The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Tyson Yunkaporta. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Tyson Yunkaporta, an indigenous Australian scholar. He’s a research fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne. His multidisciplinary approach combines traditional indigenous practices with contemporary academic frameworks. Welcome back, Tyson.
Tyson: Yo. So good to be back. Yeah. One of my very favorite people. Very favorite people. We got our body of work there — almost with what do we had? Four yarns. We’ve had quite a few, more than I thought. But, yeah, we’ve certainly had some excellent yarning over the years.
Jim: Yeah. That’s it. A little bit more detail about Tyson. He’s a member of the Apalech clan in Far North Queensland, Australia, and he’s a leading voice at the intersection of traditional knowledge and modern complexity thinking. He’s best known for his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Let me give a Jim Rutt editorial here. If you haven’t read Sand Talk, go out and get it. This is one of the top 10 best books I have ever read. Not only does it make you think differently and bring some things forward that you’ve never even thought about thinking about, but it’s also a great work of art. It’s truly a beautifully written book. I probably recommended it to a thousand people over the years. So here’s another 8,000 people — go read Sand Talk if you haven’t done it.
Tyson: It’s a goddamn trilogy is what it is. There’s three of them. Yeah. I’m going to mention the other two here. But it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like Lord of the Rings — The Two Towers is like, yeah. And then Return of the King is like, yeah. That’s the one. That’s the one right there.
Jim: His second book is Right Story, Wrong Story, also quite excellent. And he’s got a new one out called Snake Talk. And as I checked this morning, it’s still not available in North America. It is available, I presume, in Australia.
Tyson: It is — in New Zealand and the UK and, I don’t know, Sweden for some reason? I don’t know. You can search around ten minutes on the web, mess around on eBay or something, you’ll find somebody reselling a copy or something. There’s some place in the States that gets a bunch of books they think will sell well over there, and you find places — there’s some place in the yeah. In the States that, you know, gets a bunch going early.
Jim: Yeah, get some going early. It’s not even listed on Amazon, which is weird. It was listed on Amazon, but I don’t know all these games the publishers play. When it comes out — haven’t read it yet, but I’m sure it’ll be good. So for sure, start with Sand Talk. If that doesn’t hook you on Tyson, you’re a sorry son of a bitch. Right?
And as Tyson alluded to, he’s been a regular guest on the podcast — in EP 282, we did indigenous law, lore, and learning. In Currents 032, on spirits, Game B, and protopias. In EP 65, indigenous complexity. In EP 66, on indigenous knowledge. And one of my favorites, Currents 10, so that was way back, on humans as a custodial species. Even though I have it in my outline later, this is one of my absolutely favorite Yunkaporta-isms. Why don’t you tell people what that means for humans to be a custodial species?
Tyson: Well, you know, like the custodians who care for the place. I guess it’s in both ways — it’s in that sacred role, but then also like, you know, custodial staff, the janitors, you know. My generation, you’ll be right. My generation and all my kids, we’re going to be like the janitors of the apocalypse. It’s going to be sweeping up, you know, for a thousand years. Even when we’re going forward.
Jim: I think it’s an interesting vision that, you know, humans are embedded in nature, at least when we’re living correctly. But we can also help nature do its thing. Right? We can fight forest fires. We can make sure that the balance of species and the food web are correct, etcetera. So there are things we can do.
Tyson: That’s our ecological niche. Yeah, exactly. You know, it’s very unique. Nobody’s ever been that before, exactly. We’re able to be the carers for everything, you know, and it’s a bit of a sacred task.
Jim: Absolutely. Got to get back to it. Yeah, indeed.
Well, let’s get on with the core part of the show. This is another in my series of worldview podcasts where instead of focusing mostly on the works and such of our thinkers and doers, we get behind the scenes. What is it that important thinkers and doers — what is their model of reality? How do they interact with themselves and this universe they found themselves in, etcetera? So I’m going to start off with my customary first question. You’ll see how this relates to what we were talking about pregame. This morning you woke up and let’s assume it was from a deep sleep. You were gone. And then you start to wake up, and you’re there again. Who is this Tyson Yunkaporta that woke up, and where were you when you were gone?
Tyson: I don’t go in my sleep. I’ve got too many problems with my body, so I’m always aware of it. Most of my dreams are about trying to find somewhere to take a piss. And then thinking I’ve taken a piss, but then going, oh no, I still need to take a piss. That’s most of my dreams. So I’m never gone.
But as I was telling you, I did go for surgery recently. And yeah, under the anesthetic, you know, I was really looking forward to it. I was just like, I just need a frickin’ holiday. And so I went on holiday for like ten thousand years. Don’t remember one bit of it, but I know it was just an amazing deep dark oblivion. Just filled with endless potentialities. I went there. And yeah, and that’s timeless there. And so when I came back, my mind got the break it needed. You know? So very much more peaceful, like waking up — hey, who’s this Tyson? I remember that one when I went to sleep ten thousand years ago. Yeah, that’s not me anymore. So it was quite profoundly changed. Yeah, I think I learned a lot and, you know, came to grips with things in there somehow.
Jim: Interesting.
Tyson: I think the best lessons are the ones you don’t remember, but somehow leave you changed.
Jim: Yeah. I recently had some fairly serious surgery and I was out for, I think they said eight hours, something like that. And when I woke up, I had a couple of specific dream elements right at the end, but otherwise I don’t remember the damn thing. What changed during that period? How far back in time did I go? Really hard to say.
Tyson: Yeah. Like I said, the best learning is the things you don’t remember exactly. Like, I kind of remember the point where you shifted my mind towards rationality and reason, you know? But you profoundly changed my life. You put me on this path where, like, every part of my cosmology, I had to reexamine it and find an evidence-based explanation for all of these invisible things that I’ve experienced, and that’s just part of my daily life and my whole culture, you know, and how else can I explain that scientifically?
Jim: Or sometimes you can’t explain it.
Tyson: Which didn’t weaken my spiritual experience of life — it strengthened it. It strengthened it for me to actually find reasonable explanations for all these things, which I can use as ways to explain them to other people too.
But yeah, now I — oh man, I used to just make claims. Like I’d read one thing in one study, and I’d pick the part out of it that I wanted. You know, that was back at the time when that was just starting to become a problem in the world and set the world on fire, people doing stuff like that. Yeah. So anyway, you inspired me to start studying logical fallacies as well and just logic in general. And I’ve been weeding those fallacies out of the garden of my mind.
Jim: I think that’s what makes you such an interesting thinker, is that you’re a —
Tyson: It’s respect for the method. Like, pretty much most of my life, everything that I’d ever written or spoken, you know, was all just taking cheap shots at science all the time for being reductionist and not seeing the whole world the way we see it. You know, just being somehow shadowy figures motivated by obscuring truth and things like that. Yeah. But when I actually started looking into what the method is and then how all the institutions work, there’s no central authority to it, and it’s just basically peers constantly checking and testing each other’s work. And, yeah, connected locally and at a distance, and growing their knowledge together in all these amazing ways. I just went, oh, that’s pretty much the same process of collective inquiry that we use. I can recognize that there, you know. So I was starting to see more similarities than differences. I’m going to just tweak the lens a little bit.
Jim: That is very interesting. And the other thing that’s interesting, as we talked about before, is that your initiation into the Apalech clan — you were not a person sort of raised in the metaphysics and such. You had some exposure, I think, to it through your extended family. But it was, you know, in later years that you became — I think you said you were initiated as if you were a seven year old, something like that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what it’s like to come on to this big body of knowledge and this big worldview later in life.
Tyson: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. See, when I was 20, I was still, I don’t know, I was still a kid in my head. Yeah. And I had bipolar, which I didn’t get diagnosed until later. But, yeah, I had bipolar like ever since I was a kid — it was a child onset thing. My whole interaction with the world was weird anyway. And of course there’s all that, I don’t know, the violence of that time growing up, because remote kind of where it was still frontier kind of things going on, way out in these remote mining projects and things like that, and growing up in mining camps, real rough and all that sort of thing.
And you know, still learning — like I was still lucky enough to learn, you know, yeah, the knowledge of the land that I would need to have to understand the land, which was, you know, I was lucky to come across that. And then, you know, in my late teens and, yeah, twenties, like right up until the nineties almost. Yeah, right up into the nineties, I was like, you know, spending a lot of time with lots of different peoples and even back to their ancestral families. You know, and the last two of them passed away eventually. And yeah, I was just sort of kind of finished up alone with all this fragmentary knowledge and thought I knew quite a bit.
So you know, like I’d be running around like, you know, playing the didgeridoo and all that kind of thing because it’s like, hey, that’s what we do. Drinking heaps and saying, oh, that’s what we do, and fighting heaps and, yeah, that’s what we do. Yeah. But yeah, and then I landed sort of like a completely disconnected solitary person in the universe.
Yeah, yeah — we got there. There was an old lady there who sung through all the song lines going back to my traditional homeland, which just blew my mind because she somehow knew where I was from, and yeah, and she talked about the song line that connects South Australian peoples right up to the top to Cape York. And they’re different languages, but they’re still in this Pama-Nyungan group. So the Nyungan languages down there connected with the Pama languages here at some stage and fused into a combination of the both. And this is a song line that explained that — it was these white and brown owl people who traveled up and married in up there. And, yeah, and she saw that and saw, you know, how I’d lost my family and all the rest and just went, yep. You know? And yeah, brought me in and then, you know, adopted in, yeah, to Yunkaporta, and I had to — I don’t know. Everything I thought I knew, was like, oh, man. I’m like, frickin’ eight year olds know more than me. Like I thought I knew some stuff, you know, like, you know, hunting, tracking, I got it all down, I play the didgeridoo, making clapsticks and doing all, you know, painting feather shit. And yeah, that’s not it at all.
It’s, you know, yeah, it’s the systems of knowledge but also the knowledge of systems. That’s the thing I didn’t have. Like I had an idea of the information about knowledge systems. But you know, what I didn’t have was the knowledge of systems, you know what I mean? Yeah, like the systems knowledge — it’s a different thing from knowledge systems. Like, you know, being able to read cause and effect relations around you and anticipate based on that. And you know, it’s yeah. And so, yeah, they kind of flogged that worldview into me until I could see it properly, and off we go.
I had an advantage though — I had a biological advantage.
Jim: Which was?
Tyson: Which is uncommon in our communities. But I had color blindness. Color blindness is like, it gives you a lot of those gifts. You have capacities because of the way you process light visually — oh man, you should look it up. It’s amazing, the gifts of color blindness. You’re able to process visual information in much more complex ways and see things that other people aren’t seeing. And you can have a really good strong focus, like you focus really well. And you can see things that other people can’t see, because everyone’s always bloody distracted by all these freaking colors everywhere, you know?
Also, we spend about half as much money as everybody else, us color blind people. Because we’re just not really attracted to anything. It’s just all these people seeing all these colorful things they want to buy — we don’t buy shit. It’s like, you’ve been seeing me in this black t-shirt for the last five years. Yeah. We don’t really care about that stuff, so we save more money than everyone else.
But we also, because we’re constantly having to put ourselves in the shoes of everyone else to know like what the hell are they saying, you know, when they talk about feeling blue and you know, so you have to really inhabit their point of view to figure out what they’re feeling. And so we end up becoming more empathetic sort of people.
Anyway, I had a bit of a leg up in coming into our traditional systems knowledge, you know, the knowledge of systems and how to read them and flow with them. And that’s it — that’s what you need to be embedded, you know, embedded in your field, context, landscape, in creation. Yeah. You have to feel your way into that.
Jim: Yeah. I’m going to check with my younger brother. He is profoundly color blind. He has both the green-red and — what is it? Yellow-purple, or something. So he sees everything as gray, not just confusing red and green. And he’s been a very successful guy in life and a charming, hilarious character. I don’t have to — I never actually talked to him much about being color blind other than how he managed to navigate landing a job for which color blindness was a disqualifying condition, how he managed to beat that. But I never really talked to him about it philosophically. I’ll do that next time I chat with him, probably next week. That’s kind of interesting.
Tyson: Well, your military over there, they used to seek out and recruit color blind people — not to be pilots obviously, but to read the topographical map images because they would see things that other people don’t see. Like in the same way, if I’m walking, you know, even with really wise elders and everything else, if we’re walking, they don’t see the snake in the grass, you know, because it’s camouflaged. But I do see it, you know, because it’s a textural and contrast thing. Yeah, so you see it. I don’t know, that’s really cool.
But the main thing is that we statistically have longer marriages. So I don’t know if your brother ever got married.
Jim: You can’t see the hickeys on your spouse’s neck. That’s probably why.
Tyson: That’s it. No. It’s the empathy thing. It’s having to really try and read people deeply and figure out what the hell they’re thinking. Yeah. At the same time, we don’t like to waste time. So people sort of think we’re rude, you know? And I’m talking about color blind people here. Right, right. Yeah, but I mean I’m probably — man, my spouse is probably the most difficult woman on the planet. And yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s no other man alive that could handle her. I’m a patient, understanding son of a bitch. Ten years, ten years I’ve got through so far. You know? Hey.
Jim: I don’t know whether to say good for you or good for her that she could put up with you for ten good years.
Tyson: For her. You find that color blind man, and he’ll stick. He’ll stick.
Jim: That’s interesting. That’s interesting. Well, back to your Apalech studies. You said in one of our podcasts, I don’t remember which one, that a key part of the acculturation of a young man is to go through an ordeal ritual at the age of 14, 15. Were you able to do that, or was that part of your being a kid that you never made it there?
Tyson: All the sort of different tribes all around, and this is part of the interdependence thing to make sure we can never invade each other, you know. So all the different Wik-Gugu tribes around, they carry different parts of the ceremony, you know. So with my Brolga family totem, that’s a story that takes place across different lands, different territories. Some of which we speak for but some that other people speak for. And all these big complex ritual complexes really. And so your young men will get initiated there on Wik Mungkan country. But then the next day another stage of initiation will be over in different country, and other stages, different ceremonies will be hosted by different peoples, you know? Yeah, so it is the Wik Mungkan language group there — that’s the one that does the first stage of initiation. Yeah. But that hasn’t happened for about forty years? No. Thirty-five years? Yeah. Because the initiation site was obliterated to make room for a swimming pool. Yeah. And so when that went, like it just went, yeah, and I missed out on that just by a few short years. So I never got to go through the initial stages in the right place and the right ceremony.
But you know, I had elder siblings who’ve been able to take me through a kind of a lesser version of it, you know, with coming into that knowledge. And yeah, doing different things that involve — I won’t say it, but, yeah, passing through stuff.
Well, there’s — alright. So there’s energies. There’s energies that a man has. And when you go through that knowledge and induct it — not that first stage of initiation as a kid, but I mean as you get older — there’s energies you have in your belly. And we’re like a patrilineal, patriarchal people, but you can’t really have that status, that authority if you don’t have a womb. So in our way men have like a spirit womb. And we can actually, you know, we have like spirit children. And this man-belly thing that goes on. So we have spirit children that follow us around, and we’ve got to control them and control our belly power all the time, otherwise it can make other people sick around us and some people might even die.
Yeah, so I’ve had to — that’s been the hardest thing, is learning how to control that. And so there’s an instrument for that, like a woomera tool, yeah, carry around and it’s got these red giddy beads set in that native black beeswax there. Yeah, and this instrument, you carry it around. It’s a spear thrower but it’s more than that. It’s ceremonial but you carry it when you walk anyway because it’s part of that mechanism for controlling your nenwi, belly spirit, keeping your spirit children in line and all that sort of thing. Yeah. So I can’t say much about the secret side of things, but suffice to say there is a lot of — I guess what would look like gender-bending stuff that goes on.
Jim: How did that change your worldview — to get back to our nominal topic here? How did you — or maybe, since you didn’t go through it all, but people who have — can you tell how that has changed their way of relating to the world?
Tyson: Yeah. Well, it’s funny. Like, I don’t know. There’s something different because when you talk to the older people who went through the first, second, third stages of initiation here, and you see how their scarification was done, and you see what they know and how they move in the world, and just their eyes. And you look and you see there’s something that’s missing with a lot of people. And I think a few people are still doing that right now. Yeah, but I don’t know, I know a lot of people further south who go through all that ceremony, or a version of it, you know, like they’ve had to change things because things were lost, you know. And I don’t know, it’s not the same. They don’t have that same look and they don’t have that same power. And they don’t really know what I’m talking about when I talk about, you know, the belly stuff, you know. Yeah. I don’t know. It’s a different world.
People get proud in themselves, you know. Their own traditions, etcetera. Yeah, but it’s more — it’s different from that. And it’s like people are an image now. And that’s in our way — so image is the same word as for ghost. Like that part of you that’s the shadow spirit. So that shadow spirit part — that’s not the bit that lasts forever, that’s just all your attachments and you know, ego and longings and gripes and bloody belligerence and all that sort of stuff, you know what I mean? Yeah.
And so when you get — I don’t know, you take an image of something like, I don’t know, so this swamp hen here, like a sacred sculpture — it’s, you know, there’s not too many of them. So that still has that totemic power of that bird. But, you know, there are other ones that are really popular with art collectors and artifact collectors. And so, you know, people started making, you know, hundreds of them. So when that image, you know, is replicated too many times, then part of the spirit of that entity is in each image. And when it gets replicated, replicated, replicated, it loses its power because suddenly its spirit’s divided into all these images, which is the same thing as a photo of you — it’s part of your spirit, like an image, you know, that’s made. Yeah.
And I don’t know. I feel like people have so many images of themselves that are just in the cloud, like replicating infinitely. And I feel like somehow — I saw this happen because I only got my first mobile phone ever in 2016. It was the first time I got a mobile phone. And so I got to watch everybody over a decade, like, change. And they changed until they weren’t in themselves, they were a picture. You know, they were an image. Like, it’s hard to explain, but it’s like they’re not completely there. Like, not really there and not really in the field, the context. Anyway, so yeah. And so I don’t know. You see a lot of people performing wisdom and performing, you know, ceremony and stuff like that.
Jim: But would you contrast performing with something else? Because you said performing in a way —
Tyson: Well, I think people are really self-aware. Like, so for me, like back up home, if there’s ceremony, even if it’s just a funeral, you know, things where we’re singing somebody’s ancestral spirit back to country and that big spirit away, then it’s — you’re in, you know? It’s just that clapping and that sound, you know, it feels really different from what I see in a lot of other places.
But also, I recognize too in a lot of places, like you see it, you know it when it’s real, and when people are losing themselves into the collective. You know, when people are becoming like one — what we call one belly, which is like one mind, you think and feel together, all your bellies are connected, and you know when that happens for real. And you see but you see a lot of people in other places that they’re doing these ceremonies, but they’re really performing dances as individuals. And you see people with scars and you go for little bits and pieces of ceremony with them and there’s not much in it. You know? It’s not the same, it’s like it’s diluted because it’s become an image of what it was. Yeah.
And I guess yeah. I don’t know. My old people at least had the integrity of going, well, no, that’s finished now. We can’t do that ceremony anymore because that tree was cut down and that place was dug up. So that site’s gone.
Jim: Or how about we’ve all posted 16,000 images each to Instagram and no longer have enough depth of personality.
Tyson: Right? Oh, my cousin, like, became a viral meme because he would just, you know, he just like opened a TikTok account on his phone and he didn’t know what he was doing. And he just recorded — he didn’t know he was recording himself, but it’s just him looking at the camera while he’s trying to figure out how to use it. Anyway, it ended up someone found it online, and so he became the FaceTime prank guy. People were just putting that image on their FaceTime thing and they’d — so a girl would put it on there and she’d call her father, and her father would just be seeing this weird, you know, indigenous face there, like, not saying anything. And, you know, anyway, they record the reactions of the people going, what have you done with my daughter? Saying some horrendous things. Yeah. Anyway, but that went viral. And it ended up there was a meme coin about him and all this kind of thing.
I don’t know. People were mostly angry. Like a lot of people, there was backlash going, that’s so racist, that’s racist. For me, I was just worried — my god, his image is just being endlessly replicated. People were making AI videos of him, like, showing him as a mass murderer, you know, tying up white people in his basement to ritually murder or something. It was weird. There were lots of AI videos going around.
Jim: Of course, I don’t tend to watch that stuff.
Tyson: Well, me neither.
Jim: But that’s the bizarre thing about this network we live in. You know? Anything can happen. Yeah.
Tyson: It just hit pretty hard when all of a sudden it’s like, hey. Do you know cousin Eric’s — like, oh my god.
Jim: Three million views or ten million views or whatever.
Tyson: Couldn’t do anything about it, but it’s just like, I don’t know, he hasn’t been the same since. He sort of went up and down. Yeah. I just think about what does that do to your spirit? We can’t even have a photo around of someone if they passed away, like for about six months or a year, you know, because that’s part of their spirit and we can’t say their name, because the name is like the image too — part of the spirit. It just lingers, you know, it keeps them sniffing around for a long time. And that part’s just got to dissolve because it’s all the, you know, the attachment parts. It’s like that ego part. So when you do your ego death, you know, it’s like you’re setting aside that shadow spirit for a bit. And a lot of people go, well that’s who I am, you know.
Anyway, so that’s a long way around it. I kind of meandered there. But that’s sort of what I see when it’s real and when it’s not real. So yeah, like you know, some people are really high-level initiates, but they’re also ice addicts, you know? Yeah, and you wonder where they went. It’s a strange world.
Jim: Yeah, it’s multidimensional.
Tyson: I’m quite happy being a low-level marginal person in every culture I interact with, including my home culture. Yeah, I don’t feel the need to be somebody who’s the top dog around or anything like that. Which basically, like our entire governance is about not having any top dogs. So I kind of feel like that’s the right way.
Jim: So I’ve done a lot of study of forager people and their methods of organizing their social operating system. And uniformly, without exception, they have built-in mechanisms to avoid dominant individuals. Right? And we lost that when we invented agriculture and dominators could hire henchmen to enforce their will on other people. But before the invention of secondary agriculture, no forager people on earth tolerated a big man. Not for long. You know, first they’d laugh at him, then they’d ignore him. Or first, they’d ignore him, then they’d laugh at him. Then, you know, three or four of them would come together and try to counsel him. If that didn’t work, they’d exile him. And if he came back, they’d kill him. Right?
Tyson: That’s it. That’s it. I mean, you know, we call it an Aboriginal law thing, but it’s pretty much a human thing. I mean, we’re not like bosses.
Jim: Yeah. We don’t like bosses. At least we didn’t like bosses. Somehow the bosses tricked us at the invention of agriculture so that bosses became a legitimate thing. You know, it’s one of the biggest wrong turns humanity ever made was tolerating big men. Yep. And that’s it because then you’re stuck. It’s hard to get rid of them, especially once they get their henchmen. They’ve got a hundred guys to do their will — really hard to get rid of them.
Tyson: I mean, well, our law is pretty simple. It’s — you have the right of refusal and you have the right of affiliation, like deciding who you’ll be affiliated with, changing affiliation if you wish, and then the right of movement. And that’s important, where you have to travel and you have to — like traditionally most people spoke about 12 languages because you’re supposed to move around and meet people. And you’re supposed to marry far from home with your neighbors because that’s what makes things interdependent. Marry in, you adopt across, and that’s how you end up with an Australian map that has like a thousand different tribal territories on it. All small ones, like a little patchwork quilt. Nobody big and taking over other ones. Because yeah, you don’t do that. You can’t invade people and wipe them out or have big wars. You can have battles, you can’t have wars when you’re interdependent in that way. Yeah.
So that’s the whole thing.
Jim: It’s also good biologically in that it provides genetic diversity.
Tyson: Yeah. And look, that’s how — like, I don’t know, that’s the core of my worldview, I think, is it’s about borders and what borders are. You know, borders are sites of celebration and welcome and trade and exchange. They’re sites of increase. They’re sites for facilitating access and for enriching, you know, each other’s places. Yeah. That’s what borders are. You know, they’re places that are made strong by — they’re not just permeable. I mean, they’re something you pass through, that makes your relationship stronger. It’s basically what every ceremony, you know, across groups has ever been.
Like I was saying before, the initiation stages, you know, for all these neighboring tribes here, take place on different lands and in different languages, ritually. So there was that need, you know, that interdependence. These people keep this part of the ceremony and these people give that part, and this part of the story. Yeah. And I don’t know, it’s really important.
And I think more than anything, sex is the thing that kind of drives and binds everything. You know, sex is — just even for consciousness, even just to exist, it has to be in this sort of consensual relation. You know, the borders that you have around yourself as an individual, and you know, when you meet another person, you are bringing those two borders together and you’re creating like a meeting place, you know, that grows into a fire, like a half-fire of relation between the two of you. And you have that true sense of the word consensual, which is like feeling together. You have to be thinking and feeling together, and become one belly. And you know, everything only works like that. And it is sexual — everything’s sexual.
Right now I’m down in the cold South three and a half thousand kilometers from home, you know, and it’s winter, you know. So I don’t know, everything on the TV is telling me that the birds and the bees and the mating happens in spring, but that’s like — I look around and everything’s having sex here in winter. It’s like, you know, and there’s eggs being — the emu, Jim, the emu’s laying its eggs right now. And there’s a big emu in the Milky Way, that shape. He’s in the right position there which shows that that’s what’s happening and that’s the time. The eagles are laying eggs and mating, the lyrebirds, the turkeys, all these big birds.
And then, but you know, so what are the pigeons doing? And they’re just like — this isn’t the season when they’re copulating, but they’re like, they’re flying in these erotic murmurations everywhere. This is the season when they do that dance in the sky where they’re all murmuring like schools of fish. And it’s beautiful, and that — I don’t know, creation is like in the spirit of the land, it’s informatic, you know, so it’s like a system of signals where one thing is triggering the behavior of the next thing, triggering the behavior of eight other things. Boom. Making those flowers bloom. Boom. That color signaling this and this and this. So, you know, you get all these amazing things happening at once.
And there is so much happening now. Like the brolgas and the magpie geese left weeks ago and flew north, and they’re mating now, way back up home, 3,000 kilometers, because they migrate. You know. So they’re back mating and laying eggs now, you know. I’m back up home and I know everything that’s happening there, but I’m here at the same time.
And I don’t know, a couple of weeks ago there was like that unseasonably warm day that was humid, you know, at the start of this early winter time. So of course that’s the perfect time for that ceremony of the ants mating. You know, so they all grew wings and burst up out of the ground and they’re flying around and they’re in their patterns. And then all the amphibians and stuff before they go to hibernate — it’s their last song. So they’re singing that song. And the magpies who won’t really start laying their eggs and mating until spring — for some reason this is the time when they sing all these amazing love songs. So we’ve got the magpie love songs going all day.
So everything is involved in the ceremony of the mating of everything else. So when something’s mating, like the quolls right now are mating and soon the echidnas will be and they’ll be doing their little sexy processions that they do all in a line. You know, all these things are signaled and like celebrated by all of these other species who are like — I don’t know, you’d think that it’s wasting energy. Like, what the hell’s in it for the pigeons, you know, in terms of their metabolism and, you know, calorie intake and calories burnt to be doing these massive dances for hours and hours in the skies, like, you know, to signal, you know, all the mating and lust of everything else.
So anyway, long story short, you know, I believe, yeah, sex is way more than the moment of penetration and stuff that we’ve reduced it to. It’s way more than what’s happening just with one thing — it’s just going on all around you all the time. If you walk through your life just having that feeling of like just everything around you is just getting it on all the time. And you walk in that way, you flow with that, and every movement you make is like, you know, contributing to the lustful ceremonies and pairings that are going on all around you all the time, and you sort of feel that as distributed sexuality. I think that’s what — yeah, that’s what, I don’t know, that’s what brings me into awareness. I mean, yeah, I’ve started being honest about that lately. Because you usually don’t talk about sex when you talk to people about how you move in the world and how you see creation. But it’s like, well, it’s kind of what everything’s about. Whether you’re doing it or not, contributing to the dance the whole time, and that should be a joyful process.
Jim: We’re caught up in the middle of it here in Virginia where it’s middle spring, and the birds are just insane. You know, we have three different species of swallows that are running around chasing each other, fighting over nesting spots. We’ve got many, many others — meadowlarks and, you know, I can’t remember all the birds we have. My wife’s the expert on all that sort of stuff. But, you know, starting about 5AM, you know, the sounds just increase, increase, increase till right after sunrise, it’s like, you know. And, you know, I’m pretty sure you’re right. They’re all talking about sex or fighting. Fucking or fighting. One or the other. Right?
Tyson: But you know what? Where sex never comes in? And this is the biggest weakness of complexitarians and, you know, a lot of thinkers, is in thought experiments. I don’t know. We don’t often, like, consider the sexual when the sexual is pretty much at the center of everything. Like that was — I remember thinking this the first time I ever heard about Plato’s cave. I’m like, well I can’t answer the question. You know? Like, I can’t give you an answer about that unless I know what they’re doing for sex there. Are they all just like looking at shadows of bosoms on the cave wall and like, helping themselves, or are they having sex together or something like that? Because that would be — because they say, well how would you explain to them about the outside world to convince them to go out and take a look? And I’d be like, well, I’d go, yeah, that sex you do there. That’s your — it’s like that. Everywhere except everything is celebrating that. It’s a big lush bloody exuberant dance out there. You like that feeling? You’re going to love colors. You’re going to love these birds. Like, yeah, because you’ll be in that feeling all the time.
But if they’re just masturbating to shadows on the wall, then that’s a whole other thing.
Jim: Sounds like a bunch of philosophers.
Tyson: I don’t know how dirty the people in the cave would be, but they’d have to wash up a bit or something. But I would definitely have to very generously go down on one or two of them for a good while and introduce them to that and then go like, right, did you like that? Well, that feeling is all out there. You’ll feel it in your eyes, your ears, everything. So, you know, get out and enjoy the bliss.
Jim: That’s good advice for us all, actually, wherever we are.
Tyson: I bet nobody’s come up with that solution to Plato’s Cave.
Jim: I like that. No. You’re right. I’m not aware of anybody.
Tyson: Better mouth-to-south on the Plato’s Cave victims there and get them all sorted out.
Jim: You should write a little essay on that. I think people would like it. The daisy chain in Plato’s Cave.
Tyson: Yep. Right? Yep. There we go. That’s just simple. Just use your head.
Jim: Some things have come up several times in your works and in our conversations — two ideas which do seem common amongst many of the peoples, the indigenous peoples of Australia. It’s dream time and song lines. Give us a relatively brief description of those two things and why they’re culturally important.
Tyson: Yeah. Well, both of them are mistranslations that sort of take you away from what they really are. But look, you know, basically, Jim, creation hasn’t always been a thing. Every potentiality and patterning of everything that ever was or will be in creation exists like in a kind of — I don’t know, some kind of archive of blueprints. It’s not like that at all. It is just dark. It’s just a dark nothing, void, place of complete peace. But there are shapes in there. There are the designs of everything that ever, you know, has been, is, will be, could have been — even everything is there.
And it’s the serpent beings, you know, serpent entities that are in every human culture, you know, the dragons, the rainbow snakes — so what we would call dreaming, maybe dreaming entities, entities of dreaming. The creation entities that make all the song lines, the stories in the landscape that shape the land — they’re the ones that can go. They go across from that endless deep dark that we come out of too. They’re going across all the time. And it’s different entities, but it’s the serpent that bridges across those two worlds and moves through.
And so, you know, in most of the song lines and the stories of the serpent, you know, it’s his whole existence there and you can follow it. You know, there are maps in the land that are stories, but they can also be sung. That’s why people call them song lines. But, you know, they change too. They change in different seasons. So there’s a particular time of year when that serpent will be moving through those waterways, will be moving through the skyways, you know. And so you’re going singing different parts, different ceremony for each season. So even if you’re in one place, that place changes all the time because time and place are one thing.
So which — I guess that led to this kind of mistranslation of dreaming, you know, as being this kind of altered state of consciousness. But you’re just kind of in it all the time. You’re just in this understanding of the universe as, you know, moving in these ways and always correlates and matches up and allows you to predict what’s happening in the systems and flows around you. You know, even often in finance and bloody global politics and stuff like that — you’ve got your eyes across enough good data, accurate data, then you can track that. Yeah. So it’s spiritual, but it’s also intensely secular because you don’t separate spirit and life into these different areas. It just is. And it’s as simple as just being informatics, which are invisible but they happen — these massive webs of cause and effect that self-organize and have intelligence.
These are entities and minds of place. And when you have old names for them and understandings of them and deeper and deeper layers of story that you can access as knowledge improves, then you can really know these entities for how they move through and then how they change over time. You know, with that serpent, there’s always part of the story where he dies. But that’s not the end of the story because that story’s eternal. So that story goes through all of time. And so it’s just a cloud of potential moments that you visit in different moments, different times. So it’s not sad that he died because he just died in that moment. But there’s all the other moments and they still exist. And you revisit them in those seasonal cycles as you move through that story every year and as you might travel along those routes, either with your mind or with your feet, you know, along those lines, you know, where those places are. Yeah.
Because it was all those potentialities taking form out of the deep dark that made and shaped everything.
Tyson: I have to apologize for like, opening you up to the possibilities of spirit. And it’s so weird, it’s like we missed each other. You influenced me so much that I’m this fricking skeptic and bloody rationalist now. But only with everybody else’s supernatural beliefs, not my own, because mine are right. It is, like, wrong.
Jim: Yeah. That’s always been my critique of religion. Wait a minute. There are 10,000 religions out there. At most, one of them is correct. Why the hell do you think yours is correct? Right? Yeah.
Tyson: Well, that’s it. I’ve been really happy with my audit of my cosmology and to the end, it stands up. It stands up to all of my scrutiny.
Jim: Check out my Substack article, “Minimum Viable Metaphysics.” This is an actual metaphysics that even Jim Rutt can stand behind.
Tyson: It’s enough to know the title. I love it. Minimum — oh, send me that.
Jim: I’ll do it.
Tyson: No. I’ve got to get your Substack.
Jim: Since I first met you, the thing I found most extraordinary has been this two-lens thing that I’ve talked about, and you have talked about it too. Probably not as much as I’ve talked about it, which is that you really do see the traditional Aboriginal entities like song lines, etcetera. And at the same time, you’re a rationalist materialist scientist. What in the world does it feel like to be using those two lenses simultaneously or serially?
Tyson: Alright. Alright. Here’s the metaphor. Three-D glasses. You know the cinema — remember they’re two different colors, cellophane? Yep. Yep. You know, it’s like asking somebody what’s it like to just see the red lens all the time? Like, what’s it like to see the blue lens all the time? It’s like, what’s it like to see them both at once? And it’s like, well you don’t see them. But you know, Alvin and the Chipmunks will pop right out of that screen at you. You’ve got — oh, you’ve got like — I remember seeing a Star Wars three-D thing in the cinema once, and it was just all these spaceships flying out at me. Yeah. It’s kind of like that. I’m not like shifting between two lenses — I’m putting on my three-D glasses, bruh.
Jim: Wow. That’s — I love that. That’s an amazing metaphor, actually. Alright. That works. That works. That works. Alright, people. Go get your three-D glasses. You know, we’ll talk to Tyson again when his book comes out here in the US, assuming we’re all still around at the time. So I want to thank Tyson Yunkaporta for an amazingly interesting worldview podcast here on The Jim Rutt Show. And don’t forget, if you don’t read Sand Talk, I’m going to kick your ass.
Tyson: Yo, love you, Jim. I love how you say that.