Selected Product:
| Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime (Inner Traditions)
Paperback
Author: Robert Lawlor
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Release Date: 1991-11-01
ISBN-10: 0892813555
ISBN-13: 9780892813551
List Price: $29.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Australian aboriginal people have lived in harmony with the earth for perhaps as long as 100,000 years; in their words, since the First Day. In this absorbing work, Lawlor explores the essence of their culture as a source of and guide to transforming our own world view. While not romanticizing the past or suggesting a return to the life of the hunter/gatherer, Voices of the First Day enables us to enter into the mentality of the oldest continuous culture on earth and gain insight into our own relationship with the earth and to each other.
This book offers an opportunity to suspend our values, prejudices, and Eurocentrism and step into the Dreaming to discover:
• A people who rejected agriculture, architecture, writing, clothing, and the subjugation of animals
• A lifestyle of hunting and gathering that provided abundant food of unsurpassed nutritional value
• Initiatic and ritual practices that hold the origins of all esoteric, yogic, magical, and shamanistic traditions
• A sexual and emotional life that afforded diversity and fluidity as well as marital and social stability
• A people who valued kinship, community, and the law of the Dreamtime as their greatest "possessions."
• Language whose richness of structure and vocabulary reveals new worlds of perception and comprehension.
• A people balanced between the Dreaming and the perceivable world, in harmony with all species and living each day as the First Day.
Voices of the First Day is illustrated throughout with more than 100 extraordinary photographs, bark paintings, line drawings and engravings. Many of these photographs are among the earliest ever made of the Aboriginal people and are shown here for the first time.
"Voices of the First Day" still speaks to me
| Customer Rating: | Well well well, I fully expected to find a five star reader rating here. I guess I forgot that these types of different, forward-thinking books polarize people so much. I too have seen Aboriginals in Northern Arnhem Land as well as in the pub in Katherine, and I am sure that many Americans have seen drunken Indians wandering zig-zagged down the side of the road. We can all see what have become of these cultures since being raped, pillaged and tempted by European settlers. They stood not a chance - even the Aboriginal communities that did not want any "aid" from the Australian government were forced to take it - and became addicted to refined wheat, sugar and a new 'easy' way of life. Talk about the Sirens' calling sailors to their deaths. Alcohol has had the most devastating affect on their lives of all our influences. It is interesting to note that kava is strictly illegal in Australia: This is a easily grown root that can be crushed and drunk to produce a mellow high, and does not induce the same ill-effects to Aborigines as alcohol.
Anyways, Lawlor talks of pre-contact Aboriginal culture. If he wanted to do a book on post-contact culture, derrrrr, it would be a different book.
The book that he has written is packed with insight and the information provided within is the sort of stuff that could change your life if you just stay open to it. You may not agree with all of it but it doesn't make the rest a lot of baloney. I have just finished reading it a second time and there is just soooo much to this book. Yes it has been compared with Mutant Message (which I didn't like at all) but this is the real deal. I don't want to be too effusive but it has changed the way I perceive the world on a daily basis.
To all the nay-sayers: there must have been something in that culture to have not self-imploded after tens of thousands of years. It is always hard to loosen the grip on a static world view that we have held onto so tightly - even when it is increasingly obvious that it no longer works.
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Mystery, Power, Appreciation
| Customer Rating: | | To realize that all we think we know is in truth metaphor; to conceive of the lovely, intimate metaphor that we are one of infinitely varied, harmonic vibrations emanating from an earth that in turn emanates the Divine; to live this way. What a gift this book is! |
Better to wake up from this daydreaming.
| Customer Rating: | Now this is a book i would recommend:
Yorro Yorro: Aboriginal Creation and the Renewal of Nature : Rock Paintings and Stories from the Australian Kimberley by David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic (Paperback - Sep 1993) |
This is a magical book.
| Customer Rating: | I have had my copy for thirteen years now, and, since the first time I read it, I have called it my Bible. This book has helped me to summon up lost teachings of my own souls journey, and has helped me to find my truth.
As far as the people who gave it poor reviews, I guess they don't connect to the true, raw wisdom that Lawlor has to offer. |
Mostly the author Dreaming, not the Aborigines
| Customer Rating: | I bought this book not long after it was first published in 1991. I was attracted to the book because the form and binding looked good and I didn't have any books about Australian Aborigines yet. As far as appearances go, the book looks great. Nice division in chapters, wonderful illustrations.
OK, now it gets tricky because I am going to review the contents. The author is indeed a person that can write. However the book is filled with well formulated sentences as "The landscape of Aboriginal Australia mirrored a living organism" that are vague in the extreme. The author makes a division in that everything about the Aborigines (where traditionally girls are raped at age 14) is good and everything about Western society is bad. This division might be ok in a cowboy movie, but that doesn't prevent Lawlor drawing heavily on the evil sciences of the West.
Lawlor idolizes the civilisation of Ancient Egypt and connects Aboriginal myth with theories about magnetic forces. This is done in with sentences like "Indigenous people believe..." and "some scientists have recently found evidence..." that must draw the reader into his stream of thoughts. My biggest problem is that the author is making assumptions on behalf of the Aborigines to which the working of Magnetic forces is completely foreign. The author suggests that a uniform culture existed among the natives (something I doubt is true) and refrains from telling the sad story of their history since Australia's discovery.
After reading through 391 pages the reader is left with little concrete information about the Australian Aborigines, some interesting viewpoints, and a lot of information about the earth's magnetism, Carl Jung, etc.
My conclusion is that this book falls short of its mark. It's more about the Dreaming of the author than the Dreaming of the Aborigines.
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