Chapter Two: Relational Coexistence: identities present, past, future

Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Chapter Two: Relational Coexistence: identities present, past, future. Catherine Koerner https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6979-1133 https://catherinekoerner.academia.edu/research#book Abstract This chapter continues to draw on life story narratives from my white Australian family to understand oneself and one’s family at the intersections of environment, race, gender, class, history, economics, poverty and colonisation in Australia and globally. The historical narratives locate the context of contemporary Climate action, Black Lives Matter and Me Too people movements. Diverse and macro tapestries imagine the subjectivities of the future in relational coexistence with Indigenous sovereignties. I seek a more profound understanding of the identity of oneself and the nature of reality: space, time, matter and consciousness. This chapter examines Foucault, Quantum Mechanics, Indigenous Standpoint Theories and Buddhism for plural ways of understanding the self, the nature of reality, and the multiple paths to nonviolent interdependent ways of being in Australia and internationally. The chapter engages with historical contexts, social relations of power, colonisation, and anti-colonialism and the theories underpinning such identities' development. It outlines the social constructions of social identities, tearing out the matrix of power relations, especially in the context of the scientific approach, often used to negate qualitative methods of inquiry to reduce legitimate authoritative research into merely the physical science, evidenced today by the demolition of arts and humanities vis-àvis technological science in universities of neo-liberal nations such as Australia. The chapter proposes a contemporary understanding of ourselves, space and time. Introduction I write this book to draw together my intersectional research and theorising since I graduated from undergrad in the early 1990s. To publish Sociological research completed in 2001 on Reconciliation in Australia after the ten years of formal Federally-led Reconciliation ended. I also want to write about the Black Lives Matter movement globally, especially post-colonising 1 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Australian history. The very weekend that the Black Lives Matter march in Melbourne in July 2020, I received a group family email from a patrilineal cousin that contained a family photo of a late 1800s gold mine expedition in Coolgardie, WA, led by my great grandfather. In it are four Indigenous men sitting at their master's feet—the feet of my great-grandfather. I found the country and the language centre serving the First Nation men online and then contacted the centre to see if the photo was interesting. The language centre was interested indeed, and I emailed them an electronic copy of the expedition photo for their digital library. The group are currently going through Native Title claim rigmarole, and they were unaware there had been this prospecting party through their country. The photo thus provides hard evidence recognised in their coloniser's legal system. In subsequent email correspondence, my cousins and I worked out our ancestry back as far as we could take it (Koerner, 2021a; 2021b). I reflected on the interconnectedness between those in Australia, the First Nations people's history of dispossession, and the global Black Lives Matter movement. Current debates about history and public monuments, Australia's post-colonising democracy, and the impact on production and chains of supply disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic: augre the titanic shaking of our patriarchal white capitalist chains of economy and possession. Thinking about my family legacy and disproportionate flows of privilege, I was reading up on the ancient history of my paternal grandmother’s family roots from Lincolnshire and the Orkney Islands, which inevitably led me to read about the Celts and Vikings and the history of the British Archipelago Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic Western archaeological story. Further, the human civilisation developments by Indigenous peoples on the land now called Australia, where human civilisation and agricultural societies began in ancient history, still need to be mentioned in the northern hemisphere gaze fixed on Europe. These three influential moments permeate my thoughts. I need to write about the present to make sense of Black Lives Matter and our contemporary debates about race, including Australia's trajectory of reconciliation. In this section, I will next discuss how time exists according to modern physics to show its existence as merely said ‘when’ to be. Given the relational quality of time, I will explain how I will nominate 'present', 'past', and 'future' for this book. I will also need to discuss modern physics understanding of subjectivity, the 'knower'. Since the Industrial 2 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Revolution and subsequent colonial moments that saw these people that I call my ancestors leave their homeland, global hunger for gold was feverish, enabling land grabs, genocide and environmental degradation. At the same time, the use of fossil fuels led to the current climate change/inaction crisis, which leaves me to wonder about our future. Thus, the structure of this book will cover the three orientations of time: present, past, and future. Chapter 3 addresses present public policy debates concerning climate change, reconciliation, treaty, Black Lives Matter, and the social, political and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. I will then turn to our past. I will use my family as a case study to understand white race privilege, patriarchy, and gender critically. I will do this in the context of global migrations and societal revolutions, ancient and modern, and consider how incommensurable Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies are. I will use these diverse and macro tapestries to imagine the subjectivities of the future in relational coexistence with Indigenous sovereignty. The nature of reality: space, time, matter, consciousness. This section will use Foucault, Quantum Mechanics and Indigenous sovereignties to introduce new ways of understanding the nature of reality and the many paths to nonviolent interdependent ways of being in Australia and other settler colonial states. I am writing this as a contemplation on social identities in the present. Of course, to do this in-depth, one has to consider the present, past, and future tenses simultaneously. It entails engaging with historical contexts, social relations of power, colonisation and anti-colonialism, and the theories underpinning such identities' development. I will outline the social constructions of social identities, tearing out the matrix of power relations, especially in the context of scientific theory, often used to negate qualitative methods of inquiry to reduce legitimate authoritative research into merely the physical sciences. The greatest revolution in so-called Western science that of Quantum Mechanics 20 years ago let in a glimmer of light that has cracked the foundational assumptions of scientific theory concerning the dynamic relationship between the known, knowing and the knower. Active knowers have long critiqued these assumptions using critical mindsets from minority social locations, including women and Indigenous peoples. However, white patriarchal scientists doggedly ignore other epistemologies. 3 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State The Quantum Mechanics findings are an ontological shock therapy (Wallace 2018) to closelyheld incorrect assumptions about the nature of reality. The premises enabled its supporters' minds to abide by the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the extinction of 40 % of species in the past 150 years of modernity, and the subjugation of women. Quantum Mechanics' implications reveal a dynamic, interrelated multi-universe reflective of the co-existing realities of Indigenous peoples and other ways of knowing, including, for example, Buddhist perspectives. I will draw upon the ancient and classical findings on the nature of reality known by Indigenous and Buddhist philosophers, scholars, and contemplatives to understand many paths to deconstructing and reconstructing interdependent nonviolent subjectivities, including the planet, land/waters/skies environment. Throughout this book, I must locate my social identity from within the skin on the ground of Indigenous relations, as Nicoll (2001, 2006, says. I emerge Fourth-generation white Australian of Scotland (Orkney Islands), Irish and German migrant ancestors, woman, queer, mixed class, cousin, niece, sister, aunt, rural, Buddhist, disabled, and post-graduate education. I grew up in remote, rural and urban centres in QLD, NT, SA and Vic. I also live in Indonesia, Nepal and India. An itinerate life is the result of 40 years of neo-liberal economic and public policy introduced in Australia by the Hawke/Keating Labor Government. It resulted in increased housing costs and job insecurity through fixed-term contracts and casualisation of the workforce with the stagnation of wages and outsourcing of community-based, public and academic work to which I chose to contribute my career. While not negating the benefits of scientific theory, teachers present the story of science as if from no perspective. Galileo commenced his adult life as a contemplative in search of a Christian God. His father refused to pay his keep to remain in a meditative inquiry of the nature of reality. He looked outward at the universe as God saw it - from God's perspective, changing how emerging European states and their conquest of colonies viewed the world. The earth circles the sun, not the other way around. The moon and the sun are not the same distance from the globe despite their appearance to the naked eye, and some moons circle Jupiter. The universe began to unfold rapidly before radical empirical inquiry. For what were they looking? While male scientists after white male scientists searched for the 'God's Eye View' of his creation. Thus, for 4 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State the past 400 years of scientific inquiry, investigators frame their objects of knowledge through patriarchal white epistemological assumptions that the world and its inhabitants as the researcher view through the telescope of Christian beliefs regarding God, man (literally) and his world. Among the implications of this approach are that women, children, working classes, those who slowly, over time, became raced, the non-human species, landscapes and the planet, all-natural resources the scientists see as passive static objects revealed as they are without an observer. What was observed and corroborated by other European male scientists was that the world God created just as it is. So, it was the basis of scientific investigation that a distant, separate creator God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (though no Muslim scientists paid attention at this point despite a brilliant history) was the cause of the world and its inhabitants. The mind and consciousness of humans and animals are not possible in this framework. Therefore, white patriarchal male scientists construct the world and accordingly frame science in a particular way. Men held dominion over women, children, fauna, and flora. I will put this process in more detail. However, there is no space in this book for a comprehensive discussion. I will later show why it is integral to the formation of oppressive identities and through critique enabled by classical Indian scholars' methodology of the emptiness of persons and emptiness of phenomena. I propose an ontologic relationship with Indigenous sovereignty, especially contemporary settler/invader states such as Australia, USA, Canada, and NZ, to dethread oppressive identity formation and the limitations of non-oppressive interdependent relations. This section draws upon Buddhist scholar, translator (Tibetan/English) and contemplative Dr Alan Wallace. Founder and President of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies and Founder of the Centre for Contemplative Research trained in physics to develop Western science ideas (Wallace, 2019, 2020, 2021). To gain a broad conceptual understanding of the belief systems underpinning science, these assumptions, also critiqued by feminist and Indigenous scholars globally, left unchallenged, have unimaginable consequences of genocide, extinction of species and degraded water, air and landscapes. I will demonstrate through developments in science the result of oppressive patriarchal white capitalist colonialism and the position of the knower (or subject), knowing (or experience), and the object of knowledge, that is, what is known. These ideas play out in the Australian global context of developing modern 5 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State nation-states, Liberalism and its projection of neoliberalism that dominates Australian and international thinking today. Resulting in extremism of groups who identify as the left or right side of politics, often manifesting as race wars (Koerner and Pillay, 2019), now playing out as the Black Lives Matter(BLM) movement (Koerner, 2021). The beginning of the so-called scientific investigation and knowledge production began with questions posed on the material world by white men. Thus, the body of knowledge that developed from that is physical. It started with physics, and the physical laws of nature were initially assumed to be created by God, a Christian God. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) spurned the Christian ideology that underpinned and controlled the European imaginary. Instead, he purported atheism, materialism and communism. He developed a heretical presentation of God as a human creation projected as a father figure over the universe. Works such as The Essence of Christianity (1841), profane at the time, was of substantial effect to the burgeoning intellectual and revolutionary forces such as Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Ricard Wagner (Wallace, 2018, pp.151-52). Like Liberalism, Western ideals of communism colonise the world. Materialism and atheism were foundational to scientific thinking and to science itself. Through the past four hundred years of scientific development, scientists incrementally decided conclusively that material encounters of matter and energy demonstrate the behaviour of biological systems. Simultaneously, the discourse above essentialises the agency to just physical processes of the brain, which is to say, of the body. This scientific discipline premise of the nature of consciousness and free will ultimately reduces spirituality to psychology and psychology to biology, and biology is the study of matter. Thereby, matter is the whole of reality. The physical sciences market themselves to solve all human identity, mind and consciousness (Wallace, 2021, Vajra Essence Part 2). Many progressive scientists, writers and thinkers succumb to the erroneous materialist assertion that neural configurations fire our consciousness. This is a categorical error – in fact, quite the reverse. Consciousness fires neural correlates. Wallace (2021) argues that the parity between the historical construction of science and the contemporary scientific narrative is no coincidence. The early scientists fought through a maelstrom of religious dogmatism and feared the branding as a heretic. The witch-hunting era of Western Europe and North America was from approximately the 1400s to 1700s inclusive; the 6 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State climax of trials during 1560-1630 shared the birth of modern science. During that period of public psychosis over the fear of anything not explained as coming from an Abrahamic (whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim), the misogyny was undeniable as Christian men trialled and killed 40-000 to 100,000 people, 75%-85% of whom women were condemned by men as to collude or be possessed by Satan. The witch trials silenced women. The notorious witch trials condemned any woman thought to have supernatural capabilities as a witch. Most scientists were theologians, and they sought a way forward to create public intellectual space to grow science that would not condemn them in heresy. Thus, a newly formed Royal Society of Scientists enlisted Thomas Sprat to conjure a way forward. He placated his audience that Christianity was now foundational to Europe, safe from heathens so that the Devil could pose no threat. He purported that any spiritual entity, including spirits, demons, and fairies, is not real but merely illusory. He claimed conclusive proof of their nonexistence in nature through scientific experiments. Sprat failed to outline such experiments (Thomas Sprat (1667/1959). The History of the Royal Society of London, J.I. Cape and H. W. Jones, eds. London: Routledge, pp.339-41). Without the notion of a Creator of the universe in the picture of how the observable world exists, Thomas Huxley strongly negated the question of consciousness on his world tour to promote science in education from a materialist standpoint – that only matter exists (Koerner, 2019). This approach doomed consciousness from the picture to a function of the brain. Also, it increased the pressure of colonial acquisition in Australia and elsewhere because the spirituality of all life in Indigenous worldviews was deemed pre-scientific. However, from the cutting edge of empirical investigation in Quantum physics, Andre Linde observes: The standard assumption is that consciousness, just like space-time before the invention of general relativity, plays a secondary, subservient role, not merely a function of matter and a tool for describing the genuinely existing material world. But let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with physical matter but with perceptions (Linde, pp45-51) Lindt continues to argue that: 7 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State [T]his model of the material world is so successful that soon we forget our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are nothing but a valuable tool for the description of matter. We are substituting the reality of our feelings by the successfully working theory of an independently existing world. And the theory is so successful that we almost never think about its possible limitations. While not without 'I – it' relationships regarding women and caste, Classical India places consciousness as primary and in inter-relation with all living creatures in the environment. The Abrahamic religions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim), whose ideologies underpin Western scientific thought, place women and children subservient to men, animals, and the environment as resources for human enjoyment and consumption in a passive role as an object an 'I-it' relationship (Buber, M. 1923). This particular I-it relationship places man (males) as the subject, that is, as the knower, with all that is not the subject (male) being passive objects (women, children, animals, lands/waters/skies and environment. The implications of this have been catastrophic, evidenced in their extremes through genocide and climate change. Further, for 120,000 years, Indigenous knowledge developed in Australia. These two ways of knowing provide 'ontological shocks' to Western assumptions not only of their superiority but also that the dominant line of research has got it so profoundly wrong. They misunderstand the study findings of the nature of reality studied as independent of a (male) knower and framed as independent of the framework of perceptions of the (white male) knower. The aforementioned is critical to social identity formation and coexistence. Suppose one forgets the action of viewing an object, generating information as knowledge depends on the framework of perceptions of that knower. The experience of viewing, by a viewer and thus all knowledge production, is within this triad – the viewer – viewing - viewed (or knower-knowing-known). If one removes one of this triad, the others disappear entirely and are not findable. Any knowledge claims depend on the triad's relationships and are not inherently existent, separate from this process of interdependence. Knowledge production itself is the empirical evidence of consciousness. The act of knowing is dependent on consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no knowing and no object to be known. 8 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State This logic means that consciousness is apriori in the epistemology and ontology of Classical Indian, both Vedic and Buddhist, as it is for Indigenous knowledge's past and present. The Eurocentric lens looked outward to examine mindless, passive objects, separate and independent from themselves (the white patriarchal observer), never considering sentient things of their study as subjects in their own right. Conscious beings are looking back. The debates that survive Classical India show many philosophical schools, perhaps most brilliantly analysed and countered into a novel and profound understanding of existence. Using the arguments of the two schools standing at the extremes, the Sautrantika Madhyamika asserts that external phenomenon conventionally exists, and the Yogacara Madhyamika asserts that external phenomenon does not exist conventionally. As the base text for this section, I will use Classical Tibetan scholar Je Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelugpa school of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism, renowned as an erudite scholar and master contemplative non-sectarian. I am drawing on this well-known source to provide another pathway to understanding modern subjectivities: the person's identity, the manner of its existence, and the nature of matter. I intend to use the Classical logic of the emptiness of persons and emptiness of phenomenon, or matter, to help understand the interdependence of all things. Construct non-oppressive subjectivities interdependent, including non-human beings and the environment of plants and lands/waters/skies in the context of modern settler-colonial societies, such as Australia. The Middle Length Lam Rim [path] lays out the trajectory of consciousness from unknowing to knowing, ignorance to the enlightened mind. Je Tsongkhapa counters debates of materialism and nihilism. Ignorance is the opposite of knowledge. This line of argument refers to a specific form of knowledge: the wisdom of knowing the suchness of selflessness. This analysis trajectory transcends debates on the social construction of race and identity politics that fall into the extremes of nihilism (nonexistence/materialism) or externalism (permanence). The novelty of this approach derives from Nagarjuna. Je Tsongkhapa identifies phenomena that exist and those that do not. Due to ignorance, one posits phenomena that do not exist to exist. Misapprehension of reality firstly superimposes an identity on the subject of a self. Secondly, external phenomena such as the body (and therefore all material phenomena) follow. Thus, the knower superimposes an inherently existent self upon themselves and onto external phenomena, such as the body and all other matter, their inherent existence, independent of any relational causes. This school, 9 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State called the 'Middle Way', refers to these two forms of misapprehension as ignorance or unknowing, conceptually designated (Tsongkhapa, p.242). The so-called self is an entity of things that do not depend on inherent existence. Its nonexistence is selflessness. Owing to the delusion of phenomena and persons as inherently existent, the emptiness of self is understood twofold: the selflessness of phenomena and persons. (Commentary on the 'Four Hundred Stanzas' cited in Tsongkhapa, p.243). Not only are the self and identity of phenomena misunderstood, but the result is of significant consequence. Tsongkhapa argues: …you should come to understand the stages of how the mental afflictions arise in dependence upon it. Once the observed object of the thought "I" is apprehended as established by its character, attachment to the self arises. That generates a craving for the self's happiness. However, since there is no independent happiness of the self that does not depend on mine, there is a craving for mine. That obscures its faults, and causes one to see positive qualities in it. Consequently, mine is grasped as something achieving the self's happiness. Due to mental afflictions arising in this manner, actions are committed again and again. Because humans and all sentient beings have this connate ignorance, and the configurations of this ignorance are different for each individual mind, the Buddhist canon is vast in erudition. Still, all approaches emphasise selflessness, a combination of scholarship and contemplation, including meditation. While all mental afflictions, such as anger, hatred, attachment, greed, and desire, cause suffering, the root cause for all mental pains is ignorance of the true nature of reality (Tsongkhapa, p.241). One must meditate upon emptiness to understand ignorance regarding the true nature of reality. Through logic and insight gained in contemplation, one sees that reality is misapprehended to have a genuinely existing self and truly living phenomena independent of causes and contributing conditions. Tsongkhapa argues that mediation on emptiness is the antidote to ignorance. Moreover, you need to identify ignorance to know how to cultivate its antidote. Therefore, it is imperative to locate ignorance (Tsongkhapa, p.241). Through this time-tested empirical approach, the emptiness of actual existence established as independent of causes and contributing conditions is the ultimate nature of both self and 10 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State phenomena. Thus, through ignorance, a permanent separate self merely imputes various bases of designation such as body, mind, or continuity of moments of consciousness. The superimposition of a permanent, unchanging self that never existed upon the basis of designation, such as a body, mind, or moments of consciousness, is the referent object, called self or inherent existence (Tsongkhapa, p.243). This section needs more space to outline all the nuanced positions of divergence and agreement with the vast Hinayana and Mahayana canons, both classical and contemporary. I will refer to general positions of debate regarding the inherent existence of a person as a person and phenomenon. Some schools assert the five aggregates (includes, for example, the five senses such as eye, vision, form an object of vision and so on for ear) and the mind with cognisance and things of cognisance such as feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, are the basis of designation of a self. Furthermore, other schools assert the mind only as the apprehender of all sensory input as the basis for identifying a self. So, these two modes of attributing just an I and the mind-as-thebasis of that I's characteristics. The system of refutation of an innate self that we are exploring here argues that the object of negation is the mere I, as in the thought I that one has of the very person. Tsongkhapa explains that neither the individual aggregates nor the collection posited as the basis of that I's characteristics (Tsongkhapa, 244). This school asserts that the moment the thought of a separate autonomous self is misapprehended as 'I' bifurcates consciousness into that misapprehended as I and that misapprehended as not I/me but mine, such as the body, mind, and whatever one identifies as mine, including parents, relations, culture, environment. The refractory effect is a dualistic subject/object conceptually designated relative reality that obscures reality's original or ultimate nature. This obscuring of the truth of the nature of reality is called ignorance or delusion. As classical Indian scholar Candrakirti argues: Delusion is the ignorance that superimposes a non-existent entity of things. It has the nature of obstructing the view of their inherent existence, and it conceals them. Therefore, this school argues that afflictive ignorance posits inherent existence upon me and all phenomena. Thus, Tsongkhapa argues the imperative to accurately comprehend the nature of reality of the self and phenomena through the realisation of the profound meaning of interdependence, the importance of emptiness appearing as the meaning of dependent arising. 11 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State This is so because that is so. In the context of this argument, delusion is the superimposition of inherent existence on phenomena. This logic comes from Classical Indian scholar Nagarjuna. Tsongkhapa outlines logic based on centuries of classical debate in the monastic universities to demonstrate how desire, attraction, and aversion, or anger, emerge from ignorance caused by the misapprehension of and grasping to the merely labelled I and mine. The deluded mind that misapprehends the inherently existent self then feels desire through attraction to that seen as agreeable. The source of the self's happiness and aversion or anger develops toward that perceived undesirable and unhappiness source. Buddhist literature refers to this as the three poison cognitive afflictions that cause all suffering and obscure the nature of reality that is blissful, peaceful, and empty of the merely labelled and conceptually designated I. Self-grasping is the root of all mental afflictions and all suffering that arise in dependence on ignorance and delusion of the true nature of reality (Tsongkhapa, p.248). To abandon apprehending an inherently existent I and mine that is merely conceptually designated as I and mine through social convention, a path from ignorance to full knowing is laid out through realising the emptiness of the labelled self and other. To do this, one must correctly identify the referent to abandon. Before I elucidate the methods to view the selflessness of persons and the identitylessness of phenomenon proposed by the Prasangika Madhyamika schools, it is necessary to ascertain the reason. As stated earlier, consciousness and the continuum of consciousness are apriori within Buddhist and Indigenous epistemologies. However, the classical Indian debates include those who do not support the continuation of consciousness. Thus, one extreme is nihilism, and the other is that of a permanent, unchanging soul. Atma argued from the Prasangika Madhyamika view as the other extreme of eternalism. The school of Prasangika Madhyamika assert the logic of a middle path, which is subtle in its sophistication but very helpful to the trajectory I wish to take in this book. I want to see if understanding the identity of persons and objects can transform non-Indigenous understanding of Indigenous ways of being and relating and perhaps aid present and future relations of coexistence in Australia. Prasangika Madhyamika attests that the conventional truth of merely labelled self and other (that is, all other phenomena, not only other persons, including one's own body and the external 12 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State environment) exist, but merely in a manner of speaking, as a convention. The relative truth obscures a more profound or ultimate reality that transcends conceptual designation of the categories of existence and nonexistence. In that state, a fluctuation in the equanimity of awareness grasped a sense of I refracts out, causing the birth and rebirth of world systems and sentient beings. Thus, mediation on identifying the referent of the merely conceptually designated I and mine misapprehended inherently existing Self and phenomena. I will return to this argument when I discuss contemporary physics, its implications for relative time and space, and the debates within quantum mechanics and current debates on consciousness. Nevertheless, the vital point to note at this stage of the book is that if one can see the identitylessness of phenomena, then the cause for existence due to ignorance of the true nature of reality is extinguished (Tsongkhapa, p.251). Further, classical eighth-century scholar Santideva argues one can thoroughly establish the emptiness of self. Tsongkhapa extends the analysis to say: …having perceived that it is impossible to realise selflessness and emptiness without seeing that the self as apprehended by the mistaken apprehension does not exist and without seeing that it is empty of that self. The profound meaning of emptiness of inherent existence was settled in the academic tradition and ascertained through meditation. He further instructs that if one does not meditate like this on the meaning of having negated the mistaken object, which is the root of [ignorance]…unless the mind enters the suchness of selflessness and emptiness, one cannot stop the apprehension of a self (Tsongkhapa, pp251-52). The classical approach is first to locate and identify a person's self. One does this by thoroughly investigating all the phenomenon parts designated as a person to locate the person precisely. Then, they collate all the elements into a whole, where one cannot find a person. A person is designated merely by convention. This process slowly negates a continuum of the parts or whole over time, location, and space, i.e. going from here to there. One must establish the object of negation as either one entity or different from it. Since one cannot identify the person anywhere as one dissects the body into smaller and smaller components until only elementary particles remain, one cannot find a person. Apart from these, one cannot find a person. Non-physical phenomena such as thoughts and feelings are not the self. 13 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Further, one finds consciousness in moments of consciousness passing from one aware moment to another, like a series of pulses, allowing memories of previous moments but negating a permanent, unchanging consciousness, which is impossible. Thus, one cannot find the inherently existent permanent, regular self, though it appears to be present. The self that seems to be present by mere convention is a manner of speaking. Finally, by establishing the nonexistence of an inherent self, the existence of mine disappears nowhere to be seen. There can be no mine if there is no I. There can be no mine without a self, and that self is non-existent. If done thoroughly, one finds the I and mine are empty, meaning both are interdependent as conventional truths but not real. Thus, one designates dependence on persons as a basis agreed as valid, thus appearing like an illusion – they seem to be there but are not there (Tsongkhapa, p.260). Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Self This section will now turn its interest to two particular lectures of Foucault that signal a shift in his focus in earlier works from relations of power to ethical agency of the self. Foucault and Indigenous scholars such as Moreton-Robinson foundationally influenced my thinking and previous work on Indigenous/First-Nations relations. I also refer to his work on power relations and critique limitations from an Indigenous standpoint. Power relations between colonising and colonised subjectivities are still my concern, but I am also explicitly interested in these inherited power relations in post-colonising settler relations. That is, I want to see if it is possible to transcend through the binaries. I am not trying to sidestep them but instead bring them onto the path of negotiation because that is where many white Australian subjectivities are, deconstructing and reconstructing a new way of being that accords with reality. The reality of colonisation and the truth of Indigenous sovereignty never ceded, neither of which is inherently existent. Therefore, in that dynamism, non-oppressive forms of being for those uninvited guests to come into a negotiation space per the sovereign laws of Indigenous lore, people and country/waters/space/animals. Foucault gave two lectures at Dartmouth called 'Hermeneutics of the Self', particularly the Western self. He traces back to examples of Pagan development of the self. Examples from the Stoics, such as Seneca, show that the self was developed through a master-disciple relationship with the master as an Elder, giving self-analysis techniques through confession that would 14 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State gradually lead to an autonomous ethical status of the disciple. The focus of self-analysis is speech and actions. With the later development of Christian monasteries, the process changed to one of confession of thoughts to determine the trustworthy source of every thought, each of which could be deceptive, leading away from a focus on God. This process employed verbal confession to the Abbot, with whom the confessing monk takes precepts. As a Spiritual father, the Abbott represents God so that the monk sees the light within himself through confession and mindfulness of every thought. Foucault uses the term 'hermeneutics' to refer to a long history of qualitative interpretive practices that stretch back to ancient Greece and includes modern philosophers such as Nietzsche, not limited to only a modern couching of hermeneutics predominantly Christian since the Reformation when an interpretation of Christian scriptures is deferred to individual readers thus requiring multiple qualitative variations applied to both Christian and literary texts. Buddhism also has a hermeneutics of self and scripture outlined in the previous section of this chapter. That is particularly useful here, and that is known as the 'two truths' referred to earlier, of conventional relative reality and the ultimate reality, which, when understood this way, enables scholar contemplatives on the full path to an enlightened mind that knows reality as it is (ultimate truth) yet can simultaneously live and understand in the context of the conventional relative reality of what we call the ordinary world. It is also possible to apply these hermeneutics to the findings of Quantum Mechanics where, for example, light travels as a light wave. Furthermore, light's smallest element is a particle, called a photon, but light, when measured and according to the laws of physics, cannot be a wave and a particle simultaneously. That is not possible. In his analysis of the historical development of the Western Self, Foucault identifies that the central question has been a positivist search for the 'foundational technologies of the self, but instead, he asks: Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to find a positive self on the positive foundation of the self. Our problem is realising that the self is nothing more than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. The problem is to change those technologies. Moreover, in this case, one of the main problems would be our politics of ourselves nowadays, in the strict sense of the word 15 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State (Foucault, 1993). Moreover, Howiser adds a note to the publication to eliminate those technologies and the sacrifice linked to those technologies. This problem of a politics of ourselves that does not exist in a state of positivity is unfindable. It is nothing other than a historical correlation of the technology of the self, built in a historical context. The white Australian being's Indigenous relations on Sovereign Ground. One of the most sophisticated attempts to deal with the ethics of the self, raised by Foucault above, is Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2014), though not in response to Foucault's work. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos propose a philosophy to guide White Australians in proper and historically informed politics to teach us how to be worthy of appropriate (2014, p.16). They contend that white Australian history thus far is more an effort to protect us from that history, one of the destructions of Indigenous sovereign beings (2014, p.16). While there are variations in Australian history publications, they propose a misinformed general agreement that white Australians are essentially settlers and only accidentally occupiers. Astutely locates the core of resistance to viewing ourselves in other ways aligned with Indigenous standpoints. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos discuss Tony Birch (), who muses that Australia's collective 'we' could progress to make a future substantiated by truth and honesty rather than this present deception. Birch portends that non-Indigenous Australia must reconstruct its location within an Indigenous nation, in addition to preparedness to acquiesce to the rectitude of Indigenous Sovereignty, including respect for Indigenous knowledge systems and the historical landscapes from which they were created (Birch cited in Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2014, p.20). Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos introduce an understanding of the White Australian being as a hypothetical being due to the exigent whiteness at whose centre abides an ontological emptiness or a powerful kenosis or expulsion of the actual probity of self-determination that would, in other respects, define it. They contend that we assembled since first arrival 200 years' prior is a being without sovereignty (2014, p.32). In this context, sovereignty is not in the juridical-politico sense but as 16 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State ontological sovereignty or how one perceives sovereignty as a reality. The probity of selfdetermination as a defining moment in ontology is apriori to the white Australian nation-state. Let us consider this rendering of ontological sovereignty and the hypothetical being' of the white Australian invader. At the same time, the modern nation-states were coming into being around the planet independence on Western colonial aspirations; the arrival of the British Endeavour and accompanying occupiers of the colonies that would become New South Wales (NSW), Tasmania (Tas), Victoria (Vic), South Australia (SA), Queensland (Qld) and the territories: Northern Territory (NT) and Australian Capital Territory (ACT) federated in 1901. The politico-juridic white Australian nation emerged on the assumption of Terra Nullius, or land belonging to no one, which Mabo v's Qld unravelled almost 200 years later – their histories filled with colonial observations of Indigenous beings. From an Indigenous Standpoint Theory, however, First Nations are on a trajectory incommensurable with white Western notions of sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Watson, 2015). Thus, at the same time as meticulously recording observations of Indigenous beings and everywhere signs of 120,000 years or more of occupation, the invaders, in the same breath, narrated unreal discourses of uncivilised hunter-gatherers, savages who require civilising. The warping of the reality of Indigenous sovereignty into Terra Nullius required the emptying out of the hypothetical being Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos's purport. The emptying of selfdetermination has required white Australians to insist that theirs is the correct sovereign being. This white sovereign act results in the false assumption of Australia as a white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Simultaneously, it denies white Australians proper ontological sovereign relations. This line of thinking is interested in something other than building respectful relations or learning from a sophisticated ancient civilisation (Gammage, 2020) that has ascertained an excellent life. A life of flourishing, material, environmental, psychological, spiritual and social eudaimonia; exceptional wellbeing rather than mere survival. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2014) then extend this idea of kenosis, or emptying of being, to create a hypothetical white Australian sovereign being – through a genealogy of the Western subject traced back to Socrates and Plato in ancient Greek beginnings of the Western democratic (for some men and no women or children) political collective. They trace the 17 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State formation of logics of the ontological collective from the Greek polis to the Christian collectives to the French Revolution, creating contemporary forms of relating to each other (p.33). Pertinence to this book is two key ideas Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos elucidate. Firstly, the construction of an entirely new subjectivity as the being of private property ownership, and second, the forced emergence from that conception of the object owned. This subjectivity of the property owner places the ontology of the owner in relationship with an indifferent specific thing owned, which becomes known as nature. For the subject that implicitly or explicitly defines agency through private ownership, a character is essentially defined by the mode of indifference to itself and the subject. Under appropriate conditions [such as the emergence of the technoscientific Liberal capitalist project] this orientation, in turn, gives rise to the colonising drive given that the ultimate aim here is to (re)construct the totality of the world in conformity with the (on)tologic of natures indifference (Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2014, p.35). To come into existence first, the ontology of the self-made Western subject had to empty itself as a self-determining being violent. Self-determination denies the grasping of the owner as self divorces that self from its surroundings, community, landscapes, and life itself. It is a denial of the sanctity of life itself. First, the Christian collectives gathered in a particular God's name, believing that their consciousness was irrelevant. Then, with the French Revolution, De-Cartes severed humanity's head from the body, deposing God and never really solving this wicked problem of how the mind and body interface (Wallace, 2018). The reduction of the ownersubject to materialist nihilism has resulted in an insatiable Western Self embodied in this discussion of the White Australian subject. In the past 200 years of claimed owner-occupier status, the white Australian subject has committed heinous crimes against that object of nature they conceived as indifferent. The industrial techno-scientific liberal capitalist colonial project globally annihilates 40% of species in its era. Indeed, is this evidence enough of its untenability? The period was called the Anthropocene due to our collective irresponsibility in caring for nature and our mother. As unloved and non-loving, the colonial subject hides the depth of one ontological emptiness by engaging in criminal activity the world over. Far from affirming one's ontological sovereignty, the property owner abandons this very sovereignty in the name of 18 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State practising it. This violent nihilism transforms itself into the nihilism of violence (Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2014, p.45). There is no such thing as an indifferent object. Quantum physics reveals this impossibility. Einstein overcame denial and obstruction from scientific fundamentalism, where many of his peers and seniors could not release the foundational premise formed under Newtonian classical physics. He explained that one has to look outside the current paradigm for answers to unsolvable problems. So, this raises further wicked problems. What if the Western Self, as outlined so far, has completely and fundamentally misconstrued itself? What if the asserted self, especially the techno-scientific liberal capitalist property-owning self, has got wrong the science and their interpretation of it? What if the violence of nihilism perpetrated against itself and its mental projection of the owned subject as indifferent nature is proven wrong by its scientific inquiry? What if nature is not indifferent? What if, as Andrea Lindt asks, the posited theory of an independently existent world – that is, nature – is not inherently independent of the observer but arises from and in dependence upon the observer's perception, and this is limited to those perceptions and the knowledge created within perception? To be a perceiver and to perceive, one has to be conscious. So what of consciousness? Who is the conscious being, the knower, the observer, the subject? What is their identity, and what is the manner of its existence? What is the interdependent relationship between the perceived object, the knowledge the perceiver produces about that object and the act of perceiving? Is consciousness the interface that makes this possible? (Wallace, 2021). Further, in an extension of our inquiry into the colonial subject position and the dangerous consequences to its own being a subject and conscious, let us consider the technologies that lay outside the false assumptions caused by an illusory objective self. The technology is available to enhance concentration, and therefore, perception is well documented and evidenced throughout Hinduism, Buddhism and First Nations. These technologies of attention carefully attending to the interdependence of subject and object and, in some cases, the destruction of the subject and the object transcending these conceptual categories are of interest to the discussion from here. It is not illogical that people who successfully occupy a continent filled with a plethora of diverse peoples and languages with intimate knowledge of 19 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State their environs would not have developed this capacity over 120,000 years (since time immemorial) of intricate sophistication of the reality of their being? In the Buddhist context, Buddhagosa outlines exactly and precisely step by step how to develop and sustain concentration with direct perceptions thought to be paranormal, which are frequently demonstrated by sincere practitioners. Like a top mathematician or even an Olympic athlete, these feats are well known but only accomplished by some, only if the cooperating conditions enable them to develop. In both academia and meditation/contemplative settings, I have heard white subjects asserting that the above position idolises and is tokenistic of Indigenous peoples. I argue that not pursuing this further is due to white supremacist thinking that colonist white Australia denies the evidence before them of philosophies and technologies superior to their own. I am not invoking the 'noble savage' other but instead engaging with Buddhists and First Nations as conscious beings whose sustained accumulation of knowledge and practices still outlives all others. I witnessed an email exchange where one asked the other who wanted an Indigenous speaker at a contemplative event. "Do Indigenous Australians even have a philosophy? I don't know if they even have one. These statements make Indigenous Australians into the Noble Savage." Lest we turn into a golden idol a way of success for 120,000 years, let's turn to this question of indigenous sovereignty. The first and continuing occupiers of the land upon which a foreign colonial power designated colonies that federated to fix the entire continent terra nullius gave birth to the entity they named Australia. This ongoing and catastrophically wrong assumption of Australia's First Nations has been critiqued all along by Indigenous philosophers and knowledge holders. Irene Watson outlines in detail how her people were and are looking at you, looking at me. She asks if a future is even possible without Indigenous people. What if First Nations knowledge is the solution to the current economic, biodiversity and climate disasters? Contemporary physics, especially Quantum Physics and Quantum Cosmology, has offered prescient ways to question and understand time. The research findings of modern physicists can facilitate an end to the continuing paucity of expectations of non-Indigenous people toward First 20 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Nation peoples and knowledge, in addition to critical social theories such as Foucault and Indigenous critics. Hawkens and Hertog (2006) and elsewhere Bojowald (2006), as just two examples, outline how knowledge of the physical world championed by science – proceeds from a question framed in a particular worldview. This line of questioning brings the scientist into an inter-relationship with their study as a subject-object. As an observer, the scientist forms a question and makes repeated verifiable observations according to that question. The subject responds to the questions, generating knowledge according to the scientists making this observation. This 400-year-old trajectory since Galleilleo has successfully built up many fields of knowledge, but they are always limited to the observer's view. Observers with different questions make different observations demonstrated by the photon appearing as a wave or a particle but cannot be both simultaneously. It must appear as a wave or particle depending on the measurement form taken. Another example is the capacity of observation through attention training outlined by Wallace, which releases the power of the mind to superrefine attention through sequential developmental stages. Cultures with such traditions have reported the seemingly magical capabilities of accomplished practitioners for thousands of years. However, these capacities are within human capabilities if one devotes all one's time to perfection (Chagme, 2000; Wallace, 2006, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2018). Some of the accomplishments reported in the development of superenhanced perception in one or all sensory perceptions include remote viewing, clairaudience, covering vast distances in a short period, and seemingly walking on liquid or through air, earth or rock. Training can enhance visual perception so that the very atoms can be detailed and counted in intense concentration. When reading The Koori Mail, I noticed an article reporting an exhibition in NSW that compares a microscopic image of moth sperm with a 'Wichetty Grub Dreaming' painting by Jennifer Napaliajarni Lewis of Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu. Scientific denial of such capabilities' retard' our conception of human capacity. Fortunately, the very science used to deny Indigenous knowledge's existence and potential has now overturned the previous disavowal. Even Wallace limits the capacities of cultures other than Indo-Tibetan, saying he thinks the concentration skills achieved by the Vedic and Buddhist traditions need to be more evident in many cultures, 21 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State including First Nations, the USA and Australia. Nevertheless, perhaps the photograph depicted in The Koori Mail reveals comparable achievements in concentration. The knowledge and insights of the cell structures have sharp acuity and accompanying sophistication of understanding and philosophical underpinnings built over 160,000 years. Close attention to life reveals its interdependence and adherence to that knowledge, which creates the ethical foundation required to survive and flourish with exceptional levels of hedonic and eudaimonia fulfilled. Worthy of admiration and emulation. Indeed, modern democracy was stolen directly from the Iroquois Confederacy (See Audre Simpson, 2015, 2016), except that a patriarchal democracy disavowed its matriarchal womb. For a model to remain sufficiently coherent and flexible and appear to a large population, spread over extensive land and waters for an extended period requires profound regard. It must have appealed to most First Nation Australians as having internal logic and fairness; otherwise, it would not have survived. Such political stability and reliability are unknown in European or Asian civilisations, demonstrating ancient imperial and colonial expansionism as a repeated patriarchal behaviour and worldview absent in Indigenous philosophy. There is violence when folk break the customary laws, but notably, there is no acquisition or possession of land or resources. Indigenous ways of being do not have a patriarchal logic, but each sex was accorded responsibilities through the law. The law meticulously manages and deeply personalises every living thing, including the landscape and waters. In Neidje, Cox argues that Indigenous ways embed all aspects of social structure and environmental management in the landscape without a written language. Thus, the wisdom of the people remained in many living minds (Cox in Neidje, 1986, p.63). Every part of the landscape was a memory and teaching. Thus, for more than 100,000 years, each Indigenous person's landscape has been critical to their education and physical and spiritual well-being. Cox posits that this depth of connection and place-based knowledge has locations referred to as 'sacred sites', but he wonders if the European understanding of sacred conveys its meaning. 22 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State All kinds of animals come to you because that means you got a story, and they know your story. That not really bird, but spirit, spirit of these people. They were camping here, and they watching us, to look after us, might be. Good for them and good for you. (Neidje). First people come to us, They started and run our life…quick. They bring drink. First, they should ask about fish, cave, dreaming, But, They make school. Teach. (Neidje, p.20). This teaching from now-deceased Gagaju Elder Bill Neidje presents the quintessence of invader relations with Indigenous people's knowledge and ways of life. Simultaneously, he tells us what happened, what could have been, and what could still be. Koerner and Pillay (2019) ask, upon arriving in another people's country, if it is different from the accepted process to present yourself and request permission to stay. Would you not find out about the languages spoken, seek a lingua franca, and inquire about and observe the rules of the place? Finally, would not one seek the hospitality of food and accommodation of their host, follow their customs, and learn what is sacred to one's hosts as a respectful guest, including where one is permitted to go? The invaders were so convinced of their superiority in every way that they could only understand their worldview. The King's private instruction was to seize lands for the British crown. The intent from the start was white patriarchal capitalist possession and to force the First Nations either into extinction to erase them from the earth or squash them into the same mould through assimilation. Derrida argues that sovereignty is born from violence. While this is the case for white patriarchal possessive sovereignty, it is the antithesis of the premise for Indigenous sovereignty. Furthermore, what is the belief, the nature of Indigenous sovereignty? Love and 23 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State care, loving-kindness. Compassion (Leatham, 2019). Professor Irene Watson says relationality. Professor Pat Dudgeon also states: Strong female governance has always been central to one of the world’s oldest existing culturally diverse, harmonious, sustainable, and democratic societies. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s governance of a country twice the size of Europe is based on complex laws which regulate relationships to country, family, community, culture and spirituality. These laws are passed down through generations and describe kinship systems which encompass sophisticated relations to the more-than-human…Indigenous kinship as an expression of relationality, culturally specific and complex Indigenous knowledge systems which are founded on a connection to the land. Although Indigenous Australian women’s kinships have been disrupted through dispossession from the lands they belong to, the forced removal of their children across generations, and the destruction of their culture, community and kinship networks, the survival of Indigenous women’s knowledge systems have supported the restoration of Indigenous relationality. The strengthening of Indigenous women’s kinship is …a source of social and emotional wellbeing and an emerging politics of environmental reproductive justice (Dudgeon, P. et al 2019). Compassion is the nature of a sophisticated philosophy of interdependence without hierarchy conducted through consensus. In this book, we will explore the idea of compassion and relationality as the way forward for Australia. First, we will consider the complex problems in science that ground how to understand ourselves in time and place – that is, the cutting-edge physics of the manner of existence. Thus, contemporary physics will assist us in understanding ourselves concerning material, space, and time. These findings will underpin the flow of this book through the present, past and future. A contemporary understanding of ourselves, space and time This section, and the broader book, is based on evidence from good science, which develops new knowledge that transforms ontology and axiology. As outlined earlier, the development of Western scientific inquiry comes from a white, European, patriarchal capitalist worldview, and 24 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State its proponents forget its beginnings. Let's begin this section with five quotes from the cutting edge of current physics, which seeks to explain the nature of matter in time and space. The current scientific model of the material world obeying laws of physics has been so successful that we forget about our starting point – as conscious observers – and conclude that matter is the only reality. That perceptions are only helpful for describing it. Nevertheless, we are substituting the reality of our experience of the universe with a conceptually contrived belief in an independently existing material world (Linde, ) And: What if perceptions are as real (or maybe in a certain sense, are even more real) than material objects? (Linde ). In this first of five quotes that will lead us carefully to an understanding of contemporary physics, Professor of Physics at Sanford University, Andre Linde, draws to our attention that it is impossible to observe material matter without the medium of a conscious observer. The observer's perception and the conceptions attributed by the observer based on their perception of the material world describe the world; physics, science, and the general public forget that observer's role. Having a physical world without the observer to perceive it is impossible. We must recognize the importance of this understanding of the invasion and colonisation of Australia, such as the observations Charles Darwin and other scientists conducted through the glasses, or lens, of gender hierarchy roles and competition on all creatures. In comparison, Indigenous people saw reciprocity and interdependent relationships founded on compassion, love, and care. The view of survival of the fittest is only possible through white patriarchal worldviews. Both world views have robust and tested internal logic and explanatory power. Therefore, as Linde wonders, white patriarchal invaders could only see their world if perceptions were as honest or more accurate than material objects. Indigenous people already operated on multiple existing sovereignties that were not exclusive over the same land, waters, seas and skies – including the stars and planets of space. 25 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Anton Zeilinger posits: One may assume that whenever we ask questions of nature, of the outside world, there is a reality existing independently of what we say about it. We will now claim that such a position is void of any meaning. Any property or feature of reality "out there" can only be based on the information we receive. There cannot be any statement whatsoever about the world or reality not based on such information. It, therefore, follows that the concept of reality without at least the ability to make statements about it to obtain information about its features is devoid of any possibility of confirmation or proof. This implies that the distinction between information, knowledge, and reality is meaningless. In this second quote, Zeilinger states that the assumption of a truly existent material world outside of perception is meaningless. The reason is that a person has to describe anything. Creating information is a dynamic relationship between the thing described, the data generated, and the observer generating the knowledge. This participatory process creates all known existence. Therefore, upon the arrival of white patriarchal scientists in Australia, they generated descriptions and analyses of the landscapes, animals, and people who co-created a knowledge system. First Nations peoples already have a highly sophisticated knowledge of every aspect of that landscape, already named and interdependent, explained with their language and internal logics that continue to exist post-white cataloguing. Zeilinger argues that there is no distinction between information/knowledge and reality. One lives with the other, and the other creates the information. John Archibald Wheeler contends that the universe consists of a strange loop in which physics gives rise to observers and observers give rise to physics. The universe is fundamentally an information-processing system from which the appearance of matter emerges at a derivative level of reality. It is wrong to think that the past is an 'already existing' in all detail. The 'past' is a theory. The past has no existence except as someone in the present records it. By deciding what questions our quantum registering equipment shall put in the present, we undeniably choose what we have the right to say about the past. (Wheeler cited in Wallace). 26 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Indeed, John Archibald Wheeler contests that the original model of 'matter to information to observer' has inverted in a quantum world where the 'observer to information to matter'. In other words, this is a dynamic process that observers are co-creators of. Indigenous people refer to this process as 'singing up the country'. Knowledge experts trained in the songline name and call into proper interdependent relations between landscapes and their inhabitants. That patriarchal white man could come to this place and rename everything as a discovery is an outrageous fallacy. However, multiple namings can, and Indigenous people with over 500 languages across the continent have practised for over 100,000 years. Wheeler's observation of the past as a dynamic process of choice about what to measure and the instrument of measurement complements Indigenous multiplicity. Multiple stories of the past enable Australia to redress the inaccurate partial history that spoke of 'white male pioneers to include the experiences of First Nations people of frontier wars and genocide. A shared history of more than 100,000 years continues to the present. Thomas Hertog succinctly overturns any languishing materialist claim of human observer insignificance. He invites modern people to take responsibility for our conscious participation as co-creators of the universe we perceive: That quantum reality is a bit like a tree. The branches represent all possible universes and our observations – we are part of the universe, so we are part of that tree – and our observations select certain branches and hereby give meaning, or give reality, to our past in a quantum world…Quantum theory indicates we may not be mere chemical scum. Life and the cosmos are, in Quantum theory, a synthesis, and our observations now give in fact reality to its earliest days. (Hertog). Hertog allows us to place Indigenous sovereignty as the main trunk of the tree of the quantum world and all the branches as the different realities experienced over the exact location. Here is a genuinely pluralist, multicultural understanding of Australia with First Nation histories since time immemorial and many stories of many ancestors to the arrival of the first British fleet. The appearance of Dutch traders in the north before the British arrival with the Maccassans, Chinese, and Japanese, and all the migration stories to these lands united in a proper relationship with 27 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State First Nations sovereignty. There can also be a larger view of the universe's beginnings that includes Indigenous knowledge. Now let us consider a final quote by theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, that there is no space-time, which resonates with Indigenous claims that they have been here since the beginning of time. …many, many separate arguments, all very strong individually, suggest that the very notion of space-time is not a fundamental one. Space-time is doomed. There is no such thing as space-time, fundamentally in the actual, underlying description of the laws of physics. That's very startling, because for what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So if there is no space-time, it's not clear what physics is about. That's why this is a hard problem. That's a serious comment…(Arkani-Hamed). The 2018 annual national conference in Arnhem Land, NT, called the Garma Festival, had the theme of 'truth-telling' about the genocide of colonial goals of conquest. A Yolngu ElderWoman, a school teacher, spoke about how her primary school bases education on a 'both ways philosophy'. The school is multi-lingual, allowing the children to learn in their own language and then transition to English for national curriculum content. Multi-lingual schools are despite decades of attempts by successive federal governments to prevent schools taught in First Nations languages that contravene International Human Rights and International Indigenous rights. The student learned how the convicts suffered, how many died due to the appalling, inhumane conditions on the ship and how they were often imprisoned for minor crimes related to poverty in chains and whipped Yolngu children cry with empathy. This teacher asked why non-Indigenous Australians and primary school children cannot learn the truth of our massacres and weep with compassion for us. Why cannot non-Indigenous people see our suffering and be filled with heart? Only then can our country grow together. (Garma Festival ABC). Indigenous loving care for all people contrasts with the interviews and findings in Chapter Five of Koerner and Pillay (2019). They report that White Australians lacked exposure to Indigenous perspectives on colonial history and had not sought it out themselves. They were unable to talk about the implications of racialisation and the invasion of First Nation people. 28 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Furthermore, many research participants could not speak critically about race or the implications of the past invasion on the present. This demonstrates a lack of empathy and compassion for First Nations people. This is the impasse for transformative Indigenous relations. Is this lack of compassion for Indigenous Australians underlie the endemic lack of care offered systemically through institutions and its professionals contributing to such poor health outcomes? Professor Chelsea Watego (ne Bond 2014), has struggled to receive funding to examine the failure of the health system, because funding is limited to bio-medical and not social determinants of health (Bond 2014 on ABC Drum). Her research shows a consistent lack of care provided to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Shannon et al 2022, Watego ne Bond et al 2020; Shannon, etal 2022; Watego et al 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). More such studies are urgently required to understand this phenomenon across the health system using critical whiteness theories to examine and overturn the adverse health outcomes of Indigenous Australians' 20-year gap in life expectancy due to cumulative stress caused by racialisation in Australia. Indigenous Psychologists formed The Australian Indigenous Psychologist Association (AIPA) due to the low social and emotional well-being of Indigenous Australians and the overrepresentation of Indigenous people with Mental Health Issues. AIPA developed cutting-edge cultural competency training for non-Indigenous health professionals. AIPA should receive funds to conduct large-scale, long-term research on the effectiveness of cultural competency training. The main emphasis of training is to combine context about colonial history and skills in cultural safety for non-Indigenous mental health professionals, including General Practitioners (GPs) working with Indigenous people. 29 Toward An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity, and Justice in Australian Settler Colonial State Koerner Towards An Uluru Heart: Relationality, Identity and Justice in Australian Settler State Reference List Chap 2 April 2024 Arkani-Hamed cited in Wallace (2010) Hidden Dimensions: The unification of physics and Consciousness. (Columbia Series in Science and Religion). Columbia University Press. Askew, D., Brady, K., Mukandi, B., Singh, D., Sinha, T., Brough, M., & Bond, C. (2020). Closing the gap between rhetoric and practice in strengths-based approaches to Indigenous public health: a qualitative study. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health. 44(2): 102-105. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/133910/ Australian Indigenous Psychologists’ Association (AIPA). https://indigenouspsychology.com.au https://micro.org.au/stories-and-structures/witchetty-grub-dreaming/ Bojowald, M. (2006). Universe scenarios from loop quantum cosmology. Physik 518(5-5): 326341 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/andp.200651804-508 Bond, C. (2014) Panel on ABC Drum https://www.abc.net.au/news/chelsea-bond/5344278 Bond, C. J., & Singh, D. (2020). More than a refresh required for closing the gap of Indigenous health inequality. Medical Journal of Australia, 212(5). https://eprints.qut.edu.au/234503/ Bond, C., Singh, D., & Tyson, S. (2021). Black bodies and Bioethics: Debunking mythologies of benevolence and beneficence in contemporary Indigenous health research in colonial Australia. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 18(1), 83-92. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/234500/ Chagme, K. (2000). 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