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Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing

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The aboriginal Sng'oi of Malaysia are often described with words like "pre-industrial" or "pre-agricultural," but it is a mistake to think of them as living in a former stage of what of our more "advanced" society has become. As Wolff shows in this book, it would be more precise to say that are living in another world - a better world.

Having spent half his youth growing up among Sng'oi, Wolff says this: "I learned early on to be in two different realities." One reality was oriented around the clock, efficiency, technology, and harsh realism. The other was fluid, timeless, almost dreamlike - a world in which "people touched each other," a world in which "we knew animals and plants intimately." The bulk of this book is spent fleshing out differences between these worlds, in an attempt to teach us Westerners another way of knowing, another reality. Yet in the process of doing so, it quickly becomes apparent that the modern world doesn't quite measure up.

As slaves to an alienating industrial system, we civilized people must pay rent to live. A completely self-domesticated species, we live in a state of complete dependence on big industry and agriculture. We are ignorant of the flora and fauna that support our life, and helplessness to a capricious global market. Thus, the condescending glance "modern" humanity casts at so-called "primitive peoples" is extremely ironic.

Traditionally referred to as "Sakai," or slaves, by modern Malaysians, the Sng'oi do not take offense. Says one Sng'oi man, "We look at the people down below [literally, from up in the mountains] - they have to get up at a certain time in the morning, they have to pay for everything with money, which they have to earn doing things for other people. They are constantly told what they can and cannot do. No, we do not mind when they call us slaves."

At one point in the book, Wolff recounts a number of silent educational trips into the rainforest with his friend/guide, Ahmeed, who was subtly trying to teach him to interact and connect with the forest on his own terms. After days of walking, Wolff became thirsty. It was precisely then that Ahmeed decided to sneak off and leave him to find water on his own. After searching for hours, he not only discovered water - he also discovered another way of seeing. "When I leaned over drink from the leaf, I saw water with feathery ripples, I saw a few mosquito larvae wriggling on the surface, I saw the veins of the leaf through the water, some bubbles, a little piece of dirt... How beautiful, how perfect." His perception suddenly "opened," and a deep feeling of connection enveloped him. "The all-ness was everywhere, and I was a part of it... I could not be afraid - I was apart of this all-ness."

Contrast this with our culture, a culture walled-in with fear; a culture that "learns - has to learn - to shut off the senses, to protect oneself from all the noise." Unlike the Sng'oi, who are brought up to listen, watch and feel their world in depth, our culture inhabits apsychological straightjacket. We are brought up to act like machines only to find ourselves replaced by machines built to act like humans. Perhaps our fear of the natural world explains why our economic system has set out to expand and colonize every wild space left on the globe. In the other world Wolff experienced, every day - indeed every second - was a miracle. Life, by no means perfect, was nevertheless full of smiles, stories, songs and dance. It was a world without fear and domination - until Komatsu bulldozers started coming to clear away the forest.

The topics Wolff address in this book vary from indigenous medicine to education, from dream interpretation to surviving the onslaught of civilization. This is not simply anthropology or ethnology, but a critique of modern industrial civilization and it's "Development Scheme" in the gentle voice of someone intimate with the Sng'oi. In all, the book amounts to nothing less than an alternative way of being. I found it refreshing, insightful and transformative - three criteria for any great book.

Edit: New reports state that Sng'oi culture has been "absorbed" into the Malaysian population.

j.w.k.

If this book was a drug the FDA would make it Class 3. It is that powerful and will have that strong an effect on your life.

While it is described as an account of a Malaysia tribe, it is, more importantly, a window into another way of thinking about WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN. That is also the name the book was originally given by it's author. Robert Wolff opens our eyes to see and think about possibilities for being human that our western world's schools and media do not teach, do not suggest.

Every person I know who has read this books says it changes the way they walk through the world, the way they see, the way they know.

It discusses ideas that impinge upon parapsychology, shamanism, Carlos Castaneda's works, intuition, healing...

The book is a precious gift that will make you feel joy and sadness-- joy from knowing the possibilities of being human, and the beauty of the Sng'oi, sadness, because the Sng'oi were reported to be "absorbed" by the Malaysian culture several years ago. They are gone.

Thom Hartmann, who wrote the forward to the book, has written several other books which share a similar vision-- Prophet's Way, Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, and Greatest Spiritual Secret.

Read this book and see if you can find a way to begin seeing and knowing, of being human, as the Sng'oi did, and see if you can find a part of them in your heart.

This book is truly one of a kind. It is richly spiritual yet not religion based. It is about the author's cross cultural experience, which brought him to a realization. Those moments he started to question about his commonsense of the western beliefs are so honestly stated.

The book took me into a very different world where things were simpler. In this environment I could unwind my restless heart, and observed the very foreign culture...

The effect this book had on me has been profound and long lasting. In fact I am writing this review two years after reading it.

I just finished this book and was deeply moved by his description of the People are in touch with what so many of us have lost and spend money and time trying to regain through books, tapes, seminars, videos, etc. His own experience of coming into knowing was fascinating and inspiring.

As one who teaches anthropology, I found some very useful and concrete examples to share with my students to help clarify points that the texts we use don't really do justice to. Wolff makes them crystal clear and explains them in a way that is easily accessible. It will help in a classroom of college students who are only taking the course because it's required to see that our approach to life is not the only way and the assumptions we make are not universal.

This is an excellent book.

A psychologist who grew up in the culture of Malaysia pratices first in Suriname, a small country in South America, then returns to Malaysia to study and work with the people there. He becomes involved with the Sng'oi, an aboriginal, preindustrial people. But not involved the way Anthropologists typically become involved. Robert Wolff spends time with these people in their small compounds. He communicates with them as best he can, with his knowledge of the Malay language and his meager abilities with their language, which is not related to Malay. But his knowledge of diverse cultures and languages undoubtedly help him to blend with the Sing'oi.

He does not seek to put them in a box or put a label on them, but to understand their way of living and thinking. They live simply, without many possessions or any interest in possesions. The eat when they feel like it and when they find food, which they seem to find easily in their jungle environment. This is not just a story of how the author learned to live simply and love his fellow man through contact with simpler people. He actually learned something of incredible value from a member of the Sng'oi who offered to teach him. The "teaching" mainly consisted of walking around the jungle together. But author Wolff came to a day when something "clicked" for him. Like the shaman with whom he wandered, he sudenly "knew" things without knowing how he knew them. Where before he would get thirsty and ask his companion to find water, now he "knew" that a certain leaf had water, but he also found he was not so thirsty. He found he could become one with the jungle and he also found his personal "animal that helps" was a tiger, just as his companion's animal was a snake.

Robert Wolff's story is fascinating, as it is a bit different from other tales of enlightenment or peak experiences. He found the ability he gained was most useful and natural in the jungle environment but could become a burden in the civilized world. There are so many things we're more comfortable not knowing. If you are in a room full of people and you sudenly can see all their secrets, it could be disconcerting. Could that be an explanation of why we lost these abilities or why we don't use them?

The Sng'oi placed a lot of value on dreams. They considered the world they visited in dreams to be the real world that created the material world. This is also the belief of many other spiritual traditions. Each morning, the people would review their dreams, which were sometimes interrelated. The author shared in this practice and found it sometimes a key to understanding events in his life.

The author's interest in the Sng'oi grew as he observed behavior that seemed unusual and he pursued the mechanisms. For instance, when he would walk into the jungle toward one of their settlements, someone would always be waiting on the path a little ways from the settlement, waiting to show him the rest of the way. How did they know he was coming? Finally, as he himself found new abiliities to "know," he did not try to explain how the "knowing" worked, satisfied that it did work.

I liked this book very much and found it had some points in common with another favorite book, Faces in the Smoke by Douchan Gersi. In Gersi's book, African aboriginals always know when visitors are coming, even when the visitors were a long way out. Have we substituted technology for the natural abilities we once had? Do cell phones replace inner knowing? The testimony of those who have lived with aboriginals shows us how little we apparently understand about our world, and how much we can learn from simpler cultures.

This is a good book that is based on the recollections of Robert Wolff with a certain group of People. These People are what many would consider the opposite of North Americans. They do not have the same sense of time and they certainly do not believe in structuring their time. He passes on what knowledge he gained from these People to the reader. Personally, I found the book rather choppy and at times, rather dull. The point is that there is something within us all that has become lost because of "civilization". If you are looking for a quick read on the subject then this is your book. However, if you are looking for an entertaining and well thought out read on the same subject, I highly recommend Derrick Jensen's "A language older than words".

My library finally found Original Wisdom and got it for me. I almost have it finished and I havn't had the book in my hands for 24 hours yet. I highly recommend Original Wisdom to anyone who wants a first hand account of what life is like outside of our Dominant/Taker Culture. Maybe our way isn't the one right way to live.

the true narratives in this book are expressed in simple beautiful prose. these are first-hand accounts by the author about his experience with other cultures during childhood and adulthood. my favorite was the chapter 'we take care of each other' which expressed how one village views people we would label 'mentally ill' and how they treat those people.a book not to be missed if you want to expand beyond your own cultural myopia.

This was a fabulous book that clearly conveyed what it means to Live. It is not to be a slave to times, schedules, jobs, always trying to get the next best thing. Living is about being part of the world, understanding what is around you, and an absolute realization that we are part of the worlds' grand system - no more important that anything else that we share the land with.

The author puts it quite elegantly:
"...I feel one with plants and animals, the sun and the moon. Atoms of my body were once part of a bird, a lava rock, water, before I got to use them."

Some parts of the book are a little repetitive, but the message of the book is very clear. There's nothing preachy in this book, but it does make you rethink how our Western culture values things vs. other cultures. In my mind (and others), Western culture, ultimately, puts the highest value on the amount of dollars earned. Nothing else is as important that people strive for daily.

In other cultures, such as ones mentioned in this book, community, inner thoughts, and the knowing and being of nature - that is the ideal. While I wouldn't agree that everyone should live with nature, Western culture has certainly lost any kind of balance with nature, and has been hurt because of it. A highly recommended book.

This one was a quiet read, one in which you get to follow along with a man following a Malaysian tribe who are still connected with nature and unaltered by what we today call "civilization". While I don't believe the author intended one to go away from this read by jumping back into the jungle, i do believe or what i got out of it is to remember what it is like to be human again and seeing the world with the reverence and child-like wonder we probably were meant to in the first place. The approach is soft, yet the lessons and questions raised are deeply profound! An example - One of the characters is asked about not having the "choices" we have in our technological society and would they not like to have more too? But their response is: "why?, we know what to do". It took me some time to understand this.

I've enjoyed this book and will re-read in times of feeling overwhelmed by our sped-up society and as a way to deprogram and feel from a deeper part of myself. I also found it to be a good read for trusting one's human instincts which seem to get lost in the machine too often. An eye-opener especially in our Western, overly-medicated society. I found this book best absorbed with time set aside without distractions to allow for pause and reflection. This reading is soothing in its ability to help re-awaken an inner knowing.