Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing
Robert Wolff
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0892818662
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
• Explores the lifestyle of indigenous peoples of the world who exist in complete harmony with the natural world and with each other.
• Reveals a model of a society built on trust, patience, and joy rather than anxiety, hurry, and acquisition.
• Shows how we can reconnect with the ancient intuitive awareness of the world's original people.
Deep in the mountainous jungle of Malaysia the aboriginal Sng'oi exist on the edge of extinction, though their way of living may ultimately be the kind of existence that will allow us all to survive. The Sng'oi--pre-industrial, pre-agricultural, semi-nomadic--live without cars or cell phones, without clocks or schedules in a lush green place where worry and hurry, competition and suspicion are not known. Yet these indigenous people--as do many other aboriginal groups--possess an acute and uncanny sense of the energies, emotions, and intentions of their place and the living beings who populate it, and trustingly follow this intuition, using it to make decisions about their actions each day.
Psychologist Robert Wolff lived with the Sng'oi, learned their language, shared their food, slept in their huts, and came to love and admire these people who respect silence, trust time to reveal and heal, and live entirely in the present with a sense of joy. Even more, he came to recognize the depth of our alienation from these basic qualities of life. Much more than a document of a disappearing people, Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing holds a mirror to our own existence, allowing us to see how far we have wandered from the ways of the intuitive and trusting Sng'oi, and challenges us, in our fragmented world, to rediscover this humanity within ourselves.
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and measured, the survey results would provide base- D i ffe re n t Re a l i t i e s 31 line data on the diet and health status of the population. For local political reasons, only one ethnic group was to be sampled—the Malays. Two other groups, who together formed a little less than half of the country’s population, were not included, perhaps because not all of them had been given the vote when the country received its independence a few years earlier. An entire planeload of modern
very few of the People were eating—the meal had been prepared for the two anthropologists and myself, it seemed. During and after the meal the anthropologists talked animatedly with their informant, a bright, older man with a wonderful twinkle in his eye. The little house in which the anthropologists lived was quite dark and crowded with people. The scientists’ voices sounded loud in the small space. Sometimes I felt husband and wife were competing with each other to make points. I did not listen
the Sng’oi that when we sleep, we visit the real world, and when we can bring experiences back from there, it may help us live our day in this shadow world. In fact, even when I was far away from the Sng’oi, I got used to spending a few minutes every morning, before getting on with the business of the day, remembering what I could of my experiences in the dream world. Doing it by myself did not work as well as doing it with a group of people, but often I discovered a message, a theme that colored
knowing—from inside himself. Others have said the same. Perhaps, despite great destruction of human experience, ancient insight and wisdom are not lost. Somehow they are still part of us, inside us. These insights can and will come back to us when we need them. As a child listening to the people who were near and dear to me, I never thought that one way of looking at the world was better than another. When I returned to that part of the world as an adult I realized that our arrogant attitude
saw a line of insects crawling up a tree. Ahmeed noticed that I had been walking slower and slower while paying intense attention to the world around me. He too stood still. “Sit?” he asked. “Well, no . . . not really . . . perhaps . . . I don’t know,” I stammered. “Drink?” he asked. Afterward I realized that he had spoken very softly, so as not to intrude on what was going on inside me, and he had used simple, single words: Sit? Drink? Yes, I was very thirsty. I looked at him, thinking he would