Learning about cultures that have lived sustainably with Earth for a long periods of time can be helpful to our understanding of this complex system. We look at two cultures in particular: the Australian Aborigines, and the Kogi of Colombia.
Over at least 35,000 years in Australia, and possibly twice that long, indigenous culture created one of the greatest human monuments. Yet this monument is largely internal and invisible. Their culture values what the individual can learn, not make, and they are easily judged as primitive because of their lack of external culture. Their social structure is extremely complex. They understand the natural world in thousands of stories and songs that come from a world of Ancestors that precedes and creates the visible world: the Dreamtime. Running in lines of songs about particular mythic journeys, their landscape of Australia consists of a network of songlines that covers the continent. Understandable across different languages, these songs encode knowledge of landscape in changing rhythmic patterns. This mythic vision has been shared and developed over many thousands of years.
The Kogi of Colombia had a culture that lived all the way from the arctic climate of the high Sierra down to the tropical beaches of the Atlantic Coast. Their well-crafted cities are now covered by the jungle because when the conquistadors came in the 1600s, they fled. They took refuge in impenetrable mountains and have lived there, self-isolated, ever since. Their leaders are priests, raised in darkness to the age of nine (visited by their mothers) and taught about the levels of the Great Mother that are above our visible world. They see Mind in Nature, and it takes extraordinary training to communicate with Her.
In the 1990s, the Kogi emerged from their total isolation and asked a BBC film maker, Alan Ereira, to help them make a movie. This movie came out as a warning from the Elder Brothers, the Kogi, to the Younger Brothers, Western civilization. They tell us that we are killing the Mother, and we must learn a different way to live.
Other indigenous cultures, from Native Americans to Siberian shamans are giving us the same stark warning: “You do not realize that we all live inside a living being, and you are destroying Her with your ignorance.”
What can we learn from these cultures that will help us to respond to this urgent warning? Perhaps the most important area is in education. Aboriginal culture, and Native American culture, were stable on the level of society over very long periods of time, yet they offered intense, life-long challenge to the individual to learn and to transform their very being. The individual on this pathway of change became ever more useful to their society, and was not likely to want to rebel against it. Education of the individual in our culture does not challenge all parts of a person to growth and transformation. Built in inequalities in our culture from race to economics, continually ask for change; and the individual in our culture is often measured by the amount of change that they are able to bring. This situation is a recipe for cycles of continual violence and cultural upheaval.
Even more than the other mammals from which we come, humans need to learn about the world from previous generations. This is a powerful advantage of this fifth stage of life. Without instruction and guidance, however, an individual human cannot be expected to unlock and develop the full range of their internal abilities.