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The Ancient Cosmic Spirituality Of The Australian Aborigine

What The Oldest Continual Culture On Earth Can Tell Us About The Nature Of Reality

Introduction

Imagine for a moment that you are stripped completely naked, flown to the middle of a desert, thousands of miles from the nearest town or person, and left there.

No food, no water, no shelter.

How long do you think you would survive?

A week? Three days? Two days?

And yet, the Australian Aborigine, the longest continuous culture on Earth, survived in those exact conditions for over forty thousand years!

The Australian desert is one of the most inhospitable places on this planet.

People, and families, have broken down in their cars crossing one of its deserts and have survived less than 48 hours. In some cases drinking their car’s radiator water in a failed and desperate attempt to survive.

NASA trains its astronauts there because of its similarity to the severe conditions and environment of Mars.

And these Australian deserts are mind-blowingly immense.

The Simpson Desert and Nullarbor deserts combined are the size of Europe. And the land area of just one Western Desert tribe, the Walpari people — a tribe of only 1500 — is the size of England.

Driving across Australia’s deserts in the comfort of an air-conditioned coach, one looks out at the desert as far as the eye can see and is struck by the immensity of endless empty space.

For an Australian Aborigine looking out on that same scene, he or she sees a land rich in foods, water, animals, materials for shelter and tools, and an vast variety of bush medicines.

It is natural for us to be amazed at the Australian Aborigines’ ability to survive, and even thrive, in this extremely hostile and desolate environment.

And it is also natural that that tends to become the central focus of our understanding of, and engagement with, the indigenous peoples of Australia.

It is truly extraordinary. They are indeed an extraordinary people.

However, there is an even more incredible story about the Australian Aborigine.

And that is the deep profundity of their understanding of Reality and the Cosmos.

What Did Aborigines Do All Day?

It is commonly agreed among Anthropologists that for most indigenous peoples of the Earth, their day-to-day survival needs were met with approximately three to four hours a day of hunting and gathering.

And, the Australian Aborigines were no different.

It is estimated that it took between three to four hours a day of hunting by the men, and gathering by the women, to meet all the tribes’ needs for that day.

So what did they do with the other twenty hours of the day?

The great Swiss psychologist and student and colleague of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, was obsessed with the Australian Aborigine.

Jung also estimated that the Australian Aborigine spent three to four hours a day meeting their survival needs.

But where Jung felt that the Australian Aborigines were unique among the world’s indigenous peoples was how they utilised the overwhelming majority of their time.

According to Jung, they spent that time almost exclusively cultivating a higher state of consciousness.

Or, in Jungian terms: they spent the vast majority of their time contacting and immersing themselves in the collective unconscious.

Now, it is not unusual for the Earth’s indigenous people to endeavour to raise their consciousness or to make contact with so-called spiritual realms.

However, the Australian Aborigines used every spare moment for consciousness-raising. Jung, among others, estimated that they spent ¾ of their lives doing this.

And, like the New Zealand Maori, the Australian Aborigine did not use any psychoactive plants to assist them.

Instead, the way in which they cultivated a higher consciousness was exclusively through the practice of art.

Story, music, song, dance & painting were the methods that Australian Aborigines used.

All of these were practised and performed so that they might more deeply dwell in what they knew as: The Dreaming.

The Dreaming: The Story Of Nothing Becoming Something

The Dreaming. The now-moment, beyond the historical, always Now, only apparently Then.

The moment before the existence of time when Nothing became Something.

The Australian Aborigine’s Dreaming is primarily a creation myth.

And, like all creation myths, from the ancient Indian Vedas to the Judeo-Christian myth of Genesis, it points to that ‘moment’ before Time where Nothing produced Something.

All culture’s creation myths, including the scientific explanation called “The Big Bang,” point to, or attempt to explain this relation between Nothing & Something.

The great ancient poets of China pointed poetically to this always-already coincident now-moment of Nothing & Something and named it: “The Existence Tissue.”

The 20th-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, spoke of the importance of poetic thinking, or the thinking of the ontological difference, that is to say, the difference between Nothing & Something.

For Heidegger, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” was the only real question for philosophy.

The Australian Aborigines’ story of this moment of creation is a story of the primal energies or exaggerated mythic beings, who sang the Earth into existence.

One can not help but hear the resonances with the Judeo-Christian creation myth of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word …”

Language bringing things into being.

As an example, today’s Virtual Reality (VR) might be understood as merely a world brought into existence by the binary language of ones & zeros — that is to say the language of something & nothing!

The arts of song, dance, and painting performed by the Australian Aborigines all told the stories, battles, and adventures of these Dreamtime mythic beings responsible for creation.

However, if we are to understand how the telling of these stories through the practice of art cultivated a higher consciousness for Aboriginal people, we must understand that for Aboriginal people these stories are not about something that happened in the past.

This is because they are about events that created time, and thus before time.

In the same way in which a quantum physicist today might explain that the “Big Bang” is best understood not as an event in the past, but as something that is happening in every moment.

We might ask, if there is only Now when did creation happen?

If there is only Now, when did Nothing become Something?

It could only happen Now!

In other words, paradoxically Something & Nothing are happening at the same time.

Every moment is the Big Bang.

This — Reality — is Something and Nothing.

Which is what the ancient Chinese poets and today’s quantum physicists have said.

And, of course, the Australian Aborigine for who this understanding formed their whole conception of time & space.

The Aboriginal Conception of Time

The Aboriginal conception of time is not linear.

The Aboriginal conception of time has no beginning nor any end. Thus, they do not see their lives beginning with birth and ending in death.

Rather their conception of time is circular going through the cycles of the visible (something) and the invisible (nothing).

Everything (seemingly) goes through these cycles of the visible and the invisible.

For example, a person is invisible prior to their conception. Visible during their life-time. And, invisible after their deaths.

When an Aboriginal person dies, there is a few days of “sorry business” where the person is grieved by their family and friends.

However, after that period of mourning, everything to do with that person is burned or disposed of, and that person is never mentioned of again.

It is considered highly inappropriate and rude for anyone to refer in any manner to the dead person — ever again!

This acknowledges and honours that the person has passed completely from the realm of visible to the realm of the invisible.

It also is a recognition that the personality or the sense of separate self is a minor, temporary and merely contingent moment in the face of the eternalness of existence.

The Aboriginal Conceptions Of Space

The Aboriginal conception of space is not one of distance.

The Aboriginal conception of space does not see space as the distance between two or more objects.

Rather, the Aboriginal conception of space is that space is the consciousness between objects.

In other words, for the Australian Aborigine space is conscious.

Here it might help to take a brief detour into another spiritual tradition.

That of a particular school of Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen, and its “Pointing Out The Nature Of Mind” instructions.

A Dzogchen master in pointing out the nature of your mind might begin by asking you to describe what you see around you.

Most people will describe and make note of everything they see — a chair, a table, a window, the computer, etc. — but what 99.9% of people will fail to mention is that which is most abundant: the space between objects.

In fact …

Every object requires space to appear. We cannot even imagine an object without imagining the space around it.

Now, this is also true for so-called internal objects. That is to say: thoughts, the taste in your mouth, the feeling of your body, etc.

Every internal object requires internal space to appear or to be felt.

Now the Dzogchen master would ask the key question:

What is the difference between the external & internal spaces?

Very quickly it is seen: there is no difference between the internal space and the external space except that made by thought or the mind.

It is only thought that makes a difference. A difference which in reality is not actually true.

This was the profound insight of the Australian Aborigine.

The internal space that makes the consciousness of internal objects possible is no different than the external space that makes external objects possible.

Thus … Space is consciousness.

Or as the Zen Buddhists say: Reality is conscious nothingness.

For 40,000 years, wandering naked through the immense space of one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth, the Australian Aborigine came to that same deeply profound understanding.

Recognise the “some-thing-ness” of life enough that you might love & enjoy it.

But, also recognise its “no-thing-ness” enough so that you do not take it too seriously.

This is the secret to life.

Anonymous Taoist Master

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