Posted by What colonised Australia in 1788 was an ego-dominated culture. This type of culture values the individual and individual responsibility at the expense of the communal. This ego mindset tends towards competition rather than co-operation. At its worst it is exploitative and controlling, seeing characteristics such as gentleness and humility as weakness. As such, the values that yindyamarra promotes would be seen as largely irrelevant to the ego-dominant agenda.
This ego-dominant culture has taken on the extremes of the Western Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution; extremes such as an over-reliance on the rational, an over-reliance on the mechanical and the technical, the separation of human consciousness from nature, specialisation at the expense of a wholistic vision, and a scientific method that names only what can be seen and measured as real.
Today’s ego-dominant culture is also now secular: God has died in the mind of the secular modern. The Divine Life is no longer seen nor considered.
The Australian intellectual and Jungian scholar David Tacey[1] is someone who has emphasised the arrival of this ego-dominance in Australia[2]. Tacey argues that what has made it especially hard for Australia’s First Nations peoples is that their way of life has never been ego dominant. Tacey describes Australia’s Indigenous way of life as more influenced by soul. What might this mean[3]?
A soulful way of life is wholistic. The Indigenous Theologian Ann Pattel-Gray tells of a “skeleton”, or a common supportive structure, one that is common to all First Nations culture, a skeleton that holds together a wholistic vision, one with no separation or specialisation: country, cosmology, knowledge, ancestors, songlines, ceremony and ritual – all is a whole way of life with the Creator Spirit at its centre[4].
This wholistic way of living, one that sees no separation between nature and the actions of governments and boardrooms, this has been lost in the modern West.
The practice of Christianity has also been damaged by this ego-dominant, secular culture. Christianity has been largely reduced to a private morality at the expense of its personally and socially transformative vision. For many, grace has become dependent on human effort, rather than what it is: a free gift of God’s healing life we can learn to live with and in – and be transformed by. This transformation is nothing less than becoming a unique expression of love on Earth. Christianity teaches that love, not ego, is our true nature. When we are loving, we are truly ourselves.
Christian spirituality is only recently recovering its own wholistic expression. In this expression, conversion is not just a ‘once off’ decision to become a disciple of Jesus. Instead, conversion is a life-long commitment to a journey from ego-centredness to other-centredness: a soulful journey. This other-centredness must have a whole-of-creation life focus which embraces our fellow humanity and all life equally.
If more Australian Christians could live this wholistic expression, then we might find our lives resonating with the approach to life of First Nations peoples.
Many see the soulful way of Australia’s First Nations peoples as a prophetic call to the rest of us to live life more soulfully and less egoically. This is also the call at the heart of Christianity. Today, however, amid emerging environmental collapse, the First Nations focus on caring for country as part of a soulful, other-centred way of life is particularly prophetic. It is a way that has been missing from too many Australian lives. The question is, just how far are we who are not First Nations people willing to go to protect the environment we are all a part of, especially at this time?
For what we are seeing today is an ego-dominant Western culture moving towards the consequences of its own actions: biodiversity collapse, climate change, the continued pursuit of capital by a few at the expense of the many and the planet, as well as democracy being challenged to maintain itself. The sense is that all of this is coming to a head.
As this ego-domination begins to play out its end game, what might replace it? How can we nurture and maintain a soulful living of life that has as its way the flowering of love and care in the heart of life? What might all this look like in the secular nation we now call Australia?
[1] David Tacey was raised in the central Australian town of Alice Springs/Mparntwe. There he developed relationships with the Indigenous people of the area, relationships that went on to profoundly influence his thinking and writing. See, for example, his book Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth (1995).
[2] See his Eremos Institute presentation Ego and Soul In Australian Experience, given in May last year.
[3] It is well worth viewing ‘Ego and Soul In Australian Experience’ for a fuller exploration of this question.
[4]See Ann Pattel-Gray’s Aboriginal Spirituality and Connection to Country Eremos Institute presentation given in August last year. This presentation will be on the Eremos website until August 2025. See also ‘Aboriginal Spirituality: Past, Present, Future’ (Harper Collins,1996), edited by Ann Pattel-Gray.