Soul Initiation with Bill Plotkin (4K Reboot)

Summary

Psychologist Bill Plotkin, founder of the Animas Valley Institute, argues that every human is born with 'original instructions', a soul he defines as one's unique ecological niche, much like a salmon instinctively knows its life path. He claims that modern industrial cultures have lost the initiatory journey that leads to true adulthood, leaving most people stuck in psychological early adolescence and fueling global crises. Using the metamorphosis of a caterpillar as a map, he describes the five phases of the 'descent to soul' and recounts visionary encounters, including a butterfly that spoke the words 'cocoon weaver' to him on a 1980 vision fast.

Key takeaways

• 1Plotkin defines soul as a being's unique ecological niche and calls the human version our 'original instructions', a non-linguistic, non-cultural knowledge we are born with.
• 2He describes the descent to soul in five phases modeled on caterpillar metamorphosis: preparation, dissolution, soul encounter, metamorphosis and enactment.
• 3During a 1980 vision fast in the Colorado mountains, after four days without food, a butterfly brushed his face and he heard it say 'cocoon weaver', which became his mythopoetic identity.
• 4He claims Carl Jung had two soul encounters, one as 'the one who speaks to and for the dead' and a second through the 'Liverpool dream' around age 52, after roughly 16 years in the 'cocoon' stage.
• 5He says Joanna Macy had her first soul encounter at about age 28 under ether after childbirth, during her Saturn return, with a vision of turning on a great wheel in space.
• 6He follows James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld' in letting dreams transform the dreamer rather than interpreting them, citing dream workers Robert Bosnak and Stephen Aizenstat. His books include 'Soulcraft', 'Nature and the Human Soul', 'Wild Mind' and 'The Journey of Soul Initiation'.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

everything is born with original knowledge. And most animals, for example, don't even have parents beyond the moment of birth. And so, like a salmon, for example, is born knowing what its place is and when to migrate down to the sea and how many years to spend in the sea and when to come back and how to get back and all of that. So, I've made this outrageous, radical proposition that maybe we humans aren't any different in that sense, that maybe we too, for somehow we're not an exception to evolution on this planet and we too are born with original instructions. So, the journey of soul initiation is the process that takes several years, longer if you don't know what's happening or you don't have a guide. It's the process of initiation that results in what I consider to be true adulthood, which is a stage of life that I have concluded the vast majority of contemporary people never reach. Keep watching to learn more. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. The New Thinking Allowed magazine issue 10 on UFOs and UAP is now ready for free download and you can also order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. Book four in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is, Charles T. Tartt, Seventy Years of Exploring, Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon. Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring soul initiation.…

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Sep 24, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.