The Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche

An Overview

To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness.

— Gary Snyder

Wisdom traditions from around the world — including those from which Western cultures emerged — have looked to nature's seven directions for a model of wholeness: north, south, east, west, up, down, and center. These seven directions support us in fathoming the wholeness of ... well, anything that came out of the original wholeness called "nature" or "wilderness," the wholeness that human beings came out of, as poet Gary Snyder reminds us. My approach to constructing a comprehensive, nature-based map of the human psyche begins with the foundational, three-dimensional pattern of the seven directions. Here's how I've mapped the psyche onto nature's framework:

The Horizontal Plane

The Self. In the four cardinal directions are the four facets of our innate human potential — the four sets of resources that make up our horizontal psychological wholeness. Together, these four facets constitute what I call the Self. As we'll see in later chapters, they also reflect the qualities of the natural world we observe in the four directions and, not coincidentally, the characteristics of the four seasons and the four times of day: dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight.

Subpersonalities. Because each aspect of wholeness also has its immature form, we also find in the cardinal directions the four categories of our fragmented or wounded parts — which I call subpersonalities, and sometimes just subs for short — again echoing the qualities of the four directions, seasons, and times of day.

The Vertical Axis

Spirit. In the upward direction is the dimension of the human psyche that identifies with Spirit (a.k.a. God, Mystery, or the nondual). The upward direction is also known as the upperworld, the heavens, or the vast reaches of the cosmos.

Soul. Reaching down into depths, we find the human Soul, our unique and deepest individual identity. The downward direction is also known as the underworld, Hades, or the fruitful darkness.

The Center

The ego. In the center, at the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical, is the Ego. Its "home" or "natural habitat" is the everyday world or middleworld of family, social, economic, educational, political, and ecological life.

In our three-dimensional wholeness, each one of us is nature in human form, nature in its wholeness of the four cardinal directions, the four seasons, and the four times of day, and also of the upperworld, underworld, and middleworld.

Definitions

Soul, Spirit, Self, and Ego. "Why all the capitalized words?" you might ask. Simply to remind you, throughout this book, that I'm using these common words to refer to aspects of psyche defined in specific and not necessarily common ways.

Here, then, are my definitions of these and other key components of the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche:

Soul. The Soul is a person's unique purpose or identity, a mythopoetic identity, something much deeper than personality or social-vocational role, an identity revealed and expressed through symbol and metaphor, image and dream, archetype and myth. Some other ways to say this: Soul is the particular ecological niche, or place, a person was born to occupy but may or may not ever discover or consciously embody. Or, in a more poetic vein, Soul is "the largest conversation you're capable of having with the world," it's "your own truth / at the center of the image / you were born with," it's the "shape / [that] waits in the seed / of you to grow / and spread / its branches / against a future sky," or it's "your individual puzzle piece in the Great Mystery." For example, the Soul of Irish poet William Butler Yeats can be articulated by way of a poem he wrote (and an experience he had) in his late twenties, as the niche of one who "pluck[s] the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun." Ecophilosopher, Buddhist, and Earth elder Joanna Macy, at age thirty-seven, experienced a life-transforming inner image of a stone bridge that spanned "between the thought-worlds of East and West, connecting the insights of the Buddha Dharma with the modern Western mind." She knew in that moment that her destiny was, in part, to be one of the stones in that bridge — "just one, that was enough." And it might be said that cultural historian Thomas Berry was ensouled as someone who "preserves and enhances [wild-ness] in the natural cycles of its transformation" and who perceives, articulates, and advocates the "dream of the Earth."

Spirit. Spirit (or God, Mystery, or the nondual) is the universal consciousness, intelligence, psyche, or vast imagination that animates the cosmos and everything in it — including us — and in which the psyche of each person participates. When consciously attuned to Spirit, we experience a profound connectedness with all things — the "oneness" of Spirit. The manner in which Spirit manifests itself or unfolds has been called, to cite just three examples, evolution's trajectory, the Tao (the way of life), or the Universe story.

Self. The Self is an integral whole, a bundle of innate resources every human has in common, a totality that holds all the original capacities of our core humanness. The Self incorporates the four facets of our horizontal human wholeness, which exist at birth but only as possibilities that, like the Soul, we may or may not learn to access, actualize, and embody. These four facets can be described in terms of archetypes, universal patterns of human behavior and character found in all cultures and in myths, dreams, art, and literature. The Self contains all the resources we need to meaningfully contribute to our more-than-human (which means not-merely-human) world in order to live a mature, fulfilling, creative human life, to effectively manifest our Soul's desires, and to align ourselves with Spirit's unfolding. In this book, I use Self and horizontal human wholeness interchangeably.

Subpersonalities. The subpersonalities are the wounded and sometimes hidden fragments of our human psyches — such as our "inner" Victim, Rebel, Critic, Tyrant, or Addict — each of which attempts to protect us from further injury. These are constellations of feelings, images, and behaviors that operate more or less independently from one another and often independently of our conscious selves (Egos)....