A Human Guide, more fully a Human Lower-World Guide, is a wise and loving being of the Lower-World who appears in human form: the Human OversoulOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this, given a face we can relate to. Human Lower-World Guides are not dead relatives and not modern people; they live as the hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age did. After the Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, a Human Guide is usually the next great teacher in shamanic practice, showing us how to be a human being.
What is a Human Guide? #
The Human Oversoul in a form we can know. With a Power Animal, people can relate to the whole species, Wolf or Lion. With humans that is much harder: “It is almost impossible to picture a generic human, much less develop a close bond with one.”1 So a Human Lower-World Guide appears as an individual, with a face, a name and a personality, whilst being much more than an individual. Paul Francis’s own main Guide is, in effect, the Human Oversoul, but with a human face he can relate to.2
They are real beings, not parts of the selfParts of the self. There are four parts of the self, the realm-corresponding members of the Inner Tribe: the Body and the middle-world self (both of the middle-world), the Soul (of the Lower-World) and the Spirit (of the Upper-World). The Aware Self, also called the Witness, is not a fifth part but a capacity: the awareness that can watch all four, with compassion and equanimity. Read the full answer: a Human Guide is not a figment of the imagination, or a sub-personality, or a part of the psyche, but an autonomous being, someone to have a close, personal relationship with. See What is an Oversoul?
Are Human Guides the same as ancestors? #
No: they are AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer with a capital A. “The ancestors (with a small ‘a’) are our individual biological ancestors who are no longer living, our great-grandparents and so on. The Ancestors on the other hand are something bigger.”3 Every tribe’s Ancestral branch, followed back, converges into one branch, Human, and that branch is itself part of “one great being growing out of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.”
So a Human Lower-World Guide “is not an individual human being who once lived their life in physical form in the middle-world.” The same is true of the wider Lower-World Tribe: “They are not ancestors, but Ancestors.”4 Working with individual dead relatives is middle-world work, and something different.
Are Human Guides modern humans? #
No. The Lower-World is pure, unspoilt nature: “There are people there, but living as hunter-gatherers, and in harmony with nature. That is Stone Age culture.”5 So a true Lower-World Guide “will not be wearing any metal jewellery or carrying a metal knife. They will not be wearing jeans or silk, nor dressed as a Roman centurion.”6
Nor do they know anything about modern life. “They know nothing about bank accounts, insurance policies, mortgages, the law, the career ladder at work”, and a “Guide” who chats away giving advice about such things “is not a true Lower-World Guide.”7 Guides some people already have before coming to this work, such as a doctor from centuries ago or an aunt who died a few years earlier, “are not Lower-World Guides. They are middle-world beings.”8
Does a Human Guide belong to a particular culture? #
Only in appearance. A Guide will look as though they come from somewhere, but “The divisions between human races and cultures are a middle-world thing.” “Your Human Lower-World Guide is simply a face that you put on Human… Human is all humans, the Oversoul to which all humans belong.”9 Paul’s own Guide appears to be of northern Finno-Ugric origin, which is not to say that she actually is Finno-Ugric. This is also why working with a Human Lower-World Guide is not cultural appropriation.
Why are Human Guides connected with hunter-gatherers? #
Because hunter-gatherers lived in the healthiest relationship with the Earth that humans have known. Paul chose Guides representative “of the Leaver culturesLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer, of animist hunter-gatherer tribes; the cultures that preceded our broken relationship with the Earth”, because he wanted to begin the process of healing his own domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and broken relationship with the Earth, and to try to rewire his brain into a more animist way of perceiving the world.10 That means reaching back before agriculture, not to ancient civilisations: the Greeks and Babylonians “are still Fallen cultures; city-state cultures engaging in totalitarian agriculture.”11
This is not romanticising. “I am fully aware that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not living in paradise.” But relative to the agriculturalists who came after them, they had a much healthier relationship with the Earth, and “it does make them the best template that we have for experiencing the world as humans living in a healthy, connected, animist way.”12 See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Why might Human Guides take someone hunting in the Lower-World? #
To show them what it is to be Human. On a Lower-World hunt you may be joined by your Power Animal, and perhaps by your Human Lower-World Guide or other Lower-World Humans. Knowing how to be human, “a domesticated middle-world being”, is different from being Human: “Wild, untamed, free, fully at home on the earth and knowing your place in the web of life.”13 Hunting and gathering was an essential, daily part of life for our pre-domesticated ancestors, and stepping into it in a journey “will greatly deepen your connection to Human, and to your own authentic Soul.”
It is not a statement about diet. “Doing a Lower-World hunt is not about the ethics of what you choose to do in your middle-world, physical life here”, and Paul himself, when in this middle-world, is a squeamish vegetarian.
How do Human Guides relate to the Animal, Plant and Stone People? #
As the youngest members of the same family. The Human Oversoul is one branch of the great tree of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, and amongst the Peoples humans are the children: “We are the youngest and least wise of the Peoples, and like children, we need regular guidance and have a lot to learn.”14 Unlike the other Peoples, humans have to be taught how to be what they are: “A rock has no need to learn how to be a rock.”15
For hunter-gatherers, the other Peoples were teachers in how to live, and a Human Guide teaches in human form. Like the people we admire, our Human Lower-World Guides are there “to show us not how to be flawless gods, but how to be a human being.”16 There is a caution, though: because the only humans most of us know are from Taker society, “our middle-world experiences and ideas about human tend to get in the way” when meeting Lower-World Humans.17 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
What is a Human Guide like? #
A vivid individual. Paul’s own main Human Lower-World Guide is a woman in her mid-thirties in green buckskin, with “a tattoo done in black ink of a lizard on the inside of her left forearm” and a bone carving of a raven around her neck. She is compassionate and warm, and yet takes no crap whatsoever from anyone or anything. She can be incredibly fierce when needed, and Paul knows she can take care of herself and of him.18
What a Guide does is the subject of its own answer, but in brief they are teachers, and you are their apprentice: “essentially you will become their apprentice and they will guide you into the deeper layers of this work.” It is common to have at least one main Human Guide, and others may appear later with their own specialisms.19 See What do Human Guides teach and help with?
