A Complicated Dream,
Two
By contrast, Australian aborigines traditionally live not by
clock time, but by what is called the dreamtime. The dreamtime is a timeless realm in which the Ancestors sing into
existence every feature of the natural world. For those who live by the
dreamtime, the world is sacred and inviolable. Not a single pebble must be
disturbed from its place. The people of dreamtime will never produce a laptop
computer, but they will never produce ecological crisis either.
The western dream of
time, is dualistic in that it divides the web of existence into two
irreconcilable parts: the present, which is real (God?), and the non-present,
which is not real. According to this scheme, the aboriginal tracker’s feat
is impossible and absurd because an event cannot occur simultaneously in the
past and the present…
Dualism is the proto – dream underlying clock time and all
modern dreaming. Dualism might be
defined as the illusion that there are two discreet principles in the universe:
self and other. Dualism implies isolation, conflict, and a continuous struggle
of opposing forces. For this reason, actions based on dualistic vision are
simplistic, aggressive, and destructive.
For example, a farmer dreams that his livestock is part
of “self” and predators are “other.”
Immediately there is conflict, and the conflict suggests a simple, aggressive
solution: destroy the predators. This is precisely the solution humanity has
adopted over the past few thousand years. Since dualism is blind to complexity,
we have failed to notice that in destroying predators we have disrupted the
ecosystem in such a way as to impoverish productive lands and turn them into
deserts. The dualistic dream engenders
an endless procession of conflict, aggression, and destruction as each
“solution” creates new problems to be attacked. One who lives in the dream
of dualism lives in a battlefield, as a walk through any city will attest.
Plant Spirit Medicine
Eliot Cowan
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