In January 1994, I found myself in the company of fifteen good souls in Devon, England, in a five-day 'Gathering of Elders'. We were 'working the circle' and meditating for the world. We were marking an exceptional conjunction of many planets in Capricorn – a power-point in time – by making ourselves available to higher powers. Two immediate world issues taking place at that time came up for our attention: our Euro-war in Bosnia, and the raging fires in Australia.
The fires were poignant, symbolic. It felt as if the human race was burning, even though the fires were localised to New South Wales. Meanwhile, in Britain, we were having rainstorms and floods. Initiation by fire and water, at the poles of the English-speaking world. In Britain, we felt a wave of support and connection with Australians, in the midst of their fiery crisis. The fires symbolised to us the burning away of the old, and an enormous step Aussies seemed to be making – Australia was debating severing itself from its past, from British imperial days, to become a totally independent republic, a step which represents a larger and deeper shift, a maturing of a young nation. Meanwhile, we in Europe were seeking to pull together into a European Union, to resolve our historic and bellicose national dissonances, and to find a place for Europe in the multi-cultural global future. Yet we were faced in Bosnia with a painful shadow of our own history. The contrast was clear: the Australian past was burning away, and the European past was flooding us.
Yet it felt as if a psychic bridge spans Eurasia, deeply linking Britain and Australia as English-speaking nations. This is not just racial sticking-together – it's a deep energy-link which hides behind the fact that Australia was colonised (largely) by British Europeans rather than by Chinese, Indonesians or Indians. When I was touring Australia in 1992, I spoke to many about the cosmic joke behind Australia removing the imperialistic Union Jack from its flag – yet what is left behind? Light stars on a blue background. What is the flag of the European Union? Light stars on a blue background. And let's not forget the Stars'n'Stripes, the flag of that other once-colony in North America. So it looks as if the white-skinned axis of the world is adopting stars as its symbol! This suggests that the relationship between our nations is not ending, it's transforming in the light of a new global situation. Things are changing in all of our countries.
My prayer for Britain is that it soon acknowledges its soul-role in the world as a cultural seed-influence (ideas, music, arts, heritage), that it rises to the essence of its deep Anglo-Celtic spirit, drawing on its historic roots, transforming conservatism into the steadying wisdom of age. My prayer for Australia is that it awakens to its soul-role as a hothouse for innovation, for futurity, formative vitality and to its gift of both geographical and dreamtime space – though, to many present-day Australians, future prospects are either, or both, exciting and daunting.
Australia has developed from a far-flung colony to a modern wealthy state modelled on the pattern of 20th century Euro-America. This is but a beginning: Australia's modern plenty has provided soil for other things to take root and grow, yet its early-1990s 'recession' forces the pace and draws attention to essentials. Australia has space, resources, brains. It has a rich combination of a B movement for change with considerable public outreach, and a general population relatively open to the future. Britain has a srong movement for change too, yet it is contained, and the majority of the population plays safe, looking backwards and underlyingly dreading future change. Australia is thus blessed. This equation is pregnant with possibility. The official culture in Australia acts out the same suicidal, atavistic money-sex-power games as most developed countries. Yet that will change, perhaps more easily than in other lands more anchored in their past history. As TIME magazine (not known for millennialism or radicalism) announced on its front cover in July 1994: This is the beginning of the final days. This is the Apocalypse. These words described Rwanda at the time, but it symbolised something for the world.
Three key aspects of Australia's movement for change are visible (to me) from the outside:
* its inventiveness, best shown in the expansion of permaculture, holistic health and free-energy research, which are all three pivotal in the world's future. This is nourished by a fortuitous joining of Aussie bushwhacker ethics with modern urban sophistication – Australia has some of the world's best cities;
* a minority of Aussies are accumulating much experience in community living and cooperative ventures. New social forms do take time to evolve, and Australians have helpful conditions and sufficient space in which to evolve them. White-skins have a lot to learn about sharing, synergy and collectivism, just as Asians are now learning about individualism (for better or for worse);
* the relatively widespread awareness in Australia of ET activity – even though paranoia, gullibility, exaggeration and feelings of powerlessness can beshadow this. Nevertheless, getting used to our celestial and multidimensional neighbours, and to the implications all this has, is possibly, when all is said and done, the world's number one issue, and Australia is a leader in this area.
Although models for the future are being evolved worldwide, Australia stands at a cutting edge. It is such a new, unhistorical nation, with plenty of territory and possibility available – that's what draws new immigrants to its shores. However, there's a missing ingredient: people. In relation to the rest of the world, Australia is underpopulated. Cutting its umbilical link with Britain, Australia now acknowledges its neighbours – Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, Thais and Japanese – it's even drawing closer to its little sister, New Zealand. Although the deep-seated fear of the 'yellow peril' lurks in the national unconscious, these neighbours embody your future, and Australians play a part in theirs.
While visiting Australia, I saw a vision of possibility. This revealed that the land-mass of Australia, in the next century, is likely to become a fusion-place for different historic cultures, a birthplace of something new, where the European and Asiatic cultures join together to build something new. This has already started in such places as Hong Kong and Singapore, but they lack the territory and space to carry it through in more than a mercantilist way.
In the next century, old cultural patterns of national pride and racial superiority-inferiority must go – or we're all doomed. It's a global village from now on, and we're all neighbours. The global village was unconsciously initiated from Europe in the 1500s, evolving slowly until the bits were in place in Victorian times, yet it was brought to general worldwide consciousness only in the 1960s-90s. It is now here – to some extent regardless of what people feel about it. In the 2000s, it must be 'all hands on deck' – worldwide mutual cooperation is imperative. Australia's catalytic role is likely to be significant. And its population will, I suggest, grow much, much larger.
Britain's contribution to the world is likely to be to show how a devastated, overcrowded land can be restored to health and saved from self-destruction. Australia's contribution is likely to be to show how desert and scrub can be rendered into greened, fertile, populated land – without destruction, by using nature-supporting, nature-emulating means. Not only this, but it can show how the coming-together of different races can make this happen. What will probably seed this change will be a crisis: crises have ways of galvanising drastic action and getting us to face reality.
Australia's crisis might well be activated from two main directions: climatic and ecological shocks (not unlike the NSW fires of early 1994), and large-scale, unavoidable immigration by Asians leaving behind their past and seeking a future. The challenge for Aussies will not be how to stop this (that's the old way), but how to take hold of the opportunity. This possibility of mass immigration might seem overwhelming or threatening but, after all, it is a second chapter, a revisitation of the earlier white immigration into a land which originally was Aboriginal land – and it could transform the nation, like whites did.
This second-wave mass-immigration represents a potential slotting into place of the major ingredients in a big challenge for Australia and the part it plays in the world matrix: how to render dry, brown land into fertile green land, without environmental devastation, and how to bind Euros and Asians into one nation without inter-racial conflict. Both of these challenges are liklely to be born out of factual necessity. The miracle ingredients to help in facing this challenge will likely be Australian vitality, knowhow and territory – and Asian knowhow, people-power and industriousness.
I'm not talking about skyscrapers and luxury bungalows, neither about dams, combine harvesters nor superstores: I'm talking about raising water-tables and modifying climate with vegetation-buildup, about water-ennoblement and eco-emulating conservation, about new forms of agriculture and technology, about societies and communities living with the land, not off it. The ideas and means are here with us now – under-researched, under-applied, under-financed, but here. Only the will and a sense of urgency are needed.
A transformation of the Outback is possible by using three key means, all present in Australia today: soil-remineralisation, permaculture and principles and eco-technologies such as those thought up by Viktor Schauberger and others – plus half a century of hard work. Is it not fortuitous also that the world's two most workaholic races are whites and Pacific-Rim Asians?
But what about Aboriginals – the ones who occupied Australia first? Are they just to be marginalised, absorbed or overlooked? Their role in a future Australia is crucial: they have the capacity to bring the missing link to the equation mentioned above. Aboriginals are spiritually catalytic for the soul of Australia – as the spirit of ancient Britons and Celts are for the soul of Britain. The Aborigines hold advanced knowledge of the Dreamtime, the imaginal, the astral – the morphic fields, the starting-place of all life, of the future. They hold a secret understanding of the natural world and of human purpose which Euros and Chinese, with all our history, have long forgotten.
The near-destruction of Aboriginal reality and society, like the exile of Tibetans from traditional Tibet, has a sharpening and clarifying effect on its traditional culture, sorting the accumulated constraints of history from the perennial core truths which pervade reality. This near-destruction also obliges Aboriginals to summate the core-truths of their culture and to teach their truths to those who will hear – for these truths carry a direct message from earliest humanity.
The future challenge for Aboriginals – as with all global minorities faced with the bulldozer-effect of 'civilisation' – is both to nurture and to share the tender heart of their own culture, for everyone's benefit. The heart of Aboriginal culture is dying only because whites omit to recognise its value to themselves – the European shadow of racial superiority and 'mission to civilise' is cutting off the foundations of human life. The future world matrix needs to be like a multi-coloured patchwork quilt, not like a monotone-dyed, standard-issue, mass-produced blanket. So the third and crucially catalytic force in this visionary equation for Australia is its own folk, those who set the song-lines and who first named the southern stars. For without inner roots and love for the spirit of the land, a developing culture has no soul. Without soul, a culture eventually destroys itself. Aborigines probably hold the core solution to the unlocking of Australia's future, even though their white guests hold the power to decide whether or not this will happen.
Once a kind of clone nation, Australia now has more future than past from which to distil its purpose. The 21st Century is for countries like Australia, just as the 19th Century was Britain's. The pressure of unfolding world reality will force global issues and action, and a Big Step will present itself, offering a new possibility to countries like Australia. A possibility where inner growth and Dreamtime become the realistic nexus and taproot of society, where humans of all origins are valued, respected and included, where the land becomes a temple-garden as well as a resource – and where humans become responsible, creative custodians of planetary reality. Future civilisation will undoubtedly be different from what we now know as civilisation.
Australia's role in this global transformation is to carry out pioneering experiments, to evolve a new model for other nations to follow – just as California has done in the 20th Century. Australia can demonstrate how landscapes are transformed and how pluralistic societies are created, in the context of a new level of reality.
Australia is like another planet. That's why ETs take great interest in it – it's a microcosm and a potential germination-point. Without seeking to be an arrogant interfering Brit, I do suggest that it's worth exploring the notion that the Australian land and people are like a greenhouse for the cultivation of a new world civilisation – or at least a crucial aspect of it. The seeds are now germinating and becoming visible, now and over the coming decades. If this proposition is true – for it is true that all predictions are but fantasies – then Aussies have cause to rejoice and also B cause to feel the burden of bearing the onus of such a destiny. In Britain, a few centuries ago, we took it upon ourselves to determine the future world history: we passed it to America, they passed it to Japan and China – and who's next?
These are the crazy insights which came up for me while 'working the circle' in Devon and thinking about the fires in New South Wales – doing our bit as a psychic fire-brigade to help our distant kin Down Under in Australia!
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