New Member from Australia

[Curiosa]

Greetings to all here on Nexus,

I am a new member, currently basing this journey of life from the East coast of beautiful Australia. With such a deep history of local indigenous shamanism and leveraging the unique opportunities that come with living on a truly ancient continent, I have so far found Australia to be both an intriguing and challenging place in which to explore ethnobotanical interests.

I was first introduced to the Nexus through members on a local ethnobotanical forum, and have found this to be an incredible community and source of information. One of the challenges of being based in Australia is the island nature of our home. It is extremely difficult to access many botanical species due to our unique, pristine and vulnerable ecosystem. Regardless of the legal nature of any specimens, it is increasingly difficult for them to pass our force-field like borders. This has led me to expand my search to more internationally diversified communities such as this.

On the other hand, one of the benefits of living on this ancient, sunburned island is the incredible ecosystem that in many ways has remained untouched for millennia. Indeed, flora aside, even some of our fauna have remained without significant evolution for millions of years. There are species here which exist nowhere else on Earth, and the indigenous ancestors have developed an incredible history of storytelling to pass on the wisdom of the plants - some stories they have been telling for over 60,000 years.

It will be a great delight to share my interests and adventures with the Nexus community over many years to come. I hope that I might, in some way, make truly meaningful contributions to this vast tome of knowledge.

-Curiosa

 

[LysergicAbreaction]

Austrailian aboriginal culture is fascinating.

...Specially when it comes to dreams and how they influence and are incorporated into their culture

Dreams are hugely important. Uh, I was in Australia in February and I did a lot of reading up before I went down. Uh, the aboriginals of Australia are- have been at the cultural enterprise for a long, long time along a different path than the rest of us. I mean, I've spent time with Amazon tribes and with people in central Asia, and yes they’re funky, and yes they’re different. But these Australian aboriginals are on to something quite other.

Uh, many people barely open their eyes…people sit silently, people don’t talk. This again relates to what we said about language. In Australia among these people you get this feeling among these people that they don’t talk because they’re not sure it’s here to stay. If, if an aboriginal wants to communicate something with you they would rather walk a half mile with you into the bush and point at it than to simply describe it back at camp.

So uh, the dreamtime and the Jungian unconscious, and the unconscious made conscious by the internet begin to sound like the same thing. I previously didn’t have much interest in the Australian aboriginals because I was slightly irritated by irreliance on psychedelics [audience laughter] And so it was like…what am I supposed to do with these people, they’re clearly very loaded and very far out, and how do they do that without drugs? It was paradigm agonizing to me.

[audience laughter]

Well it turns out that they are just better at keeping secrets than people in the Amazon, there’s a revolution breaking over ethnobotany. We have been saying for decades that South America was the most hallucinogen rich ecology on the planet, and why was that and so forth and so on. In the next eighteen months some Australian ethnobotanists and trippers are going to publish data that shows that the Australian aboriginal worldview is entirely running on DMT. These acacias, this gumtree ecology that stretches from Queensland all the way down to the south coast is replete with DMT. It’s simply that the aboriginal culture is even more secretive than other cultures, other aboriginal cultures in other parts of the world, and only very, very slowly is this information uh, uh being let out. So dreams are one of the great friends of the imagination. -terence mckenna

These "song-lines" mentioned in chatwin's book and by mckenna in the lecture below also piqued my interest:

So here’s a story that relates to this that it is in Bruce Chatwin’s book Song Lines. There are these things called song lines, which cross Australia and they can be thousands of miles long. If you’re a shaman and one of these things crosses your territory, then you are the keeper of the song, of that part of the line. You must learn and keep this song. There are a hundred and thirty-seven aboriginal languages in Australia, so these people did the following thing. They went to the place near one end of the song line and they recorded a shaman singing his song of that place. Then they went two thousand miles to another part of the same song line and they found the song keeper of that place and they played the guys song for him. It was in a language he didn’t speak and he had never been away from his own home – he had never been to this place. So he listened to the song and after a while, he began to sing with it. Not the words but the melody and he sang with it the way you could sing with green sleeves if you didn’t know the words but you knew the melody. Then after it was over he said, the man has sang this song. His place is a ‘Beaut’ with three mountains and eucalyptus filling the valley and a red rock like a lizard over here.
So then they tried to analyze, what is happening here? Is this telepathy? Is it magic? What is it? I think the key to understanding it lies in…I’ve recently seen, you can buy for about six hundred dollars a piece of software where you glue electrodes to your head and sit down in front of your computer and you see an undulating landscape of neuro readouts that look, lo and behold, like mountains, valleys, escarpments. It’s like visit to Utah. I am convinced that what’s happening is that when the shaman listens to the first shaman’s song, he does not process the sound the way we do. He processes it the way this computer is processing the neurological input and what he’s seeing is an acoustical environment of sound and he can see the place. The song is the way it is because the song is not a song; the song is a hologramatic acoustigram of the topology of the land through which the song line passes. These people are called the most primitive people in the world, remember? -terence mckenna

Its an amazing outlook and personal psychology that these cultures have developed, and in my mind it's no question that entheogenic plants greatly influenced these novel approaches to communication and interpretation of the world.

Australia in terms of a source of psychedelic plants and culture has always been somewhat of a mystery to me, and I have always been quite eager to learn all that I can in relation to this topic. Australia is also home to many novel DMT containing plant species, which I would take full advantage of if I were in that area.

 

[Hendrix87]

I'm a south Aussie myself. Welcome to the nexus ✌

 

[jam-maker]

One of the challenges of being based in Australia is the island nature of our home. It is extremely difficult to access many botanical species due to our unique, pristine and vulnerable ecosystem. Regardless of the legal nature of any specimens, it is increasingly difficult for them to pass our force-field like borders.

Ohhh man I feel you, in WA and I believe Tasmania we have increased quarantine laws to protect our isolated environment. This means seeds, plants, anything are going to have an incredibly hard time making it in... I have more luck with LSD than I do peyote seeds.


Welcome to the nexus your description of our country was beautiful. Its good to see another Aussie here I hope you enjoy your time in this wonderful place, come say hi in the chat sometime :d

 

[jam-maker]

double post