Survival Day: Answering the Ancestral Call for Global Change
This January 26th lend an ear to the voices of Indigenous Australia
This Friday, millions of Australians will hoist up the Australian flag to celebrate a day that the traditional custodians of the land will be mourning, all while fighting for the injustices that lead to their pain and suffering.
For the Indigenous Australians, January 26th symbolises the painful history marked by dispossession, violence, and cultural suppression that continues to this day. It is a stark reminder of the continued struggle for justice and reconciliation not just here but the world all over.
Today their voices are needed now more than ever; with our adolescent culture too busy shaking ass on TikTok to realise we are sleepwalking to our collective demise.
The damage done by post-industrial modernity in just a few hundred years is really quite impressive when you consider that Aboriginal communities, the world’s oldest living culture, thrived for 60,000 years on their land without leaving so much as a ciggy butt behind.
The allure of the material world with its instant gratification, metaverse and vajazzles obscures the reality that we are fundamentally the same human beings who, for tens of thousands of years, lived in similar hunter-gatherer communities in harmony with the land around us.
As American Sociobiologist Edward O Wilson so eloquently expressed in 1929: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
This single quote launched a thousand ships in the ocean of my spirit and has been a major inspiration in my life. It played a key part in the launch of this Substack and one of the biggest questions I sit with as a result is: how do we navigate this ever-widening chasm?
Two thousand steps forward, three thousand steps back
“The Archaic Revival is this overarching metaphor that is the way for us to go to save our own necks. When a culture gets into trouble, instinctively, what it does is it goes through its own past, and finds a moment where things seem to make sense, and then it brings that moment forward into the present”. - Terrence Mckenna.
At the risk of stating the obvious… we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, proceeded to dig a hole, and somehow ended up shits creek without a paddle (I couldn’t think of which metaphor would do our dire situation justice).
Our weather patterns are becoming more unpredictable, our land is becoming increasingly infertile, genocide is being live-streamed to us via our phones, and our ruling governments & corporations are creeping more and more towards authoritarianism in a desperate attempt to normalise all of this.
Before we continue our exponential march forward we must remember the things we have forgotten and resanctify the natural world. And we cannot move forward without acknowledging the existence of the sacred.
Once our tools for healing and revolution go through the sausage mincer of capitalism and market forces collide with a growing counter-culture they quickly become commodified. All movements with promising beginnings quickly hoodwink us into becoming better consumers and cogs in the machine.
Indigenous wisdom, the psychedelic renaissance, and the mindfulness/ yoga movement either become empty jingoes, opportunities to make bank, or turn us into more productive workers. The sacred quickly becomes the profane, and until we honor the sacred within and around us, we’ll eventually loop back to serving the interests of The Empire.
When we look back to recent history it is no wonder the sacred was rejected in its totality in favor of materialism and rationality. Religion has long been an oppressive force, justifying war and destruction in the name of an invisible man in the sky who really didn’t want you to diddle with each other unless you were married and ESPECIALLY if you were gay.
By rejecting the mythopoetic power of religion, we threw out the baby with the bath water and lost important shared values that were held together by stories from an unseen, but equally alive world.
In its place, our desire for meaning was hoovered up by the strong arm of colonialism when we replaced the religion of Monotheism with the religion of Capitalism. God became celebrity, priests became CEO’s and the Cathedral became the shopping centre. The Empire Strikes Again.
Instead of finding community through our shared beliefs, we found community through our shared purchases.
Fast forward a few generations, and all consensus has been lost in favor of tribal identities and extreme individualism. The theory of Spiral Dynamics outlines that societies oscillate and evolve through phases of collectivism and individualism but we cannot mature fully through each stage until we integrate the lessons from previous ones. This follows individual stages of Ego Development and as we continue to level up, we expand our circle of care by integrating the understandings of previous stages.
We know we are reaching maturity when we stop prioritising our needs above those of the collective. The only problem is there are hardly any adults around. True, virtuous behavior is expanding our awareness of sentience to everything on the planet and across time. This is a concept that is so foreign to us we don’t even have a term for it in the English language. As always, we can look to the indigenous for wisdom on such matters.
The term "Whakapapa" is an indigenous term from the Maori language spoken by mob in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. In short, it can be described as the unbroken chain between all those that have come before and all those that are yet to come.
Whakapapa is also used to refer to the relationships between different elements of the natural world, such as the connections between different species of plants and animals. Interestingly, the concept of ancestries in most indigenous contexts doesn’t just include the people that came before them, but all living things.
In order to progress in a way that doesn’t ignorantly march on without considering the consequences of our behavior we need to revisit the indigenous wisdom that is alive on this planet today and learn from our ancestors how to care for the land in reciprocity with it. We don’t need a new story of what it is to be human to usher us into the New Year, but to reconnect with our old ones.
Two steps forward.. Three steps back... Four steps forward.
God-Shaped Hole
In our secular society, many people have an allergic reaction to the concept of God. This is understandable, given the history of religious conflict and oppression. But no evolution can be summoned forth without a connection to the sacred, and God is as fitting a term as we can collectively agree represents this.
It can be difficult to come to a shared understanding of its existence, as the concept has been debated throughout history. So how do we approach this topic in a way that promotes understanding and respect for different perspectives?
By looking outside.
If we were all to paint a picture of what a truly benevolent, omnipresent, and honorable God looks like how would we express it?
Caring?
Giving?
Nurturing?
And if we were to paint a picture of the Natural World we are all connected to, are born from, and will die on, how would we express it?
Nourishing?
Generous?
Loving?
Our God is all around us. Our God is our planet and our existence is directly tied to it. We take care of the land. The Land takes care of us. It’s a circle. Not a triangle.
Yet it is not invulnerable to our attacks. And it will fight back. Just as antibodies increase when it detects danger in our micro worlds; our bodies and the collective intelligence in the macro world respond in the same way.
It's no surprise we’re seeing an explosion of healers, artists, and entrepreneurs working at the root cause of our traumas to heal the collective and build resilient communities.
This includes myself. I’m literally a dude in his 30s who decided to start writing on the internet, and I’ve already amassed 1,000+ pairs of eyeballs connecting with this monthly publication writing about and God and decolonisation and stuff.
The Golden gate of traditional media has been torn down and now we all have a voice and potential to create global change at the touch of a button. You are all artists now, you are all creators. And we have all the tools we need to transform ourselves and those around us.
All parties must end and we’re currently at sunrise post kickons looking down the barrel of the mess we now need to clean up. The last 25,000 years have been one grand Great Gatsby-type masquerade ball, but now our masks are being unveiled, the drugs of social conditioning have worn off, and we have a thumping third eye.
From the ashes of 2023 with the death, destruction, and disasters we will rise into more integrated versions of our previous selves. This integration is not one we can train for or heal into, but one we remember.
There are many questions you are probably facing at this moment in time but some questions aren’t answered straight away. They can only be lived into being.
May you remember who you are in 2024.
Best enjoyed with some headphones and a space to sink in.
Hey fam, thank you so much for making it this far, to have your attention, the most generous gift of all, means the world. This is a remixed article but, please share your thoughts and comments below as it keeps me connecting to you, the reader, and helps me round out my understanding of the world. Thank you 🙏🏾
Quite apt for the start of the new Aquarian season and Pluto's transition! A new era has been ushered in.
Wow. This piece aligns so perfectly with my own thoughts and feelings.
If you're not already familiar with the work of Daniel Schmachtenberger, I suspect you would appreciate any of the videos on YouTube of him in conversation with anyone. His talk at Emergence is an excellent intro.