Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Stories are powerful tools and can be even more powerful weapons in the hands of malignant narcissists. If you want to take control of your life or work toward some kind of sustainable change in the world, you need to harness the power of story.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
The interaction between the gut and the brain cannot happen mechanically through purely biological function, so it must be done through cultural practice. It is done by constantly making meaning in the worlds around us and within, transferring knowledge from one domain to another through use of metaphor. It is about making connections between thing
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The most intelligent part of your body is actually separate from your central nervous system. Your gut has its own independent nervous system that is still a mystery to modern science.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
There is knowledge and intelligence in your hands, feet, and even hair. Using your body consciously and meaningfully can unlock this intelligence. This is why any training that incorporates kinesthetic learning is so effective.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
This is how traditional message sticks work. This kind of haptic knowledge is also encoded in relationships, which is why kinship systems are so central to our cultures. If you learn something with somebody, you might have trouble remembering it on your own but recall it in vivid detail when you are with her again, or if you think of her or call ou
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If you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge that you are learning, then when you pick up that object or even just visualize it, you instantly remember what you learned.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Story Places or sacred sites are places of overlap between the two worlds, which is why people need protection when entering these places—calling
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Creation is not an event in the distant past, but something that is continually unfolding and needs custodians to keep co-creating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphors in cultural practice.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Metaphors are the language of spirit. They go around, top and bottom, because you need to close the feedback loop—you can’t just sit in the abstract space, because you need to take the knowledge back to apply it in the real world, and vice versa. This can be seen in a secular view of reality as a relationship between theory and practice.