psynapz wrote:Don't be an absolutist. At least some co-incidences between pop-culture media and world events are not a direct result of CIA manipulation, though some, probably most in fact are.
Some synchronicities you pick up are only because your mind is biased towards them, and some others are the product of either the collusion of other human minds, or holographic (intra-dimensional) effects produced by more complex intelligence than we possess, but the shadow of the presence of which has become unmistakable.
Some.
Yeah.
http://www.mossdreams.com/text/2008.05% ... 20time.htm
Dreaming into the Aboriginal Dreamtime
“Those who lose the Dreaming are lost.”
- Koori saying
Aboriginal Australians believe that we dream our way into this world, and dream our way out of it.
“We talk to the spirit-child before a baby is born,” naturopath and traditional healer Burnham Burnham explained it to me. If the father-to-be is a dreamer, he is frequently the one who first meets the spirit-child in dreams. These dream encounters often unfold at places of water that exist in the natural world – a billabong, the shallows of a river, a waterfall – where the spirit-child plays with its own kind and is not confined to a single form. It can appear as a kingfisher or a platypus, as a fish or a crocodile. The dreamer may have to negotiate with the spirit-child, giving it reasons for coming into a human body. Finally, the dreamer plays soul-guide, escorting the incoming spirit to the mother’s womb.
On the way to death, the soul-guide appears from the other side. Departed loved ones and ancestral beings who are at home in the Dreamtime come calling, in dreams, to prepare a dying person for his or her journey. When the spirit leaves the body in death, these guides from the Dreamtime escort it along the roads to the afterlife, which may involve a sea crossing, descent through a cave, and/or the ascent of a magical tree whose roots are in the World Up Top.
Aboriginal dreaming is an antidote to Freud, who wrote that the dream “has nothing to communicate to anyone else”. The first Australians know that dreaming means everything and is a highly social activity. We meet other people and other beings when we go dreaming, and sharing dreams is not a matter of puzzling over obscure “texts” but a source of wisdom, community guidance and grand entertainment. Among nomad communities, listening to a dream by the camp fire, or over a morning cup of tea, is better fun than going to the movies, and may run the whole gamut from romance to horror, from Star Trek to soaps.
The 500-plus Aboriginal tribes of Australia share this understanding: a dream is a journey. When we dream, “the spirit goes on walkabout”, says Nungurrayi, a wise woman of the Kukatja, a people of the Western Desert. A powerful dreamer, she explains, is a person who knows how to open the tjurni, travel – in spirit – to interesting places, and bring back a “good story.” [1] Tjurni is usually translated as “womb” or “abdomen”. For those of us familiar with chakra work, it may be helpful to think of it as the second chakra. The dream journey is powered by the same energy that is discharged in sex. The female dreamer opens her womb or vagina; the male dreamer projects a magical cord from his penis or testes and uses it to climb to another realm.
If you know that your dream is a journey, or a visitation by another dream traveler, then you are unlikely to be interested in the kind of analysis that reduces dream experiences to a list of symbols and then interprets what the symbols mean. When traditional Aborigines share dreams, they want to know who, when and where. Who was that sorcerer I saw pointing the bone at me? Who was that person who came to my camp and wanted sex with me? Where is the cave where the dream ceremony took place? When will the car break down?
When you know that a dream is a real experience, then you want to get the information clear in order to figure out what to do with it. Maybe you’ll want to tell that dream of the sorcerer all over the camp to scare away the actual sorcerer, as anthropologist Sylvie Poirier saw done in the Western Desert. Maybe you’ll get together with your dream lover (if the experience was pleasant) or find a way to prevent that person from intruding on your psychic space (if it was not). Perhaps you’ll travel to the dream cave, and celebrate a ritual to confirm and honor what has already taken place, in the Dreaming. Maybe you’ll get your car fixed before it breaks down.
The Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land view dreams as a field of interaction between the living and the dead. This can be helpful when the encounter is with the higher spirit of the departed, or a benign ancestor, but dangerous when the contact is with the lower aspect of the departed, known as the mokuy. The Yolngu are very clear about something that is almost hopelessly confused in contemporary Western society: the need to distinguish the different nature and destiny of at least two aspects of soul or spirit that survive the death of the body, and to handle them accordingly.[2]
Aboriginals look to dreams as the place of encounter with spiritual guides and sacred healers, who often appear as totem animals but may come in many other forms.
Since the missionaries arrived, Aboriginal dream visitors often include Jesus and the angels. A Yolngu woman dreamed that the Hero Sisters – the mythic founders of her people – came to her dancing, resplendent in lorikeet feathers, and were joined by a smiling Jesus Christ. Together, they showed her a place of power, used for a fertility rite in earlier times, that had been forgotten by her community, and urged her to make it a place of worship again. [3] One of the messages of the dream seemed to be that, if we go to the living heart of religion, there need be no conflict between traditions.
Aboriginal Australians are well aware that dreaming can be active; you can decide where you are going to go, and you can go consciously. You can travel across time and space, or into other dimensions. You can rendezvous with other dreamers, and embark on shared journeys. Shamans receive their calling and much of their training in this way.
The first Australians do not live under the illusion that it is necessary to go to sleep in order to dream. They dream with a living landscape in a way that baffles urbanized, deracinated people. Everything in that landscape is alive and conscious, every place has its Dreaming.
“Nothing is nothing,” as they say in the Cape York peninsula; everything means something.
The powers of the Dreaming are closely tied to the land. You can find them only if you are endowed with what the native people of the Kimberley region of NW Australia call kurara, the power to “talk to the land.” Otherwise, as the mysterious, mouthless Wandjina figures of the Kimberley appear to those who do not hear inner voices, the landscape is mute.
You might listen to the kingfisher, which is good at spotting ghosts. If the kingfisher calls out ekwe, ekwe, ekwe you need to watch out for a malevolent ghost that could bring illness or even death.
In the speaking land, for those who can hear, some places speak louder and stronger than others. Four thousand years ago, at a site called Eagle’s Reach in the Wollemi national park, an easy drive from Sydney, Aboriginal rock artists created stunning images of composite beings – human figures with the heads of birds, therianthropes that are half-man and half-kangaroo. They recall the gods of Egypt, and the shapeshifters of Lascaux and the Alpine caves. To touch these images is to draw in their power, through the skin – a power that may be too much for the uninitiated to handle – and come into direct engagement with the energies of the Dreamtime.
Let’s be clear: there is The Dreaming, or the Dreamtime, the realm of gods and ancestral beings, and then there is everyday dreaming. The two interweave, but are not the same. The Kukatja, in common with many other Western Desert tribes, use the word Tjukurrpa for the ancestral Dreaming, but a different term – kapukurri – for personal dream experiences.
Dreamtime is creation time, and stories of the Dreamtime often tell us about the origin of things. But Dreamtime is not long ago; in Dreamtime it is always now. Aborigines call Dreamtime the “all-at-once”. Dreamtime is the seedbed of life, the origin of everything that is manifested in the world. It is not separate from the physical world; it is the inner pulse of the land.
The science of the 21st century may help us to grasp the Paleolithic science of the Earth’s oldest ongoing tradition. Dreamtime may encompass the six (or seven) hidden dimensions of the physical universe posited by superstring theory. Dreamtime is the multidimensional matrix in which 3D reality floats. By entering Dreamtime, we may be able to reach into the quantum soup of possibilities from which the events of the 3D world bubble up.
A crisis of illness may open the gates of The Dreaming. I learned something about this in childhood. Aged nine, in a Melbourne hospital where I underwent an emergency appendectomy, I left my body and found myself drawn down into what seemed to be a world inside the world. I was welcomed by very tall, pale beings who raised me as one of their own. I seemed to spend a whole life with these people, becoming a father and grandfather, until they laid my body to rest – and I found myself yanked back into the body of the nine-year-old kid in the hospital, and learned that I had lost vital signs for a few minutes and everyone had been worried I had checked out.
Many years later, I encountered an Aboriginal artist from Arnhem Land who says that when he gets sick, he goes to live with the “Mimi spirits” until he gets well. In painting and sculpture, the Mimis are depicted as very tall and skinny. They are said to be more ancient than the Rainbow Serpent, and to live inside rocks. They come and go through what my Celtic ancestors might call the “thin places”, blowing on crevices in the rocks to open doorways to and from their hidden worlds.
Though I have lived outside my native Australia for most of my adult life, something of The Dreaming seems to live in me and creatures of the Dreamtime sometimes cross the ocean to call me back. At very important passages in my life, and that of my family, a sea eagle I remember from boyhood in Queensland has come into my dreamspace and flown me back to Australia. Once sea eagle launched me on a journey that led to a Dreaming place of the Mununjali of southern Queensland. When a “spirit man” of the Mununjali heard my dream as the result of a “chance” encounter in Beaudesert, he led me to the exact place of power, on a bend of a muddy river, that I had previewed in the dream. [4]
Our dreams may lead us into The Dreaming, and into ways of seeing and knowing that were shared by all our ancestors. In this way, our dreams may open the way for cultural soul recovery, and the healing of the relations between our kind and the natural world.
Notes
[1] Sylvie Poirier, “This Is Good Country, We Are Good Dreamers: Dreams and Dreaming in the Australian Western Desert” in Roger Ivar Lohmann (ed) Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 2003.
[2] See Howard Morphy, Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1984).
[3] Fiona Magowan, “Syncretism or sychronicity? Remapping the Yolngu feel of place”, in Australian Journal of Anthropology, December 2001.
[4] I have told this story in detail in Conscious Dreaming (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996).
