James Lee of Earth Arts  has written that the arts are a catalyst for individual and community connectivity to place, and are an inclusive producer and communicator of new, or other, forms of socially and ecologically beneficial knowledge.

I am interested in how the arts can open up liminal conversations with Mother Nature as we find a way back from our paths of destruction that the modern world has bequeathed us.Sorting through the endless articles that pile up on my desk as I follow the trail of exploring the language of communication, of different ways of knowing, between humans and the more than human world and the Earth itself, I chanced upon an article by my Canadian friend Chozom, otherwise known as Dr Elizabeth McDougal, anthropologist of religion. Chozom is also a noted translator of Tibetan into English for students of Tibetan teachers such as Wangdrak Rinpoche of the Gebchak Nunnery of Nangchen, who before COVID regularly visited his students in Australia, and Khenpo Tsering Tashi, who has come to live amongst us in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, and who recently became an Australian citizen.

Chozom’s article explores the idea of beyuls, the secret hidden lands of refuge in times of trouble associated with the spiritual power of Guru Padmasambhava, credited with bringing the Tantric Buddhist teachings of India to Tibet in the eighth century. Guides for pilgrimage to beyuls, known as néyigs have been revealed over the centuries by spiritual adepts known as tertons—revealers of hidden treasure teachings (termas), whose whereabouts are revealed in visionary meditation, and whose whereabouts are guarded by spirit protectors known as terdaks. The Tibetan word ‘ter’ means treasure. The treasure being the realisation of wisdom for which the teachings will provide a guide.  Such termas were often written in what is called dakini script, a special language that could only be read by the right terton, that is, the one appointed across time and space by Guru Padmasambhava (Tulku Thondup, Hidden Teachings of Tibet, 1986).

The Pemako Gorge that cut through the Himalayas as the Tibetan Tsangpo River transforms into the Brahmaputra River of India is the site of one of the most famous beyuls of Tibetan Buddhism and is our feature image for this post.In this way Tibetan Buddhism built a powerful connection between the analytical traditions of Indian Buddhist schools of philosophy, and the more mystical practices of the tantric tradition embedded in landscape that is both physical and spiritual. Spiritual power is revealed through spiritual practice, whereby the sacred is not the mundane, nor is it extraordinary: it is the truth, the nature of the animate and so-called inanimate universe.

This is the world First Nations knowledge systems encode through their mythopoetic language and sacred ceremony, captured in the idea of Law that binds human beings to obey the truths of total ecological systems awareness. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972) calls this the basis of wisdom. He contrasts it with the limited awareness of ‘purposive consciousness’, which sees/cognises but one small part of the total system, and which is the basis of ordinary rational analysis, using what Buddhists call conceptual thinking that has a subject-object duality.Increasingly we realise that the Western knowledge system, which is based on the idea of ‘reason’ as limited to rational purposive consciousness, has progressively led us down a dark alley of alienation from the natural world. It did this by conceiving nature as simply resources to be exploited for human wealth and knowledge. In the face of the current ecological crises which are enveloping us, and the rising tide of anxiety about our future, there is increasing interest in how to cultivate this idea of wisdom as ‘total systems awareness’.  The Australian Earth Laws Alliance is calling this the need for a complete epistemological transformation of our current knowledge systems and the institutions they uphold. It’s a bit task. But is starts with thinking differently.

I’ve been reading about the way Amazonian Indian peoples discovered ways of talking with plants, as well as animals and birds, using psychotropic plants such as ayahuasca to engage in dream vision journeys. I’ve become more and more interested in the ways in which humans have explored their kinship with the natural world and all its creatures, through engaging in what we Westerners would call non-rational ways of knowing that that the Western knowledge systems dismisses as ‘primitive’,  ‘fanciful’, and ‘untrustworthy’—having no basis in facts.The anthropologist, James Narby (Cosmic Serpent, 1995, and Intelligence in Nature, 2006) has been on his own long journey to understand these different ways of knowing and find a bridge between them and the western scientific tradition for establishing valid knowledge. He has been particularly interested in the idea that the total ecological system is ‘intelligent’ with its different ways of knowing from slime moulds to plants, birds, animals and humans who, of course, are just one form of animal.

Rooted in the Christian culture of the West and its foundational myth in Genesis 1.26 that God made man in his own image and gave him dominion over the Earth and all its lifeforms, which was further reinforced by the power of mechanistic science and technology to exercise increasing control over nature, Western culture increasingly asserted that only humans had real intelligence. This has allowed us to factory farm animals, factory fish the depths of the ocean, hunt whales and dolphins, use animals for laboratory experimentation to produce human medicines, including live vivisection, to pollute our soils, rivers and oceans with chemicals and plastics, and clear fell the great forest lungs of our planet.

This assertion is now being uprooted by the resurgence of interest in First Nations knowledge systems, and by revelations through the practice of science itself.Under the guidance of an experienced Amazonian Shaman, Narby undertook his own vision journey with ayahuasca, which introduced him to a world of communication via images and soundless voices:

“Snakes start talking to me without words. They explain that I am just a human being. I feel my mind crack and in the fissures I see the bottomless arrogance of my presuppositions. It is profoundly true that I am just a human being, and most of the time I have the impression of understanding everything, whereas here I find myself in a more powerful reality that I do not understand at all and that, in my arrogance, I did not even suspect existed” (Cosmic Serpent, 1995: 6-7).

I was particularly struck by Narby’s vision, which led him to identify the role of the dragon-serpent imagery in a wide range of pre-industrial cultures as the symbol of the creator force of life with the twisting form of the double helix of DNA, the language of life. My own journey out of the confines of only rational ways of thinking was shaped by a significant series of dreams that all featured serpent imagery and physical experiences of this lifeforce of energy in my body. To this day I wear a small silver ring embossed with two snakes in honour of the power of this dream in my life journey. And of course, the cosmic Rainbow Serpent is the foundational creation ancestor common across all Aboriginal cultures in Australia.

The source of communication for the Ashanica people of the Amazon is the invisible spirits, the maninkari, that reside within all life forms and who are considered to be ancestors with whom one has kinship, which as science has now demonstrated is a literal description of the pervasive nature of DNA in all life forms. Similar to many First Nations knowledge systems, and in sharp contrast with the Western knowledge system, this deeper knowledge requires respect and cannot be used for personal gain and power and is only gained by those with the right respect. In the Buddhist system of mind training we learn to look out for what are called the ‘three mind poisons’—greed (wanting to get); aggression (not wanting) and ignorance (indifference)—and which underpin the pull of disturbing emotions that affect human beings and distort their perceptions.  A sign of wisdom is being free of such mind poisons.

For example, in Aboriginal culture, such knowledge is encoded in the songlines and passed through ceremony, but only to those with the right qualities to receive it, those able to be Elders, those who display such wisdom.I’ve also been interested in the power of song, particularly songs that have no common meaning translation but that act as a medium of liminal communication beyond the rational. In Tibetan Buddhist practice we use mantra, the sacred syllables of Sanskrit, the ancient classical language of India, and its vibratory presence on the breath in our subtle energy body. The Amazonian Indians also use a special song through which they communicate with the maninkari, the innermost hidden spirit ‘beings’ of the world.

The Gay’Wu women of North East Arnhem Land describe their way of using songspirals/songlines in the book Songspirals, 2019:

We Yolnu women from North East Arnhem Land, we cry songspirals, we keen the songspirals—this is what we call milkarri. Milkarri is an ancient song, an ancient poem, a map, a ceremony and a guide, but it is more than all this too. When we sing through the tears of milkarri it comes from deep inside us. Milkarri is a chant, a soft tremulous voice deep with emotion, sometimes grief, sometimes joy, pierced with loss and pain, often all of these and more. It is hard to translate the concept of milkarri into English (p.xvi).

For the Yolnu, the songspirals are Law about how to look after Country:

Country has awareness, it is not just a backdrop. It knows and is part of us. Country is the connections between those beings, and their dreams and emotions, their languages and their Law. Country is the way humans and non-humans co-become. Country is the songspirals. It is milkarri (p.xxii)There is a huge ethical and cultural conflict that faces us as the two knowledge systems come into contact. In the Amazon, western science is keen to gain the botanical knowledge of the Amazonian shamans, for the Amazon is a rich field of botanical complexity of interest to the Western pharmaceutical industry, while at the same time the forests that harbour this botanical knowledge in the ‘wild’ are under threat from land clearing to make way for modern practices of beef production.

However as Bateson has warned, where such knowledge is gained by ‘purposive consciousness’—one branch of science leading to exploitation through profit-based business practices, it lacks the wisdom of total system awareness. It therefore harbours the potential for a threat to total systems ecological understanding that includes human cultures and their socio-economic expression.

Australian First Nations leaders like Mary Graham call this the conflict between the extractivist logic of the Western system (that has reached its nemesis in modern global capitalism) imported into Australia through British colonial settlement. It informs our systems of governance, institutional frameworks and knowledge production and transmission.

It sits in marked contrast with the relationist logic of First Nations knowledge systems and systems of governance, socio-economic organisation and knowledge production and transmission that were practised in Australia for the 60,000+ years that preceded white settlement.

When Aboriginal people read the Australian landscape, they read it liminally: it is both sacred, informed by the living, breathing presence of the creation ancestors, and mundane, in the sense of its ability to provide food, water and shelter for humans and other creatures across the seasons of our weather systems.In a similar way, finding beyuls requires reading the landscape liminally. The most famous of these beyuls lies in the area of Pemako, which spans from Kongpo and Powo in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) to Arunachal Pradesh in India. This region includes the spectacular and forbidding gorges of the Yarlung Tsangpo River as it leaves the Tibetan plateau and cuts through the Himalayas to form the Brahmaputra River that joins the Ganges River to form the great Ganges Delta. Chozom’s article about the Pemako Beyul is based on her translation of a néyig by terton Dudjom Drakngak Lingpa (1871-1929), who revealed a further opening of the beyul to be accessible from the Indian side of the Sino-Tibetan border, and therefore available to disaporic Tibetan pilgrims.

The mandala of the Pemako beyul is regarded as the body of the semi-wrathful wisdom dakini, Vajravarahi, whose five subtle energy centres mark geomantric centres in the mountainous landscape, with the focal point of modern pilgrimage linked to a site regarded as the ‘gathering place of dakinis’. The dakini is a feminised symbol of non-dual dynamic awareness, whose warm breath is experienced as the spiritual process of surrendering expectation and concept, revealing limitless space and pristine awareness, whereby the dakini’s manifestations and meaning are profound, experiential, and hidden from rational strategy (Simmer-Brown, Dakinis Warm Breath, 2001: xvi).As revealed in my memoir, Call of the Dakini (amazon.com.au, edition 2022), I have been fortunate enough to have developed some sensibility to such liminal conversation despite my rationalist academic learning in sociology and the history of science and technology. I spent time married into the Trobriand Island culture of Papua New Guinea. I spent a year with Tjilpi Uncle Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara songman of Central Australia, helping him write his autobiography and travelling with him through his country, and I have been a student-practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, undertaking a three-year retreat 2006-2009 and receiving teachings from some of the leading teachers of Tibetan Buddhism in Australia, Nepal and Europe under the guidance of my teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche.

It is also here where I live in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, that the Tibetan lama, Wangdrak Rinpoche, identified the rock formation known as Boars Head Rock as a manifestation of Vajravarahi, this same feminised symbol of non-dual dynamic awareness that lies at the heart of the Pemako beyul. It is also the central symbol of my own personal Buddhist practice. Such is the power of a liminal connection with the natural world.