The Upper-World is the realm of Father SkyFather Sky. The sacred Masculine pole: pure consciousness, from which the Upper-World arises. Paired with Mother Earth. ‘Father Sun’ is the older name for the same pole, found in the first three books. More about this and of Spirit: spacious, full of light, a place of wisdom, compassion and perspective. Its oneness is the oneness of everything being part of a single whole, where the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer’s oneness is ecological, a web of relationships. It is not higher or better than the Lower-World, and much of what people today take to be the Upper-World is a human-made distortion of it, shaped by the sky-religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this and their idea that “up is good and down is bad”.
What is the Upper-World? #
The realm of Father Sky. It is the realm “of what in Therapeutic Shamanism we call Father Sun, whereas the Lower-World is the realm 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”, and “Christians essentially pinched it and called it ‘heaven’.”1 Its purpose is clear: “The point is that the Upper-World is a place of wisdom, love, healing and compassion… It is a place where we can go to get a bigger perspective on things; to ‘rise above’ petty concerns and problems”.
It also feels different from the Lower-World. “It is a bit floaty, a bit wispy, and spacious to the point of appearing almost empty sometimes. There is an amazing quality to the light.” It is not crowded or ornate, but spacious, often layered like veils of sky within sky: “Light here has substance, it seems to breathe.”
What is the Upper-World part of us? #
Spirit. Our Upper-World Spirit is “pure consciousness. It is a fragment of Father Sky (or God, if you like), in the same way that a water drop is part of the ocean, or that a spark is part of a fire. This part of us likes to soar and transcend; to rise above things and see the bigger picture.”2 It also “needs us to live in a way that is ethical and moral, kind and compassionate.” Of all the parts of us, Spirit has the least individuality: “some degree of individuality, but not much.”3 See How are the realms related to Soul, Spirit and the middle-world self?
How does Upper-World oneness differ from Lower-World oneness? #
They are two different kinds of oneness. “The Upper-World speaks to oneness in an abstract way, while the Lower-World shows us oneness is ecological and based on reciprocity and healthy inter-dependence”. Upper-World practices “help us transcend the sense of separation. They help us move beyond our limited Self and experience non-duality in the sense of everything being part of an undifferentiated whole.”4 In the Lower-World, by contrast, we discover that we are unique and at the same time part of something far greater.
Neither cancels out the reality of the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer. Separation is not only an illusion: “In shamanic terms, everything is indeed part of Great SpiritGreat Mystery (Great Spirit). The unknowable from which everything comes. Better rendered ‘the Great Mystery’: animism has no interventionist creator-god, and the truly infinite cannot be prayed to, bargained with or journeyed to. More about this. And (not but), on another level, separation is real, too.”5
What is the Upper-World for? #
Perspective, ethics and compassion. Upper-World practices “help us see the bigger picture, and gain perspective from the agendas and concerns of our ego and its stories and desires. They help us align ourselves with good ethics, and in cultivating healthy detachment, discernment, compassion (including self-compassion), tranquillity, serenity, and living in the present moment.”6 We go there to bring something back, not to escape: “We rise not to leave the world behind, but to return to it refreshed, with clearer eyes.”
Is the Upper-World higher or better than the Lower-World? #
No. “In shamanism, the Upper-World is not a better place than the Lower-World. God is not superior to Goddess.”7 The idea that “up is good and down is bad” is, from a shamanic point of view, “sheer and utter nonsense.” A balanced practice works with both realms equally, and “You do not come to love and revere the Earth by resolutely ignoring her and focusing only on the Sky”.8 See Why does Therapeutic Shamanism begin with the Lower-World?
How does the Upper-World get distorted? #
Through the hierarchy that came with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. With the rise of the city-states, the organised religions “placed more and more emphasis on the Upper-World, albeit a highly-distorted view of the Upper-World. ‘Up’ became ‘good’ and ‘down’ became ‘bad’.”9 That value judgement is “insidious in our culture”, shaping everything from religion to how we treat the other Peoples.10
Our idea of the gods was distorted too. “We have lost true connection with Father Sun too, replacing him with distorted projections made in our own image. We create gods who share the worst of human flaws.”11 These gods are “nothing like the gods that our hunter-gatherer ancestors knew”, for whom “The gods had no more interest in us than a mountain has in us, or the wind or the rain.”
Spirituality that only looks upwards is distorted in another way. Trying to transcend everything through Spirit alone produces “a top-heavy, disembodied and ungrounded spirituality”; instead, “shamanism shows us that we need to rise, but rise rooted.”12
What are human-made Upper-Worlds? #
Imagery and ideas we have built and mistaken for the realm itself. From an animist perspective, much of what people today take to be the Upper-World is not that realm at all, but a human-made construct, a reflection of our own cultural imagination. When the real Upper-World is experienced, “what we find is not the grandiosity of heaven, but a realm of clarity, spaciousness, and perspective, a place that helps us see through illusion, rather than escape from the world.”
Because we can only perceive shamanic reality through images, we always clothe the Upper-World in something. Michael Harner found, as he reports in his book Cave and Cosmos, that people “experienced the same themes in the Upper-World” but “clothed their experience in different images”.13 Treating that imagery as symbol rather than literal fact is part of keeping the realm clear. See How are Upper-World Guides different from Lower-World Guides?
