This book looks at 'the Aboriginal problem' from an unusual viewpoint - that of the Aborigines themselves, for whom 'the Aboriginal problem' is the white Australian. The essays deal with all those features of traditional Aboriginal life that made it so deeply satisfying to the original Australians: religion, attachment to land, imaginative culture, and the whole ethos on which the impact of Europeans and their way of life has been destructive. The Aborigines have been dispossessed, exploited, rejected and on occasions reviled. What we now offer them is, from an Aboriginal point of view, neither true reconciliation nor equality. The author argues that race relations will deteriorate even farther than the neuralgic point to which our ethnocentric insensibility has already brought them unless white Australians make an effort to comprehend the Aboriginal truths of life.

This book looks at 'the Aboriginal problem' from an unusual viewpoint - that of the Aborigines themselves, for whom 'the Aboriginal problem' is the white Australian. The essays deal with all those features of traditional Aboriginal life that made it so deeply satisfying to the original Australians: religion, attachment to land, imaginative culture, and the whole ethos on which the impact of Europeans and their way of life has been destructive. The Aborigines have been dispossessed, exploited, rejected and on occasions reviled. What we now offer them is, from an Aboriginal point of view, neither true reconciliation nor equality. The author argues that race relations will deteriorate even farther than the neuralgic point to which our ethnocentric insensibility has already brought them unless white Australians make an effort to comprehend the Aboriginal truths of life.

New edition of the author's 1968 Boyer Lectures. Two decades later, these essays on Aboriginals, their society and their vision of the world still inform and stimulate. This edition includes a foreword by H. C. Coombes. Other books by the author include 'An Aboriginal Religion' and 'White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-73'.

Examines particular rituals (social and religious) as a special kind of cultural performance or interaction in a wide variety of traditions and locations.

“Mindell examines addictions & relationships, time travel, lucid healing & preventive medicine, and Dreaming as world work.” —The Dream Network Journal What if you could dream twenty-four hours a day, even while awake? According to innovative psychotherapist Arnold Mindell, Ph.D., we already do. The seeds of dreaming arise in every moment of the day, in body symptoms, problems, relationships, subtle feelings, interactions, random thoughts, and fantasies. We’re getting countless little cues from the unconscious every minute. All are signs from the world of dreaming. And, according to Mindell, we can be in this state of lucid dreaming all day long. In Dreaming While Awake, Mindell shows how to become aware of these “flirts” from the dreamworld and how to interpret their message. The goal, he says, is to be wide awake and lucid 24 hours a day in the midst of this unending dreamfield of information. Practicing twenty-four-hour lucid dreaming: Helps you solve personal, physical, and emotional problems Serves as a preventive medicine for relationships and health, helping you catch the earliest warning signs before they turn into problems Helps resolve conflicts in relationships, families, large groups, corporations, even politics Dreaming is the mystical source of reality, says Mindell. “My goal is to make the Dreaming roots of reality so accessible, so visceral, that your conscious mind will give you back your right to dream.”

Spanning many different epochs and varieties of religious experience, this book develops a new approach to religion and its role in human history. The authors look across a range of religious phenomena-from ancestor worship to totemism, shamanism, and worldwide modern religions-to offer a new explanation of the evolutionary success of religious behaviors. Their book is more empirical and verifiable than most previous books on evolution and religion because they develop an approach that removes guesswork about beliefs in the supernatural, focusing instead on the behaviors of individuals. The result is a pioneering look at how and why natural selection has favored religious behaviors throughout history.

David Wilson's initial research into the phenomenon of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible suggested that many of the passages featuring prophets, and hitherto considered to be bizarre myths (or much-edited collections of traditions) were, in fact, sequences of dreams. Moreover, it was possible to compare the structure of these sequences with the structure of a night's sleep (hypnogram)--as revealed by modern sleep research--to demonstrate that the "sleeper" was depressed. This characteristic, depressive sleep architecture was then used to show that three characters in particular, Elijah, Jonah, and Adam--compared in the New Testament with Jesus--were all, in fact, depressed. Quite naturally, this raised further questions concerning the nature of Jesus himself: Was he merely a prophet? If he wasn't, how did he differ? If he was depressed, how was he able to function (and succeed in his mission) when Elijah and Jonah clearly had such great difficulties? These and other questions are raised throughout this book, and many of them are not new, but they are, however, changed forever when asked against a contextual background of altered states of consciousness (ASCs), and dreamform in particular.

The texts collected in this volume take an anthropological approach to the variety of contemporary societal problems which confront the peoples of the contemporary South Pacific: religious revival, the sociology of relations between local groups, regions and nation-States, the problem of culture areas, the place of democracy in the transition of States founded on sacred chiefdoms, the role of ceremonial exchanges in a market economy, and so forth. Each chapter presents a society seen from a specific point of view, but always with reference to the issue of collective identity and its confrontation with history and change. The collection thus invites the reader to understand how the inhabitants of these societies seek to affirm both an individual identity and a sense of belonging to the contemporary world. In doing so, it informs the reader about the contemporary realities experienced by the inhabitants of the South Pacific, with a view to contributing to an intercultural dialogue between the reader and these inhabitants.

W.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. Without condescension and without sentimentality, in essays such as 'The Dreaming' Stanner conveyed the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture. In his Boyer Lectures he exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale,' regarding the fate of the Aborigines, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. And in his essay 'Durmugam' he provided an unforgettable portrait of a warrior's attempt to hold back cultural change. 'He was such a man,' Stanner wrote. 'I thought I would like to make the reading world see and feel him as I did.' The pieces collected here span the career of W.E.H. Stanner as well as the history of Australian race relations. They reveal the extraordinary scholarship, humanity and vision of one of Australia's finest essayists. Their revival is a significant event. With an introductory essay by Robert Manne. "Stanner's essays still hold their own among this country's finest writings on matters black and white." - Noel Pearson

"WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he remains a highly significant figure in Aboriginal affairs and Australian anthropology. Educated by Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney and Malinowski in London, he undertook anthropological work in Australia, Africa and the Pacific. Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aboriginal religion. His 1968 broadcast lectures, After the Dreaming, continue to be among the most widely quoted works in the field of Aboriginal studies. He also produced some exceptionally evocative biographical portraits of Aboriginal people. Stanners writings on post-colonial development and assimilation policy urged an appreciation of Indigenous peoples distinctive world views and aspirations"--Provided by publisher.