Phases of Descent of Soul - Dissolution
#2
Dissolution
This is the second part of a five-part Musing
“The Descent to Soul is a psychospiritual expedition into one particular precinct of the underworld — the precinct I call Soul Canyon — and, if fortunate, the eventual emergence from those depths having been radically transformed by an encounter with soul. My names for the five phases of the Descent are Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis, and Enactment.
The second phase, Dissolution, comprises the psychospiritual descent itself, down into Soul Canyon. This is not at all your mere or temporary separation or severance from your everyday community and social roles. No. What happens during this plummet is the conclusive dismemberment of who you had believed you were; the unconditional disintegration of everything you believed the world was; the definitive end of the story you had been living; the unqualified dissolution of the identity, the persona, the mask you had been walking around in, everything that enabled you to get the things done that you thought essential to who you were, who you could become, how you could serve your people. Everything.
With this phase, you step across an invisible existential threshold and enter a ritual space of liminality, a kind of identity indeterminateness . You are in a state of suspension. You are not an active agent who is trying to solve anything. Rather, your goal is to be dis solved — by Mystery. You can cooperate, but you cannot make it happen. It happens to you.
This phase, in understatement, is challenging. It may, theoretically, last only a week or two (although I’ve never witnessed it so short on a person’s first Descent), or it might go on for months or years. Not everyone who departs reaches the bottom of the Canyon — or even very far down. I believe that in a healthy cultural context and with the support of guides or elders, this phase might last only a few weeks or months, even on a first Descent.
Dissolution is the first of the three central and liminal phases of the Descent to Soul, the three phases in which the initiate has no fixed identity in the everyday life of the Village (and, in many traditional contexts, is separated physically and socially from the Village).”
Content from SoulCraft Musings, Animas Valley Institute
