Indigenous Australian: artist unknown
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A focus on linear, abstract, declarative knowledge alone not only fails to create complex connectivity but damages the mind. We are biologically punished for this destructive behavior with a neurochemical rush of lethargy and discomfort that most people call boredom. Extended periods of this affect a person’s mental health, resulting in bouts of rage, depression, and worse. In centralized knowledge institutions today, this illness is called misbehavior or misconduct. Without the spark of creation in your neural system, the mind-body system stagnates and falls apart, affecting not only your ability to learn but your health and relationships as well, leading to increasingly destructive behaviors.
If you are an Aboriginal person living in Australia, this will almost certainly lead to incarceration and/or a decreased life span. The creative spark is a process that allows us to solve seemingly impossible problems. It involves representing real-life elements with metaphors, which transform tangible things into spirit, images in an abstract space. That is the action of the line at the top of the symbol. In that Dreaming space, the abstract entities can be manipulated and reorganized to find solutions to real-life problems. This is how the thought experiments in this book have been conducted. For a simple example of this Turnaround process, consider the way four apples and two hungry people can be translated into the abstract symbols of 4/2. The solution (=2) may then be found in the abstract space, transferred back to reality and applied to share the apples equally. If one person has more nutritional requirements than the other, then the abstract of 3:1 might be applied.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
by Tyson Yunkaporta