Original Wisdom is an unforgettable book. Like all humans, author Robert Wolff was born a wild animal, ready to enjoy a pleasant life, romping around in a tropical wilderness. He grew up in Sumatra, the son of Dutch parents. His father was a doctor. The young lad suffered the misfortune of being educated by the dominant culture. It trained him for an unnatural life of schedules, destinations, and anxiety. His wildness was paved over, and his consciousness became disconnected from All-That-Is.
Wolff was interested in healing, and hoped to become a doctor, but World War II interrupted his plans. After the war, he became a social psychologist, and worked on a number of government projects. Work included numerous visits to rural villages in Malaysia, where life was very laid back. The people were “soft, gentle, polite.” Villagers were the opposite of city people, who tended to be “crude, loud, insensitive.”
Oddly, the patients in Malaysian mental hospitals included whites, Indians, and many Chinese — but no Malays, who were half of the population. Malay villages had a healthy sense of community. They accepted the presence of people who were odd; there was never a thought of sending them away. Everyone knew the village thief, and no one reported him to the police, because he belonged where he was. Malays respected one another.
Wolff was grateful that he had learned to speak several languages, because this ability expanded his awareness. Languages are unique products of the cultures in which they evolve. Different cultures perceive reality in different ways, and many ideas cannot be accurately translated from one language to another. Consequently, it was clear to him that the Western worldview was not the one and only way of interpreting reality. Most Western people never learn this. Insanity seems perfectly normal to the inmates of the loony bin.
His career began in the 1950s, the dawn of the most horrific era in human history. Population grew explosively, as did the ecological blitzkrieg. Traditional cultures were being exterminated by a plague of bulldozers. Wolff worked hard to learn and record the knowledge of traditional healers. He believed that their skills were the time-proven results of thousands of years of trial and error. A tremendous treasure was on the verge of being lost forever.
He remembered the days before antibiotics, when Western doctors were little better than witch doctors. He detested modern healthcare, where doctors practiced medicine, not healing. They were highly skilled at temporarily postponing death via extremely expensive treatments — even if the additional weeks or months of existence were meaningless. Not long ago, most of those with fading spirits would simply have been allowed to pass to the other side in peace.
In his crusade to preserve ancient knowledge, he met a number of healers who had not been the apprentices of venerable elders. They acquired their skills via inner knowing. Intuition told them what herbs to use, and the way to prepare them. These healers told Wolff to relax; a treasure was not being lost. The wisdom was always accessible. When it was needed, someone would find it. This notion gives Western folks cramps, because they process reality via thinking.
One day, Wolff learned about a tribe of hunter-gatherers who lived in a remote mountain forest — the Sng’oi (or Senoi or Sakai). Meeting them opened the door to a series of life-changing experiences, a great healing. They were masters of intuition and inner knowing. They lived in a spiritual reality, “where things were known outside of thinking.”
Their camps were not close to the road. Whenever Wolff arrived unannounced for a visit, one of the Sng’oi would be waiting for him in the forest. The guide would stand up and, without a word, lead him to the village. This baffled Wolff. How did they know he was coming? When asked, they told him that they had no premonition of his arrival. They had experienced a feeling to go to a place and be there. When Wolff appeared, they understood why they were there.
They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, communicating telepathically. Their shaman could sometimes foresee future events. In the mornings, the Sng’oi discussed their dreams. Once, Wolff described a dream. Its message, they told him, was that he was needed at home. He returned to his family, and learned that a child had had a medical emergency.
“They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.” They loved to laugh and joke. They were often singing and smiling. Angry voices were never heard. Each new day was a blank slate — no plans, no jobs, nothing that had to be done. They floated, inspired by feelings. Life in a tropical rainforest was not a tough job.
One evening, while sitting in a group, Wolff went into a trance, and spoke to the others, an experience he did not remember. A Sng’oi shaman recognized that Wolff had shamanic powers, and offered to open spiritual doors for him. His name was Ahmeed, and his job description was “to bring new knowledge to the People.” Wolff accepted his offer.
The learning process involved long, silent walks in the forest, with no food or water. Wolff was frustrated, because he was thinking like crazy. It was impossible to still his furiously roaring mind. He could not hear his inner voice. At the end of the walks, he was exhausted; his mind fried.
Eventually, his thinker got more and more flaccid, and he learned to pay attention. Some days, he could float away from his mind, and vividly experience the sounds and smells of the forest. Everything changed. The world became intensely alive. He ceased being an observer, and became a living part of All-That-Is.
After months of practice, he gradually remembered how to be a human being. “The all-ness was everywhere, and I was part of it. I cannot explain what went on inside me, but I knew that I had learned something unbelievably wonderful. I felt more alive than I had ever felt before. All of me was filled with being.” He felt great love for the people. The trees and mosquitoes were his family.
Back in the civilized world, Wolff was no longer the same person. Inner knowing could be painful, and sometimes had to be turned off. He could sense the feelings of the people around him, and this could be overwhelming. “It was frightening to discover how many people think nothing at all, but feel waves of anger, resentment, and bitterness — although they act as if they are deaf and blind to their own feelings.”
As the years passed, Wolff became whole and confident, as his humanness recovered. Being human was so much healthier than being civilized. That’s his message. Even adults can heal. It’s never too late to try. “Knowing inside is not something unusual; it is how we are. All humans can have that connection with All-That-Is. The connection is within us.” Cultures without the connection are on a bleak path.
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Ancient Way of Knowing
Book Review – Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by Robert Wolff, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2001. I came to read and review Original Wisdom because of the description of the Sng’oi’s dream life as described in Philip Shepherd’s previously reviewed book Radical Wholeness. Also, while attending the conferences of the International Association for the Study of Dreams I frequently heard of the dream life of the Sng’oi, or as they are sometimes called, the Senoi. Kelly Bulkeley often told of how this peaceful tribe of people of the interior mountains of Malaysia would share their nighttime dreams each morning and how this dream sharing brought peace to the community. Also, Patricia Garfield in her book Creative Dreaming describes how the Senoi children are taught to face the dangers in their dreams/nightmares to overcome their fear. Robert Wolff, growing up in Malaysia and spending much time in his adult life with the Sng’oi, tells of their Ancient Ways of Knowing. These ancient ways of knowing spoke deeply to me in my belief that in order to save the Earth we must again begin to listen to the Earth as did our hunter-gathering ancestors. The Sng’oi consider the world of their dreams as the real world, and their waking world as the shadow world with their daytime activities reflecting what they learned from their nighttime dreams. Wolff’s stories open the door to Sng’oi’s way of knowing, stories that go beyond the anthropologist’s way of describing such indigenous cultures. When he would ask the people of the Sng’oi village a question, their response would be silence, silence that would last for a considerable length of time before one person of the group would provide a brief answer. It seemed to Wolff that they were deliberating to find an answer though there was silence in this deliberation as if they were reading each other’s minds. Also, on each of his visits he would have to walk an hour or more to reach the village from where he parked his car. Since the village often moved, he would find a member of the village waiting for him along the trail to show him the way, though they had no way of knowing that he was coming. When he asked how they knew, they said that they didn’t know, but in their day’s wandering someone would just know that he had to go and wait at a certain place. On one occasion Wolff was to drive to Port Dixon on the Malaysian coast. Upon leaving the village he asked if anyone would like to go with him. After a lengthy silent deliberation Ahmeed, the village bomoh or shaman, said he would go. These mountain people had never been away from their mountain home. While in Port Dixon Wolff saw Ahmeed just standing silently looking out over the endless water. Upon returning Ahmeed to his jungle home Wolff was invited to stay another night because of a celebration that was being planned that evening for the people to hear Ahmeed’s story. They all retreated to a hut where Ahmeed enthusiastically told the story of the Great Water with the Lord of the Great Water telling him to not be afraid. These aborigines had some fear of the water of the rivers of the jungle. In telling the story, Ahmeed told of the mountains under the water, the giant animals that lived in the water, and though he had not ventured near or into the water, he knew it was salty. His stories were again a mystery to Wolff since Ahmeed again had no apparent way of knowing these things. The many stories told in Original Wisdom were of the Sng’oi’s way of knowing that was a deep mystery to Wolff. Because of his close relationship to this village of the Sng’oi, Ahmeed invited Wolff to learn the ways of a bomoh. Wolff agreed with some apprehension, and upon his next visit to the village Ahmeed offered to take him on a walk each day of his visit. Upon leaving the village and returning home Wolff felt that he learned nothing from these silent walks. The next time he visited and Ahmeed again took him on a daylong walk, at one point Ahmeed indicated to Wolff to be silent and not move. After a few minutes a large snake crawled out of the jungle and across the path. Again Wolff could not imagine how Ahmeed knew that the snake was there. Snakes resided in the trees and are rarely seen on the ground. The next day they again walked and Wolff’s mind was racing, searching for answers as to how Ahmeed knew. When noting how his mind was racing he stopped his thinking and listened instead from the heart. The jungle turned bright and was full of sounds and smells. He was thirsty and Ahmeed said “do not talk” meaning “do not think.” Wolff opened his heart and saw in a leaf a small pool of water. This new ability of seeing amazed Wolff. He saw the jungle very differently: “the leaf-with water in it, attached to a plant that grew in soil surrounded by uncounted other plants, all part of the same blanket of living things covering the soil, which was also part of a larger living skin around the earth. And nothing was separate; all was one, the same thing: water-leaf-plant-trees-soil-animals-earth-air-sunlight and little wisps of wind. The all-ness was everywhere, and [Wolff] was part of it (p. 157).” When he next looked up, Ahmeed was not in sight, but Wolff felt no fear. He intuitively walked in the direction of the village led by a sound, a soft growling purr of a tiger, who he knew was saying, “I am tiger, I am here.” The tiger was his new spirit guide just as the snake was Ahmeed’s spirit guide. Wolff had learned the ancient way of knowing, knowing from the heart and not from the many words of the brain. From my 50 years of using hypnosis and more recently ecstatic trance of listening from the heart, my frequent encounters with what could be called “mind-reading” have shown me the beautiful reality of the Sng’oi way of knowing. As a practitioner and teacher of ecstatic trance, I see that trance brings us into the state of oneness with all that is of the Earth, brings us to the Sng’oi way of knowing. Wolff’s experiences of finding this oneness with the Earth shows us the way of saving the Earth from the devastation of global climate change by again learning the ways of the hunting and gathering cultures of the Earth. For our salvation into the future, this book is a must read.
Top reviews from other countries
Nicole Brooks
One of the most beautiful books I have ever read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 14, 2023
R. Pepler
An easy read and a profound reality-check for our culture
Reviewed in Canada on August 8, 2015