Voices From the Dreamtime
Mary Lynn Adzema*
An Essay Review of Robert Lawlor's
Voices of the First Day:
Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime
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In Voices of The First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Robert Lawlor invites us to put aside for a moment our superiority complex and a misplaced pride in our civilization's "accomplishments," and join him on a journey to recapture a treasure long lost to us, a memory of the true origins of our species.
He points to the fateful schism between our civilization and the natural environment a schism reflecting the more fundamental one within, between our conscious and unconscious selves. This lack of integration, along with our objectifying and overly analytical mind is now driving us headlong to apocalypse.
In his eloquent and richly illustrated work the author urges us to expand the vision of our origins and, in so doing, dare to embrace a saving, healing synchrony with Earth's cycles of death and rebirth.
He is not the first to diagnose our dilemma but the mirror he uses is unique.
It is one of our most cherished assumptions that Western civilization is based primarily on the ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, and Rome. But if we are to find a way out of the disastrous imbalance we have created on our planet, then we must search elsewhere for a model and spiritual guide. In fact, Lawlor maintains, we need look to none other than the oldest known human culture on this Earth, that of the Aborigines in Australia; for it is here not in Africa, but in Tasmania to be exact where we shall find the true birthplace of humankind.
What can we learn from this ancient people? For centuries we have denied the universe an internal life and have imprisoned our own awareness; living only on the shallow surface of our world and of our consciousness, we have lost touch with our sense of unity not only with our deeper self but with all of creation. At this time in human history it is absolutely essential that we recover it, and, as Lawlor demonstrates, this is the precious knowledge that the Aborigines possess. In the Aboriginal way of life there is a vital message for us and a deep logic that we can no longer deny.
Lawlor seems well qualified to guide us on this journey. He has spent much of his life studying ancient civilizations, particularly ancient Egypt. He lived and worked for six years with Dravidian village people in South India and has spent another ten years on an island off the coast of Tasmania considered by the Aborigines to be the sacred abode of their deceased ancestors.
The Australian Aboriginal culture is founded entirely on their remembrance of "the first day." The author begins by describing their worldview a myth of creation, which, along with the value system it gave rise to, has survived some 150,000 years. The Aborigines, Lawlor tells us, call the forces that shaped the world their "creative ancestors." It is their experience that the world has been created perfect in accord with the power, wisdom, and intent of these first ancestral beings. During this creation epoch which the Aborigines call the "Dreaming" the ancestors traveled, hunted, made camp, fought, and loved; and through all these activities, shaped the original void into a topographical landscape.
Before journeying they would sleep and "dream" the adventure of the following day. In this manner, moving from dream to action, the ancestors created all things from grasshoppers and emus, food and plants, the sun, moon, and stars, to human tribes. All were created at once, and each could transform into any of the others. Finally, wearied with their activity, the ancestors retired back into the sky as well as into the creatures they had created, where they remain as a potency within all creation.
These ancestral journeys are preserved and cherished in the rituals, stories, art, and social patterns that have been carefully maintained by the Aborigines for thousands of years. And the lessons learned from these sacred stories is what they call the "Dreamtime Law," expressed even today in the pure simplicity of the Aboriginal way.
To explain it in our own terms, Lawlor describes the Dreaming as the original field of consciousness from which all life emanated. All beings from stars to humans and insects each uniquely reflects a form of that consciousness. It is then self-evident that the Aborigines respect and adore Earth "as if it were a book imprinted with the mystery of original creation" (p. 17). It is their life's goal to preserve and maintain the natural world as much as possible in its original purity and wholeness.
Following his sensitive explication of the Dreamtime myth in Part One, Lawlor demonstrates in Part Two how the Aborigines' cosmology is perfectly expressed in their cycle of life, beginning with their attitudes and practices surrounding birth, sexuality, initiation, and their kinship system. In Part Three he examines the role of totem and image as vibrant communication links between the Dreamtime and the realities of everyday tribal life. Part Four is devoted to "Death and Initiations of High Degree." Here Lawlor sets forth in fascinating detail how their lifelong cultural practices surrounding birth; initiations; education in totem, taboo, and animism; as well as the underlying strength provided by their elaborate kinship system all prepare the Aborigine for her or his final passage, death, as a natural and not to be feared expansion back into the Dreaming.
Without propagandizing he lets us see for ourselves through the brilliant lens of anecdote, observation, and conversation with tribal elders how the Aboriginal lifestyle and worldview prepare each member to face the inevitable changes, challenges and crises of life and even the denouement of death not with resignation, but with the grace of conscious surrender. Ever implicit in the Aborigines' altogether natural and fearless embrace of life is a depth of psychological wisdom and a full-blooded spirituality which shows our civilization, with all of its highly touted achievements, to be impoverished and even barbaric by contrast.
Indeed, Lawlor can be fairly described as a paradigm-smasher. Side by side with the simple, spiritually nourishing Aboriginal way, he places our own; showing how our adherence to Darwinian theory, which is based on the principle of natural selection and the implication of Homo sapiens's superiority, has projected a worldview based on competition and conflict; a worldview which has resulted in the subjugation and destruction of indigenous cultures the world over. Basic to our own myth is the ladder concept which portrays the climb through stages from lower to higher, simple to complex, a theory pervading most Western cultural structures and even transpersonal psychology! (cf. Wilber, Kenneth; any work from 1980 to present) thus perpetuating the idea of struggle, and demonstrating once again how deep is the split in the Western human between the conscious and the unconscious self.
As a logical outgrowth of this worldview, is it any wonder that we are fragmented, stressed, engaged in ravaging our environment and fleeing from death?
How well has our Newtonian-Cartesian-Darwinian paradigm served? How well, indeed, can be readily observed when we place its end-product, the Western man and woman, next to their Aboriginal counterparts, who are quite at home with their instinctive, psychic, and spiritual beingness and who live in a creation which is "fully present, embodied, and magical in the union of its physical and metaphysical dimensions . . . " (p. 389).
Are there some specific lessons we can actually learn from a culture seemingly so diametrically opposed to our own?
Lawlor points out that Aboriginal society can be a potent resource for us in finding non-violent alternatives for parenting and discipline.
For example, young children in the Aboriginal culture are allowed full expression of their emotions and free rein in their behavior and are supported, even indulged, by the entire clan. But as they mature they are increasingly introduced to their responsibilities to kin and society. In other words, as babes and toddlers their individuality is supported and encouraged; but as they grow older, around the age of six or seven, their relatedness to clan and tribe is increasingly emphasized. Still later, at the time of puberty, they are introduced by way of initiatic rites to the spiritual mysteries of the Dreaming. These rites are designed to help the young Aborigine to face his or her worst fears, making conscious the unconscious. At this critical transition into adulthood, children are provided concrete experiences in relating to and surviving in the natural world, in meeting a variety of challenges physical and spiritual, and in so doing are encouraged to unfold their natural psychic powers. Finally, upon completing their rite of passage, their achievement is joyously celebrated by the entire tribe, giving each young person a sense of well-earned self-worth, acceptance, and rootedness in their tribal family.
As a result of this natural progression, Lawlor points out, Aboriginal adults are mild-mannered, confident, and easy-going . . . with none of the rigid defensiveness and self-centeredness of the Western personality. In Western childrearing practice, for the most part, repression and control occur very early; the emphasis as the child matures is on competitiveness, rather than relatedness, and materialism as opposed to spirituality. Nor, with the exception of the Bar Mitzvah of Judaism, for example, are there supportive rites of passage. Is it any wonder that the cumulative results of our unnatural childrearing practices, not to mention the violence of our high-tech birthing procedures, are the ever-increasing cycles of violence, suicide, and addictive behavior in our young people?
Is there hope for us? Yes. In fact our "fall from grace" may have been a natural part of the cosmic rhythm, the ebb and flow of events that is expressed in the explicate order by the periodic shifts in the Earth's magnetic fields, to name one factor. In spite of the cosmic drama, with its highs and lows, the implicate order (as David Bohm would have it), the Dreaming of the Aborigines, the "Ground of Being" of Paul Tillich, is ever with us, timeless and eternal. Indeed, our primal "home" has never really left us. We need only open the door. For starters we can pay heed and perhaps imbibe some of the ancient wisdom which the Australian Aborigines and so many indigenous peoples, including our own Native Americans, have preserved now for over one-hundred-thousand years.
This does not mean a return to the hunter-gatherer culture, of course. But it will mean having the courage to heal our sundered selves. To heed the archaic voice, which, although brutally quelled when first heard in the turbulent Sixties, is once ill be heard. Indeed it is already happening. All around us links to the archaic are manifesting: shamanic journeying, inner explorations through holotropic and pagain swelling and demanding expression. And this time it wrimal breathwork, and other modalities based on the reclaiming of our repressed inner selves are now spreading fast.
The very fact of Lawlor's book, along with many others now being published under the New Age rubric, speak to a growing and now perhaps irreversible "primal renaissance"; hence the title of this journal, and the theme of this first issue: "Multiple Realities and Primal Visions."
Voices of the First Day is a magnificent call to acknowledge and join in this renaissance. An artist as well as anthropologist, Lawlor has brilliantly highlighted his many-faceted and wholistic work through his choice of photographs, Aboriginal art, and his own drawings based on some of the finest early photographs from collections around the world.
The effect of this book is that of a tapestry, weaving together many fascinating strands of knowledge from the latest research on the effect of the Earth's magnetic field on our mental processes; data from the new biology, the new physics, psychology, philosophy, and the world's religions to Lawlor's own uncompromising analysis of the destructive impact of Darwinian and Baconian thought on our civilization. But more eloquent than all of these, and resonating throughout, is his faithful depiction of the Aborigines and their vibrant, joyful, and totally Earth-friendly way of life.
All the elements in this tapestry reinforce Lawlor's theme: that there is now a critical need for us to integrate our physical, psychological, and metaphysical selves. From this integration alone will come the healing that the modern Westerner is so desperately seeking; and from this integration alone will occur quite naturally the healing of our imperiled relationship with Earth.
In reading this magnificent book we can only echo Lawlor's motivating theme:
Dreams, collective memories and imagining are more potent than religious faith or scientific theories in lifting us above the catastrophic ending that confronts us all. A recollection of our origins and a remembrance of a sense of reality in its pure and primary form is essential if we are to understand our present circumstances and imagine the possibilities of our collective destiny. (p. 8)In conclusion, perhaps we can take sustenance from the Aborigines' profession of faith, which Lawlor shares with us:One need only be aware of the intricate interwoven fabric of the body, mind, and spirit of nature to know that . . . . nothing is left to chance or probability in the wondrous woven web of creation. As the Aborigines say, "The life of the universe is a one-possibility thing." (p. 391)
NOTE: This article was originally published in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, 1(1), Spring 1995, pp. 111-115.
Copyright © 1995 by Mary Lynn Adzema
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Biographical Note
MARY LYNN ADZEMA is a former journalist, civil-rights activist, and poet, whose writings have appeared in a number of West-Coast, national, and international publications. She has been a student of yoga and Eastern spirituality for over thirty years. She has also been a lecturer in psychology at World University in Ojai, California, where she had previously earned a Masters degree in Consciousness Psychology and an A.B.D. in Philosophy. She wrote a chapter for and co-edited a book about the experiences of Sai Baba devotees titled Transformation of the Heart. Mary Lynn has received training with Stanislav Grof in holotropic breathwork and with various people in primal therapy. Having served with the International Primal Association on it Board of Directors and as Assistant Editor of the publications, Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, a professional journal of psychology, and Primal Spirit: The Deeper Wave of the New Age, a magazine; she now serves as Assistant Editor of those some publications in their reincarnation on this website, and as consulting editor for Primal Spirit website in its umbrella-role for those publications plus all its other facets. Most importantly, she serves as Assistant Director of the newly opened Primal Spirit Center for Human Evolution, offering primal breathwork, primal therapy, a community of healing -- to name its major intentions. Mary Lynn's extended bio can be found at Mary Lynn Adzema's Writings. She can be contacted at P.O. Box 1348, Guerneville, CA 95446-1348; phone: (707) 869-9008; e-mail: marylynn@primalspirit.com.
Related Article: Go to "Prologue: Why 'Primal Renaissance'?" by Mickel Adzema
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