It has been suggested the Australian Aborigine is primitive and uncultivated, an animist who uses ritual to win the favour of the spirits controlling food, shelter, and fertility and to counter malignant forces. In spite of what sounds to the Western mind as believing in legend, these semi-nomads have shown big intelligence by hunting and foraging for food, and thus surviving, in extraordinary conditions of the arid bush-land and desert wastes for over thirty thousand years. Like with other native races, there is a sense of closeness with, and a deep respect, for the natural sector of animals and plants.
Full-blooded Aborigines, in their natural state, live in and are influenced by both the physical world and also by what they think of as a spirit world (dreamtime). They are not materialistically oriented like those of European descent. Their non secular values have been mirrored in a rich oral tradition of legend and ritual returning to traditional times, unaffected by the major world’s religions. And thus the question appears whether there is anything of worth in their technique of life which can benefit us all today? With white settlement of their tribal lands and consequent loss of identity and self-esteem, their culture is being lost. Nonetheless there are still some brought into their legends and rituals who know the conventional meaning of rock and bark paintings, rites and oral teachings. Cyril Havecker lived near to the Warramunga Clan and was seen as their blood-brother. He has written an illuminating book Understanding Aboriginal Culture.
All Aborigines, initiated into their convention without reference to the tribe to which they belong, share a creation parable. Baiame is claimed to be the ultimate clever creator spirit who dreamed of a future that he needed to materialise. To paraphrase there is believed to be a purpose behind the development of the Earth, all living things being brought into existence with the object of satisfying a function in the great plan of life.
There are said to be three inbuilt drives in every person – drives to survive, reproduce and achieve. These drives were to be the root of all the difficulty and mischief on the earth but also the reason behind all that is positive and productive. Each soul was to have the will and liberty to discriminate between negative or positive action, choice being dependent on wisdom-knowledge and level of development. A decision was taken to give each soul a memory to stop chaos. Connected with this creation story is the claim that the physical world is hooked up to a psychic dimension by personality vibrations and that this land of poser basically exists. The tradition teaches that the universe is a psychological creation projected out of spirit basis.
And so traditional healers and wizards (wirinun) who handle spirits have been operative and are fairly well known for their powers in extra-sensory perception and control of the mind. Induced emotion and directed thought are two powerful ‘magical ‘ weapons used by the wirinun. This involves long periods of isolation, and limitation in diet. It is claimed that when in an increased state of consciousness, such people get in touch with the ancestors in the unseen world (dreamtime), this being possible because each individual soul has two bodies – one material and also a spirit body (dowie). It is the latter that's seemingly used to communicate with the ancestral spirits.
The soul is said to never leave the body of the living except at physical death, when it goes to reside permanently in the dreamtime, this dimension only being ceaselessly experienced in a spirit body as it is not somewhere in space : it is all about us and it needs only the right conditions to be contacted at any given time. The wirinun, through training in concentration and the environment of the plane of spirits, use signs, symbols and incantations critical to call up needed psychic entities. Such an individual never calls on any religious entity with which he's not fully familiar for he is saying he must know their nature and aims.
In truth he regularly uses requests (narmingatha) directed to the ultimate intelligence (Baiame). In seeking the aid of benign entities of the non secular world he uses no words of compulsion, or indulgent terms. He asks sincerely and gives reasons. He doesn't ask for something that divests folk of what justly belongs to them or which gives an unmerited edge over someone else. Lots more may be written about this entrancing tradition. However to finish up extra-sensory perception, survival after death, and steady contact with a far more knowledgeable spiritual world, are all commonly accepted facts in conventional Aboriginal culture, as is the presence of a supreme divine spirit and other spirits who affect life on earth. In reality the whole of their way of life is subject to supernatural forces.
