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I am aboriginal and want to share my views on this topic with a real life example:- I go to the shops and walk around the aisles only because I have no country of my own. In these shops I am directed only by my gut instinct, I will chose only foods that my body agrees to. Most foods here in these supermarkets make my guts tight in a "I really don't want that" reaction, if the food is agreeable my guts will soften in a "Yes Please" reaction

I do not choose foods because I have been told they are best or because the colored packaging or pricing influences me.

In older times we walked around our country (supermarket) and if we felt the desire to eat a certain plant we would. There were no meal schedules or pharmacy's to tell us what to do and when. We followed our own individual, natural, well developed, instincts. When it comes to what we call today as drug plants, these would only be consumed if the body, mind and spirit together so desired it.

As small children we tasted and experienced everything in the natural supermarket so as adults our bodies knew what it could access, when and where. Fresh food and water was never in shortage, as Australia was abundant.

If a new thought was born and a new desire grew then the "shamans" could program the plants accordingly. Like we program crystals, water, idols, thought forms, etc, plants too can change their essence to suit the new desire or purpose. The creator could be found everywhere so using drugs to access these levels was not necessary. As we now prove, the human body can experience altered states of consciousness without the use of drugs.

This knowledge has been written now, for all colors to see and understand.

Those who continue to misunderstand and try to destroy life, will not be desirable breeders and therefore will be bred out of the human population because women seek only truth and these false dogmas continually get exposed.

Beware those who make aboriginals out to be stupid or drugo's as they are the destroyers of ancient knowledge and truth.

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This has turned out to be a very interesting discussion with lots of valuable input! I thank you all <3

There's definitely much more to ancient cultures around the world than western civilization assumes.

I'm on the path to shedding all my cultural programming that makes us believe we are anything less than gods/beings of infinite potential. (Sorry if this sounds too new-age for some), I'm finding it to be the most challenging thing I've ever experienced but it feels so liberating afterwards. No more lies.

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Micromegas

^ ^ thanks for posting that, you seem to be a very thoughtful person

^ ^ Word

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yah great post micro although i would heartfully disagree whilst in the same vein in a way agree hahaha :P you know im very indecisive in my decisions and thought processes lol. lack of evidence does not always automatically equate to the lack of usage. also the lack of evidence is hard to equate when we are discussing a heritage that was largely passed down via an oral traditional and markedly influenced by assimilation and the god of the christian bible in the early years of colonization. the lack of hardcore evidence could largely come down to the processes of time perhaps being one of the oldest linear ( not the best word i know only one i could think of lol ) traditions esitmated from perhaps 50k years ago and or more. who is to say they did not implement such plants 20k years ago then they lost favor to a new thought form / tradition etc no one can really say yay or nay unless we start building shiny new time machines. such evidence from such a time such as ground seeds / plant extracts etc would have long ago eroded with the ebb and flow of the moons. oral traditions always evolve and grow over time spans and no doubt in a culture without written language would become closely guarded secrets and perhaps in time disappearing altogether, especially in times of colonization.

Even modern anthropology and or anthropology in general is highly subjective whilst at the same time claiming not to be, limits the studies of native cultures with all kinds of bias which i guess is most unavoidable and the same sad because it lacks the insight and specific views which are automatically inherent within that culture and extrapolated within the terms of another for the sake of academia.

As an example a lot of the recent ( within the past 50 years or so ) work on indigenous cultures of south american shamans (pedro/aya etc) are tainted within the context of the conquistadors and Christianity albeit not a direct fault of anthropologists is still highly tainted in terms of bias towards the prevailing invaders / culture and we cannot and perhaps will not really know the true cultural and ritual significance of these peoples before such a time, all we can make is educated assumptions based on evidence and or lack thereof again based on modern thought which is far removed from those which are studied.

Reminds me of Graham hancock i think its in "underworld" where he talks about that cavern system in france ( the name escapes me atm lol ) which was the site of some sort of shamanic/religious ritual - visited for i think around 10-15 thousand years which we basically know nothing about and yet it survived longer then christianity ( 2 thousand years at the present time give or take )

Edited by -YT-
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There is only 1 instance I know of where a traditional shaman (high priestess) has come to the world with their knowledge unbleached. This woman lives in the Taiga forest of Siberia with her she wolf, bear and numerous other animals who desire only to serve her. She has no need to physically leave the paradise that her forebearer's created for her and knows she can effect us with out having to leave. The story of Anastasia is worth reading for anyone who wants a glimpse into our pristine origins, occult dogmas, the natural human powers of creation and destruction, time travel, space jumping, animal training, plant communication etc....

Please read them and talk about them here on The Corroboree!

I have found a link where these books are free to read in PDF. Rivendell Village Ringing Cedar .

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Free Land For All = Freedom Forever :innocent_n:

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Edited by woodwoman
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Although I am young and am certainly not an indigenous person to this land, I feel that now would be a good time to just say a quick word about "dreamtime". This term is generally not accepted anymore as it dictates that the dream state of the indigenous peoples beliefs is not continuous. The term dreaming is now preferred as it by definition explains the belief system better, this state of living on this landscape is a constant experience of the dream. I feel that the school of thought around ingestion of psychedelics by aboriginal people is less of a likely scenario due to the fact that they believe they lived in a dreamstate, thus attempting to reach an even higher state would only be like a dream within a dream. Inception

EDIT: However, no doubt of instances of experimentation and isolated incidences where they came across a new plant food species that turned out to be an energy enhancer type drug like psilocybe mushrooms and who else knows what they encountered. I believe that i read somewhere that they date the Indigenous Australians in this country up to 80,000 years ago! Who knows what extinct magic plants were out there?

Edited by 3rdI
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The Anastasia books are interesting enough fiction books with some solid metaphysical information within.

I keep meeting people who have been given psychoactive medicine by aboriginal people. I met one the other day, who said he was given a preparation that lasted five days! Normally, they say it lasts 3 days and is stronger than smoked DMT.

Thing is, as part of the initiation, you are not supposed to talk about it, it is secret business.

However, one aboriginal man told me many years ago what he could, after a recently deceased elder told him after he smoked DMT, to tell these white fellas what he knew.

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the problem with language and words is how literally we take them like "dreamtime" obviously it must be some sort of dream type state of mind, it is questionable whether indigenous australians even used the term "dreamtime" before anglo's and was more than certainly used as a sort of turn of phrase to describe an inherently alien thought form ( to outsiders anyway ) of relating to each other, the land and culture.

Remember reading an article in Nexus on Anastasia and seemed to me to be the Soviet equivalent to don juan/carlos castenada books, many similarities and reading the article the guy who apparently met anastasia writes it as fact not fiction, i reserve any judgement yay or nay and would really like to read a few of the books to get a feel for the sort of message he is propogating.

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In ancient times certain mathematical equations were a highly guarded secret of the gods, secret buisness in a way only to be passed onto those who were worthwhile to the understanding and propagation of such "truths" = initiation

Todays modern world how much information can we say is "secret buisness"? national security... perhaps and even that is more than questionable heh but not the point, most if not all kinds of data/information exists within twenty key strokes and or less in the modern world of the great spiders web. In the world of today we have been given access to a multitude of information seconds away and at barely any cost (besides what it costs to pay for the net, its not like we are carving off foreskins or requiring a life of celibacy etc in exchange for such info). Such information has been successfully assimilated as human basics ( in terms of mathematics ) and or completely relegated to the fringes as a flaky hobby of sorts.

Perhaps we lack a definite form of societal initiation wherein such modes of information are respected as guarded and or as sacred or holy or whatever ( again it could be mathematics and or the general relationships of those within ones sphere/tribe etc ) and which again extrapolate within the terms of ones life - reciprocation in relationships and to the immediate surrounding environment & others , personal growth & continual self growth / understanding etc, etc.

The ritual loosely related to the passage of adulthood some what recognized as a form of initiation in today's youth of Australia in particular is "schoolies" (which i luckily and or unluckily had forgone in my youth, mostly due to moving interstate and loosing my friendship base - a blessing in disguise lol ) i guess the way i see it from the view of others is some sorta retarted right of passage or a backwards extremity of par excellance, within which drunkenness, stupidity, violence, and promiscuity proliferate and is seen as what it takes to become a man and or woman ( not that i have any moral view on sexual freedom although when its used as some sort of tool for boasting of conquests-to me is extremely lame heh, altho each to their own :P)

im not saying all forms of initiation are right, and or correct - they intrinsically imbue the morals of that particular culture and within it self is an expression of the land, times and world frame they are existing within, i think it is generally more than hard for most people to get into the skin of another and or view the world as someone extremely removed from the cultural norm which i guess for some will exasperate the them from us world view

Edited by -YT-

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I'm just going to add a few final points from my end in what has turned out to be a very interesting and thorough discussion.

(1) when we talk about aboriginal shamanism in this country, it is important to remember that when Europeans first settled Australia, there were at least 600 language groups on this continent. Today only around 30 languages are spoken. That's obviously a lot of knowledge that has been lost, including plant usage, so who can really say what was going on in deep antiquity. Also, that is also a great deal of divergent cultural perceptions of reality. While common themes run between many we should not necessarily lump them all together. Australia is an extremely heterogeneous environment and, believing as I do that the formation of culture is at its foundation a landscape based process, equally heterogeneous world-views emerged (although similarities, paradoxically, abound). Desert tribes, for example, often saw the Southern Cross as representing an eagle's claw, while coastal societies often viewed it as a sting-ray. Equally, the distribution of powerful psychotropic plants that *may* have allowed deep shamanic plant-based exploration is not necessarily even across the entire continent, just like psychotropic plants are heavily weighted toward the western hemisphere of our planet (the Americas). So, the potential was not necessarily the same for all groups, and yet I would say, all groups could get as equally intimately immersed in their cultural perceptions and knowledge and connection to country, with or without the aid of potent psychotropic plants. So psychotropic plants are not of themselves a necessary factor for deep connection to landscape.

(2) the knowledge/certainty about whether some aboriginal cultures used psychotropic plants (in a similar vein to Ayahuasca in the Amazon rainforest, i.e. fundamental to the entire cultural paradigm and experience) will be strengthened when concoctions emerge that can be processed in a way less "sophisticated" than modern extraction of DMT from acacia sp. One that intrigues me greatly for northern Australia is Galbulimima bark which was spectacularly bio-assayed by Thelema, a member on these forums, some time back and somewhat fits the bill as per Folias' anecdotal comments above. Further to that, there may be pharmacological marriages in the Australian flora that could quite easily have been lost and not yet rediscovered involving the combination of an MOAI and an acacia species or similar that does not involve extraction with solvents and smoking as the uptake method, since smoking is not to my knowledge reported in aboriginal cultures (but please correct me if I am wrong) prior to colonization. Indeed, these concoctions may already be in use by modern psychonauts, or modern aboriginal groups using knowledge from an ancient lineage, and I have simply just not kept up with the discoveries and trends or am not within these particular circles.

(3) Re: the Dreamtime, I would say that is a modernization (the phrase, that is) but the concept is definitely within most indigenous groups in Australia, which is an amazingly intriguing fact in itself, since creation stories in, say, North America are extremely diverse even in a region as compact as southern Arizona. However, extreme differences in altitudes/presence of high mountains etc. may explain this to a large degree, with North America being an even more heterogeneous landscape than Australia (due mostly to the altitude gradient of 4000-15,000feet) over a short space (i.e. the four corners region). A further difference is that North American cultures do not have a consistent cultural history anywhere near as deep as those in Australia with several cultures cycling through within even a few thousand years, i.e. Clovis, Cochise, Anasazi, Navajo, all within the same landscape, where creation stories have been constantly renewed and (metaphorically) rewritten. Again this may be due to significant changes in the landscape such as the extinction of the megafauna in relatively recent times compared to the same event in Australia, and the development of farming which of course never took off in Oz. Nevertheless, even within Australia where the concept of the “Dreamtime” may have some consistency, each group may still have a place particular to them where the first creator emerged onto the earth or lives at the current time, such as a mountaintop or river unique to that group’s “country”, so variances exist, again, based on significant landscape features in a given area which are not shared with other groups, i.e. Uluru, Mount Bruce, Cape York, Mt. Kosciusko.

Finally, the "Dreamtime" as I understand it can be split into two distinct phases - a "creation phase" and a "consolidation phase" (my terms). In the "creation phase", the time when "the world was soft" (as they say in the Pilbara) ancestral spirits existed in a malleable world in which their actions created landscape features that were not previously present. These beings had foibles just like modern man (as narrated through the stories) but they also had special attributes and as such the interplays of their desires, loves, hates, animosities, greed etc. were powerful enough to creature significant landmarks like hills, gullies, rivers, waterholes, springs etc. Usually at some point in the stories, these supernatural beings gave birth in some way to the first humans, this act being facilitated by their creation through their activities of "living waters", those being the above mentioned springs and rivers etc. fundamental to human survival.

And then began the "consolidation phase". What was previously a wholly externalized process - ancestral beings doing battle in a malleable landscape without a human witness - became internalized within the mind/understanding of the first humans, who referred back through the landscape itself to penetrate externalized actions in a distant time. From that point landscape features became "fixed" and the "Dreamtime" relationship was now expounded in the internal connection of man with his world. As such, the same “foibles” of the ancestors related in the “dreamtime stories” became allegories internalised within cultures to demonstrate the “correct way” of relating to one's relatives, associates and other tribal groups. The externalised/internalised revolution within the dreamtime philosophy is of fundamental importance in understanding aboriginal cosmology (in my opinion) because it sets the regulations by which man lives in harmony with his actual and perceptual world. They key point being that at some point “the world was soft” and then it became (largely) “fixed” and required upkeep and maintenance by the human custodians through the working of innumerable sites within the landscape known as “increase sites” or “thalus”, sites for corroborees, and avoidance or interaction with various sacred sites that feature in the original creation myths, as well, of course, as actual or purported use of potent psychotropic plants. But the myths are more than myths; they are personally and culturally internalised structures that set boundaries for behaviour and perceptual understanding of reality that relate to a solid world of largely fixed landscape features – and each group had their own set of landscape features in which the original ancestral activities are writ large… and of course these divergent landscapes were then linked through trade (moveable items and also gene flow), story and song, which may explain the widespread concept of the "Dreamtime" across Australia.

Now I could go on, but truth be told I only understand this subject about 1/10th as well as I would like. I appreciate the chance, in fact, to explore the subject here outside of my own head. As always, I understand there are innumerable additional comments and tangents here, as well as the very high possibility I have completely misinterpreted everything as I am not part of any indigenous group or have any aboriginal heritage. This will be my last comment in this particular thread because the subject is too large to cover on a forum, but I have greatly enjoyed the conversation and everyone’s unique input, it certainly got me thinking.

Edit: "aboriginal shamanism" and the potential and possible use by Australian aborigines of psychotropic plants is relevant in all the above because it is one of the mediums by which the link between the "creative" and "consolidated" phase of the "Dreamtime" is fully elucidated by the peoples/cultures seeking to fully understand their place in their landscape and by extension, the reality and meaning of their existence. Shamanism and ritual is one of, if not the key, bridge(s) between man's current existence and the creation of actual (landscape) and perceptual (cultural) worlds in deep time. It is hard to understand perhaps for those of us brought up with the scientific method, but as I stated in my earlier post, our perception is merely an interpretation we make about how life came to be and the content of our current reality, of which no "correct" version exists. If there is indeed a plant medium in the Australian environment that can pierce this mystery and allow us to hook our perception to the perception of indigenous groups in the past we will go a long way in healing the rift between modern (caucasian) man and the Australian landscape, since piercing the mystery of indigenous ritual is so difficult to the uninitiated "white fella". Incidentally, sacramental plants from other countries do have the ability to give significant insight by virtue of their supreme and farsighted intelligence and long relationship with shamanic cultures elsewhere.

OK I'm done!

Edited by Micromegas

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I assume that the dreaming is a state/ place reached by use of entheogenic plants/ meditation. You know what they say about assuming though.. I know they use the ash of acacias in their 'pituri' but I don't know much more than that..

The info regarding Pituri seems to differ between sources. I thought it was made out of dubiosa, and the active components scopolamine and hyoscyamine?

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With the enormous length of time indigenous people lived on this continent I think it's safe to say there must have been some examples of at least accidental ingestion of a plant/ fungus that had a psychotropic outcome. Whether this resulted in people's continued use of the plant in any ceremonial or social setting will sadly probably never be known to most of us. But as discussed the fact that most information was passed down orally I find it difficult to imagine that people didn't discuss their experiences when these situations arose. Potentially giving rise to some of the ideas around which the dreamtime stories evolved. These stories are not static, I remember hearing of a creation story similar to that of the rainbow serpent in one area where the indigenous people no longer participate in certain rituals as the story now goes; that white man came with a rifle and shot the snake and it was taken off hanging off the back of a ute. While I have this story as secondhand it was told to me by a professor at uni that had spent time with this community. My point is that all of these stories have probably changed through time to encompass new changes to lifestyle whether that be the arrival of new people or a climatic change. The oral tradition was/ is perfect for making adjustments through time as it becomes necessary. I imagine that if there was a collapse of the current society as we know it, the short period of contact (relatively) would be forever in any stories that perpetuated into the future especially in very remote communities where there may not be many non-indigenous people but the effects are still dramatically felt none the less.

I definitely agree that the distribution of plants that have the potential for use in this way are far from being spread evenly. As the best pituri came form a specific area where the best plants grew so too would there be areas where concentrations of plants for potential use would occur. A sophisticated network of trade meant that the potential is there for sharing over a broader area but I personally think that a large part of sacred knowledge to a specific area was how to live in the area, which plants could safely be used for medicine, food, ceremony etc. and sometimes how they would be processed. If a neighbouring mob found out this information they could much more easily take over your land for themselves.

Also as there were so many different groups it is possible that different plants and techniques could have been stumbled upon in different areas, some may have simply noted them and understand what they do but don't access them while others may have discussed it and kept the use of it to specific rituals. I think it is highly likely that how these plants could be used was understood, (considering the level of sophistication displayed for processing other plants), but whether that knowledge was employed regularly or at all we'll probably never know.

I was trying to think of a way that this could be answered definitively though and the only way I can think of is to either find samples of processed material in an archeological sense but considering the level of disturbance at many sites, weather and the trace amounts you may be looking for that may be near impossible. The other idea I had was to somehow find trace elements within a skeleton as has been done with Egyptian and South American remains. However considering the sensitivity surrounding tampering with a relatives remains this is probably very unlikely as well. Also I'm not even sure there would be any trace of these compounds left behind as I understand they are metabolised with leaving no trace but I really don't know. I'd be interested to hear what others thought about how one could get evidence to show what substance had definitely been consumed?

Great thread by the way, really interesting read.

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