The Dreamtime of the Aborigines - Sindhu.

In the beginning, all was dark. There was no life and no death. The sun and moon and stars all slept under the earth. All our Ancestors lay sleeping there too until at last They awoke from the eternity and stepped out onto the earth. The great Spirit-Ancestors walked the earth for a time, sometimes in animal form, sometimes part human part animal, sometimes as human-plants. They could take on many forms outwardly as they went about singing and dancing and naming the earth. Their dances created the hills and rivers and valleys. Their songs awoke the land. They found the first humans, made of animals and plants and rolled into balls, unfinished and without limbs. So They carved with big stones the first humans, giving them faces and hands and feet (and this is why we revere the totems of the animals and plants from which we were created). When Their work was done, the Ancestors rested in the trees and rocks and places of the earth. Traces of our Ancestors still live in the land because the Dreamtime is not a distant past - it is an eternal present. And they say that between heartbeat and heartbeat, the Dreamtime can come again.


To the Aborigines of Australia, the idea of “dreamtime” is crucial to an understanding of the universe. They believe that the perceivable material world comes out of the events in the dream world; and that our external reality really lies within a fluid dream space where creation began. All things in the world are given equal importance because they all come from the ancestor spirits, and the spirits reside everywhere. The idea of animism seems to me, such a wise way to look at the world. Only when we object-ify nature do we tend to destroy it. To them, the entire Earth is like a memory, a document of the first day of creation – when everything was in its purest spiritual form. So they take care not to disturb anything in nature because they do not want to forget the magic of that first day of creation. The Aborigines also have a strong affiliation to the songs of the spirits. As the vast, unbounded and intangible spirits of the dreamtime “spoke the earth into being”, so they believe that singing to the landscape is a way of calling out to it, to become one with it. The aboriginal stories of creation suggest well-intuited, lyrical ideas of evolution. And to say that all things may come from the same spirits goes well beyond just the idea of humans evolving from single-celled organisms, it ventures into the idea of “we are all made up of stars”.