must continue to be cultivated.
GT: So Soulcraft is more like a verb—like a craft technique… Your ego will be “crafted” into soul, is that it?
BP: Exactly. In this case the main hero of the journey is not the soul, but the ego. And it must be a very courageous and mature ego to endure the journey. Ego is processed into soul. The paradox is that in the early phases of life ego is the boss, the agent of change and action that helps us achieve a lot. And that relates to how we think about life with the help of the calculating mind. The mind strategically calculates possible scenarios. Often even upon entering the Cocoon phase we hear how the mind tries to figure out what that soul down there really wants. That is ego trying to calculate the soul. But that isn’t possible. It’s the other way around. The soul can rework ego into something new. That is usually hard for the Western white man who is used to controlling everything to understand. Letting go of that control isn’t easy. To truly go on the Journey of Soul Initiation, you must allow something else to take the reins and allow yourself—ego—to be ground down. So yes, Soulcraft is more like a verb in that sense.
GT: In your book you write that “not all egos survive this transplantation into soul.” What to do? Crawl out of the Cocoon back into Late Adolescence?
BP: No. In this process there isn’t really a backward direction. What happens, in fact, is the illumination of unfinished things from previous stages. We don’t need to regress to fix them. But unfinished things from earlier stages must be completed in order to go on. When I say ego may not survive the transplantation, I mean a person can die. Physically. In ancient cultures, very often initiates did not survive to the end of the process. From that we have concluded their methods were not only more effective, but also wilder and more dangerous. If we applied that knowledge as a method in the form it once had in Animas programs today, we would be sued in our first year of operation—and the shop would be closed. We must act responsibly, and we adapt these methods to today’s laws and to human capacity. That, of course, makes our work less effective than if we applied the full spectrum of methods that is possible here.
GT: That makes me think about the lack of true rituality and mythology today. How easily and quickly we get various things and experiences without the necessary effort—things for which once you had to give almost your life—has destroyed something beautiful and real… Is it possible to revive it?
BP: It is possible. That is exactly what we work with—finding ways to create new rituals and effective ceremonies. But ego is not capable of creating true mythology. Mythology arises from the collective unconscious. The expressions of mythology and myth can change, but not as a result of ego’s actions. What we have been doing for forty years at Animas has more to do with translating the oldest traditions to a modern person on their initiation path. And I want to emphasize this especially—we have not taken, stolen, or appropriated any rituals that served as initiation methods in the oldest cultures. We have created and continue to create our own modern method and system for a nature-based initiation process that includes elements used by earlier cultures not only here in the West, but all over the world. Trance dance, work with dreams and visions—these elements are found throughout ancient initiation processes. And I would like to stress that at Animas we have created only one version of this process. Only one. And for cultivating wholeness in any era and society, at least one such system is needed as a structuring force. We have long searched for the deep structure that forms and supports the downward journey to the depths of soul and would fit a person in any culture in the future as well. It is an essential tool in my and our guides’ hands to understand the leading patterns and threads that help foster the Journey of Soul Initiation. Only after that is done can we begin building our own system and embodying it in action.
GT: A self-discovered and self-created initiation ritual sounds very powerful. I thought about that when my son turned seven. I decided to give him a knife. But then inner contradictions began—it’s an archetypal object; you can’t just give it like that; it can’t simply happen like that. Similarly today with other values—education, relationships, marriage, sexuality—they come to us just like that, without an added depth dimension, and thus do not gain true value; and just as quickly and easily as they came, they also disappear, continuing the spiral of a valueless era.
BP: You see, if a ritual or ceremony is carried out from the standpoint of true intention, it creates an expanded reality not only for the one who experiences and creates it directly, but also for those who witness it. It is essentially an altered state of consciousness that allows us to experience existing reality more deeply, attentively, and fully. A good wedding ceremony affects not only the couple getting married, but also those present, creating a field of expanded reality, a unified universe in which the event gains deeper and more shared meaning. It creates a level of unity and wholeness among beings in a way that would not be possible if the ritual were performed shallowly or carelessly. Your son, who received the knife on his seventh birthday—not merely as a gift but as a ceremonial, ritual gesture—will understand in his depths that he did not receive only a sharp object. More than that—he will grasp who gave it to him, from what lineage he comes, and ultimately who is the “he” who received that knife!
GT: Your newest book is full not only of danger warnings, but also of practical techniques we can use for structuring ourselves intrapsychically. I’d like you to expand one of them that helps us work with inner contradictions that often tear us in two and affect mental processes as a whole, determining the stage we are in. It spoke to me strongly, and you called it “Mandorla,” the “Mandorla technique.”
BP: It should be emphasized that this technique is recommended for people who have already reached the Cocoon phase. I do not recommend this method for people who are still in their Adolescence or Oasis phase. This method offers the opportunity to voluntarily destabilize your ego. Primarily this is necessary for the successful second step of Soul Initiation, where we collapse our previous identity. But the method can be used for other purposes too. “Mandorla” means “almond” in Italian. It is the shape formed when we draw two circles that partially overlap. And the technique works like this: we invite a person to recognize within themselves some contradiction, some opposition, and name it. For example—joy versus constant striving toward a goal. By that we say: on one side is the belief that in life you must strive toward a goal and achieving it is the main task, while on the other side is the belief that what matters most is joy and rejoicing, not an iron striving toward a set goal. Both of these beliefs operate in the psyche of the same person, creating pressure. This contradiction may not be relevant for everyone, but I know people who indeed see this quite in black-and-white terms.
You may place whatever contradiction you wish into this matrix. To practice the Mandorla technique, it’s best to go outside to a more open place, for example a sea shore, where you draw these two circles whose boundaries partially overlap, creating the almond shape. The circles should be quite large—two meters in diameter—so that, moving into the other circle, you must take a wide step. Then, standing in the center of one circle, defend one side of the contradiction—how important it is to strive toward a goal in life—no rejoicing! Then take a step into the center of the other circle and defend the position that what matters most is joy, and iron striving toward a goal is a waste of life. Speak out loud, expressively, convincingly from each position. Argue with foam on your lips. Gesture! Do it with increasing intensity from each viewpoint. The goal is not reconciliation or compromise. The goal is to fully confuse and destabilize the ego. Would you want to do this in your Adolescence, while striving and longing for social belonging? A very bad idea! But if you have begun the downward descent into your soul depths, then this is a good way to make ego experience its collapse. It creates changes in the psyche; ego’s gravitational center shifts. It moves and becomes more ready to take on a new form, which is necessary in order to move from the Cocoon into the Adult phase.
GT: You have created and developed this method at Animas. How does that happen? How does the development of methods and techniques happen? Is it a laboratory process?
BP: Usually it’s a couple of guides who, after working in intensive programs, discuss observations accumulated over time. Sometimes a guide alone processes and crystallizes a set of patterns in behavior and structures that can then be methodized. The idea of intrapsychic contradictions is not ours; it was primarily discovered and worked with by the legendary Swiss scientist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), whose work and discoveries still enable our guides to recognize these structures in themselves and then also in the people who participate in programs.
As we study and analyze these observations, we still listen to Jung and his ideas about inner human oppositions and, especially, the value hidden in the pressure of contradictions in work with ego—value not visible on the surface. Animas’ work primarily takes place in the wild. We hold to that as much as possible, because by inviting a person into such an environment we open wider possibilities to develop a unique set of practices and techniques that becomes an individualized toolkit for a person’s journey of soul initiation. That’s also why our program groups are relatively small—to provide as much individual space as possible. We have quite a lot of guides. Over a long and intense period, that produces many experiences. When we later discuss them, it’s not heavy, laboratory-like spear-breaking, but embedding already crystallized concepts into a larger structure. For example, in the case of Mandorla we have been blessed with many experiences where, by allowing a person to experience the escalation of this inner contradiction, we have also seen physical danger, where the practice must be stopped because it becomes dangerous and too fierce. That means we are aware: there are certain limits and additional elements that must be included. A certain typology begins to form. We begin to recognize not only desired aspects, but also explore the unwanted and dangerous zones—which is essential for different people in different stages.
GT: Again I hear that warning Plotkin voice that sounds many times in the new book! But what is the worst thing if, for example, someone in the Early Adolescence phase takes the Mandorla practice and begins to practice it?
BP: Death.
GT: And that’s it?! That’s the ultimate answer?
BP: Yes. That may seem like the worst outcome to many people. That death would mean they would be people who would never get to where they could find within themselves the great unique value that, returning from the Journey of Soul Initiation, they could gift to the world. They would be people who tried, got close, but in the end did not make it all the way. Very many do not even get close.
GT: That’s why in your book those warning signs are placed so unobtrusively, but at the same time so solidly, that they can’t be missed or ignored.
BP: Exactly. And my goal isn’t to justify myself to avoid a lawsuit for spreading dangerous methods (laughs), but so that anyone reading and learning the specifics of this path understands from afar their place in it and does not ruin their experience unnecessarily and irreversibly. I say that because—OK, it will sound a bit trivial—but at Animas we are rebels and we somewhat invite trouble ourselves, because what we actually do allows people to create the right problems for themselves so growth can happen. But we definitely don’t want a person to create the wrong problems.
GT: Speaking of rebels and the right problems, in the context of your new book I can’t not ask about Jung, whom we’ve already mentioned. There are several chapters where you examine Jung’s soul initiation path, which he in turn first described in his Black Books and then, with additional commentary, in the legendary Liber Novus or the Red Book. Reading your book, I felt within a handshake’s distance of Jung! You offered an alternative mapping for how we can look at experiences as massive and enigmatic as Jung’s descent into his soul depths…
BP: In my work I share my version of how I understand the processes that happened to Jung in the decisive period from 1913 to 1916, when he devoted himself to a relentless confrontation with his unconscious. Part of that experience is included in the Red Book. Reading it, I realized it actually describes his first meeting with the core of his soul. Like many, I found the Red Book a great mystery—until I looked at what is described there from the perspective of the Journey of Soul Initiation. I have distinguished five phases of the downward descent to the depths of soul, and that is what my newest book is about. Preparation (a psycho-spiritual shift in consciousness from the current life phase to the next). Collapse (a decisive farewell to one’s existing social identity). Arrival at the core of one’s soul depths (discovering one’s mythopoetic identity). The fourth phase is Metamorphosis, where the existing, tormented, collapsed, change-ready ego is filled with this new identity. And the fifth phase is Return and the Embodiment of the new identity in our everyday social world. In the Red Book Jung describes very subtly and extensively, in my view, the Preparation phase. Figures from his unconscious come to help him, each in their own way, to prepare him for the journey of soul initiation. His notes also reveal the Collapse phase in detail. And essentially it shows how figures from his own unconscious help him cultivate his weakest intrapsychic facets so he can go down.
You see, it’s important to understand—he is not doing it; it is being done with him. There are seeds there of what I said earlier about that essential moment when a person can heal themselves from within. And near the very end of the Red Book, in my view, the third phase is described—Jung’s meeting with the core of his soul depths.
Metamorphosis and Embodiment come later—after the Red Book in Jung’s life. For those who have never heard of the Red Book, I should explain that Jung, the father of modern psychoanalysis, wrote diaries about his confrontations with the unconscious. These are called the Black Books because they were notebooks with black covers. They have, by the way, now been published. The Black Books describe only the sequence of the experiences he had in his home in Switzerland with the help of active imagination. But the Red Book is something else entirely. After 1916, when those deep immersions were over, Jung began an extensive self-analysis of his experiences. He wrote commentaries, returned to what he had experienced. And he did this in a special way. He bought a large folio bound in red leather and created a new form of recording—medieval-style drawings, calligraphy, etc. That took about the next fifteen years. Jung himself considered that this experience—his Journey of Soul Initiation—was the foundation of all his life’s work in psychoanalysis afterward. If you read the Black Books, the Red Book, and then my book The Journey Of Soul Initiation, you will likely agree that Jung’s Red Book describes precisely the first three phases of Soul Initiation. And it’s notable that in his biography and memoirs he allowed publication only of the third phase—his meeting with the core of his soul depths—called Seven Sermons to the Dead.
That is notable because Jung did not want to publish the Red Book during his lifetime. His family did not want it published after his death either. Nevertheless, in 2009 it happened, and we all—especially Jungians themselves—realized that for a long time we hadn’t really known much about Jung at all! It is such a mystical experience that Jung did not want to share publicly, because there was a risk that the era’s ability to receive such a massive mystery experience would be neither adequate nor receptive. He risked being mocked and declassed. How could he explain to the 20th-century mind that a horde of the dead arrived in his study and illuminated him about what the unconscious, God, soul, etc. are? But it was the decisive phase that created the turning point in Jung’s life and identity—from a socially successful man of science to a mythopoetic interpreter of the unconscious for humanity. That is how he understood his most hidden value as a gift to the world. And I have described that in great detail in my book as well.
GT: But Jung was not in the wild. He had no guides. He experienced all of this at home at the table in his office, while his family ate dinner!
BP: He also continued to see patients during the day. And in the evening he returned to his unconscious. Voluntarily.
GT: That’s where you can go insane!
BP: Jung had an exceptionally strong will. He both used and created methods to keep himself within the bounds of reason during the process. He truly had no external guides. He did not understand what was happening by everyday logic. But he had inner companions—whole systems of guides! The prophet Elijah, Salome, Philemon, Ka… Jung truly did not go into the wild in the Animas sense. He spent much time by Lake Zurich and in his garden. But—since childhood Jung had never lost his connection to wild nature, as has happened to most of Western civilization. In Jung’s ethos, the living, self-organizing world around him was always a mystery rich with secrets, not an object of consumption, as we see in the 20th century and especially the 21st. We see this strongly at Animas, because only 25% of all people who come to us are ready for the Journey of Soul Initiation. Those who can prepare faster are usually those whose childhood is connected with mystery experiences planted in the wild. They never lost the expansiveness of imagination and the deep somatic bond with all the rest of the living world. But the good news is that it can be awakened within oneself.
GT: Do Jungians often come to you?
BP: Yes, we work with specialists in Jungian psychoanalysis. Not very many, but they come. And we often hear from them that we truly do something completely different from what they do in their offices. I’m convinced that Animas is not doing Jungian psychoanalysis, and 98% of Jungians are not doing the Journey of Soul Initiation. Interestingly, Jung himself, having undergone this journey, did not create any successor or guide who could lead others into this deep immersion. Perhaps he didn’t know how it could be done. Perhaps it was caution in an era when anything not officially scientific wasn’t taken seriously. Jung was a top-level scientist. But Jung was also a top-level mystic, gnostic, and alchemist. And it was precisely these qualities that allowed him to experience and survive a process that is not destined for most of humanity. In a sense, Jung is a prophetic figure. I don’t know many people with such a powerfully developed facet of deep imagination as Jung. That phenomenal ability to voluntarily access the deepest contents of his being—and then process them! Such ability is rare. Moreover, Jung used 2–3 methods to process these contents—expressive art, dreamwork, and active imagination. At Animas we have about forty such methods. But Jung managed with 2–3. That says a lot about Jung. That’s why everyone who tries to do their own Soul Initiation journey as Jung did fails, because those methods worked for him in a very authentic and spontaneous way. Therefore at Animas we work with people so they can find the most suitable tools for them from a broad range and meet the core of their soul depths in the most successful way.
GT: Even if you aren’t Jungians, I feel that unbreakable kinship of souls between you and Jung’s world. That great trust in the Unknown…
BP: I would call it a love affair with the Unknown. Animas guides always—if I may put it this way—court the Unknown and follow its signs and enigmatic hints in the wild, in ourselves, and in the people we work with. We do not control mystery. We only listen to what it says. We do not try to interpret dreams. Rather, we support the quiet, persistent work they can do from our depths.
GT: Bill, a huge and heartfelt thank you for the time you devoted to this conversation! I hope you will be able to come to Latvia!
BP: Thank you! I give you my wild blessing, and see you soon!