Finding a New Way of Being, Thinking and Doing
There is an underground revolution occurring in the belly of the beast of modern civilisation; a revolution searching for new ways of being, thinking and doing in the cracks and crevices of its unravelling. It requires us to give up easy solutionism—Instead recognising that in doing this we invariably remain trapped in modernity’s cultural framing of reality and its possibilities. An alternative framing is expressed by Nigerian poet-philosopher, Bayo Akomolafe, who says we must stay in the trouble, extricating ourselves from the stranglehold of the familiar to create the nurturing conditions for the imperceptible to blossom.
We all recognise that our world is in the middle of a multi-layered crisis. All the promises of continued growth in material prosperity and personal security for the bulk of the population, in the liberal democracies of the Euro-American world, are unravelling. This is despite the rapid growth in technological innovation and free trade that was meant to deliver this equalising prosperity. We are witnessing that the world we in the West have come to expect, under the rules-based global order and overseen by a dominant US, is falling apart.
Confusion, anxiety, fear, and anger stalk even our most affluent societies as they grapple with gender culture wars, the rise of strident ethno-nationalism, the loss of trust in democratically elected governments and the experts produced by our universities in the sciences and humanities. Accompanying this is rising anxiety about immigration from an increasing body of displaced people, as growing wealth inequality is threatening the basics of life for many ‘ordinary’ people: those dependent on income rather than accumulated asset wealth. A secure place we can call home, an ability to feed and educate our families, even when we are working fulltime.
Making Sense of Things
One way of making sense of this unravelling of our world and expectations is to draw on Elizabeth Kübler Ross’s five stages of grief at the death of a loved one. To recognise that we are caught in a grief cycle with the slow death of our taken-for granted world order, or grieving at the loss of a world we once thought we had, and could return to.
Five Stages of Grief—the unravelling of the promises of modernity
Denial Those who deny the ravages and impact of climate change and advocate continued reliance on fossil fuels to drive growth, who continue to regard Western style civilisation as the high point of human progress, and who continue to advocate for growth and a neo-liberal marketised world. Denial is also escapism into consumerism and the narcissistic selfie and consumer-driven Influencer social media culture that drives it.
Anger Strident ethno-nationalism, social media trolling, road rage, misogyny and gendered violence and coercive control, revenge politics, terrorism, youth crime especially among the most disadvantaged raging against their powerlessness and marginalisation. The revenge impulse of religiously or politically motivated violence against other members of the community. It also infects aspects of climate change activism, when fuelled by anger at the seeming impossibility of the required action.
Bargaining Progressive social-democratic reformism, as we seek to fix the gaps and deal with black swan events that threaten to derail our desired world order, trying to balance growth and social justice and environmental restitution. To transition to new energy sources without giving up on economic growth as the vehicle of increasing prosperity. To restore social harmony in multicultural nation states grappling with a tsunami of refugees fleeing military conflict and environmental degradation, while yet more and more countries put their walls up to protect their own
Depression Widespread mental health crisis in anxiety and depressive disorders, including suicide in both young and middle-aged people, especially men. Socially it is disengagement from the political process and public life, just giving up on possibilities, sense of indifference, or despair at the futility of things in general.
Acceptance The growing search for a new way of being, thinking and doing that is being undertaken in small communities and their networks around the world; the search for a new post capitalist model for economic thinking, such as the post-growth movement, new business models such as social enterprises, not-for-profits and cooperatives being explored through the work of New Economy Network Australia (NENA) and its Arts & Cultural Hub, environmental care in its broadest sense through the Blue Mountains Planetary Health Initiative and many other such bodies in different parts of the world.
The Challenge from Post Colonial Thinking
The post-colonial scholars of First Nations peoples in Australia, the Americas and the Arctic [1] together with long standing literature of post colonialism in Africa, India and the rest of the Pacific, are challenging the global (hegemonic) dominance of Western Modernity. This has been a project of civilisational progress to shape society through humanism, scientific rationality and technological innovation. In particular, the scholar, Vanessa de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity (2021) points out that modernity must be bracketed with Coloniality as two sides of the one coin.
Coloniality is Modernity’s dark underbelly of expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarisation, dispossession, destitution, genocide and ecocide.[2] Yet as Oliveira points out, these are frequently just dismissed as unavoidable collateral damage in the quest for ‘development’, the economic growth and wealth to feed the promise of prosperity.
For this reason, these scholars and thinkers are urging us to transition from an extractivist mindset, built of hyper-consumerism and expansive economic growth, to a relationalist mindset that will allow us to heal our broken spirits and live in bio-regional sustainability.
Drawing on their Indigenous knowledge systems, these scholars, writers, poets, and artists have pointed out that the deeper older violence of modernity-coloniality, intrinsic to the Western knowledge system, is the dualistic separation between humanity and nature, the dynamic interconnected ecosystems which sustain all life. A theological separation between creature and creator, which is a feature of the Genesis story of the Old Testament (v. 26.1), and the utilitarian objectification of the scientific gaze. This separability underscores our inability to effectively address the global warming and climate change that now threatens human habitation in large parts of the Earth. That underpins the factory farming of animals in the name of efficiency. That is causing accelerating species extinctions in the animal, insect, bird, fish and plant worlds on land and in our oceans and rivers. This, through land clearing, irrigation, and monoculture farming to feed industrialised ultra-processed food production that is undermining human health. Adding to this are the effects of the widespread use of antibiotics in food productions leading to antimicrobial resistance in human populations against treatments for infections as a new global epidemic waiting in the wings.
These scholars and activists are calling for a new shared cosmology that incorporates the core principles of relationality, the eco-spiritual relationist ethos of First Nations knowledge systems, joined with Western knowledge systems’ commitment to eco-sustainability, nature conservation, social justice, multiculturalism, and a zero-waste, wellbeing economy. Professor Margo Ngawa Neale, editor of the First Knowledges Series, National Museum of Australia, which are co-authored by scholars of Indigenous cultural heritage and those of non-Indigenous cultural heritage, has explained how all the books in the Series are grounded in Country:
“It is the spine that runs through each of them and binds them as one, not unlike Songlines, which are storehouses of knowledge that run through time and place. In this way, they take the reader on a journey through an integrated knowledge system, a pathway along which they encounter multiple sites of learning, unlike the highly compartmentalised approach of the Western knowledge system.”
Given the importance of Christianity in shaping Western culture and its role in colonialism, Indigenous theologians are challenging the Western expression of Christianity through the development of a distinctly Indigenous Christian Theology. These include Randy Woodley, a Native American missiologist/theologian (Indigenous Theology and the Western World: a Decolonised Approach to Christian Doctrine, 2022). Woodley suggests that we can no longer hide from the role that Christianity played as the handmaiden of colonialism. He contrasts the propositional, linear vision that undergirds much of Western theology, rooted in Plato’s dualistic distinction between spirit and materials worlds, with the Earth-centre narrative theology of Indigenous worldviews. He suggests that whereas Indigenous theology and practice is embedded in storytelling, and a communal sense of identity, Western theologists search for truth in terms of propositions and facts, whereby religion is understood in terms of doctrine and thus orthodoxy, with a focus on the individual. Which in turn gives rise to the doctrinal wars that have raged in all the Abrahamic ‘religions of the book’, causing untold bloodshed and misery.
We also see the development of this relationist theological perspective in the writings of Indigenous journalist, Stan Grant, and in the intrinsic relationist ethos of numerous Indigenous works in the cultural sphere: dance, theatre, literature, poetry, film, and visual artworks, which occupy the heights of Australian cultural production. This reframing of a way forward is producing a considerable outpouring of insights and small-scale projects in many parts of the world. These are some of the ideas that I explore in my book, The Regenesis Journey (2022). However, this was before I read Olivia de Oliveira’s confronting book, and before I became aware of the Indigenous theological revolution occurring within Christianity.
The challenge before us is how to apply relationalism to the dynamics of a 21st century world witnessing the collapse of Modernity and all it promised, in the face of new waves of technological innovation in AI, quantum computing, bio-engineering and space technologies.
Relationalism
Relationalism is expressed through Aboriginal Law as the sacralising of the relationship between Land and human beings, which in turn led to the fundamental principle of custodianship, a permanent, standing obligation to look after Land, society and social relations.—Dr Mary Graham, Kombumerri and Wakka Wakka community development leader, Elder, educator, and philosopher.
However as Indigenous scholars all remind us, the idea of ‘Land’ incorporates ocean, sky and all waterways, which together with humans and all other countries constitutes the all embracing term, ‘Country’.
Scholars such as Vanessa de Oliveira warn us against either romanticising Indigenous culture, or seeking to appropriate their ideas within the hegemonic western knowledge system. Instead, she calls for ‘living in the eye of the storm’; the practice of divestment: to transcend modernity, while staying with its troubles, facing our responsibilities, and gradually developing discernment to reorient our desires away from modernity’s violence and unsustainability. But without resorting to heroism or escapism. She warns us to not turn the creative imagination into ‘creativity’ ready for co-option, consumption, and reproduction of the status quo—something readily apparent in the marketised Arts. She instead asks us to hold onto the life-affirming yearning that keeps life open to being ‘fertilised’ by the world with its endless differences and variety. She urges us to stay in the state of instability to allow new possibilities to germinate.
This is the sort of two-way learning that Yolngu Elders have long called for and which informs their Yothu Yindi Foundation and the Garma Institute. It is the sort of learning that my local Kindlehill School are pursuing through their Buran Nalgarra eco-curriculum for their senior students, completely bypassing the ATR scoring system of the conventional matriculation system for entry into university. For these days there are different paths to tertiary education. At the same time, many are questioning the purpose of a university education requiring them to accrue large debts with no real promise that it will lead to a more secure future, and while universities also grapple with the contradictions between their corporate drive and the traditional promise of delivering a better ability to understand and shape society.
It is the work of assisting with the birth of something new, without suffocating it with projections. Oliveira suggests that intellectual surrender, especially in the academy, is about discernment, learning to let go, tapping collective exiled capacities, developing metabolic literacies, dissolving individuality and separability, enabling a bio-intellect, and surrendering the imprints of coloniality. She also warns that for we children of modernity, in order to sense, hear, relate and imagine differently, there must be a clearing, a decluttering, an initiation into the unknowable. We must let go of the desire for certainty, authority, hierarchy and insatiable consumption, whether that be of material goods and services or of the so-called dematerialised economy of marketised experiences, or even of knowledge.
Escaping the Stranglehold of the Familiar: a Personal Journey
As documented in my memoir, The Call of the Dakini (2022), decolonising the self is difficult. It is very hard to escape the ‘stranglehold of the familiar’ in terms of the way we try to understand things. When I married into Trobriand Island culture, and went to live with my husband in PNG, I found myself caught up in the Development paradigm. First, I taught courses in Development Studies to PNG District field staff (kiaps) as a new framework for them to understand their role, as they began to replace the former expatriate staff drawn from mostly Australia when PNG was under its colonial administration. Then I took a job in the National Planning Office, working closely with the Finance Department, to help the newly independent government of PNG implement its ‘Eight Point Plan’ requiring new priorities in budget allocation and policies to drive them. Later, when my husband became head of the National Planning Office, I transferred across to the Office of Environment to lead their Social Policy Unit, dealing with population policy and the social impact of large scale development projects in mining and agriculture.
Meanwhile I found myself stranded in confusion in the Trobriand world, without the ability to speak or understand their language, and completely at sea in understanding their cultural priorities. I wish that I had known about and read Randolph Stow’s book, The Visitants, which is set in the Trobriand Islands, a truly post colonial novel that captures alternative voices and perspectives.
I remember my father-in-law telling me that we Dimdims (Europeans) were ‘heavy’ to things that they could clearly hear and see. I remember the time I was at a funeral mourning session with my husband’s cousin, Daugi, whose wife had died from a kick in the side that ruptured her spleen, already swollen with malaria. We were gathered at the house of another cousin who was a doctor at the hospital. Suddenly an old woman started speaking loudly in their Kiriwina language, which I could not understand. My husband explained that she was talking in the dead woman’s voice, saying not to blame her husband, Daugi. That it was not his kick that killed her, but that the betel nut (which is slightly narcotic, chewed by everyone) was poisoned. This shifted the conversation to clan politics over land back in the villages in the Trobriand Islands. When I complained to my husband that of course his kick had killed her, I came to understand their reasoning. Not everyone kicked in the side dies. Malaria was common. Something else must have been at work. I realised that in a society built on extensive relationalism, living sustainably in their island culture, what was required was a way of re-weaving the fabric of relationships that holds their culture together without conflict. Every death requires a whole series of gift exchanges between the relatives of the dead and the relatives of her/his in-laws to re-weave this fabric.
Much later I would have a significant and unexpected experience, when divorced from my husband and living back in Australia. When visiting the Trobriand Island collection of artefacts in the museum in Sydney, as I gazed at these objects, my mind took me back to a time when I had travelled across the ocean lagoon to the small Vakuta Island, home of my father-in-law, for the final mourning ceremony for the death of his father, who had been Chief of Vakuta. On the way back, we were caught in a squall of strong winds and fierce rain, and had to seek shelter in a village nearby on Kiriwina Island. My father-in-law had stood at the prow of the canoe shouting magic incantations to the storm spirits, while the rest of us furiously bailed water. Suddenly waves of intense and powerful energy seemed to pass from these objects in their glass cages through me. I felt that a doorway had opened in my mind, challenging my prosaic worldview and academically informed ways of knowing. What did knowing really mean? I quit my job as then Director of the Council of NSW, on leave from the Cabinet Office of the NSW State Government, and began to explore this question. I called this my journey into the epistemological abyss.
During this time I formed a new romantic relationship, which after two years fell apart, plunging me into emotional pain and confusion. In search of a way out of this pain and confusion, I met and began to follow the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, who introduced me to an entirely different way of making sense of my experiences, feelings and the wider society.
For the more than 30 years that I have been a student-practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, this has included several three months retreats and finally a three year retreat (2006-2009), during which I undertook the special deity yoga practices of this tradition, with three four-month periods of strict solitary silent retreat. Along the way I began to understand that such teachers as Sogyal Rinpoche somehow had the power to become portals to other ways of being and knowing, developing a deep connection to their lineage of masters reaching back to the time Buddhism came to Tibet in the 8th century.
In 1999, I also worked with Tjilpi Uncle Bob Randall, a singer/songwriter of the Yankunytjatjara people of Central Australia, who asked me to help him with his autobiography (published as Songman, 2003). During this time we had many conversations about similarities between his culture and that of Tibetan Buddhism. I came to understand that just as ‘deities’ are metaphors for understanding and experiencing different types of wisdom creative energies, Indigenous ideas of Ancestral Beings seem somewhat similar. Both are beyond linear time, forever present and able to be invoked/sung up. Tibetan Buddhist masters have a similar role to Elders, Senior Law men and women in Aboriginal culture. Tibetan Buddhist practices, which involve mantra recitation, visualisations and ceremonial initiations might be compared to the way ceremony and initiation into songlines provides the way by which Aboriginal knowledge systems are transferred to the next generation.
Tibetan Buddhism, as a knowledge system, was particularly satisfying for me as it combined the rational analytical tradition of Indian Buddhist philosophy, the tantric deity practices of Tibet, replete with its pre-Buddhist ideas of mountain gods and water and earth spirits, and the celebration of the outer elements as expressions of our inner sense of energy and vitality. In particular I was drawn to the outer, inner and secret meaning of the ‘dakini’, a symbol of dynamic wisdom energy that is portrayed in the form of a dancing female, but who is utterly beyond gender—equally available to men and women. She is known as the great disruptor—illusive, elusive and allusive, but not unknowable (Dilgo Khyentse, quoted in Gyatso, Apparitions of the Self: The Autobiographies of a Tibetan Yogi (1998). As I discuss in my memoir, I slowly came to realise that the dakini had been calling to me throughout my life through many such disruptions.
It is still difficult for me to escape the intellectual framework of my western education. But I have learned humility. I have learned that my western knowledge system is but one turn of the kaleidoscope of possibilities. I have learned to stay with uncertainty, with an open question, and to tolerate the intrinsic ambiguity of life as a process of interdependence and impermanence. That this is what gives life its magic, its vitality. That the world is fully animated, replete with spiritual energy where each has its own voice, to which we can learn how to listen even though it does not speak in a human language. Aboriginal people call this dadirri—‘inner deep listening and quiet still awareness and waiting, and suggest that it is the greatest gift they can give to modern Australia.
Endnotes
[1] For example: scholars such as Vanessa de Oliveira (Hospicing Modernity, 2021); the First Knowledges Series, edited by Professor Margo Ngawa Neale, National Museum of Australia; the many scholars across now working across different disciplines at Institutes/School of Indigenous Knowledge Systems at Australian Universities; and the work of Indigenous theologians who are challenging the Western expression of Christianity through the development of a distinctly Indigenous Christian theology.
[2] Vanessa de Oliveira, (Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (2021), for as Martin Shaw (Courting the Wild Twin) says: this is a book about breaking spells. And not just the obvious kind (of Western cultural superiority), but the grievously impacted, deep-in-the-psyche variety. As Bayo Akomalfe (These Wilds Beyond Our Fences) says; this book is rude. Like the shaman’s confident cackle. Like the punch of an Elder whose eyes shimmer with a secret. Like a trickster’s feverish dance to a drumbeat in a time supposedly passed. This role of the trickster in his culture acts much like the ‘dakini’ as a disruptor of assumed ideas.
[3] Titles and authors in the First Knowledges Series: Songlines: The Power and Promise by Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly (2020); Country: Future Fire, Future Farming by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021); Design: Building on Country by Alison Page & Paul Memmott (2021); Astronomy: Sky Country by Karlie Noon & Krystal de Napoli (2022); Plants: Past, Present and Future by Zena Cumpston, Michael-Shawn Fletcher & Lesley Head (2022); Law:The Way of the Ancestors by Marcia Langton & Aaron Corn (2023). As the authors in this series point out, Indigenous knowledges are not something lost to the past. They continue on, held in the storytelling culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples of Australia, and are now being explored by scholars in the sciences, humanities and the arts—a knowledge tradition that is firmly grounded in a relational way of being, thinking and doing.
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