Soulcraft Musings

Friday, July 3, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part X

This is Part Ten of a 20-plus-part essay on making and following a map that might get us to the Next World, and on what it means to leave one world and eventually reach another, and on what it’s like for a community or a society to be between worlds, perhaps walking that long road for several generations. Think of this as a draft of an essay I’ll be working on for a while — or eventually a short book. Let me know — through Substack — what resonates with you. To fully understand or contextualize today’s part, you might want to read, reread, or at least scan the first three parts. Link Below.

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Portal to the Next World: A Passageway Opens on the Mossy Edge of Imagination

What do we mean when we talk about the world changing? What more can we say, if anything, about “the Next World”?

Here’s my take: The Next World could not simply or only or primarily be a matter of living in a community of more mature humans in daily communion and reciprocity with the greater web of life. That’s got to be part of it, but it isn’t the essence. Living in a human community of that sort would be more like the means or path by which we might eventually reach the Next World. Describing a community in those terms does not, by itself, reveal much about the nature of the Next World or the experience of living in it.

But let’s pause here a moment: Having communities of more mature humans in daily communion and reciprocity with the greater web of life would obviously be a huge improvement over the current global mainstream of modernity. This would be the shift from life-destroying to life-sustaining societies. A major breakthrough — and a necessary one. But this is still a long way from the life-enhancing societies of the Next World. Life-sustaining societies are the transitional communities we’ll need for at least a few generations before the Next World could be reached. (I’ll have more to say later, in this multi-part essay, on these transitional societies.)

Before I return today to musing about the nature of the Next World, I want to emphasize how monumental a project it will be to get there, especially when we’re starting within a Dominator global society and one that’s in the midst of collapse, in the midst of the Great Unraveling or the Great Simplification. [24] Although this will be a complex and challenging journey of a couple hundred years or more, embarking now will generate a framework, a perspective, that will help us choose our best path over the next few decades, choices that will determine if we’ll ever reach the Next World. Surely there are much more urgent crises facing us now — the rapid loss of biodiversity amidst the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, this one brought about by us; rising authoritarianism and the consequent erosion of social and racial justice and the loss of human diversity; climate disruption, the decline of ocean health, the disappearance of our forests, and the diminishment of soil health and arable land; even the existential possibility of self-inflicted human extinction this century — but addressing our longer-term deep-time challenges and opportunities cannot wait until our more immediate crises are resolved. The big picture question of where we hope to be in three hundred years is no less important now, even if less urgent. Our journey to the Next World requires current generations to design and cultivate social systems and structures that support nature-based full-spectrum human development for people of all stages and ages. Doing so also enhances our capacities with our more immediate challenges.

Now, back to (musing about) the future: In the Next World, the primary thing that will have changed is … well, the world. And also our consciousness. World and consciousness dependently co-arise, to borrow a Buddhist phrase. When consciousness shifts in a profound way, the world does as well. And vice versa.

We might imagine that the Next World is a lot more like the animate world of our indigenous ancestors than it is like our current Dominator World. Not the same, but likely many similarities. But the truth is that it’s really hard to say how much the Next World will be like the world our forebears experienced — in part because we ourselves haven’t directly experienced that prior world and in part because we as a species have been evolving, even during our millennia of Dominator domination, and, consequently, we are likely being readied by Mystery/ evolution for a world no humans have previously inhabited.

From our current location back here in Dominator World, we can generate only an impression of the Next World. We can conjure it but only mythopoetically or by way of analogy.



There’s a poem that summons for me a sense of an opening to the Next World and perhaps a hint of the Next World itself, suggesting ways in which it might be like our earlier animate world but different, and suggesting that the ladder waiting for us might be a kind of “perceptual portal” or a “porous passage.” I invite you to read the following verses at least twice, slowly, perhaps out loud. The poet is Geneen Marie Haugen:

Perceptual Portal

My antennae sweep and scan

for reception, for a portal

in perception, for a porous

passage to a green breathing

land where every presence

offers itself to be known,

where everything speaks,

even galaxies, even stone,

where interspecies

lovetalk leaps like

flashing fish and flying

dragons in blue-pooled

dream canyons, where poems

sprout from cracked bark

of sequoia and oak, and

madcap music mushrooms

from decay and darkness.

Sometimes human beings listen,

ears tilting in a creaturely way,

tuned to something not entirely

audible though there is no barrier

to reception, and through

this listening we might remember

how to live, hearing the old

voice that still bells forth

from the primal body

who birthed us all,

the old voice reverberating

along tendrils of mycelia

that entwine the human psyche

with the mother tree:

living psyche of Earth.

It’s not a far country or fictional

galaxy, but an unfiltered mode

of consciousness with no screen

to block or deaden the Others

and their always-streaming voices,

their ancient kinships, star-studded

extravaganzas, where even human

beings might harmonize their wildly

necessary sound. I have sojourned

plenty in that stone-talking terrain

but lost the way of return

busy as I was with all varieties

of civilized absurdity,

forgetting I even had

antennae, formed long

before we became human.

But here: a passageway

opens on the mossy edge

of imagination. Shadows

illustrate the way, flicker

and hum their own language.

Praise the revived antennae

and sing with the Others now:

cackling trills, creaking

dreams, moon swoons, rough

poems sprouting from

portals in perception.

Written from an enchanted state of consciousness, these words might lift the veil, supporting us to peek into the Next World. Just a momentary glimpse. A feeling. A state of being. An inspiration. Geneen writes not from the experience of living in a soulcentric community in the Next World but from the consciousness of a contemporary person, a seer, an imagineer gifted with the capacity to glimpse the future. Yes, learning again to deeply listen might enable us to “remember how to live,” but “hearing the old voice” might also usher us into a new, never-before-experienced world “where interspecies/ lovetalk leaps like/ flashing fish and flying/ dragons in blue-pooled/ dream canyons.” Love talk of that sort will likely culminate in the birth of unprecedented and pioneering possibilities. “It’s not a far country or fictional/ galaxy, but an unfiltered mode/ of consciousness.”

References

[24] The Great Unraveling is Joanna Macy’s term. The Great Simplification is Nate Hagens’.

Photo: Porous Passageway [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.