Indigenous Women Are Publishing the First Maya Works in over 400 Years

I was with a bunch of pre-med students from california that were doing a free clinic down there, and a few of them had parents from the area, and spoke spanish.

We were on a bus tour back from tikal, driven by a couple of Mayan tour guides from Lake atitlan, and they started telling ghost stores in spanish while one of the pre-med students was translating for everyone else.

They told this story of a backpacker who had brought a ouija board with them to their town and how they had accidentally opened up some kind of portal and let spirits loose that cursed the town or something like that, and then eventually some old woman in the town discovered that it had been the ouija board that was the source of it, so the town all went to the backpacker's hostel and burned him.

Or at least that was how it was translated and then after everyone in the car was like "WHAAAA" they clarified that "lo" meant "it" and not "him" and that they had burned the ouija board-- gender in spanish can be a little confusing.

I don't know what you mean by math being constant - I think you'll find the Mayans had a different understanding of math than we do.

I'm a recovering information addict who used to perceive myself as having a deep need to know things, which was actually anxiety around and fear of uncertainty or not knowing.

In recovery, I've learned there's very little I need to know, learning to tap into my intuition, instead.

One indigenous story dealt with exactly this.

I used to think of myths and mythology as ancient outdated beliefs. I now view them as learning opportunities. I've found it useful to view literally everything this way, which is another teaching I've encountered in indigenous stories & I learned on my own beforehand. I now view beliefs as tools for configuring cognitive biases and can find many useful ways to prime my brain this way.

So yeah...crazy useful and totally counter to modern society's teachings, probably because these lessons work against the more toxic/limiting aspects of modern life.

Thanks for asking! There are timeless teachings about how nature works (at least until nature evolves away from them) in indigenous cultures, which includes how to care for ourselves. That's stuff that was for sure missing from my upbringing and education.

Also, here's another example of how what I consider Western science is only just now catching up to some indigenous teachings: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2015/11/08/ornithogenic... The local indigenous tribes in that area told of birds that were setting fires. People considered the stories a myth. Nope...just observations of nature being passed down generationally through stories. I've heard some indigenous folk refer to it as their form of scientific documentation. That perspective also makes it much easier for me to find value in the stories.