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The Australian Election Story and Our Times

Given the way Australia has given an overwhelming majority to the Australian Labor Party at the recent election, and consigned the Liberal Party with its increasing tendency to culture wars into the political wilderness, there is a sliver of movement in the wider Australian cultural psyche away from rage and divisiveness to something kinder and inclusive as we head into troubled international waters.

In some strange way Australia is showing how to move away from hyper-capitalism along the lines advocated by Joseph Stiglitz, as it uses the power of government to support the Care Economy, and uses regulation to reign in the tech-oligarchy’s global power, as it navigates these troubled waters—no easy task, particularly in the face of growing wealth inequality. An overview of the challenges of contemporary capitalism is provided by Cassidy in a recent article in The Guardian.

We must also be mindful that extreme weather events will continue to extract their toll. Further, the AI revolution and its computing demands on energy and water resources, combined with its impact on jobs, militarisation and political surveillance, casts a big shadow on many aspects of our society: environmental, political, social and cultural, as Australia seeks to shape its future in a rapidly changing world.

The Deeper Cultural Challenge

While embracing new technologies and productivity for ‘a Future Made in Australia’ is on the agenda, I would argue a deeper cultural change is slowly gathering energy—a yearning for a different story that gives life meaning and purpose—a yearning to move away from hyper-consumerism and fragmentation, as ancient cultural wisdom encoded in Indigenous knowledges and connections to Country continues to call to us, even though we mostly don’t recognise its source.

A call to free ourselves from the dissociations of our culture of COLLECTIVE TRAUMA, built on ccompetitive individualism and rational materialsm, and embrace a new story of ENLIVENED LIVING, based on relational integration of mind-body-spirit.

Closing the Other Gap and Reconciliation

Rejecting the Coalition story that continues to marginalise Indigenous culture, can the Labor Government now embrace a different version of ‘closing the gap’ that acknowledges deeper issues of cultural meaning?

As Wayilwan Elder, Aunty Lorraine Peeters of the Marumali Program for the Stolen Generations says, “People acknowledge there’s a gap, but they don’t understand what that gap is.”

This other gap of cultural meaning is the need for non-Indigenous Australians to move away from the extractivist ethos of competitive individualism, which George Brandis claims lies at the core of Liberal Party values, and which informs the right-wing libertarianism of the tech bros of Silicon Valley and their ilk, towards the relationist ethos of Indigenous knowledge systems.

Without closing this other gap, are we not continuing the hubris of ‘white’ cultural superiority, the very set of cultural norms and practices that underpins the global polycrisis of our times and locks Indigenous people into ongoing cultural trauma?

Our Troubled and Uncertain Times

As I have contemplated the times we are living through, in the context of the recent Australian election and the rise of Trumpism and the techno-oligarchy in other parts of the world, I have been combining two fields of research:

1. Trumpism and Autocracy—trying to understand the forces driving Trumpism and its ‘white ethno-nationalism’ face in the US and elsewhere, along with the forces underpinning the relentless drive for wealth and power among the Tech bros, with their AI dreams for a future world, including leaving Earth behind;
2. Trauma—building on my own Buddhist journey, I have been exploring the trauma perspective on the nature of human suffering, and its mirrored reflection in society, triggered by these areas in particular:

• • The psychophrenic nature of modernity’s ‘war on nature’ perpetrated by science and technology in the name of Progress and Prosperity in the service of economic growth and productivity, at the very same time that this same science, particularly in the environmental sciences, is alerting us to the consequences of our actions
  • The enduring impact of ‘white’ European colonial settlement of Australia with its consequential destruction of the knowledge systems of the ancient cultures that lived here in a state of bioregional sustainability for millennia, mirrored by the inability of ‘white’ Australia to face this and heal the psychic wounds of this destruction.
  • The continuing horror of the Israeli Jewish war on the Palestinian people that now begins to mirror the Nazi campaign against Jewish people in Europe leading to the horror of the holocaust.

This led me to Thomas Hübl’s book, Healing Collective Trauma (2023), which explores how trauma and its symptoms in the individual can be mapped onto collective trauma in the wider social system. Excerpts from his book inform this blog post. Hübl suggests that trauma is not something that happened to us, but something that lives inside us, lurking in our unconscious, in muscle memory and our nervous system. He draws on insights about the mysterious polyvagal nerve system, mapped by the work of Stephen Borges, which is central to the mind-body complex.

Polyvagal Mind-Body Complex

The vagus nerve (tenth cranial nerve) is a system of paired nerves that administrates the parasympathetic nervous systems control of the heart, lungs, digestive tract, and other autonomic systems. The central vagal complex (VVC), sometimes referred to as the ‘social nervous system’ is the first part of this system that is engaged when we experience stress or any kind of environmental or psychological threat, whether real or imagined.  As soon as it is activated, we seek to reestablish a sense of safety, certainty and connection through ‘tend and befriend’ behaviours with those around us. It operates on three dimensions: the ventral vagal complex that promotes engagement and calm states; the sympathetic nervous system engaged in flight or fight responses; and the dorsal vagal that triggers hypoarousal—freeze or immobilising responses (frozen with fear).

It is for this reason that from the earliest stages of development, including in the womb, humans require safe, stable, attuned, connected relationships that are nurturing. This includes attunement via the parental-child relationship to map the tenth cranial nerve (polyvagal), which regulates so much of the body’s autonomous nervous system.

Trauma healing that takes account of the polyvagal system emphasises the importance of sensory grounding—improved embodiment awareness through directed mindfulness of the senses, recalibrating the body’s biological responses to stress, aiding in the restoration of a calm physiological state—overcoming survival patterns of dissociation, hyper vigilance, hyper-arousal, mind-body splitting, and therefore allowing greater mind-body integration and coherence in our lives, through both intrapersonal attunement and interpersonal attunement.

Collective Trauma

Hübl further explores the idea that just as what is suppressed by individual trauma in the unconscious as our ‘shadow’ that expresses itself in projection and unhealthy ways of coping, it is also mirrored in the wider society.

What is suppressed in social trauma (wars, racism, inequality, dispossession, epistemic violation) becomes ‘shadow’ culture, a ‘dark lake’.

Might this be the energy source of the current rise of right-wing populism and rage-filled social media and related conspiracy theories that has gripped so many people in our so-called modern, educated, societies? The rising of the dark shadow as the fatal legacy of human hubris?

As we become more and more familiar with the framework of ecology; of complex systems of interrelationships, which define the way life on Planet Earth works—from the microscopic world of molecules and subatomic particles to the macroscopic world of climate change and cosmological forces—we are coming to understand the fractal nature of our world: the replication of self-similar patterns across vast scales, and the way the outer mirrors the inner, reminding us of the old adage: as above so below.

And this brings us face-to-face with the realisation that our modern culture is an expression of collective trauma, normalised into our knowledge system and institutional structures, which are characterised by dissociation, dis-embodiment, dualistic splitting off (mind/body; cognition/emotion; masculine/feminine; sacred/secular) that denies and inhibits wholistic integration—the crisis of silo-thinking that paralyses government policy solutions and action in a world of increasing complexity. While the dark forces of our cultural shadow gain ever more energy, threatening increasing disorder. What some have called the new age of Dark Enlightenment.

From his own extensive work in healing collective trauma, Hübl concludes that trauma injures not just relation, but also perception. Such misapprehensions and misperceptions become culturally normative as cultural agreements about ‘reality’, as we see in the spread of a mechanistic view of reality that flowed from the European Scientific Revolution, and the application of its ideas into the world of technological innovations across energy, communication, transport, bio-engineering, food chemistry, plastics, warfare, agriculture and fisheries—in search of our human comfort, convenience and control over our world.

The resultant process of hyper individualism and knowledge specialisation (compartmentalisation) has blinded us to the complex ecologies of connection and symbiotic dependency.

At an individual level, we find ourselves caught up in a mind/body split, riven with rising mental illness, unable to access the creative flow state that should be natural to us. We feel strangely ill at ease, never at the right place at the right time, because our vital inner organising principle is unable to receive necessary information and energy from the cosmos in which we are embedded.

At a collective level, we become unable to create a coherent ‘we-space’ or to find ourselves in synch with others to collaborate as ‘one’—leading to cultural disintegration, communal violence and pervasive discord.

Symbiosis

The opposite of cultures of collective trauma are cultures of symbiotic attunement; the sort of natural attunement we see in the flocking of birds in flight. This possibility was imaginatively explored in James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar, and its 2022 sequel, The Way of Water, and the 2025 film yet to be released, Fire and Ash—each exploring the clash between two world views: one of technologies of conquest, where winner takes all drives social norms; and one of technologies of symbiotic relationship, where community wellbeing across all life forms drives social norms.

In the film, Avatar, on Planet Pandora of the Na’vi people, the souls of all their ancestors and the boundless flora and fauna are intimately connected through a vast bioluminescent neural network. This living nervous system is visually depicted in the film as glowing filaments of light. It glows in every moss and lichen, every leaf and stem and seed. Its tendrils and fibers run radiant through the roots of trees and emerge from the crowns of heads, culminating at the tips of the long braids worn by the Pandorean people. When the Na’vi connect with one another or with their animals, they can feel the other from within. They no longer need speech or gestures to communicate with one to whom they are linked. Through this same neural web, they can connect to their ancestors and bridge time.

Much of the lore that underpins the vision of the Na’vi people draws its inspiration from surviving Indigenous knowledge systems, like those of Australia’s First Nations peoples, encoded in songlines and ceremonies and deep respect for the sacred LAW of ancestral creation beings (past and continually present)—the deep eco-spiritual truths of how the world of Planet Earth actually works as a living, symbiotic system. And as these cultures warn—disobeying this LAW brings consequences.

As those of us familiar with Asian mind-body knowledges encoded in meditation, tai-chi, martial arts, TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) and yoga have learned, everything includes chi (energy), and even in the material realm the gross body isn’t simply mechanical. The intricate plexus of the human nervous system is a corporal extension of the subtle body matrix; its fractal reticulations—self similar and recursive—are a complex natural structure for the flow of awareness.

Our human nervous system is profoundly alive, interdependent, and interconnected. As Hübl suggests, once activated, even our DNA code has the potential for awakening to inner presence, the realisation that we were never separate, as we learn to rewire and strengthen our sense of interconnection, allowing for amplified intelligence and capacities for bridging beyond our body or integrating and utilising it in transcended forms.

We do indeed have a ‘gut response’ to situations, and we do indeed feel things in our heart centre, even though on a physical level, as any heart surgeon will tell you, it might just seem to be a ‘pump’ for the blood. The attunement of our mind-body complex to the wider cosmos is not as extraordinary as mechanistic science would have us believe.

It is extremely common and ordinary for Aboriginal people to experience ‘prescience’, the intuitive understanding that something important has happened impacting family members far away. Many, even among we modern people, experience this in dream experiences.

The AI Story

As we witness the current global interest in the potential of AI and is evolution into AGI, replicating and even surpassing human intelligence, Michael Gerlich, suggests we may be inadvertently sabotaging human capacity for creative and analytical thinking, in much the same way that deliberatively addictive social media has undermined our human capacity for sustained attention. By being served information rather than acquiring that knowledge through cognitive effort, he suggests that the ability to critically analyse the meaning, impact, ethics and accuracy of what you have learned is easily neglected in the wake of what appears to be a quick and perfect answer.

“To be critical of AI is difficult – you have to be disciplined. It is very challenging not to offload your critical thinking to these machines,”

Meanwhile Sternberg concludes “Generative AI is replicative. It can recombine and re-sort ideas, but it is not clear that it will generate the kinds of paradigm-breaking ideas the world needs to solve the serious problems that confront it, such as global climate change, pollution, violence, increasing income disparities, and creeping autocracy.” As Sternberg warns, we need to stop asking what AI can do for us and start asking what it is doing to us.

In the hubris of our endless search for materialist Progress and Prosperity through technological innovation, while remaining captive to the extractivist logic of global capitalism and scientific materialism, we fool ourselves that it can be a force for good, when history is already telling us what it is most likely to be used for.

What are the tech oligarchs really up to? What is their vision as they strive to turn AI into AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) driving their quest for control, their embrace of hyper-individualist libertarianism and destruction of the state?

In the name of profit maximisation and productivity, we see them developing robotic infrastructures, which can autonomously extract resources, manufacture products, maintain supply chains, manage financial portfolios, and optimise corporate profits far more efficiently than human labour ever could.

What is the end game? Adam Becker suggests it is a quasi-religious quest, remnant of 20^th century apocalyptic Christian movements, with AGI playing the role of the deity and space a substitute for paradise, The tech oligarchs are confident that their godhead will arrive and deliver them to ‘paradise’. This offers them moral absolution for their actions and gives them a sense of meaning and purpose, denied to them from their already achieved global wealth and influence; but where AGI will open up new frontiers for conquest in space, their minds uploaded into AGI eternity—death defeated.

Can this megalomanic tendency be revealed in Palantir’s strategy to become an AI-based government, able to control all of us through seamless integration of our personal data on one platform as we watch attempts to capture government data sets about individuals in the US? Already alert to the surveillance capability of AI systems, highlighted in Zuboff’s book, ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, and evident in China’s social credit system, we have witnessed Israel’s use of it for targeted killings in their war on the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank and other protest groups, deemed to be a threat to Israel’s dominance in Lebanon and Syria.

Shadow Culture—Challenge of Integration

Is Trumpism and the Dark Web of criminality, violent pornography and drug addiction showing us the hidden ‘face’ of our collective shadow, accumulated through the culture and structures of modernity/coloniality: the relentless war on nature in the name of human material progress, combined with the relentless war on the knowledge systems of non-Western cultures, via the hubris of Western cultural superiority expressed first in colonisation, and then through global capitalism?

How has the accompanying spiralling and intensifying physical, cultural and psychological violence underpinned our alienation and separation from our family kinship with the natural world, and one another?

Is the rising global chaos of Trumpism a way that the cosmos is calling on us to integrate our shadow, or face destruction? Combined with the increasing chaos of climate change on patterns of human habitation, is it urging us to take the paradigm shift from modernity/coloniality celebrated in the idea of ‘Western’ techno-rational civilisation and its dream of Progress and Prosperity, to a bio-poetic enlivenment worldview of symbiotic participation attuned to the underlying laws of how life on planet Earth actually sustains itself, as myriad fractal patterns of relationality?

How are these forces playing our in our personal lives and the society around us?

Individual Trauma

We are more and more aware of the impact of traumatic events on individuals—whether as a result of difficult childhood parenting experiences, separation from loved ones, being caught up in wars and other forms of inter-community violence, responding to violence resulting from road accidents or other civil disturbances.

We have become familiar with PTSD – post traumatic stress disorder; acute anxiety and depression, uncontrollable flashbacks to traumatic events, intrusive thoughts, hyper-vigilance and arousal, defensive behaviour. It is a feature of the life of the returning soldier, the frontline workers in police and ambulance services, the survivors of life-threatening events, including displacement through different forms of extreme violence.

As a species, we human beings are highly vulnerable because of our high levels of dependency in early childhood, but continuing on into adolescence in the wiring of our mind-body complex, including our nervous system and cognitive development. And because we are essentially social ‘animals’ we are vulnerable to social exclusion and marginalisation on the basis of our physical characteristics and mental capacities, in the development of our sense of ‘self’ identity.

Adverse childhood experiences impact on our ability to develop into healthy, adjusted and resilient adults. Where we don’t experience a sense of safety and love in our relationship with our most significant parental figure (attachment theory), we fail to develop the ability to bond and connect with others in life affirming relationships. Such trauma also affects our neurobiology, setting us up for difficulties with emotional self-regulation, leaving us susceptible to stress, expressed as anxiety and depression, and encouraging survival strategies such as closing down and numbing out (dissociate), particularly disconnecting from our inner somatic and emotional experience.  We often hold such trauma in our bodies, which take their toll on us through lack of physical flexibility, being prone to injury, headaches, digestive problems. Or we may alternatively lash out, having problems with behavioural impulse control in our response to situations and people.

We see these patterns all around us in modern society: pervasive and rising anxiety and depression (mental health problems); rising misogyny among young men struggling to make sense of the loss of male privilege in the construction of masculine identity; the seductions of social media hate trolling and conspiracy theories directed against ‘the other’; epigenetic and intergenerational trauma among Australia’s First Nations peoples, expressed in high suicide rates, substance abuse, lateral violence within communities and high rates of criminal incarceration, especially among youth.

We ask why ‘closing the gap’ targets keep alluding us, without asking about the fundamental ontological-epistemological conflict that lies at the heart of this ‘gap’ between the goals of the modernity-progress complex (of exploitive material consumption) and Australia’s proud inheritance of the ‘oldest continuous living culture in the world’ (of bio-regional kinship with all of nature).

The dark shadow of our national foundation story stares us in the face, but most of us cannot bear to look.

Integration

A Personal Journey through the Shadow

This trauma-informed way of looking at things is personal for me. It mirrors my own life journey, which I wrote about in my book, ‘Call of the Dakini’ (2022); my own struggle for spiritual embodiment that maps against the trauma perspective of dissociation and intellectualisation that can be interrupted and healed, opening up a spiritual journey to greater inner awareness, freedom and compassion that has allowed me an expanding sense of interbeing with the world.

Within the Buddhist tradition that I have followed the ‘dakini’ is a feminine symbol of dynamic awareness known as the ‘great disruptor’. Iconographically ‘she’ is shown as a dancing female form with her right heel tucked up against her vulva. In a ‘secret’ wrathful form, she is shown dancing on the cosmic cervix of the world. And yet ‘she’ is utterly beyond gender, a form of awareness available to men and women alike. In ‘her’ outer form ‘she’ is associated with the elements, with the lifeforce of creation, commonly known in Asian traditions as ‘chi’, and in the Tibetan tradition as lung-ta.

My own personal therapeutic/spiritual journey is a mirror for the wider collective journey we are all being called to make, together as part of our Earth family.

What I personally experienced as the call of the Dakini (the spiritual disruptor), which finally shattered my habitual coping patterns of dissociation, physical holding, and my mind/body split through intellectualisation, came through my encounter with cervical cancer, simultaneously combined with abandonment by my intimate life partner.

I caught the cancer early, but when I sat with my bleeding body to ask it what it was trying to tell me, the answer was strangely clear. ‘The cells in your body at the entrance to your womb will turn cancerous if you do not give birth to your inner embodied feminine energies that you have buried beneath the shell of your intellectualising mind.’

I drew strength from the flesh of Earth, making ceramic fertility sculptures in my neighbour’s studio, which I consigned to the alchemy of fire in the kiln. Many vivid dreams followed and I learned to keep a dream journal, and to go back into the dream and ask its different aspects what it was trying to tell me. The answer was always the same. ‘We want you to learn to dance’, which I increasingly realised meant to learn how to dance with life, to live in flow, embracing impermanence and ambiguity. To let go of the impulse for control and certainty; to recover a poetic sensibility in my engagement with life, in its many aspects.

And it was at this time of great disruption that I met my Buddhist teacher, as the guide for whom I had been searching to help me on what had become increasingly clear was a spiritual rather than an intellectual journey. I was fortunate as my teacher was of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, which combines a highly rational philosophical tradition of contemplative analysis with a richly symbolic world of experiential tantric practices and the direct ‘cutting through’ methods of meditative awareness.

At this time in my life, I was also studying for a MA in Science and Technology Studies, following my undergraduate studies in sociology. This field of study took me into the history of scientific thought in my culture and exposed me to the feminist critique of its masculine ‘gaze’, emphasised in the rational materialism of scientific methods and their determination to wrest nature’s ‘secrets’ from her womb. The radical shift in viewing the cosmos as a vast mathematical machine, over which ‘man’, made in God’s image, could bend nature to ‘his’ will.

This insight set me, in turn, on an alternative journey to understand the world of symbolic language through Joseph Campbell’s comparative study of world mythology and symbols.

This has been a lifetime’s journey. It has provided me with a mirror for understanding what the wider social collective is now undergoing. The descent into rage-filled tribalism that defines US Trumpism (being reflected and amplified internationally), combined with the almost manic ambitions of techno-oligarchic capitalism.

We can understand this growing cultural crisis through the insights of trauma-informed ways of understanding individual and collective trauma in modern society.

Presencing

Hübl coins the term presencing to capture the idea of being fully present to our full potential both as individuals and as collectives—human societies in embodied symbiotic relationship with our world. Presence is the ability to create an integrated state of being in our lives. An integrated person is therefore flexible, adaptive, coherent, energised (full of vitality) and stable in terms of leading to a solid set of interactions that support their own unfolding in adaptive ways.

Integrated presence allows us to extend the space of presence to another, allowing it to be mirrored, fostered and honoured. As Hübl says, such presence is the most sacred and essential substance we can bring, the prima materia for integration to flow.

It points to the Aboriginal practice of dadirri—deep inner listening and quiet still awareness, which Elders regard as the greatest gift they can give to modern Australians. The ability to listen to Country, the whispering ‘silent’ voice of the creation Ancestors who remind us of the fundamental LAW that governs life on Earth.

In a recent conversation with Wadi Wadi Elder, Dr Barbara Nicholson, I was reminded that this deep inner listening is about listening to this ‘silence’, free of the endless chatter that frequently occupies our minds, even when we cast aside our plugged in earphones to technology’s distractions.

In common with the teachings and practices I have received through my own Buddhist journey in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition, Hübl asserts that through various presencing practices, we can learn how to raise our vibration, elevating our emotional and mental capacities and delivering more space and resilience, which enhances positive feelings such as love and joy, deepening and expanding intersubjective space through mutual presence and witness.

This is the task of integration; to be able to fully live the truth of the spiritual teachings we have received and embody them in all aspects of our lives and ways of ‘making sense of things’. Such integration delivers coherence, which reduces separation and increases the experience of inter-being with the world around us so that we feel and we sense and understand more and more.

Absencing

Sadly, spiritual bypassing trauma is not possible.

Instead the shadow must be integrated. The stored poison, the energetic residue of cultural trauma and multigenerational suffering has to be acknowledged and felt, to be lived in an embodied way, not just cognitively. Just as in spiritual practice, there is a profound difference between intellectual understanding and felt realisation.

Mere intellectual understanding, so celebrated in our education system, is too easily linked to habits of dissociation and numbness, which is part of the collective post-traumatic symptomology that characterises the modernity/coloniality worldview. Its collective capacity to look the other way.

Our collective shadow prevents integration and promotes dis-integration. Its symptoms surface in multivalent forms across human endeavour, feeding disconnection, dissociation, apathy and malaise, and stimulating antisocial behaviour in leaders, corporations and institutions.

It is manifesting as negative feedback loops of stagnation, systemic breakdown and cultural collapse.

We cannot continue with our cultural habit of absencing: turning backwards towards an imagined past shaped by collective cultural agreement based on trauma (to make great again). This is a freeze reaction – freezing the heart, mind and will (ignorance, hate and fear).

Absencing, as opposed to presencing, has us looking away, dissociating, desensing, our closed minds stuck in clinging to the idea of ‘one truth’ or ideology, an ‘us’ versus ‘them’, where all the world arises as our enemy (a hell realm). The path of absencing is denial, entrenching and holding on. This is what is driving the ‘make great again’ stories of ethno-nationalism infecting our world disorder.

A Pathway Through the Debris of Modernity/Coloniality

As Hübl reminds us, we find ourselves at a profound moment in history, standing at an inscrutable edge – whether on the brink of destruction or the cusp of unprecedented change.

We cannot make this change through a dialogue of ‘facts’  and clever ‘memes’. We must ‘feel’ the deeper reality of our time in order to know the crucible it presents. We must take the path of integration.

In the painful mirror of Trumpism and the hubris of the tech-oligarchs, we are being forced to confront our shadow, and make the paradigm shift to an ENLIVENMENT worldview, or face unimagined horrors.