The Church of Uluru

As I was beginning a Jungian Analysis I had a dream:

I am at Uluru in central Australia. There is an old Aboriginal man playing a song on a guitar. There is a young woman in a bath next to him. I am struck by the colors. The blue of the sky, the red of the earth, the green of the vegetation. The song he is singing is a simple song that is beautiful. It is like he is hearing the song and then playing it with simple chords. I am enchanted by the beauty of the song.

The dream makes me sit bolt upright. I know it is a big dream, but what is it about? What is it trying to say? I read somewhere, it is important the dreams you have at the beginning of an analysis, and this dream has always held a deep fascination for me.

One thing about big dreams is they stay with you for the rest of your life. It is like there are layers to them that can take years to peel off. They are like mysteries wrapped up in enigma’s. They are an endless source of fascination. They keep on working on you these kinds of dreams. Carl Jung said ‘’Áre we having the dream or is the dream having us’. Looking back on it there is something archetypal about a big dream. They have a kind of ‘mysterium tremendum’ feel about them, but I didn’t know about that at the time.

The first thing I would have said about Uluru, is that it is our natural Cathedral in the centre of Australia. It is our Church here. And whilst England might have its Westminster Abbey and the French have their Chartres Cathedral, we have our Cathedral at Uluru in central Australia.

It is full of memory and calling for me this dream. It reminds of the Aboriginal dreaming in the beginnings of this land. It reminds of something ageless and timeless. A deep past. It reminds of the Ancestral dreaming and wisdom at the beginning of this land. The Aboriginal people were the first poets, here, who were ‘'singing’' the land into being.

Mircea Eliade in his book on ‘Shamanism’ said that someone wasn’t considered cultured in these older cultures unless they had been initiated into the first stories and myths. It is from the Aboriginal dreaming that some of our first stories and myths come from. And when Aboriginal people say that someone has ’language’, it means something like they are initiated into these old ways of knowing. That is the ‘language’ that they have.

There is a ‘Songman’ in Australian Aboriginal culture(who teach through song and myth and dance). David Page from the Bangarra Dance Company was called a ‘Songman’. And he drew on some of those first myths and stories and made them into contemporary dance theatre.

I heard somewhere there are ‘songlines’ that come out from Uluru. And those songlines, or dreaming tracks as they are sometimes called crisscross the vast Australian continent in Aboriginal dreaming, connecting land, sky, and water. It was said that ancestral beings traveled these songlines, leaving their wisdom and knowledge behind.

songlines

The old Aboriginal man reminds of the 2 million year old man in Jung. The ‘wise old man’, maybe. The first Adam in Jung, the one who was made out of clay. There was once a time when heaven and earth were in harmony. The ‘'old man’’ of this dream is connected to the divine of the sky, but he is also firmly rooted in the earth. Maybe, the old man speaks to something old or indigenous within ourselves. Recently someone spoke about reawakening the Indigenous Sensibilities in the Western Psyche, and I can get that. Maybe there is an archaic or indigenous aspect of the ‘psyche’ that needs to be reawakened within ourselves?

One thing I get from this dream is how the sacred shows up in unusual places and where you would least expect. I grew up in the Christian tradition, supposedly, in my so-called ‘normal’ world, but it has never really spoken to me, but this dream of Uluru speaks to me in some deep and mysterious way about the sacred. The sacred is showing up in what is really old, even Pre- Christian, in this dream.

Only recently I have realized something else about this dream. When I was young (about twentyone) I went off to India. It was like going up the mountain in India and it was like having an experience of some of the ‘superbia’ of the transcendental spiritual experience. It was exotic going into a different culture. And it was like a taste of a spirituality from high up on the mountain. But in this dream, which I had at my midlife, it is like I am returning to ground of our indigenous sacred wisdom.

I also heard much later after this dream that in indigenous culture’s that it was thought everyone was born with their own song. That is another way of looking at ‘índividuation’ in Jungian language. That each person is born with a song.

Peter Kingsley speaking about ancient Greek culture said:

In the language of ancient Greek poetry the word for 'road' and the word for 'song', oimos and oime, are almost identical. They have the same origin. The poet's song was quite simply a journey into another world: a world where the past and future are as accessible and real as the present. And his journey was his song. Those were the times when the poet was a shaman. The words shamans use as they enter the state of ecstasy evoke the things they speak about. The poems they sing don't only describe their journeys; they are what makes the journey happen.

There is an important detail for me in this dream. The ‘old man’ is in between, the wide blue sky of the spirit, and the red of the earth, lets say, He is in the middle of the world of the spirit and the earth, and the body and nature. And it is the soul that is between spirit and the earth(and that is how I would see the soul). And this dream speaks towards some kind of an orientation towards life. To be open and receptive to let the soul come through. There is a word for it in Aboriginal language ‘dadirri’ which is often translated as a ‘deep listening’. There is a way of deep listening, which is also like getting out of the way, to let the soul come through.  

Getting back to the dream, it also reminds me of the ‘Ánima Mundi’ in Jung (the soul of the world). It is the world that is alive that might need to be reawakened. Maybe that is where so much of the modern dis-enchantment comes from, we have forgotten about the ensouled world. The world that speaks to us like that. Modern Man(or Woman) has become isolated from the cosmos said Jung. We are no longer connected to the world like that. It might be a way for re-enchantment for us, to become more attuned to the World soul.

I grew up with Aboriginal kids in country Western Australia. I remember one kid listening to a song on the radio one day and then play around on the guitar and then slowly begin to play it by ear. That is what this ‘old man’ in the dream is doing, he is playing by ear. It is like he is hearing the music, or catching the music from the divine world and bringing it into a song. To sing is to enchant, I read. Enchantment was the first medicine said Jung.

I have been to Uluru, I went after this dream(and it was sacred, and maybe I belong to the Church of Uluru). There was also something cool there called ‘Dinner under the Stars’ (where tables with white tablecloths were set up in the desert under the stars where an Aboriginal woman told stories about Astrology). She spoke of how Aboriginal people saw the constellations. It was wrong when the Europeans first came here and said ‘terra nullius’(this land belongs to no-one). Because it had belonged to Aboriginals for hundreds of thousands of years and they had their own view of the stars.