The Dreaming and The Songlines: The Wisdom of Aborigines
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Perhaps the longest surviving human cultures on Earth are the Australian Aborigines which have some 50,000 years of known history. Did they learn anything of value during those 2500 generations? What, if any, wisdom did the Aborigines acquire? What can we learn from them? What is the value of their culture? How does their philosophy of life, the Universe, and everything differ from our own?
What can we learn about being human from thinking about those whose history is longer than our own? What can we learn from a people who, by luck, avoided the devastating forces of empire until 1788 when the first migrants from Europe started settling Australia?
Can mythology and anthropology help us gain new perspectives on our philosophy of life? What insights can we draw from a dawning awareness of Aboriginal culture and its wisdom?
Main Questions for Discussion
• What can we understand about the wisdom of The Dreaming, the cultural perspective of the Aborigines with its unique philosophy and ontology?
• What can we understand about the wisdom of The Songlines of the Aborigines? What can we infer from The Songlines about their Sacred Geography, Wade Davis' term to identify how a people's mythology shapes the way they understand and interact with their environment?
• What can we identify of the wisdom of the Aborigines? Do they have a wisdom? Why? Why not?
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Optional Resources (4 videos, 1 podcast: total of 1 hour 16 minutes)
All resources for our events are optional. Key points will be summarized during the discussion so everyone can participate. But you will be able to think more pointedly about the topic if you review at least a few of the resources before the event.
• For a great introduction to the Aborigines and their culture, watch this 50 minute video "Songlines, Dreamtime, and the Visionary Realm of the Aborigines" with Wade Davis (read my notes on the video (https://plus.google.com/104222466367230914966/posts/fHqEErNipoB)):
• To learn more about The Dreaming watch this 8 minute video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4rAa6PReQM
• To hear why one American Astrophysicist thinks "Western Science has far more to learn from indigenous knowledge than vice verse", listen to this 11 minute podcast (https://audioboom.com/boos/4967263-american-born-astrophysicist-aboriginal-knowledge-is-a-different-way-of-thinking)
• Should we celebrate ancient voices and ancient wisdom? Mandawuy Yunupingu, the late great lead of Yothu Yindi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yothu_Yindi), seems to think so in this 4 minute music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ-hbpWlXNQ
Do you agree with the song? Is there value(?) and wisdom (?) in our tribal voices?
• For some political context on the English migrants who settled in Australia, pushed the Aborigines to the periphery, dictated the legal land rights to which Aborigines were subjected, and eventual comprised the majority of the continent's population, watch this 3 minute Yothu Yindi music video for the song "Treaty".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7cbkxn4G8U
How do we rectify a history created by a migrant population of settlers who largely failed to recognize the wisdom and the rights of the Aborigines? Can we ever learn to value the wisdom of other peoples? Should we? Why? Why not?
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The Dreaming
"The most provocative and elegant exploration of the subtle philosophy of the Aboriginal civilization is W.E.H. Stanner's 'The Dreaming' [23 page Word document; 17 pages as published in the 1979 collection] (https://app.lms.unimelb.edu.au/bbcswebdav/xid-2410946_2) in his collection White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938-1973" — Wade Davis, "The Wayfinders", p. 238-239.
Here are some quotes from Stanner's exquisite essay:
"White man got no dreaming,
Him go 'nother way.
White man, him go different.
Him got road belong himself." — Muta, a Murinbata
"A central meaning of The Dreaming is that of a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither 'time' nor 'history' as we understand them is involved in this meaning. I have never been able to discover any Aboriginal word for time as an abstract concept. And the sense of 'history' is wholly alien here. We shall not understand The Dreaming fully except as a complex of meanings. A blackfellow may call his totem, or the place from which his spirit came, his Dreaming. He may also explain the existence of a custom, or law of life, as causally due to The Dreaming." — W.E.H. Stanner, "The Dreaming", 1953
"Although, as I have said, The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot 'fix' The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen. We should be very wrong to try to read into it the idea of a Golden Age, or a Garden of Eden, though it was an Age of Heroes, when the ancestors did marvellous things that men can no longer do. The blacks are not at all insensitive to Mary Webb's 'wistfulness that is the past', but they do not, in aversion from present or future, look back on it with yearning and nostalgia. Yet it has for them an unchallengeably sacred authority.
"Clearly, The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man. If I am correct in saying so, it is much more complex philosophically than we have so far realised. I greatly hope that artists and men of letters who (it seems increasingly) find inspiration in Aboriginal Australia will use all their gifts of empathy, but avoid banal projection and subjectivism, if they seek to honour the notion." — W.E.H. Stanner, 1953
"In our modern understanding, we tend to see 'mind' and 'body', 'body' and 'spirit', 'spirit' and 'personality', 'personality' and 'name' as in some sense separate, even opposed, entities though we manage to connect them up in some fashion into the unity or oneness of 'person' or 'individual'. The blackfellow does not seem to think this way. The distinctiveness we give to 'mind', 'spirit' and 'body', and our contrast of 'body' versus 'spirit' are not there, and the whole notion of 'the person' is enlarged. To a blackfellow, a man's name, spirit, and shadow are 'him' in a sense which to us may seem passing strange. One should not ask a blackfellow: 'What is your name?' To do so embarrasses and shames him. The name is like an intimate part of the body, with which another person does not take liberties. The blacks do not mind talking about a dead person in an oblique way; but, for a long time, they are extremely reluctant even to breathe his name. In the same way, to threaten a man's shadow is to threaten him. Nor may one threaten lightly the physical place from which his spirit came. By extension, his totem, which is also associated with that place, and with his spirit, should not be lightly treated." — W.E.H. Stanner, 1953
"The truth of it seems to be that man, society and nature, and past, present and future, are at one together within a unitary system of such a kind that its ontology cannot illumine minds too much under the influence of humanism, rationalism and science. One cannot easily, in the mobility of modern life and thought, grasp the vast intuitions of stability and permanence, and of life and man, at the heart of Aboriginal ontology.
"It is fatally easy for Europeans, encountering such things for the first time, to go on to suppose that 'mysticism' of this kind rules all Aboriginal thought. It is not so. 'Logical' thought and 'rational' conduct are about as widely present in Aboriginal life as they are on the simpler levels of European life. Once one understands three things—the primary intuitions which the blackfellow has formed about the nature of the universe and man, those things in both which he thinks interesting and significant, and the conceptual system from within which he reasons about them, then the suppositions about prelogicality, illogicality, and non-rationality can be seen to be merely absurd. And if one wishes to see a really brilliant demonstration of deductive thought, one has only to see a blackfellow tracking a wounded kangaroo, and persuade him to say why he interprets given signs in a certain way." — W.E.H. Stanner, 1953
"If one analyses the hundreds of tales about The Dreaming, one can see within them three elements. The first concerns the great marvels—how all the fire and water in the world were stolen and recaptured; how men made a mistake over sorcery and now have to die from it; how the hills, rivers, and waterholes were made; how the sun, moon, and stars were set upon their courses; and many other dramas of this kind. The second element tells how certain things were instituted for the first time—how animals and men diverged from a joint stock that was neither one nor the other; how the blacknosed kangaroo got his black nose and the porcupine his quills; how such social divisions as tribes, clans, and language groups were set up; how spirit-children were first placed in the waterholes, the winds, and leaves of trees. A third element, if I am not mistaken, allows one to suppose that many of the main institutions of present-day life were already ruling in The Dreaming, e.g. marriage, exogamy, sister-exchange, and initiation, as well as many of the well-known breaches of custom. The men of The Dreaming committed adultery, betrayed and killed each other, were greedy, stole and committed the very wrongs committed by those now alive.
"Now, if one disregards the imagery in which the oral literature of The Dreaming is cast, one may perhaps come to three conclusions.
"The tales are a kind of commentary, or statement, on what is thought to be permanent and ordained at the very basis of the world and life. They are a way of stating the principle which animates things. I would call them a poetic key to Reality. The Aboriginal does not ask himself the philosophical-type questions: What is 'real?' How many 'kinds' of 'reality' are there? What are the 'properties' of 'reality?' How are the properties 'interconnected'? This is the idiom of Western intellectual discourse and the fruit of a certain social history. His tales are, however, a kind of answer to such questions so far as they have been asked at all. They may not be a 'definition', but they are a 'key' to reality, a key to the singleness and the plurality of things set up once-for-all when, in The Dreaming, the universe became man's universe. The active philosophy of Aboriginal life transforms this 'key', which is expressed in the idiom of poetry, drama, and symbolism, into a principle that The Dreaming determines not only what life is but also what it can be. Life, so to speak, is a one-possibility thing, and what this is, is the 'meaning' of The Dreaming.
"The tales are also a collation of what is validly known about such ordained permanencies. The blacks cite The Dreaming as a chapter of absolute validity in answer to all questions of why and how. In this sense, the tales can be regarded as being, perhaps not a definition, but a 'key' of Truth.
"They also state, by their constant recitation of what was done rightly and wrongly in The Dreaming, the ways in which good men should, and bad men will, act now. In this sense, they are a 'key' or guide to the norms of conduct, and a prediction of how men will err."
"One may thus say that, after a fashion—a cryptic, symbolic, and poetic fashion—the tales are 'a philosophy' in the garb of an oral literature. The European has a philosophic literature which expresses a largely deductive understanding of reality, truth, goodness, and beauty. The blackfellow has a mythology, a ritual, and an art which express an intuitive, visionary, and poetic understanding of the same ultimates. in following out The Dreaming, the blackfellow 'lives' this philosophy. It is an implicit philosophy, but nevertheless a real one. Whereas we hold (and may live) a philosophy of abstract propositions, attained by someone standing professionally outside 'life' and treating it as an object of contemplation and inquiry, the blackfellow holds his philosophy in mythology, attained as the social product of an indefinitely ancient past, and proceeds to live it out 'in' life, in part through a ritual and an expressive art, and in part through non-sacred social customs.
"European minds are made uneasy by the facts that the stories are, quite plainly, preposterous; are often a mass of internal contradictions; are encrusted by superstitious fancies about magic, sorcery, hobgoblins, and superhuman heroes; and lack the kind of theme and structure—in other words, the 'story' element—for which we look. Many of us cannot help feeling that such things can only be the products of absurdly ignorant credulity and a lower order of mentality. This is to fall victim to a facile fallacy. Our own intellectual history is not an absolute standard by which to judge others. The worst imperialisms are those of preconception.
"Custom is the reality, beliefs but the shadows which custom makes on the wall. Since the tales, in any case, are not really 'explanatory' in purpose or function, they naturally lack logic, system and completeness. Is is simply pointless to look for such things within them. But we are not entitled to suppose that, because the tales are fantastical, the social life producting them is itself fantastical. The shape of reality is always distorted in the shadows it throws. One finds much logic, system and rationality in the blacks' actual scheme of life.
"These tales are neither simply illustrative nor simply explanatory; they are fanciful and poetic in content because they are based on visionary and intuitive insights into mysteries; and, if we are ever to understand them, we must always take them in their complex content. If, then, they make more sense to the poet, the artist, and the philosopher than to the clinicians of human life, let us reflect on the withering effect on sensibility of our pervasive rationalism, rather than depreciate the gifts which produced the Aboriginal imaginings. And in no case should we expect the tales, prima facie, to be even interesting if studied out of context." — W.E.H. Stanner, 1953
What wisdom can you infer about the Aboriginal Dreaming and the philosophy of the Aborigines? Is Aboriginal culture full of wisdom? Why? Why not?
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The Songlines and Sacred Geography
"To walk the songlines is to become part of the ongoing creation of the world, a place that both exists and is still being formed. Thus the Aborigines are not merely attached to the earth, they are essential to its existence. Without the land they would die. But without the people, the ongoing process of creation would cease and the earth would wither. Through movement and sacred rituals, the people maintain access to Dreamtime and play a dynamic and ongoing role in the world of the Ancestors." — Wade Davis in "The Wayfinders", p. 149
In "The Design Way" by Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman we are invited to consider the provocative statement "Genesis is ongoing". Could it be that the wisdom of Aboriginal Dreaming and The Songlines are an ancient realization that life is more about ongoing genesis than an evolution through history imperially dominated by causation? Is a tuning into the "reality" of ongoing genesis a reasonable summary of Aboriginal philosophy?
Could we have our philosophy upside-down and backward? Is the perspective of ongoing creation with us as objective participants in the (ritual) creation of the world instead of subjective scientific observers a more practical approach to life? Are these two ontological perspectives compatible? Incompatible? Reconcileable? Irreconcileable?
Given Wade Davis' idea of Sacred Geography suggesting that mythology shapes the way we understand and interact with our environment, could it be that these fundamental ontological perspectives are in fact profoundly important?
Is the sacred geography of American culture (with its emphasis on bulldozers & jackhammers & extracting every last drop of oil out of million year old rocks, and eminent domain) fundamentally different from the sacred geography of Aborigines? In this light, should the British who settled Australia be pitied for failing to realize that they were the "primitives" displacing an advanced people who did not need to visibly change the land with settlements to live on it?
How can we better understand the strengths and weaknesses of European and Aboriginal philosophy?
What value is there in the wisdom of Aborigines?
The Dreaming and The Songlines: The Wisdom of Aborigines