Mutant Message Down Under

This is a book by Marlo Morgan .."A Woman's Journey into Dreamtime." I read it a few years ago and remembered it again when I recently picked up "Stuff" by David Miller to make notes for my contextual studies on existential phenomenology.


The Australian Aboriginal’s traditional culture had relatively few material things, but was hugely rich in kinship and elaboration of cosmology.  Australian tribes' "dreamtime" is the time of the ancestors who lie at one remove from people, but whose actions and consequences remain an integral part of the lives of the living, ancestors remembered in myth. They recognise that there are prior forces which have already created the world in which we come to be socialised. But in turn we can come to act upon those forces. The Walbiri retain contact with ancestors through the dreamtime, and re-enact this relationship in ceremony and ritual today. It is the same landscape and order which is used to legitimate the critical relationships of kinship and social order which give individuals a sense of who they are. So both ancestors and contemporary people externalise themselves as culture and recognise themselves in that which has been created. They objectify. And in their myths they possess also a theory of culture that explains this process. (Miller 63)

Miller wrote this as a response to Simmel's theory that the subjective only gains when it can assimilate the expanding objective culture. What we cannot assimilate oppresses us. He wrote essays on the contradictions of the metropolis.  A place where, if we try and relate to too many things, but have no substantial relationship to any one of them, we can become largely indifferent to the world and to ourselves. We are then being reduced, rather than expanded, by the sheer quantity of things. (62) , as the Australian Aboriginal Tribes have drifted towards the fringes of urban life, they may have lost much of their traditional culture and many have ended up reduced to alcoholism.(Miller:62)

Reading Mutant Message I am reminded of the simplicity of life, and the powers of the mind that we have lost through the ages. The ability to think positively is seen as something new, something that we have discovered in recent years. But in fact, there is nothing new about positive thought. The Aboriginal Tribes have been using it for thousands of years. The Tribe in the book follow a path of purity, every thought is considered to affect the lives of all living things. If the mind is hindered by anything less than pure thought, then their whole way of communication with the earth and its resources is lost. They believe that untruths clog up the mind, and that life then becomes difficult. They see all life as being connected, and that sacrifice by animals is given gladly to sustain life, and that everything, including food and water, is given to those of pure thought.

The Aboriginal people who have lost their way of life, and have been integrated into our modern society have suffered because they have different values. In fact they have not integrated well because the lives led by other peoples are alien to them. Their culture has not been recognised and the result has been catastrophic to their existence.

Why one human being should consider his/her life better than another has been detrimental to our society in so many ways. It is a tragedy that so many cultures and peoples have been forced to follow a path that has led to the destruction of many. We can only hope that we do not continue in this vain and that the generations that follow will recognise and respect each culture and tradition as important as their own.