Soulcraft Musings

Friday, August 14, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XVI

This is Part Sixteen 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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The Familiar Experience of Shifting Between Worlds

The Next World, as I’m conjuring it in this series of posts, may seem like a radical leap beyond where we are now (it surely is) but the generic notion of different worlds, of moving between one world and another, is not a new or unfamiliar experience. For any of us. Even you.

Consider, for example, the difference between the worlds of dreaming and waking, the nightworld and the dayworld. With very rare exceptions, each one of us experiences both worlds as entirely and unquestionably real when we’re in them. But they are astonishingly different kinds of worlds. [39] Indeed, it’s often challenging and sometimes impossible to translate one world with the language and consciousness of the other. Nightworlds commonly include creatures and features that not only do not or could not exist in our waking world — like unicorns or our capacity to “ski” in our bare feet down the smooth precipitous waves of cascading rivers (I’ve done this often in the nightworld) — but also phenomena that cannot even be accurately described with dayworld language. We find ourselves resorting to metaphor, to “as if,” or throwing up our hands, admitting defeat, and saying there’s really no way to describe it, you just had to be there. Shuttling from one world to a very different one is a common human experience. Most of us do this every morning when waking.

Another way we experience different worlds is through the magic of certain films, like the classic Wizard of Oz (when, for example, the film switches from sepia-toned Kansas, with its grim, gray, mundane prairie life, to the full color of entrancing and action-packed Oz bursting with vitality, music, and fantastical beings like witches, talking flowers, and flying monkeys) or the more recent Avatar (when, for example, Jake Sully first enters the Pandora forest, which, under artificial light, initially appears dark and menacing, but is then revealed in its natural, ethereal splendor as a dazzling, glowing landscape of vibrant blues, greens, and purples, a sight completely unlike anything on Earth). We all know there are possibilities in one world that exist not at all in others.

We also experience world change, at least temporarily, through common human experiences such as falling in love, reading great fiction, spiritual practices, and the full sensation of different seasons or radically different habitats (e.g., the tropics vs the arctic) or through generally less common contemporary experiences such as psychedelics, ritual and ceremony, soulcraft, immersing ourselves for a while in a culture exotic to our own, entering or leaving a cult or even an off-beat social group, or the onset of a drug addiction or the recovery therefrom. You could say that these experiences alter our consciousness, which is true, but you could equally well say that they change the world.

Moving from one life stage to another is yet another common experience that entails a profound shift in both consciousness and world. Consider, for example, the changes entailed in birth (from the dark, confined, and nurturing womb to the expansive, infinitely diverse, wondrous, and uncertain world of an infant’s early terrestrial life), or emerging from that unlit and (mostly) unremembered world of early childhood to the world of self-aware middle childhood filled with conscious wonder and conscious choice, or the passage of puberty from the relatively contained, family-identified world of childhood to the peer-group-identified, wide-ranging, sexually animated, painfully self-conscious, and self-determining world of adolescence. The several life passages beyond puberty, which most contemporary humans never experience — save the final one, death — are equally profound transformations in consciousness and world. For example, whether or not you’ve been through the passage of Soul Initiation, [40] I invite you to recall your life as a teenager, with its focus on social status and belonging and (hopefully also) social authenticity, and then compare and contrast that life, at least in your imagination, with your actual or potential existence as a soul-initiated adult with a passionate focus on the mysteries of your mythopoetic identity (derived from your Soul, your unique psycho-ecological niche in the world) and your passion for and devotion to embodying that identity as a life-enhancing gift to the more-than-human community — and your relative disinterest in fashion, fitting in, social positioning, or economic advancement beyond what enables you to support health and wellbeing for your family and community members. [41]

Consider also the consciousness of different species — say, that of humans compared to that of whales, or mushrooms juxtaposed with stones, or salmon in contrast to cottonwoods. Each species inhabits its own unique “lifeworld,” a term I picked up from podcaster and visionary, Alexa Firmenich, and perhaps originated from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. We can to some extent imagine the particulars of these different lifeworlds (like the way a fox might experience, largely with her nose, a city park at night), but the translation from one lifeworld to another is always enigmatic, equivocal, gnomic. Nonetheless, we readily appreciate the existence and reality of different worlds inhabited by different creatures. From earliest times, some humans sometimes experience a shift in their consciousness from human to that of some other animal (say, fox, raven, deer, seal, or snake) and then back again. [42] Most would say that these kinds of “shapeshiftings” are profound alterations in world.

Humans of different cultures, subcultures, races, classes, ethnicities, gender identities, religions, and spiritual practices can experience the world in quite different ways that, again, are often challenging to translate from one to the other. It’s even commonly contended that humans with predominantly female psyches dwell in rather different worlds than those with mostly male psyches, a ceaseless spawner of spice as well as strife.

Although world-shifts may be common experiences for us, the passage from Dominator World to Next World is of a different order than all the other phenomena noted above because it (1) is not simply a change in an individual’s world but a world shift for a whole community, (2) is irreversible, and (3) endures for many generations, perhaps thousands of years.

What does it take for a whole community to navigate through a shared world shift? That’s what I’m exploring in this multi-part essay. The key, I’m suggesting, is several generations of nature-based full-spectrum human development that is soulcentric as well as ecocentric. This is a way of living that prepares children and early adolescents for the initiatory descent to Soul that they’ll undergo in late adolescence and that eventually results in a community with approximately 25% true adults and 25% genuine elders. The soulwork, leadership, and interactions of those adults and elders organically generate a Partnership culture, a society rooted in cooperation, reciprocity, and co-dreaming among its members as well as with other human societies and with the greater Earth community.

We might wonder to what extent the old Dominator World will still be accessible to us once we reach the Next World. For sure, the old world will not simply disappear from our view along with its humans, communities, and systems — as with a geographical migration to a remote uninhabited place. Rather, humans in the Next World and humans in Dominator World will, it seems, be analogous to two different co-existing species (and may in fact be different species). This was once the case, for example, with homo sapiens and Neanderthals: these two genetically distinct hominin species coexisted for several thousand years (until around 40,000 years ago). Dominator World humans and Next World humans would be their own lifeworlds even though they would physically appear as the same species. Next World humans would still be entirely able to interact with Dominator World humans (and probably to mate), but it might eventually be challenging to understand (or recall) the way they experience the world. [43]

References

[39] An interesting ontological difference between dreamworlds and waking worlds is that, in the former, we are rarely aware we are dreaming at the time or that there is another kind of world we call the dayworld, whereas, in the latter, we know that we dream when asleep (even if we rarely, if ever, remember specific dreams) and that dreams are different worlds than our day lives. Another way to say it: When we lay down to sleep, we know we likely will be entering a dreamworld, but when we are dreaming, we rarely know that we will soon enough wake into a different world, the dayworld.

[40] See Parts III, IV, and XII of this Substack series for a brief intro to what I mean by Soul and Soul Initiation. Also, see here.

[41] See The Journey of Soul Initiation for many examples of mythopoetic identities, how soul-initiated people experience the world, and how they embody their soulwork in acts of service to the world.

[42] See, for example, David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 2011) and John Perkins, Shapeshifting: Shamanic Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation (VT: Inner Traditions, 1997).

[43] It’s only fair to wonder which of these two future human species would be more likely to survive and whether one might be more likely to attempt the extermination of the other (and possibly succeed). I’ll only say here that a primary evolutionary principle has often been misconstrued as “survival of the fittest” (where “fittest” is understood as big, fast, or strong) when the actual principle is the survival of those who fit best in their habitat and in the living community of other species. The capacity to cooperate is at least as important as the capacity to compete. Think bees pollinating flowers and fungi feeding tree roots.

Photo: The Great Passage [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.