https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZN7rPxvFBKQ
So I thought that we would start by addressing, I do read the comments on our YouTube videos, I know that you’re not supposed to do that, but I do it, you know. And one of the common things that I’ve seen the last couple of videos is people saying things like, well, okay, everything you’re saying is nice for like a Eurocentric world, everything you’re saying is nice for like an American centric world, but what about people in the Far East? Or what about people in Australia? So this is one of the critiques I saw on our Groundhog Day video, which has been weirdly popular. I mean, it was a lot of fun to do. But one of the critiques on there I saw is, oh, all the stuff you’re saying about there being more light in the world, you know, on the vernal equinox, for instance, all the stuff you’re saying about there being more light in the world, that doesn’t apply if you live in Australia. So checkmate, Jonathan Peugeot. To this, I just have to say, Australia is upside down world people. Like people are walking around upside down in Australia, there are the antipodes, there are insane hybrid animals and people, like I was thinking about this, because recently I got to hang out with a friend, a friend of a friend who was passing through Dallas from Australia. And he lives in Australia, and he’s a pretty interesting dude. And so we were just, we had a meetup. And I just had all kinds of questions for him about living in Australia. And what’s that like? And things. And the thing that I came away with was, man, that’s the other side of the world. Like Australia is a weird place. Sounds like an awesome place, would love to visit. This is nothing against Australia. I know we have some Australian listeners, but Australia is the other side of the world. And most importantly, it’s the other side of the world from Jerusalem. So this is the thing that I want to kind of start out by pointing out is that the Christian grammar, right? I joked to somebody the other day that this is supposed to be a universal history series, but like low key, it’s actually a universal grammar series where grammar, meaning the old, in the old sense means something like the way everything connects and relates to each other and what the proper names for things are, things like this. I want to say a little thing about Australia, because it’s important to understand, let’s say people will think what you said is weird, but when you understand the idea, the ancient idea that people on the South Pole or in the southern part of the world were upside down, of course, we think of it in a very simplistic way, but we can understand it in a little more subtle way, which is they are upside down in the heavenly patterns, they’re upside down in the way they encounter the pattern of the lights in the heaven. And they are also, like you said, they have all these creatures. I mean, if there were ever dogheaded men, kangaroos are like good candidates for that. Because look, just think of what they look like. And so there’s a way in which when the Europeans will encounter Australia, the way it will happen will be related to the upside down. When we say that Australia was a colony of criminals, that there’s this whole fringe aspect of Australia, which can help you understand why the world lays itself out this way if you think about it in the way we’re trying to help you understand it. And if you think about, I mean, it’s easy to read some of these things that we’ll be quoting from today. There’s a great Anglo-Saxon text that I’m not going to read from today, but it’s worth your time to look it up and read it. It’s called The Wonders of the East. And it’s basically just a catalog of here are all the weird hybrid creatures that you’re going to encounter when you go out to beyond the edge of civilization. And some of those things sound, oh, well, clearly he’s describing a rhinoceros or something like that here. But some of those things are just super weird. But also, if you know the history of European colonization exploration of Australia, when they would send animals back, they’d shoot an animal and kill it and ship it back to England. And they’d get it at the academy in England. And they’d open it up and dissect it and start looking for the seams on the duck-billed platypus. Because obviously, this is a hoax. This animal couldn’t possibly exist in real life, right? So Australia is actually a great example of what we’re talking about. It’s not just a hoax. It doesn’t disprove the categories that we’re using here. It actually kind of demonstrates Australia is a really real way in which hybridity and the culture of the edge and the upside down world, all that stuff manifests itself. And none of that means Australia is bad. And also, none of it implies the fact that there isn’t an inner experience of, let’s say, like these things are, but we cannot, we can only formulate the world from the perspective in which we live. And so the idea that we are formulating this universal perspective, but the universal perspective from the point of view of our own story, of our own interactions, doesn’t invalidate the existence or the inner possibility of Aboriginals to have their own story and their own way to fit into the universal history. But we don’t have access to that. We have access to our story. And the best way to encounter even something which to us would be as strange as, let’s say, Australian Aboriginals is to be able to fully embody our own story and to encounter them in the proper way. Right. So that is a super underrated point that you just made there. I feel like we almost need to spend some time talking about that later or something. Like that’s the thing. Like if you want to most honestly interact with someone else, another culture, another world, you have to honestly and legitimately and authentically embody the world and the story that you actually belong in. Because one of the simple example that is biological is that when you encounter the strange, there is a danger of infection and you can’t pretend that that doesn’t exist because Europeans weren’t careful about the way that they encounter the strange. Massive populations were wiped out because of not understanding that you were encountering things that don’t fit with your identity. And if you’re not careful, there can really be a destruction, which of course there was the war and all that kind of stuff. But even just in terms of disease, it actually could create that type of interaction. So think about how we talk about extraterrestrials, for example, and people were all excited about supposedly encountering extraterrestrial life, but if they don’t think about it properly in terms of a medieval way of thinking, then that encounter, if it would ever happen, could completely annihilate us, even without the ill or goodwill of either parties.