Australia’s indigenous peoples represent the oldest continuous culture on Earth. For around 60,000* years they remained at one with the land, highly tuned to the frequencies of nature and brilliantly able to adapt to their surroundings as each millennium unfolded.
Many indigenous Australians refer to themselves as Anangu (pronounced an nah new). Anangu simply means “human being, person.” Other local variations of the term Anangu exist, depending on geographic region, such as Koori, Noongar, Nunga and Murri. We’ll stay with Anangu to keep things simple. It is certainly preferable to using the maladroit and outmoded 18th century English term ‘Aboriginal’ (from the Latin Aborigine, ab: from, and origo: origin, beginning).
The Dreaming
Within Anangu cosmology, the Dreaming (aka Dreamtime, Altjeringa) refers to both the creation story and a spiritual realm of ‘time outside of time,’ a co-existing confluence of past, present and future out of which all phenomena emanate. It is perhaps, the Australian equivalent of the Toltec Shamanic concept, the Nagual.
Robyn Davidson, in a recent quarterly essay on nomads, writes: "No matter how much I read about the Dreaming, the confidence that I understand it never quite takes root in my mind. To me it is on a par with, say, quantum mechanics, or string theory – ideas you think you grasp until you have to explain them. Each time I attempt it, I have to feel my way into it again, and I am never sure of my ground. One could say that the Dreaming is a spiritual realm which saturates the visible world with meaning; that it is the matrix of being; that it was the time of creation; that it is a parallel universe."
The Anangu consider the Dreaming to be entirely objective, whilst linear time is understood to be a subjective construction of the individual’s waking consciousness. This is diametrically opposed to European and Western thinking which views dreaming as subjective and linear time as objective.
Within this context, we may understand that our reality is a subjective construction of our own consciousness. It is existent in the sense that we can touch it, see it and feel it. It was there yesterday and it will be there tomorrow when we wake up. Yet the whole thing has no independent existence outside of consciousness.
The Anangu are taught by their elders to believe that only through Dreaming can they return to authentic reality. Life in normal time is simply a fleeting fantasy, a bird flying by the moon. It has a beginning and it has an end. The Dreaming has no beginning and no end. Before, during and after our life on Earth, the true source of our existence is anchored there. It is the origin and the return. A 'piece' of the Dreaming is only downloaded into earthly life by being born through a mother. Upon birth, the child is considered to be a special custodian of that part of their country, their spiritual landscape, and so is taught the stories and unique characteristics of that place.
In the Dreaming creation story, ancestral totemic spirit-beings formed the World. These shapeshifting spirits embodied forms of animals, plants, people, natural phenomena, even inanimate objects. Their existence is expressed by their formative journeying and the signs they deposited through the landscape. Their dreaming and journeying trails are referred to as songlines (or Yiri). Traces may be encountered as spiritual essence or physical marks, such as petrosomatoglyphs (body impressions or footprints usually incised in rock). A good example would be the journey of the Rainbow Serpent itself (the key figure in the Anangu creation story) which followed a path across Northern Australia, creating rivers and mountains as she went, and stopping at especially sacred places such as Ubirr. Her song is still sung by Anangu, and describes the features of her journey. These songs may also be used to navigate vast distances and also to locate waterholes in the desert. Songlines are an ancient tool of recording, navigating and identification.
Sowing Seeds
And so to our society. To the modern expression of the Dreaming. Why do movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, Armageddon, War Of The Worlds and I Am Legend get to be so pervasive? Cheesy disaster flicks with nothing to offer but cheap thrills, eye candy and melodramatic inevitability. Just why do these shallow tales win big every time? Simple. Their high profile and colossal backing reflects the crucial role they play in fulfilling the Control System’s manufactured reality.
Spirit encompasses matter. The circle contains the square. Imagination is the engine of holographic potentiality. Grasping this concept is the key to shifting one’s consciousness to the next level and embracing mindful self-control and personal creation within the holomovement. If we are to develop our own inner crucible of manifestation, we must reject the Control System’s movie screens and brush away their fake songlines. In understanding the mechanism, we automatically drift away from the manipulation. Our creation is their destruction.

