Shamanic Cosmology - The Shaman's View of Reality
 

Shamanic cultures around the world have traditionally experienced reality (the Cosmos) - for example in their Shamans' "Shamanic Journeys" as consisting of three domains: The Upperworld, The Middleworld and The Lowerworld (Underworld). The Upper World is what is termed "Heaven" in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic cultures. It is a world inhabited by divine spiritual entities e.g. God and Angels. The Middle World is what we know as everyday reality - the material physical world that our bodies inhabit. The Lower World is an aspect of the metaphysical (non-physical) dimension inhabited, according to native American shamanism for example, by "power animals" - archetypal instinctual natural spiritual (= life force) forces which humans can draw on (connect to, identify with, own, resonate with), and which may be either helpful (karmically positive) or unhelpful (karmically negative). In Jungian psychology this is equivalent to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious - home of the archetypes or role models i.e. patterns of perceiving, thinking, feeling and behaviour.