The Soul Glimpse
Hold to the truth at the center of the image you were born with
All the True Vows
are secret vows,
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away.Hold to the truth
at the center of the image
you were born with,
don’t turn your face away…Remember,
in this place
no one can hear youand out of the silence
you can make a new promise
it will kill you to break,that way you’ll find out
what is real and what is not.I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these yearsin my own voice,
before it was too late
to turn my face again.~David Whyte, All the True Vows
I have shared so far the story of my solo vision quest, a four-day fasting rite in the deep jungles of Kaua’i. I shared about the journey, the ceremonies of cleansing, and the ritual removal of the mask of my adolescent masculine persona.
But those ceremonies, and the insights they brought, were not the Vision I had come for. They were merely making space for my soul glimpse. As it would happen, my vision arrived on the final day of my Quest, as the sun slid behind the near horizon of the towering canyon walls.
This was the moment in which my life came fully into view, a moment which I will recount in the following post. Before we dive in dear reader, I’d like to ground us in the definition and origin of the Vision Quest. Here’s Phd psychologist and author Bill Plotkin:
“There are countless cultural variations on the archetype of a wilderness fasting rite. European anthropologists coined the term vision quest to refer to rituals practiced by the indigenous people of North America, but this term could be employed equally well to refer to similar rites found in European, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures. The wilderness sojourns of Moses, Jesus, and other heroic figures from Judeo-Christianity as well as those of the Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, and other faiths were vision quests.
As a rite of passage, the vision quest facilitates the transition through a major life crossroads… such as puberty, leaving home, marriage, starting or expanding a family, terminating a pregnancy, vocational change, loss of a loved one, divorce, major injury or disability, or a spiritual crisis are often disorienting and emotionally charged, but these times of disruption and profound change are also unavoidable and potentially pivotal, serving as thresholds to deep healing, growth, and self-empowerment.
As a rite of initiation, the quest is a ceremonial descent to find our soul image and derive greater clarity regarding the purpose and meaning of our life. The initiation is not into any social, religious, or spiritual group but into our own soul path and deeper levels of authentic adulthood.”
~Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
This quest in particular, for me, was a rite of initiation. I was here seeking a glimpse of my soul, what David Whyte calls the “truth at the center of the image you were born with,” or “a promise it will kill you to break,” or perhaps what Mary Oliver calls “your one wild and precious life.” Over the years I’ve learned the concept of soul is ineffable, it eludes definition in language, but is best experienced as a feeling-tone, and most sharply felt precisely when we are most disconnected from it.
If we are to put words to it however, the best definition I have come across is again from my mentor Bill Plotkin, who says that soul is first and foremost an ecological phenomenon, and not a (purely) psychological or spiritual one. Soul is our ecological niche, our one true place in the great web of life, the human and more-than-human community. Here’s his definition, from the glossary of his book Journey of Soul Initiation:
“A person or thing's unique, innate niche in the Earth community. To discover our unique eco-niche, we must go through an initiatory process if and when we are developmentally prepared to do so. We become conscious of our Soul - if we ever do - through metaphor, through poetic or mythic images or patterns that I call mythopoetic identity. For me, Soul is an ecological concept, not a psychological one, and not a spiritual or religious one.”
As I understand it, from my current level of consciousness, Soul is a fact of biological life on Earth, that may well arise from the very core of our biology, the blueprint of our beings, what modern science calls Deoxyribonucleic acid, our DNA. Or, perhaps, from some thing much deeper, some information encoded or emanating from the very pattern the electrons of the molecules adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T) are weaving, a mandala of energetic signatures radiating from deep within the mitochondria of our bodies. Or, perhaps something even deeper and more cryptic, something for which we mere humans have no technology for detecting, or aperture of consciousness wide enough for perceiving, to borrow from Aldous Huxley.
Wherever it comes from, Soul exists largely beneath our conscious awareness, even as it gives rise to that very consciousness. To our conscious Selves, soul can only be understood, as Plotkin writes, in a mythopoetic way. I never fully understood what this meant, until I asked the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world, for it directly…
The final day of my Quest
I begin this final ceremony with an opening of the four directions, and centering myself with meditation, quieting the ego-mind, and dropping into the heartspace. From this place, I wrote my intention in the form of a letter, to our wild and animate world:
Dear sweet Mother Earth, Mama Gaia, Pachamama, and your holy children, los Niños Santos,
I come to this ceremony bearing gifts of prayer, tobacco, and flute song. I want to be of service to you, the highest service I can humbly offer, but I don’t know how to help. And I don’t know what gifts I carry.
On your altar, I have placed:
4 Ti leaves, honoring the 4 directions
3 red coffee cascaras
2 Redwood acorns, gifts from the forests of California
1 bright yellow Lilikoi, wild-foraged
The mask of masculinity, my sheared beard, thousands of red and white hairs, genetic strands of my former ego identity
The horned-skull of a wild goat
A ripe sliced avocado and an apple-banana, to feed the spirits of this place
My former way of belonging to the world, my instagram account, and my business as a retreat facilitator…
Please sweet Mother, you who give us everything—air to breathe, water to drink, food from your sacred soils. Please show me a glimpse of my soul, my service to you and your great web of life, and my role within it.
In humility, reverence, and Gratitude,
Jonathan ♡
*An aside here: As you can see, dear reader, this is not really a ceremony for “me,” but for the greater Earth community. Here, I could go off on a tangent about the “psychedelic narcissism” rampant in new age spirituality, a virulent and ego-inflating disease I myself am not immune from, but that will be a story for another time :) For now, I want to emphasize that I was prepared to burn my life to the ground, in order to recieve a glimpse of the way I was meant to be of service to the world.
I set to preparing the medicine for this ceremony: six grams of dried psilocybe mushrooms, what the Mazatecs of southern Mexico call “los Niños Santos”—the Holy Children. I carry water from the red stream, and boil it on my small backpacking stove. While the dried mushrooms steep, I slice a wild, not-yet-ripe orange I collected along the trail. I squeez this into the tea, to allow the citric acid to break down the psilocybin into the more bioavailable and psychoactive psilocin.
Holding the vessel close to the my heart, I invoke my guardians, Puma, and Cheii, and my ancestors, and pray my intention into this steaming vessel. I pour a sip on to the forest floor, as a final offering to Mama ʻĀina, and then raising the cup with a loud “Salud!” to the council of insects, stones and trees gathered around me, I pull this earthy soul elixir into my belly.
I gather a few items in my small pack: my cedar drone flute, a stainless steel water bottle, my headlamp, and my keffiyeh shall—and make my way slowly out on to that peninsula in the red rushing river, which I only now realize is a giant stone altar upon which I would be offering my body to the Anima Mundi. I tremble with this knowledge: the man I have been, the man I am, the man walking out on to this black volcanic slab, will not be the same person who returns at the end of this ceremony. I am about to be ritually and irrevocably altered by this ceremony.
Laying myself bare on the altar of Mother Earth
It was from this place—now lying completely naked on the ancient black volcanic altar, in the midst of the rushing red stream, a half mile deep in the womb of Mother Earth, three thousand miles from the nearest continent, while the mycelial spirits went to work on my brain and body—that I would receive a glimpse of my soul, my one true purpose in this life.
I must at this moment warn any would-be psychonauts attempting such a rite. This is advanced spiritual practice, and it will not work unless you are able to cultivate a level of physiological and psychospiritual safety. This can and will challenge even the deep explorers of consciousness and/or backcountry trekkers, and even challenged my skill as an explorer of inner and outer wilderness: my nearly two decades of long-distance and high-altitude trekking experience, a wilderness first aid certification, a Johns Hopkins University psilocybin training, high-dose pscyhedelic journeywork facilitation and space-holding for others, and over a decade of experience working with psychotropic substances in remote backcountry settings.
And all this was still not enough to bring me my Vision…
As I lie here, with keffiyeh wrapped around my eyes, the Anima Mundi embraces me. I feel the free electrons from Mother Earth, and the photons of light-energy from Father Sun, flowing into the collection of cells I call “me.”
This “me” is dissolving into the light and the rock, as I come face to face with the stark reality: I have ingested enough to psilocybin to take me into Purusha, source consciousness. A rainbow mandala swirls in my mind’s eye.
It is beautiful, breathtakingly so, but it isn’t my soul. So I ask. I ask Mystery, the Anima Mundi, whose energy and consciousness are flowing into me through the spirit of these sacred mushrooms, and this black slab earth altar:
Please, Great Spirit, show me my soul.
With this request the mandala fades, and a new image appears in my consciousness. It is one I have seen before in my consciousness-altering practices with sacred medicines and breathwork, and it is decidedly dark, one my ego even labeled “grotesque.” It is an image I had associated with a wounded part of me… but that’s not what I am wanting to explore right now.
I know, I whisper gently to Mystery. I know this wound image. But now I need you to show me a glimpse, just a glimpse, of my soul.
The dark image fades. Here it comes, I think. But as the new image appears, it is the same thing, in a different form. And so I ask again. And again I recieve the same dark image, in a slightly different form… (my ego) slightly annoyed with Mystery now, I sense I need to break through this cycle I am stuck in. And for this, I call in the “big gun,” the most powerful single technology for consciousness expansion we have:
The breath.
I recall my training as a Somatic Breathwork therapist to upshift my consciousness. Deploying the method pioneered millennia ago by yogis in the forests of India and Southeast Asia, I begin to breathe deeply and rhythmically, activating my phrenic nerve, and recalling the wise words of my breathwork master:
“The breath is the only body rhythm we can do consciously and unconsciously—and that makes it the bridge between mind, body and spirit.”
After a few eons of deep, connected breaths that may have only been a few minutes in linear time, I take a final gulp of air, and hold my breath. I already know what is about to happen. In my oxygenated-saturated state, I will be able to hold my breath for a very, very long time. Longer than my prefrontal cortex, my rational mind, will be comfortable with. Believing I am dying, this breathhold will signal my brain to release endogenous dimethyltryptamine (DMT) from my neocortex and hippocampus (1), radically altering my consciousness (even further).
The sound of the rushing red river fades, my body melts even more, merging with the black slab altar, and I am rocketed into a realm of golden-white light, wrapped in faint swirling rainbow mandalas all around me. I merge with these and become a mandala myself. It is glorious. Ecstatic. I feel I could just dwell here forever.
But this is not the time to revel in Samadhi. I summon all of my wits to re-focus my awareness, and reconnect with that seed of intention, now a needle in the haystack of light that is my greatly expanded consciousness, to demand, more forcefully this time:
Mystery, great spirit, please help me. I have put my life, my body on the altar, and I am asking you directly:
Please, show me my soul.
The white light of unity consciousness fades, and the dark image returns once again, even more vivid than before. This time, unlike my previous journeys, this time I was able to regard the dark, grotesque image without fear. Perhaps the strong seratonergic activity of the psilocybin has initiated the fabled fear extinction (2). Or perhaps my being is just finally ready to surrender to the deep truth of itself. Whatever the pathway, I receive this vision with my full body this time.
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH
I let out a long audible exhale I’ve been holding for at least an eternity by now, and immediately empty my lungs of all their air for a bahya kumbhaka—another breath retention. My body struggles against it at first, but I gaze within, directing my eyes up into the skull, aiming them at the third eye center, the point between my eyebrows, and everything softens again.
And with that surrender, a rush of memories, images, feelings, and insights pour into my brain and body. These were all the ways I had already been embodying my soul, already walking the Soul Path, making my way, at times stumbling, at times off track, to the fate/destiny to which I belong.
All of it—all the pain, depression, heartbreak, suicidality, grief, longing, wandering, curiosity and ecstatic moments, the friends and lovers I had made and lost, and the work I had chosen—all of it, finally made sense now.
HUUUUUUUUUUUUUNH
A deep gasping inhale brings me back into my body. Brings back the sound of the rushing river, brings back the cool smoothness of the black slab on my back, and the warm rays of Padre Sol kissing my naked body, itself alternately washed with cool canyon breezes in the late afternoon.
The vision is undeniable. And yet, my ego comes trotting back online to protest, downplaying it, not wanting to believe. I sit up, and remove my blindfold. The canyon walls soar three thousand vertical feet above me, waving in unison in my visual field, as if dancing in celebration. I reach for my companion, my beloved F# drone flute, tuned to 432hz by a master flutemaker in Peru.
What pours out of this carved piece of cedar…
powered by my breath and danced upon with fingers as light as feathers, is the most beautiful, intriguing, and innocently playful song I have never heard before, yet is deeply familiar, and unmistakably my own. A song I have known is deep inside at the core of me, that had been secreted for safekeeping, for this very moment, all along.
I play and play, swaying my body with eyes closed, and the sonic vibrations fuel a visual feast of delicious iridescent mandalas swirling like galaxies, and at the conclusion of this solo concerto, I sit and listen. The canyon blossoms to life with the evening call of the local birdlife, replying with a resounding chorus that fills the belly of that deep canyon space, above the rushing red river and the dancing cliff deities watching over it all.
This soul song, and the symphonic resonance from the more-than-human world, was my confirmation that what I had just encountered was indeed my soul, and not a figment of my de-wilded and deeply conditioned ego.
By acclaiming the extraordinary features and the very existence of every landform and life-form, the Wanderer falls ever deeper into a consciousness of blessing and miracle. If he persists, an astonishing surprise awaits him: one day, it will dawn on him that he himself could not be an exception to the rule of resplendence. At this revelation, he will grasp—beyond all explanation—that he, too, is a wild and miraculous thing. The universe then opens more fully for him, and he finds himself at home in the world to a depth he had never imagined possible. Now he runs into the fate he longs for.
~Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul
That evening
I formally closed my ceremony by breaking my fast with a prayer of deep gratitude, and a warm cup of regenerative organic bone broth, infused with local grown ginger.
Before bed, though my body was exhausted and depleted from four days of fasting and the body load of a high-dose entheogenic journey, I stole away into the forest, and there in the darkness, “out of the silence,” I made a promise it would kill me to break. I made a vow to Mother Earth, Mama ʻĀina, the Anima Mundi, that I would embody my soul image and the power and responsibility it bestowed upon me, always with love and compassion, for the life-enhancing good of all beings.
In the morning, I packed up my tarp, and all my belongings. I stuffed as much trash as I could fit in my pack left by other campers and hunters who frequent the area. (Please, please dear readers, Leave no Trace when venturing into wild places).
My final ceremony was the ritual offering of the Mask of Masculinity. Before my soul glimpse, I had been unsure of how I might offer it: into a ceremonial fire, scattered into the red rushing river, or into the belly of Mother Earth to be composted.
After my vision it was crystal clear: the mask must be composted. I wrapped it carefully in its Ti leaf, and tied it with a piece of paracord, to keep it together while I began the long hike out, fully expecting to find the offering place on the way.
This concludes the series on my solo Vision Quest in Kaua’i. Thank you for joining me on this journey. You may be left wondering…
What was the mythopoetic, dark image of my soul glimpse?
I have only shared my soul glimpse with a few human others, my soul guides and mentors, and my closest friends. The Vision I received, the vision of my one true place in the human and more-than-human community, is a sacred calling from the wild and holy Earth. It is a vision I may never share in writing, but it is the story I now live into the world.
Dear reader, in closing, a request: please pause for a moment — do you have anyone in your life who might benefit from hearing a story such as this? I would be deeply grateful if you would consider sharing it with them.
And, if this sounds like the kind of journey you would like to experience for yourself, please head to thesoulwanderer.com/application and fill out the form there. I’ll be in touch via email.
With deep gratitude, and much love,
Jonathan ♡