Dreaming Our Reality
Paddy Roe, Goolarabooloo
& Nyikina Elder
I have just watched Aboriginal Nyikina Elder, Paddy Roe speaking with Frans Hoogland in the short film which was directed by David Maybury Lewis in 1992 called ‘Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World’.
It’s in a grainy 4:3 format as it was produced for Canadian television with a long list of co-distributors including Biniman Productions Ltd; Adrian Malone Productions Ltd; KCET; BBC TV; The Global Television Network; Rogers Telefund; Telefilm Canada.
Maybury-Lewis, D., 1992. Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World, Canada: Adrian Malone Productions Ltd; KCET; BBC TV; The Global Television Network; Rogers Telefund; Telefilm Canada.
You must understand it this way, as Paddy and Frans are not in any way a natural fit.
The conversation between Paddy Roe and Frans Hoogland opens up the most cogent examples of how we can connect the loss of human spirit as a result of the abstraction of living amongst computational intervention. In other words, location is about land, Country speaking into people, not location as computational place marker, rather an instinctual relatedness with the geomorphology and biosphere in which humans exist.
Frans speaks of the holistic expansion of the universe from a physics analogy, an “awareness" that despite all that western society has tried in abstraction, it is already, always has been, in totality the dreaming that Aboriginal Australians speak of. For example, instead of a boundary marker denoting what is ‘their’ land and what is ‘our’ land as is customary in Western society Aboriginal communities ‘know’ the boundary through an awareness in fluidity as to where those boundaries exist, an instinctual relationship with Country.
Paddy speaks of “walking in our dreaming” where the “dreaming” is not separate to us, rather we manifest our reality out before us … like a path that we are creating in our spiritual minds’ eye.
The concept of Native Title as it is known in Australia is, therefore “white" man speak and is just acts of parliament that force first nations into compromise and with no right of veto for what will occur to themselves and the Country on which they live. The only outcome that Native Title provides is income for a minority who separate themselves from all others who reinforce they are entitled to live in and on their Country undisturbed, yet in reality mining and rampant destruction of their culture, communities, and country continues unabated.
In this short film, Paddy Roe speaks of how Frans "gets it" or has the capability of being and carrying the story forward, as an element of ‘transmergy’, like a virus. This whole story Paddy emphasizes needs to be spoken of by those who are in ‘essence’ that carry that ‘liyan’ which is a term that most intercultural understandings relate to as our ‘instinct’, our own individual moral compass.
The Aboriginal dreaming Paddy explains is the relatedness between people, law, and land and that Frans Hoogland became a carrier. The manner in which this knowledge is transposed is that Paddy spoke that into Frans, the past, present, and future as Spatio-temporal fusion.
This awareness of living and connecting, knowing and being on Country, is together in one ever-present reality, not segments of knowledge. So, location is shown here to be critical, in the most accessible way with no satellites, no tracking, no GPS, no GIS, no devices, no networks……
Aboriginal people have for tens of thousands of years by listening and observing known exactly what was happening around themselves, by looking at patterns and shift in patterns across nature. We could get lost on the mythological language barriers however the lines and the story that Paddy draws into the sand to describe how Frans was allowed to hear the story is about parallels, not homogeny and a way of being a human existing without colonization.
The end of the film depicts the two men walking together in their Dreaming as Paddy relates, walking in that dream and that the Dreaming manifests itself in what we put out before ourselves as humanity. Frans goes to great lengths in the film to reinforce that instead of following the road as we commonly relate in life that it is there already and that we are sending that out ahead of ourselves.
In summary, in western culture humans are obliged to follow a certain path whereas Paddy is relating that humans dream their own lifeworld path forward and it becomes reality. That will be the center and fullest message that my PhD could ever hope to realize, that we have the freedom to dream our way forward and that all of these western ways of paths to follow are nothing more than illusions.
Sleepwalking through society by contrast comes with a loss of instinct and those who choose to ignore that loss does so at their own peril.
As it is all about location, time, and circumstance it is that there is a massive gap here in the social and ethical listening to the story....different law....different altogether as Paddy states. With emphasis, that point is labored and by doing so Paddy points to difference as the way out, not homogeneity as the way forward.
As I relate what Paddy Roe has to say in this film with my own research I equate the concepts that Paddy speaks of with deep listening. The converse position will be disastrous for humanity if engineers don’t listen to any more than western science fiction. As Paddy and Frans relate in listening to Country and being connected fully with our own liyan, humans will come to the realization that the technology is US, not separate from us. In essence, - humans are responsible for ensuring that humans listen to more than an empty western dream as the way forward.
As humans, we can learn from the wisdom of those who have a deep connection to Country, who recognize that we manifest what we dream. In dreaming we bring to creation, not just lockstep in following technology that takes us away from reality, knowing that loss of reality denies us of the opportunity of dreaming that reality.
Read more about Paddy Roe here - http://www.goolarabooloo.org.au/paddys_story.html
