More on Plotkin’s Book.
by SGHolland
I’m more than halfway through this book. Page 263, to be exact.
It has stretched my mind, for sure. In a dumbfounding sort of way.

And I am just getting to the hard part!
He calls this part of the evolution of the human soul the Cocoon, in his “map” of the journey of a human soul. After the earlier build up of experience and skill and survival know-how, one begins to be ready to enter into this later part. It is not for the uninitiated, Plotkin reminds the reader. It is the part where everything a person has learned, questioned, tried, experienced, memorized, suffered from, and aspired to is left behind. As I asked in an earlier piece on this matter — am I expected to jump naked into the abyss?
What Plotkin describes is a true revolt from everything that a person has accumulated in his thinking — and the utter relinquishment of all preconceived and prelearned concepts. A spin into the world without props.

I have run across some familiar names. Esalen is one of them that caught my eye especially because my late friend Veronika spent time there in her hippy days. She was deeply influenced by her experience.
I listened to her and thought it sounded very esoteric and hazed with psychedelics. Yes, she said there were experimental drug events that some had. Someone slipped her little child some LSD that made for terrible nightmares that recurred in that child’ s life. Not sure if she is rid of them yet.
But there was also a letting go of other conventions there — which is one of the reasons I asked myself at the outset whether the journey this book would take me on would require me to jump into a sort of abyss naked.
There is no question that Veronika, and Plotkin, had/has good grey matter. These people have studied deeply much more than my art-directed life has entailed, if you include the metaphysical. Very creative and fascinating people, both!
I am not so sure I have not been that traveler into the abyss in different ways than Veronika and Plotkin have. But the concept applies to all cultures, he insists, and has been a process enriching humans since pre-history!
The idea is to let go of yourself. Offer up yourself to the world of nature around you in a place far from your usual environment. Let nature teach you whatever it wants.
An initiation into the spiritual world.

Yes, it began long before our sociologists were around making notes, and the root of Plotkin’s explorations has to do with a basic, primitive, natural relationship to nature that he believes ties us as much to the natural world as any living creature. We have just lost track of that connection, he teaches, in our learned focus on getting what we want out of the world.
This is certainly a hot topic of our times: Materialism versus Humanistic concerns.
Plotkin is aiming to get more people through this cycle, in whatever individual way Nature teaches that person, so that we will be contributing our gifts to the world — to nature — to each other — to human existence. So that it will not be us grabbing what we can by hard work and smart investments — but by being beyond those values. This, Plotkin agrees, puts us at odds with the mainstream — most people in our current culture.
Bartering for one’s piece of the planet — conquering and owning — using resources to build bigger and better things for ourselves, he feels is what has put us into the smoky, polluted, selfish, self-centered world we now live in.
So this is where the book has been leading, and I’m in. At least in my head. There have been glimpses of this sort of revolt in my life — and yes I learned a lot from each one. My value system has been changed every time I have been, as my cousin calls it, headstrong and headlong.
Reading this book is more of same.
I am a believer in a loving God. And there are affidavits that come with my faith, including the one of not forsaking me.
So when I launch into a concept like this I find, swimming around my thoughts, one of my favorite refrains of a bit of music by Daniel W Whittle (pub.1883) that has been for years as handy in my head as any favorite song is. Music is definitely how I hear nature, whether it comes from voices or thunderstorms!
“I know Whom I have believed,
And am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I’ve committed
Unto Him against that day.”
So, armed with that confidence, I read on. Not into the abyss yet, but reading about it.
Dumbfounded! Susan G Holland ©2017

