The Trial and Triumph of Soul Encounter
Michael Ebbinghaus • April 5, 2023
Treasures Await at the Bottom of Soul Canyon
Tomorrow a group of close friends and I will journey out west to Big Bend National Park, experientially inviting soul to visit us with its wisdom and direction. The impetus for our pilgrimage has been our reading and implementing of Dr. Bill Plokin’s Journey to Soul Initiation. In this masterwork, Bill provides a great map of the terrain of Soul Canyon, that place we descend into ourselves to discover our true becoming and identity, an inseparable and magnificent piece of this incredible more-than-human world.
Soul encounters are among the treasures possible when we take the arduous descent into soul canyon. A Soul encounter is not merely an epiphany or revelation, but a deep knowing of true identity that will require us to embark upon paths not outlined for us in our consumer-capitalist culture. Our soul encounters lead us to a place far more ancient and wise than the machinations of man, a place far more interconnected with the true field of reality. When we access the dreams soul has dreamed for us, we tune into the dream of the earth and become part of a much greater synergistic organism, one that is capable of integrating our powers into a harmonious dance of technology, cerebrum, branch, and soil.
Soul encounters may occur without any warning or invocation, during near death experiences or mind wanderings on the train. They also come to us through dreams and other altered states of consciousness. Our method will be a prayer, a seduction, an invocation: the vision fast. Three days of hiking in the Chisos mountains with only water and electrolytes. The fast empties our bodies in preparation for spirit, and the exhaustion will loosen the ego’s hold. It guides us into a state of consciousness similar to the hypnagogic state, that liminal period in between sleeping and waking in which rules are suspended and creativity reigns. The landscape will take on the pallor of our dreams, and our dances and rituals will invoke Soul to bring us a message.
"When we access the dreams soul has dreamed for us, we tune into the dream of the earth and become part of a much greater synergistic organism, one that is capable of integrating our powers into a harmonious dance of technology, cerebrum, branch, and soil."
Soul encounters are vital to shifting our perspective from an egocentric viewpoint to an ecocentric one, recognizing on a cellular level the degree to which we are cells in the breath of the Kosmos. This is no denigration of our humanity, but an illumination; they reveal the particular ways we embody and are close to the divine. The show us our true face or our mythopoetic identity, that great journey and mission which will require the full integration of our entire lives. Soul initiation is not a rite, a passage, or an experience, but a way of being in the world that is irrevocably alchemized into greater Truth that cannot be unseen, a way that will call to us for the remainder of our lives. It requires us to grow into the mysteries revealed by soul, and though sacrifice is required, we are richly rewarded in meaning and experiential connection to our human and more-than-human communities.
In order to illustrate these topics, I will give three of my soul encounters, each of which was experienced under very different circumstances. The first are dreams that have stayed with me and developed, the second a chance encounter in the wild connected with a vision, and the last the results of my first vision quest in 2020 which I undertook intuitively and under no guidance or knowledge of what I would receive. Just following the feelings and the threads.
Soul Encounter #1 – Dream of the White City and the Mystery School
My first soul encounter came to me when I was fourteen. I dreamt that I jumped into a hole in my best friend’s backyard, a wild place among the suburbs where our imaginations could run wild. I was transported to a great city made of white stone. There was a canal that ran all through it. Where I stood at the city center the canals converged in the circle of the four directions. The city was totally vacant, its inhabitants long absconded. I had no idea what this dream meant at the time, but it stuck with me. It would resurge at random times in my awareness, and I could always return to the majesty of that safe and powerful place.
Over the last few years, it became evident that my mission is to catalyze the evolution of education in this country, in this world, particularly in the realms of esoteric instruction and connection to spirit. The white city is a real place, not in its particulars, but in its foundations. The white city is ancient and subterranean, hidden in the dream of the earth. Though its inhabitants have gone, it remains perfect and sturdy. It is representative of ancient and perennial wisdom.
I am to repopulate this ancient city, to fill it with life, revelry, conversation, and dancing, intellectual discussion and joyful explorations, being wedded to the land and the deep layers of our being.
"Soul encounters are vital to shifting our perspective from an egocentric viewpoint to an ecocentric one, recognizing on a cellular level the degree to which we are cells in the breath of the Kosmos."
The dream surfaced again in new form last year in 2022. This time the white city was no longer subterranean, but here on the surface of the Earth, and it was a bustling university, the New Alexandria that my heart wants more than anything to see actualized. It was near a forest and a river, and the river fed a series of canals through the grounds, the canals feeding back into the river (integration with Nature). Athenian buildings dotted the land. There was one, a Pantheon-like structure, exactly half submerged in the water. I swam underneath it. One of the students warned me we were not supposed to go in there. But this was my school, and I knew there was no danger (transcending rules with mastery). I was then a floating point of perspective following the river away from the grounds, which culminated in a breathtaking U-shaped cistern, a place I imagine may actually exist out here in the world, a place I will likely be called to one day to set the foundations for a new civilization, a task that will call me to grow and expand in tremendously uncomfortable ways. This uncomfortable expansion is the seat of soul work.
Soul Encounter #2 – Visions and Meetings with Deer
Soul encounters may stretch over long periods of time, free as they are from its bounds. As far as spirit animals are concerned, I always identified with the owl. I have found that our sprit animals are often ego animals – folks generally identify more with predators in this culture. They find them more powerful, captivating, dominating. How appropriate then that they act like herd animals in the shadow. But as my encounters with deer unfolded, I knew that these gentle yet powerful creatures were the seat of my heart.
On a run one morning in 2018, an enormous buck came out of the trees directly onto the path in front of me, perhaps 10 feet away. He turned his head to look at me. I gazed on in amazement. His head stood a little above mine – he was incredible. We stood there briefly before he galloped off, and I could feel his weight and power in the earth as he left.
Esoteric events surrounding deer have occurred on at least five occasions. The most notable was a high-dose mushroom ceremony out in Nature in which I saw out of the singular eye of a hermaphroditic deer goddess, but that’s a tale for another time. The most vital have been visions received during non-psychedelic altered states. During a morning meditation, I saw myself 10 years in the future, wearing a great green cloak and a headdress of antlers. Perhaps two months after this vision, I attended a soulcentric dreamwork intensive at Bill Plotkin’s Animas Valley Institute in Cortez, CO. On day 3, we were gathered in an alcove where people had slept, cooked, and lived for thousands of years. The facilitators did nothing more than keep a steady drum beat, and instructed us to work with our process. I followed the intuitive movements of my body, rubbed myself into the earth, rubbed earth into my hair and my face. I stopped moving and laid on my back. I knew that I needed to take the earth and cover my eyes with it, so I shut them tightly and grabbed fistfuls of dirt, filling my sockets. I completely lost connection with the physical world and fully inhabited my dreambody. I was in a wigwam lit by a dull fire. Sitting on a raised platform was the deer-headed enchantress, a beautiful woman with a deer skull for a head. Her eyes are yellow and piercing. A dark rhomboid, blood red constellations at its center, floats just above her outstretched hand. She pushes it outwards into my belly, and it fills me with vitality and power.
Soul Encounter #3 – Vision Quest in the Southwest
I’ve already written at length about this experience in my article “Sojourn to Sedona,” so I will briefly cover it here. In 2020 as lockdown descended, I felt an inexplicable and potent call to journey to the southwest and hike through Zion National Park. Storms steered me towards Sedona, but a day hike through Zion at the beginning of the pandemic harkened me home. Snow fell almost as soon as I began my ascent. I felt welcomed, acknowledged, and it became clear to me from Women Who Run With the Wolves, the book I selected out of many to deeply study during the trip, that I was to contact the wild feminine.
Over the course of three days, I hiked 31 miles. For many of those miles I was singing, calling the divine/wild feminine to me. On the final day I hiked 13 miles (13/31), one of the many incredible synchronicities that occurred. But the real soul encounter occurred as I felt called to sit in a specific place on the land, a beautiful red slate rock waterfall. There I contemplated the ending of a five year relationship, and a thought occurred to me: that the version of myself I was trying to hold onto was already dead.
Something broke inside of me, and a flood of tears and moans came. Behind my closed eyes I saw my former partner floating just beneath the surface of a lake. She wore a white gown and her golden hair extended radially. I gripped her dress so tightly that it was wound around my wrists. She looks at me with a gaze of pure compassion and understanding. We nod to one another. I release my grip, and she sinks into the depths below.
More tears. More emptiness pouring out of me. A deep and maternal voice enters my awareness: “I know, child. I know coming to consciousness hurts.” The wild feminine contacted me. Her voice was clear. She had been relentless in giving me this vision, and so tender in holding me once I had faced it: the action of a divine mother. What’s more, that very day a favorite band of mine released a song called “Empress,” which I listened to 40+ times on the way home with exuberance and sadness, a deep knowing that the Universe is infinitely intertwined and cares genuinely about all of us.
There was nothing really that had to be done. I have always been gifted with the ability to honor what is true for me, and my own knowing has always been my greatest ally. All of these experiences have informed me about parts of myself that I was unaware of but were all deeply true, and provided much needed direction to the question of what do I do with this sacred life.
The Sentient Soul
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