Seven dimensions
of being.

Shipibo teaching Shipibo teaching lays it out as a simple list — the dimensions of being: yora — the body; shinan — mind and psyche; joi — the voice, also the word for language itself; kaya — the soul; kano — glossed as connection structure; niwe — a wind-like energy; and nete — at once universe, day, and time-space. Healing work, in this frame, can address any of the seven — which is why a Shipibo healer's questions can sound so unlike a clinician's.

Shipibo teaching The person stands inside a structured cosmos. Our course materials teach four principal worlds: Jene Nete, the water world beneath; Non Nete, our world — the one we perceive; Panshin Nete, the yellow world — a transitional space between life and death where energies mix; and Jakon Nete — glossed by our sources as the life-giving good essence of creation. Its shadow-counterpart, Ocha Nete, names the realm of harm done with intention. Even the word for 'good' carries the cosmology: jakón breaks down as ja, to exist, plus -kon, truth — the good is what is true to life.

Shipibo teaching The same frame explains why the visual art is not decoration. Kené — the geometric designs — belong to this system: design, song, energy, and world share a single vocabulary, where the finest aesthetic terms (sankén, intricate beauty; soí, lustrous beauty) apply equally to a textile and to a state of being.

Scholars noticed early. A 1985 study by Angelika Gebhart-Sayer proposed that kené designs once functioned as a codified system of meaning employed in ritual — a striking thesis that later scholarship has debated rather than confirmed. Peter Roe's The Cosmic Zygote (Rutgers) set Shipibo cosmology in the wider Amazonian frame in the same era. Read both as dated interpretations by outsiders: valuable, contested, and no substitute for what Shipibo teachers say themselves.

This is where it gets deep: how the songs move through these dimensions in ceremony — the icaros acting on the body, the mind, the worlds. It is the living heart of Shipibo thought, and we bring it forward in the maestros’ own voices across the medicine pages and the course.