Exploring the Dreamtime: Ancient Connections Between Australia's Outback, Indigenous Lore, and Global Shamanistic Traditions
The Mystical Australian Outback: Indigenous Dreamtime and Its Global Parallels
The Australian Outback located hundreds of miles from the bustle of the major city centers of Sydney and Melbourne. This sparsely populated region of the continent is home to an indigenous population that can trace their roots back over 40,000 years. Through ceremonial transes, elders claimed to be able to freely access a realm where they connect with ancestral beings. They refer to this alternate reality as the dreaming or dream time.
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Jonathan Toung (Founding Curator, Joseph Campbell Archives): The task of the traveler, the dreamer, is to connect the two worlds, is to bring the reality of the dream, which they consider superior to the reality of what we call waking life, to bring that over because it is full of guidance and treasures. Dream time allows the indigenous people of Australia to travel back in time or at least visit with ancestors very far back in time. They say back to their original ancestors.
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| The Aboriginal artwork |
The Aboriginal artwork depicts these ancestors with oblong heads and large eyes and appearance that ancient astronaut theorists find eerily similar to modern day accounts of gray aliens. But Australia's dream time is not an isolated anomaly. In fact, shamans and holy men in numerous other world cultures speak of alternate realms. Throughout Asia, Hindus and Buddhists believe in the existence of infinite universes. The eruba of West Africa consider that another domain exists above the tangible realm. In the Kabbalah, it is conveyed that there are 125 tiers between humans and the creator. And even in North America, many native tribes perform ceremonies that connect them with unseen entities. But if spiritual leaders really are able to seek into other dimensions, is it possible that there may be a way for all humans to obtain such vision? The upper Amazon region of South America. For hundreds of years, medicine men here have utilized a plant-based drug called ayahuasca for healing and to access other worldly realms.
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Jonathan Toung: In the ceremonies and altered states that are conjured up in the Amazon and other places, there is information that seems to be of great value. Ayahuasca makes the curtains between realities vanish. Such journeys are central to shamanistic initiatory rituals. Whether they are penetrating parallel realities or investigating the concealed dimensions of their own inner worlds, these experiences are profoundly significant in the lives of the travelers.
William Henry (Investigate Mythologist): One of the great revelations of the ayahuasca experience is that they experience ancient ancestors as well as extraterrestrial beings, suggesting that, in fact, the ancestors than the extraterrestrials are the same beings.
The ayahuasca concoction is created from two components, a root from one particular plant and a leaf from an entirely different species. The act of ingredient in the repaired conconction is dimethyl-tryptamine or DMT. This powerful psychedelic chemical is found in small quantities within the human body. The substance is believed to be released into the human endocrine system and floods the pineal gland upon death and during near-death experiences. While mainstream scientists consider the action of the ayahuasca to be purely hallucinogenic, some modern researchers believe the substance can open doorways to new realities.
Daniel McQueen (Executive Director, Medicinal Mindfulness): DMT seems to be able to alter our brain wiring in a way that allows us to perceive in more than four dimensions. Dimethyl-tryptamine might be the mechanism to allow our perception of these other alternate realities. It's like the key to a receiver. You pop the key into the receiver and it activates not just a part of the brain, it literally re-orients all of the receivers in the brain to pick up more information. The question of just how ancient healers stumbled across this particular combination in a jungle containing tens of thousands of plant and vine species remains a mystery.
David Childress (Author -Technology of the Gods): What we're looking at here are incredible, remarkable plants that are using receptors in our brains to help us have these otherworldly experiences, contact otherworldly beings. So who has created this incredible biological catalyst for humans to use? Chapter wonders if extraterrestrials themselves didn't have a hand in this.