Visionaries: David Abram and Bill Plotkin, PhD

Author, depth psychologist and ecotherapist, Bill Plotkin explores the needed great shifts on the planet with cultural ecologist, philosopher and spiritual teacher David Abrams. Their in-depth discussion examines our western culture’s disconnect from nature, the consequences of that disconnection and potential solutions to reconnect not only to nature but to our authentic selves. Bill describes our current educational system as a prison or zoo in which the wild connection to the authentic self is tamed out of children. David encourages us to closely examine nature around us to help reconnect to our authentic selves and he gives a detailed and poetic description of his physical location. They believe western society is currently stuck in perpetual adolescence due to the cultural resistance to experience the downward journey prescribed as necessary for maturation in many indigenous mythologies. The easiest way to arrest the development of a society is to identify that downward journey as evil. And the modern western society has done just that. Even the conceptual downward direction is where the devil lives in some modern beliefs. So we have arrested our maturation process by resisting that downward descent as part of the transformational process.