Indigenous knowledge isn’t facts and figures. It’s method and process. This is one of the reasons it can’t be written down well. It has to be handed from one person to another. It has to be discovered and integrated.
You can discover it on your own, if you are able to drop all your preconceptions and simply look at things in the world. Nature is the divine teacher. It has all the information we need, when we know how to look.
If you are thinking that you already know everything then you are not going to really, really look. Instead you will habitually interpret.
One of the interesting things that’s becoming available to us now is the true history of Native societies that used to be fluent around the world. All of these societies were very scientifically based because they were based on observation and testing. They were based on critical thinking that was in harmony with mystical thinking. Many of the indigenous voices that are speaking to us now talk about how, from an early age, they were taught to think independently. To use their mind for what it had was created for.
Our giant brains were created to reason, and see, and think. We were also created (evolved) to share what we know with each other. You get three people together and they naturally start brainstorming on things. Several people can come up with so much more than just one person can imagine. Twenty people may be better, even though they are way way slower.
Then add time and the passing of knowledge, and we have an amazing, living, growing culture. What we have now as the western scientific process is a process that has been contributed to by thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, over thousands of years; accumulating knowledge; putting it together; testing it; trying it out; bringing it into new ways of perception over and over.
This is how we can approach creating the new world that we need to live in. This is how we create this new world that’s going to work for everybody.
It’s going to take an open thinking process. It’s way more than just facts and figures. To make this new world we need a new inner mental landscape.