SongLines of The Dreamtime

kdjh and withinthevacuum joins SatoriD around the frog pond and shares about Bruce Chatwin’s book Song Lines that Terence McKenna mentions in this lecture:

"So here’s a story that relates to this that it is in Bruce Chatwin’s book Song Lines. There are these things called song lines, which cross Australia and they can be thousands of miles long. If you’re a shaman and one of these things crosses your territory, then you are the keeper of the song, of that part of the line. You must learn and keep this song. There are a hundred and thirty-seven aboriginal languages in Australia, so these people did the following thing. They went to the place near one end of the song line and they recorded a shaman singing his song of that place. Then they went two thousand miles to another part of the same song line and they found the song keeper of that place and they played the guys song for him. It was in a language he didn’t speak and he had never been away from his own home – he had never been to this place. So he listened to the song and after a while, he began to sing with it. Not the words but the melody and he sang with it the way you could sing with green sleeves if you didn’t know the words but you knew the melody. Then after it was over he said, the man has sang this song. His place is a ‘Beaut’ with three mountains and eucalyptus filling the valley and a red rock like a lizard over here.

So then they tried to analyze, what is happening here? Is this telepathy? Is it magic? What is it? I think the key to understanding it lies in…I’ve recently seen, you can buy for about six hundred dollars a piece of software where you glue electrodes to your head and sit down in front of your computer and you see an undulating landscape of neuro readouts that look, lo and behold, like mountains, valleys, escarpments. It’s like visit to Utah. I am convinced that what’s happening is that when the shaman listens to the first shaman’s song, he does not process the sound the way we do. He..