Introductory remarks:

Before you begin reading this transcript you may like to find a copy of Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" and mark Chapter 7, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" because it ends with a reading of that story.

The following are three quotes from C G Jung:

The reason, I would suggest, why Jung would have to make such statements, and to reiterate them so consistently throughout his work, is that in so doing he points to two of those core assumptions that Alfred North Whitehead refers to. Such assumptions take on the quality not of Jung's working hypothesis but of absolute truths, and when such a situation pertains, views contrary to those assumptions are relegated to a variety of categories of invalidity. Those two fundamental working hypotheses of Jung's, that the psyche is real, and that our relationship to and understanding of it is in need of continual reinterpret- ation, are clearly in counterpoint to fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality and religious truth that are central to modern Western thought. These presuppositions have been so unconscious that we have ceased to see that they are merely other working hypotheses, to which the status of absolute truths had been assigned. These two hypotheses, which lie at the core of modern scientific materialism, and the Judeo-Christian tradition are:

(i) that physical reality is the only reality and that any other (apparently non physical) phenomena can somehow be reduced to physical causes, and,

(ii) that Judeo-Christianity is the religious truth, an absolute which supersedes all other religious perspectives, of which the final doctrines settled just after the death of Christ.

The first assumption, that physical reality is the only reality, has been developing and growing in its dominance of Western thought and culture since around the time of Newton - one wonders what Newton who was well versed in astrology and alchemy would think of such a development - and despite the extraordinary developments in modern science still very much holds sway today. The second, that the Judeo-Christian perspective is a complete and final religious revelation, has to a large degree accommodated and supported this other development, apparently to its own detriment. Initially I am going to focus more particularly on that first presupposition and its dominance of modern Western perspectives, for it gives a particular framework within which to view or present situation.

Jung's need to reiterate his views regarding the reality of the psyche, and the numerous sayings which dismiss, reduce or invalidate phenomena of a non physical nature are testimony to this situation. In everyday language and situations there are numerous examples of this - such as:

(i) when one tells a child waking in fear from a scary dream, "dont worry its only a dream". or whenever one says oneself "its only a dream".

(ii) the notion that something that some-one feels or imagines or cannot explain is "all in their mind" or just imaginary.

(iii) the statement that some-one has a vivid imagination which usually carries a negative tone and implication that such experiences are not valid.

All of these statements are based on the assumption that the phenomena involved are not in themselves real. Its only a dream clearly suggests that the dream is not real and that it can therefore be dismissed as unworthy of any serious consideration. That the imagination is not productive of real things is likewise an assumption so deeply ingrained that it rarely occurs to the average person to question it, or as many people will testify, if they do suspect otherwise they most often keep it to themselves.

On the other hand Jung took an entirely different point of view when in drawing a parallel to the difficulty of European science in accepting revel- ations from the biological unknown, he says:

It is this question of the reality of the psyche that is central to our attitude to mythology and fairytales. It is what lies behind the failure of western cultures to understand and value the perspectives of so called primitive cultures and their realities, such as the Aboriginal Dreamtime and Dreaming. It also prevents us from seeing what such worldviews may have to offer us in ways to revitalise and update our own traditions of relationship to the psyche which remain largely stuck in literal interpretations of Biblical writings.

So let's look at the implications of the assumption that the physical represents the basis of all that we call real. From the perspective elaborated by Jung it is interesting to take a look at two events, one physical, a car accident, and one psychic, a dream, and examine the generally accepted view of these, and the extent to which our own outlook has been, and still is, affected by the cultural bias we have grown up with. None of us have any difficulty accepting the car accident as an objective reality. We see it as an event essentially external to us - it happens to us - when we say "I had a car accident", we dont mean that we created the whole reality of the situation. We may accept that there is certain input on our side, especially if we are in the wrong, but it remains for us essentially an event that happened to us. We may however find a whole different perspective on the accident if some-one went and interviewed the people involved several hours later. If their were three people in the cars and two bystanders as witnesses we would end up with five different stories, dependent on a variety of factors such as physical positions, confidence about driving, emotional reactions, the moods people were already in, the peoples' psychological types etc. However in spite of these subjective accounts few of us would doubt that there was an objective event that took place, of which, given all the evidence available, we could reconstruct a reasonably accurate picture. And if there had been a Polair helicopter hovering above with a video camera running we could even check the various subjective accounts against what we might consider to be this more objective evidence.

Turning now to a dream, how do we respond and see the dream? For most of us here even, it would be easy to recall the attitude of dismissal, either our own or from those around us, with which we grew up. Initially, even as Jungians we see the dream as `my dream', an inner event and usually this means that I somehow produced it. Very few of us would have initially seen our dreams as events that happen to us, as an objective reality of which we simply retain a subjective recollection after the event (when we wake). Obviously it is more difficult to come to this sort of perspective about dreams (and other psychic events) because where is the evidence for the dream as an objective event? Within the materialistic frame work there is none by definition. The materialist and reductionist framework filters out such evidence as there, is precisely because it is not physical.

This however is a cultural perspective and one by which few of us have escaped being prejudiced. Certainly some terminology in Jungian writing seems only to have compounded this difficulty. The use of the terms inner and outer has a confusing effect if one is attempting to see an `inner' or psychic event such as a dream as an objective reality. We quite readily see the outer event such as a car accident as objective to us but the notion of `inner' in our way of thinking suggests something which we contain, it is mine, it is inside of me. So when we say `I had a dream' we see it as `my dream' in quite a different way to when we say, `when I had my car accident'. My car accident means it (objectively) happened to me (the subject), whereas the my dream means the dream (as subject) that I (as object) produced. Can we make the leap to seeing the dream more in the way we see the car accident? Can you see your dreams as events that happen to you, of which you have a subjective recollection, that you no more made up or produced than the car accident?

A dream itself points out this different perspective quite clearly, Nick's dream:

In essence Jung's approach flies in the face of the materialist outlook. He consistently refers to his approach as empirical, a word that the physical sciences are generally accepted to have a monopoly on. In its attempts to gain scientific credence mainstream psychology has by and large seen the empirical approach as requiring it too to reduce the phenomena it studies to physically observable behaviours. Jung on the other hand took the term empirical in the broader context of its meaning: in the dictionary it is defined as - known or knowing only by trial, experience or induction.

In attempting see the dream more as an objective event we need to employ Jung's notion of the empirical, to ask what empirical evidence there is for `inner' or psychic events. To do this we are confronted with the need to know, and become objective about, our own fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. If we assume that only that which is physically observable and measurable is real we will dismiss the empirical/experiential evidence for the reality of psychic events. It is this attitude which predisposes us to the sort of different treatment of psychic and physical events that I have described earlier, for as Jung says:

Jung is not however simply proposing that we turn the whole situation back to front, rather he suggests that we develop and entirely different perspective, one not bound by the binary, either/or attitude of modern Western thinking. What he suggests has the same paradoxical quality of the Taoist notions of Yin and Yang in which there is a polarity, but within which each pole contains the seed of the its opposite. It is also essentially in accord with the world view of Aboriginal culture, within which the interplay of the dreaming or psychic real- ity and the physical reality of the land and people, is a day to day occurrence which is the fundamental premise of the culture. ( We will return later to this when discussing the Aboriginal notion of the `Law'). Here nothing is completely Yin or Yang, or matter and psyche cannot be dealt with as separate realities, and as in Jung's outlook, there is no way to completely separate the physical and psychic realities, or matter and psyche, to quote him:

From a rationalistic/materialist viewpoint there is a sharp division between the categories of matter and spirit/psyche, in which one is assigned the value of a `reality' and the other reduced to a by-product of the former. However such a standpoint is essentially subjective, and in so called `primitive' perspect- ives it is clear that the boundaries are quite blurred and that the reality of the psyche is far more an accepted value. From this perspective matter may have a `soul' and the psyche can affect physical reality - there is a fluidity of interplay between the realms of psyche and matter.

A person living in a viable Aboriginal cultural context does not need physical proof of the reality of the Dreaming/Dreamtime, she or he experiences it daily as a living reality. It has the quality of numinosity or mystery associated by Aboriginal people with events and circumstances that invoke the reality of the Dreaming during both waking and dreaming life. This matter of the numinosity of certain experiences I will return to later. For the moment it is sufficient to say that because the numinous event involves a primary subjective response, the general attitude to it in the western outlook, is to reduce it to this and dismiss it on that basis. What evidently separates modern western people from the Aboriginal person is not a lack of experience of the psyche but the barriers of rational materialist assumptions that we have erected between ourselves and such experiences of our own dreaming. It is probably pertinent to say that even a lot of so called Jungian thinking is only a more sophisticated rationale with which to keep the psyche at bay or prevent our own dreaming from coming to life and demanding of us the attention and care with which Aboriginal peoples have always attended theirs. Two more reflections of Jung's elucidate this problem further:

Just what is it that the western scientific rationalist and the Judeo- Christian attitudes have in common, that renders them so fatal to a living relationship to the psyche? This I think is a critical question, as is the further question of whether the assumptions those attitudes are founded upon are sufficient to justify their claims? Within the limits of this talk we cannot go into great philosophical depth but I think these questions can be addressed quite simply. Each approach lays claim to having, or being the only path to the final answers to questions about the nature of reality. From the scientific point of view this is put quite simply and succinctly by the physicist/cosmolog- ist Stephen Hawking. Hawking claims for science the dubious victory of having discovered a `theory of everything'. In this claim he also sees science as having obviated the need for `god'. To those with Hawking's outlook any further questions are simply a matter of tidying up a few loose ends, there are no further questions of substance (excuse the pun?). It is here that even some of Hawking's scientific colleagues beg to differ. Although there may (though it is doubtful) be no further questions regarding the nature of and evolution of the physical universe (matter), even some physicists have the temerity to ask whether the nature of physical reality is the whole issue at hand. Is a `theory of physical reality' really a theory of everything?? The history of Christian claims to being the final therefore only currently valid path to salvation need little reiteration here.

These (unquestioned) assumptions about the nature of reality, physical and religious, however, set the bounds within which these predominant western world- views operate, and so determines what they are capable of discovering. They are as it were the old and new approaches to the Dreamtime reality in the west. It is clearly arguable that aboriginal worldviews may have lacked some of what western science and Christianity see as sophistication in its explanations of life, both physical and religious, which these reductionist standpoints seem to facilitate. On the other hand it is becoming increasingly evident that in adopt- ing such one-sided worldviews we in the west have paid a price which we are also now imposing on the whole planet, to which so called primitive perspectives may offer some very real means of redress.

The Aboriginal and other so called primitive world views were not based assumptions which excluded all phenomena not physically measurable, and claimed knowledge of the `laws of nature' rather than of the behaviour of the physical universe. What is variously referred to as the `Law' or Dreamtime Law in Aborig- inal culture is very different from our notions of law. It is an immutable real- ity standing not so much outside as behind or a priori to what we experience as nature in the day to day sense. However,it is through individual experience and collective interpretation that this `Law' is brought into the human domain, and through which human understanding of it is continually updated. This well accords with Jung's view that the archetypes are mediated into human conscious- ness via individual human experience. To put it in the words of Diane Bell in her book "Daughters of the Dreaming":

Bell goes on to discuss the relativity of human interpretation of the `Law' but the notion of an immutable Law which remains despite changes in human behaviour and interpretation is an important point. It is a cornerstone of the Aboriginal world view along with the equally fundamental notion that the Dreamtime Law exists in the present only via the continued `redreaming' and reinterpretation of it by living individuals. This is a notion with which Jung was very much in accord and is reflected in such statements as:

What is becoming apparent here is that the complex of terms, Dreamtime Law, Dreamtime and Dreaming, is connected to or elucidating the process by which Aboriginal culture described and maintained its living relationship with what in Jungian terms we call variously the objective psyche or collective unconscious, and the archetypal reality which underpins them. The mythic or fairytale story is the current version or dreaming of the archetypal reality of which it is but one expression. That this relationship in Aboriginal culture included both the physical and psychic aspects of reality is a crucial point. It enables us to understand both something of the reasons for western failure to understand aboriginal cultures worldwide, and the state of our culture itself.

We have created a mythless society, if we take myth as having to do with a living relationship to the psyche, for even our own religious traditions have adopted the attitude that they are not myths but `the one truth'. Furthermore when our religions place themselves within the ambit of a reductionist material- ism they cease to be alive to the extent that they allow the need for reduction- ist outlooks to deny the mysteries of which they speak. Also, because they tend more and more to deny individual experience as the wellspring of the mythic/ symbolic/religious life they fail to capture the imagination of individuals, which is of course where the myth engages one. Edward Edinger says in "The Creation of Consciousness":

Aboriginal people Australia wide are engaged in a struggle to reactivate their own mythic systems. Through this they may hopefully set in motion their innate processes of evolving to accommodate change, and make them once again a source of containment and psychic health for aboriginal people.

So what, if anything, does an understanding of Aboriginal culture and world view have to offer us as non aboriginal people struggling to come to terms with our own situation? And are there ways in which the mythic realities of our own cultural heritage are maintained and evolving with any semblance of vitality and integrity?

In attempting to address these questions I would like once more to turn to Jung, then to explore some reflections of Sir Laurens van der Post on the place of the story in the culture of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, as well as delving deeper into what I see as pertinent contributions of an understanding of Australian Aboriginal culture.

About scientific concerns with the nature of matter (ie. physical reality) Jung observed that:

which is very much in accord with the latest thinking in Quantum mechanics and Chaos theory), and further he says about matter:

One could certainly be forgiven for suspecting the scientific community at times of defending its theories rather more rigorously than is warranted if it accepts that they are in fact no more than transitional attempts to describe an unknowable reality which lies outside/beyond them. Certainly Jung would claim no more than this for his theories about the nature of the psyche, and either of the above statements could just as easily be to do with what we know of the psyche. However if there is a real, albeit unconscious, attachment to the notion of physical reality as `the reality' from which all else arises, the assertions of scientists have more the quality of a religious dogma, which tends towards absolutism in its attempts to claim its truth as `the truth'. In Jung's rhetorical question about whether or not the reality of matter is affected by our speculative understanding of it, lies I think an important point in understanding the reluctance of science to admit the reality of the psyche. For if science has a subjective attachment to, or belief system premised upon, physis being `the reality', then even to admit the question of an intervening consciousness as a psychic factor affecting our perception of it, does reduce it from its state of absoluteness.

To paraphrase Jung; matter as a working hypothesis of physics, like the spirit as the hypothetical category of religion and philosophy, and the psyche as a working hypothesis of psychology, all need constant reinterpretation. And aboriginal perspectives invariably offer something which is of immense value in bringing much needed change in western outlooks. This is a view of matter and psyche as interactive with each other, as well as a built in system of updating the dreaming by reference to individual experience in the here and now. In aboriginal world views there is no artificial separation of physis and psyche, which has its own pitfalls, but also offers the possibility of admitting to consciousness a whole range of experiential evidence about the nature of reality that the materialist perspective filters out. Jung's approach is also suggestive of an outlook which sees no final answers to questions about the nature of reality, only ongoing re-interpretation based on further empirical evidence.

The aborigines like the alchemists experienced the psyche in matter (the country and sacred places in particular). Of course we do not just project the psyche into matter, matter and psyche are not essentially separate, the psyche is in matter anyway. In the process of projection we meet the psyche that is already in matter/nature, but via the medium of the images we project.

What we consistently fail to understand in observing Aboriginal culture is the extent to which our fundamental assumptions differ from those of aboriginal peoples. If there is any hint, however slight, of reductionism in the attempt to understand what aboriginal people mean by the Dreaming/Dreamtime we are lost. There was in Aboriginal culture no conception of history as we know it, rather there was the past, the present and the jukurrpa, or immutable reality of the Dreamtime Law, which stands outside time as we know it. The past to Aborigines was a very different concept to what we understand by it, something probably better understood with an outlook which Lauren van der post describes as:

".....time which Einstein described as not a condition in which life exists but as a state of mind."

To Aboriginal people the dreaming is not in the past, it is happening in the here and now, in the lives of the people and their experiences of the country. It would be entirely inconceivable in aboriginal culture for the marriage dreaming for example to have been dreamt nearly 2000 years ago and remain attached to the particular person of St Paul. [PAUSE]. With the jukurrpa as its reference point Aboriginal `history' is a living imaginative process of relationship to the twin realities of physis and psyche as they proceed from their archetypal roots. It is continually re-experienced anew by individuals, and not a chronological person/event centred listing.

That one person's experience of a dreaming, however powerful, could become dogma in that particular way which is so central to Christian (and scientific) perspectives was structurally guarded against in aboriginal understanding of the dreaming. The taboo against the naming of the dead, and regarding the dead person's property which includes objects of ritual significance, means that specific connections to the dreaming for which a person is responsible are unable to be spoken of once a person dies. Until further dreaming activity (which includes dreams, visions and other numinous experiences) on the part of a living individual reactivates that particular facet of the dreaming it remains dormant. When such dreaming activity does occur the individual responsible brings it before those others responsible for the whole dreaming complex and it must be re-interpreted and fitted into the overall context of the dreaming. To quote Diane Bell again:

In this way the very nature of the Dreaming/Dreamtime Law as it is experienced in the everyday lives of the people is bound to individual experience. The individual experience is central to the renewal of the dreaming and at the same time contained by and integrated into the collective consciousness.

This is a far cry from modern western attitudes, even in the area of religious experience. At best the so called `New Age' attitude is that certain individuals somehow claim the right to create or facilitate such experiences for us, at worst the attitude of religious and ideological perspectives is to deny the validity of individual experience if it in any way makes claim to things which the dogma sees as its domain. The following story , told by a 15 year old girl of her friend's experience, is a good illustration of the latter attitude.

How then we might ask is the approach to individual experience and its relationship to the collective experience in so called primitive cultures relevant and instructive for us? It is precisely in its response to such a story/experience as the one I have just related that we begin to see where we could be aided. It is clear from Diane Bell's accounts that in aboriginal culture individual experiences are taken very seriously and as the source of ongoing renewal of the group relationship to the Dreaming. This is also well documented as a central reality of American Indian culture and eloquently out- lined in "Black Elk Speaks" where the care taken to treat the `vision' with due respect is also greatly emphasised. This is put succinctly in Mary Watkins' "Waking Dreams" as follows:

"for Black Elk vision was not reduced to, or assimilated by daily life. The attempt was made to bring the daily life into relation with the vision. The images of the visions were the guides in this relation. They had power and through them the daily world was transformed."

We accept almost unchallenged the changing images of matter and the physical universe with which science continually presents us, and the changes in our experience of the daily world around us which they precipitate. The theories of Darwin or the discoveries of modern physics are clear examples of this. That we cannot accept an outlook which assigns similar power to psychic factors such as visions, dreams etc. essentially a matter of belief or prejudice, based on unconscious assumptions, rather than of truth in any absolute sense. It is also in the opinion of Edward Edinger quoted earlier the source of our current individual and social distress for it undermines our living relationship to a containing myth. Why is this so??

An essential element in Aboriginal (and other primitive lifestyles) is the place of daily reiteration of the mythic containment of the individual and group by the greater reality of the Dreamtime. This process takes on many variations but is almost always rooted in some form of story telling, at times also accompanied by dancing and other ritual acting out processes which deepen and enrich the quality of the events or experiences being given expression. Such processes however have a quality and power now rarely evident in their remnants in our own lives. This it would seem is somehow connected to our attitude to the reality of the psyche, and the implications of that attitude regarding the place and power of the imagination in our lives. Our barriers of logic and materialism prevent us as Jung put it from being `gripped' by the mythic reality in stories. In relation to fantasy and imagination Jung said:

"....if you recognise your own involvement (one might add let oneself be involved) you yourself must enter into the process with your own personal reactions, just as if you were one of the fantasy figures. It is a psychic fact that this fantasy (story may be inserted here) is happening, and it is as real as.....you are real."

What Jung has said about involvement in fantasy/imagination can be just as well applied to the use of stories in oral traditions. The listeners were not sitting in rational judgment of the story, comparing it to the reference point of a reality reduced to the physical. Rather for them the characters of the story existed as real entities inhabiting the psychic realm but able to affect the day to day reality of the physical world they inhabited. Here the story and the fantasy or imagination it induces becomes the prima materia for the ongoing and evolving imaginative process of the listeners. As Jung put it they, "enter into the process with their own personal reactions". The story or enactment of a dreamtime myth is a numinous experience, that is, an experience of being touched by the divine.

The meaning of myths and fairytales remains, like the realities that they describe, essentially unfathomable except in the experience. It is for this reason that stories must be told, for in the telling, the process of verbalising numinously invokes those `hidden' realities in a very particular way. You will all know the experience of telling a dream and how at times it really takes one back into the experience in a way that just reading it never quite achieves. Aboriginal people did not just listen to the story in a passive way, or use it simply as an escape from the `real reality' of the material world, they were gripped by and involved in the story whose mythic characters were utterly real to them. When we simply read a story, or even worse watch it rendered into pre- packaged images on film or television, something very different is happening. Lauren van der Post refers to this vital difference when he says in "Witness to the Last Will of Man":

The story is always a post mortem in its written form, and the possibility of its full resurrection lies in its re-telling. And this resurrection is a risky business for the retold story may be altered in the individual experience, something that is always dangerous for those attached to dogma and fearful of the living reality of the psyche. Attachment to dogma, of which writing things down can be an important tool, always attempts to prevent the re-definition which proceeds from activation of the individual imagination. It limits the capacity of the individual to mediate the experience of the psyche anew, to ask new questions, or the age old questions in new ways, for as van der Post also reflects:

It is the imagination of the individual which is the vehicle for the ongoing renewal of the religious life of the group, and the species as a whole, and the dream or vision is central in this process for to quote van der Post again:

Religion fails us in this process when it becomes dogmatised and attached to particular accounts of religious experience. In other words when it turns religion into history, and denies us the right to direct experience of our dreaming, or invalidates it if we attempt to claim it anyway. Likewise science wearing its blinkers of materialism refuses to ask questions which do not fall within its predetermined domain and denigrates and what it cannot reify.

Both of these attitudes are founded on assumptions that we can, or in fact do, know something final about the ultimate reality underpinning life/ creation. The attitude of Jung and of aboriginal peoples worldwide would seem to be more that the moment we think we know something definite and absolute about either matter or the psyche, our living relationship to them ceases. It is as though in taking a photograph we forget the existence of the subject of the photo and see it (the photo) as reality. We must look away from that stilled image in order to see that reality goes on and may have changed!.

How can we do this, let go of the stilled images of our culture and regain our living relationship to our dreaming???? It is not going to be a simple process for in our long denial of individual experience, which is the primary carrier of that living connection, we have also allowed the matrix within which those experiences are given meaning and context to wither and become barren. But there are ways and we can take them up. Jung's work itself is a redreaming of the old revelations as he reveals when he says:

And we can turn away from the imagination dulling prepackaged forms of imagery and begin to reconnect with the fleeting butterfly of our own inner lives. We can turn to the written stories in a new way, begin to read them aloud, memorise them and retell them, feeding our imaginations from the old sources and allowing them to be the prima materia of our renewal of the dreaming. This process cannot be forced and deliberately structured for it is a delicate and subtle matter. Slowly as we redream and share we may find we are pouring this water of life into the matrix of our collective dreaming, renewing its life and vitality too, for as Mountain Lake of the Pueblo Indians said once to Jung of his tribes' religion: "We do this not only for ourselves but for the whole world". So, for tonight I would like to finish by practising what I preach, I am going to read you a story.

Here I recommend that you read "Wind in the Willows" Chapter 7, "Piper at the Gates of Dawn", and enjoy!!!