I had long discussions with an anthropologist who works on music among peoples in Arnhem Land and elsewhere in Northern Australia, as well as with some aboriginal peoples I met at a conference on spiritual teachings; and as Art says, it is completely mindblowing. The most staggering experience I had was listening to an exchange between the anthropologist (who had been essentially adopted by the tribe, for a whole variety of personal reasons) and an elder. They were talking about maps, and how to fool anthropologists. The anthropologist told the story about how the first time he went there, he wanted to get a sense of how the people thought about their territory (this is very important in Australia because of land claims issues). They were quite happy to draw maps of the songlines of each clan that (for example) would be like a stingray or a hawk moving over the sea or land, carving out the terrain. Then the elder at the conference laughed and said, "And he believed this!!" After the anthropologist had gotten a little more trust, they sent him to a more senior elder, who drew what the anthropologist called "the negative of the previous picture", the land as it would be seen from the spirit's point of view, boring through spacetime. Finally, about ten years after that, after some wild experiences, he was able to talk to one of the few elders who had never assimilated into Western culture. He showed us one of the pictures the elder drew of his version of the world as seen from the dreamtime -- it looked like nothing you have ever seen -- the closest thing I can liken it to is one of those scatter pictures you see in cloud chamber photographs of subatomic particles. The anthropologist said that he had been working on this set of pictures and ideas for years afterwards: as far as he could make out, the elder was trying to show him how the universe was music -- you can come in and out of music, it is in time, and yet not, and is both dimensional and dimensionless. He thought that the singing of the world into existence was really like the weaving of voices in choral music, and that each of these voices was a dimensional thread (a bit like the Hinduism of the Bhagavad Gita). In the conference, the elder who was there kept saying, "Yes, but not really."

I have had many discussions about this since, but I always remember that strange picture, the real attempt to try and describe the universe as musical (and why is music so weird anyway? why does it work?) and firmly believe that the aboriginal vision is closer to whatever is going on in the real reality than anyone. Not just because of modern string theory, or whatever; but because there are echoes of that vision in other traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist) that seem to me to be more than just part of some vague New Age kind of stuff.

yours,

Peter T.