The Shamanic Middle World:
Spirits of Nature, Ignorance, and Lost Souls
The middle world non-ordinary reality is the non-ordinary shamanic reality ‘counterpart’ to our ‘ordinary’ reality. What is most important to be aware of is that the non-ordinary middle world does not include human morality. For instance, nature spirits are common in the shamanic middle-world. Such spirits are simply nature, and can be anything from a typhoon to a gentle breeze. What is common to middle world non-ordinary reality is that moral frameworks, upon which ethically driven decisions are made, simply do not exist.
Additionally, and this is something that is studied in depth as we move through our training, there is a lot of confusion and ‘personal interest’ in the non-ordinary middle world, just as this is common in our everyday ordinary reality. Thus, in the case of a typhoon, it simply blows and that is its nature. A typhoon does not consider how it affects the world, what the ramifications of a particular storm might be such as that something might be injured or that crops might be destroyed... it just blows.
On the other hand, the middle world – both in ordinary and non-ordinary realities – is a place of potential suffering. Suffering is a consequence of ignorance. There is no ‘evil’ in ordinary or non-ordinary middle world. That is just a common misunderstanding of what actually is not ‘evil,’ but ignorant thought and behavior, which simply does not fathom the full nature of a situation, or the ultimate consequences of actions. However, it is a framing that has become commonplace in many contemporary cultures. Unfortunately, this misrepresentation has been actively encouraged by a number of religions, particularly monotheistic, which have benefited by discouraging people from investigating other spiritualities.
Suffice it to say, that whereas the upper and lower world spirits are completely safe and either extremely beneficial or at ‘worse’ an uneventful part of the landscape, middle world spirits – just like middle world ordinary reality people and events – carry the potential for lending confusion, disruption, or on other ways confounding our lives and work, from a degree that ranges from minor to potentially toxic.