The Dreaming Path

Reflection

Admittedly, I didn’t actually finish the book. I initially started it because I’m a big fan of learning about cultures, for the better or worse. Perhaps it could have been leveraged into a different career, but I like playing god by ordering around a machine too much to steer away from it. As evident from the name, the book is about Aboriginal culture, and I found it quite fitting as a resident in Australia to learn about it. What little I know about it was gained by half-listening to documentaries on the TV while cooking and some elements from a fantasy series by the name of Metaworld Chronicles.

In reading around 80% of the book, I gained an understanding the culture that created the Smoking Ceremony that I’d seen in the courtyard of my university campus. As shamanism is still very much alive and thriving back home, in Mongolia, it was closer to life than I expected. In the end, it seems that most naturally-attuned cultures have an innate respect of nature —as a baseline— but their ways of tending to nature and living alongside it differ. What is common seems to be giving a name and face to nature, and treating it as a living entity.

The parallels that The Dreaming Path draws between the corporate landscape and traditional culture was quite interesting, and it gives millennia-old coping mechanisms, if they could be called that. Rather, I see it as a way to prevent the sickness instead of fighting the symptoms and if everyone thought that way, perhaps the world could become a utopia. Maybe one day it will.