From: dean@pico.qpsx.oz.au (Dean Economou)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.australian
Subject: Re: mysticism in oz
Date: 30 Sep 92 06:19:29 GMT
Organization: QPSX Communications LTD, Perth, Western Australia.
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cbs@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Chris Syed) writes:
: 
:    A semi serious question: is Oz going "all Buddhist"?
: 
:    When I first went to Australia several years back, it seemed my (mainly
:    programmer or librarian ) friends were into bushwalking, tin whistles,
:    Toohey's Old, and computers. This past June, some of the same group wanted
:    to listen to the Dalhai Lama and David Suzuki, visit ashrams and
:    meditate. I thought at first that it was just my group of friends,
:    until I came across a book in our library - "Under the Shade of

The mysticsim of which you speak has been going on as long as I can
remember, but in my memory it became much stronger in the mid-eighties.
Australia has also been a shelter for people who live off-beat life
styles, and there are still many communes in W.A. (and NSW and
QLD I hear).

The Dalai Lama also came to Perth not so long ago, and packed out the
Entertainment Centre (usually reserved for rock bands).


:    a Coolibah Tree". It's a series of articles by philosophers from various
:    unis in NSW, Vic, and Qld for the most part. The subtitle has to do
:    with "consciousness", so I picked it up thinking to find the usual
:    AI and semiotics stuff. Instead I found writeups on Transcendental
:    Meditation, parapsychology, Hindu scriptures.... (and one nice 
:    article about Aboriginal paintings of European ships).
: 
:    I'm getting a strange impression from this that the mysticism thing
:    is not just confined to my circle of Sydney friends. After all, 
:    if academics pick up on something, it must be pretty pervasive 8-}

See above for the same story on the West Coast...

:    right? A few years back, an American wrote a book called "At the
:    Edge of History". His idea was that California represented the
:    westermost advance of western civilization, and that LA was the
:    city at the edge of history where east and western cultures would
:    clash in a big Hegelian dialectic and a new planetary culture would
:    be born. (His name is WI Thompson b.t.w.). I'm getting the impression
:    that Oz is more worthy of that title...{.

Funny you should mention that.  I went to a University Summer school
class on "Body Awareness", which turned out to be on "Rebirthing" (glad
I went, at least I can criticise with some knowledge now).  The teacher
was from California, which she described as a "Centre of Energy" for the
raising of humanity's collective consciousness.  I am not pulling
your leg.  Now the really interesting bit was that she thought that
Australia, and in particular a place called Margaret River in the South
West of Western Australia, was also a "Centre of Energy", and ther one
which would eventually dominate.  So there you go.

BTW: I went to that course about 7 years ago.


:    
:    Does curiosity alone account for the 3K * 2 nights attendance at the
:    Dalai Lama's talk, for example? When did all these ashrams spring up?
:    How much of the academic curriculum is being devoted to understanding
:    the East? Etc. etc. ? 

You can take history units, but I haven't noticed a push in academia...

: -- 
: --- 
:        "We cannot think without imagining."  -- Thomas Aquinas
:             cbs@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Chris Brown-Syed)

"Life is too short to be small" -- Benjamin Disraeli
Newsgroups: soc.culture.australian