Dakini Grace Blog

I recently read a book by an Australian Aboriginal woman, Sally Morgan which brought me to reflect on abundant living and the nature of consciousness.  The book is ‘My Place‘.  It’s beautiful for many reasons, but it was a particular statement made by Sally’s uncle, Arthur Corunna, that caught my eye.  It’s a description of the lifestyle of the Australian desert people.  According to Arthur,

‘Those Aborigines in the desert, they don’t want to live like the white man, owin’ this and owin’ that.  They just want to live their life free, they don’t need the white man’s law, they got their own.  If they want water in the Gibson Desert, they do a rainsong and fill up the places they want.  If it’s cold, they can bring the warm weather like the wind.  They don’t need the white man to put them in gaol, they can do their own punishment.  They don’t have to hunt too hard, the spirits can bring birds to them.  Say they want a wild turkey, that turkey will come along, go past them and they can spear it.  Kangaroo, too.  They don’t kill unless they hungry, the white man’s the one who kills for sport.  Aah, there’s so much they don’t understand.’ (pp. 266-267)

It’s rare to read such a clear description of free and abundant living.  In the West we’ve confused freedom and abundance with financial wealth.  In the West, financial wealth, abundance and freedom are used as virtual synonyms. And yet, here is a group of people, without any financial wealth whatsoever, living more abundantly and with greater freedom than any Westerner I know.

At some point, Western culture lost sight of the fact that human beings are wired to live abundantly and that the world is set up for us to live in this way.

Indigenous nations have known this throughout time and have lived their lives accordingly.

Western nations, on the other hand, chose the path of industrial and agricultural revolution, becoming enchanted with the powers of the mind over those of body and spirit, and worshiping at the alter of Descartes’ philosophical revelation; ‘I think therefore I am’.

With that brilliant exemplar of deductive reasoning, human beings across the Western world started trusting only that which we could see and touch.  We lost sight of the relationship between the physical and the energetic and we forgot that, in reality, the physical is a mere extension of the energetic.

Our medical system designed itself around this forgetting and to this day remains focused on treating symptoms of the body that it can see and touch, with scant understanding of the body’s relationship to energy, to emotions, to thoughts, beliefs or to spirit.

This rejection of the interconnectedness between mind, body and spirit found us suspicious also of the environment.  Over time it came to be viewed as something to be dominated and controlled, rather than revered and protected.  Gradually, as we became less and less connected with the land, we lost sight of the origins of the food we consume and started destroying the world’s rainforests in the name of agriculture.

Our disconnection saw us spend less and less time with our families and friends and more and more time away from home in cubicles in office buildings which are pumped with artificial light and air.

Gradually even those temples of worship, the supposed refuges of spirit – organised religions – became infected with the dominance of the mind and lost their way in dogma and egoic assertions that they, and they alone, held the key to the golden gates of heaven.

We began to think of ourselves as alone in the universe, without meaning or purpose.  We created wars and corporations to distract us from this inherent meaninglessness and yet aching despair and fear dominated.  ‘Stress’ replaced freedom and abundance as the norm for human beings and depression, anxiety, alcoholism, drug abuse, and over-eating took their place as standard human experiences.

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In such a world, it is easy to become disillusioned.  To treat oneself as a helpless child, subject to the whims of greater forces.  And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Descartes’ proclamation.  That in our disconnection we lost sight of the all powerful beings that we are.  That by losing our connection to spirit, we forgot that we are conscious and abundant beings, expressing the life force power of the universe through human form.  We forgot that as the life force power of the universe, we are spirit, choosing to live in a body, in harmony with a mind which is designed to harness those powers and direct them in myriad forms of exquisite, individual expression.

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Naturally, there have been shimmers of truth slicing through the mass of confusion throughout the evolution of the Western world.  In the early part of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre transcended Descarte’s paradigm when, through personal inquiry he realised; ‘The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.’

Ha!  Recognition of something beyond the individual.  Recognition that mind is part of something greater.  Hope springs eternal!

Eckhart Tolle explains this revelation in his book ‘A New Earth‘.  In it he states; ‘If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking.  It is a different dimension of consciousness.  And it is that awareness that says ‘I am’. (p. 55)

And so truth reveals itself through the veils of illusion and in that moment, mind, body and spirit begin their journey towards reunification.

For myself, I arrived at a similar conclusion to Satre and Tolle after a lengthy meditation a few years ago.  Like a flash, this thought passed through my mind, as though from consciousness itself; ‘It’s not I think, therefore I am.  It’s I am, therefore I think’.

I am.

Not ‘I’, the individual known as Samantha Nolan Smith.  ‘I’ as in universal consciousness, expansiveness, awareness.

I AM.  Therefore all else follows.

The bible says; in the beginning there was the word and the word was God.

A yogi would say, in the beginning there was vibration and the vibration was om.

A quantum physicist would say in the beginning there were particles of energy and the energy began to move.

And in the end, It’s all pointing to the same thing.

I am.

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It is only when we move toward this knowing that we can begin to appreciate what Arthur Corunna was saying when he said; ‘They just want to live their life free, they don’t need the white man’s law…  If they want water in the Gibson Desert, they do a rainsong and fill up the places they want.  If it’s cold, they can bring the warm weather like the wind‘.  Only people who begin first with an understanding of the connection between mind, body and spirit – with an inherent understanding of the truth of themselves – can known how to do this; how to harness the elements and live in abundance.

In the West, we are very far from living such a life and yet the move towards self-realisation, conscious and abundant living is inevitable.  It’s our true nature.  The only difference amongst the people of the world is that some know it and some don’t.

Do you?

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 10:43 am and is filed under Abundance, Freedom, Must Read, Truth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.