Wolff's early childhood prepared him better than most Western people for his journey. He grew up while living with his mother, father, and sister in a tiny town on the island of Sumatra, part of the modern nation-state of Indonesia. There, he was a member of a genuine community of a kind that has long since broken down in most, perhaps all, of the industrialized world. He considered the rest of the people of the town his other family, and from them he learned the Malay language.

Though raised among these Malay, he was also simultaneously being raised as a child of an American family, and he went on to become a psychologist in the Western scientific tradition. Once educated, though, he chose to work first among the people of Suriname in South America, and later in many parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He felt driven to learn about the healing traditions of the indigenous and aboriginal peoples of these areas, and he was struck again and again by the profound differences between the ways in which they lived and the ways in which the people of the industrialized world lived.

His observations are often telling, as when he notes that we are awash in choices, which we call freedom, while the other peoples he lived with have few of those kinds of choices, that supposed freedom. He wrote:

"We are proud to be a society of free people, by which we mean people who are free to choose, people who, in fact, must choose—endlessly, all day—often making choices from alternatives that are so new that we have not had time to even imagine their consequences. We are choosing in a fog."

And:

"Stress is the price we pay for affluence—an affluence that in the end is little more than a glut of meaningless choices."

He wrote of the Malay:

"One of the basic tenets of Malay culture is that nobody tells anybody what to do. Adults never order a child older than about two to do something or not to do something. The language does not allow for such commands."

It's almost impossible for me to imagine living as part of such a culture, though I've been striving for years to learn how to live my own life that way. In fact, I recently decided to do my best to avoid ever again selling my life as a wage slave. I hate being ordered to do things—being bossed around—and I hate being the one ordering other people around just as much, sometimes more. As far as I'm concerned, that's no way for human beings to live.

In explaining his interest in traditional healing, Wolff wrote:

"In many parts of the world, when you are sick you go to a healer. These healers have different names in different cultures, but they have in common the age-old belief that healing is an intrinsic capacity of human beings. When you look behind the ceremony, the dress, the ritual, what all native healers do is take away barriers to healing, or strengthen what we would now call the patient's immune system."

For all the recent movement toward a more holistic approach in Western allopathic medicine, it still seems to me that we're a long way from that. Most doctors continue to see healing as a process they are in charge of, that they control, not one they can, at most, facilitate.

Wolff's words illuminate what we have lost even when he doesn't explicitly make a point after sharing an anecdote. Of his general impressions of the Sng'oi and other aboriginal people, he wrote:

"These people were hard to find because our aggressive and intense civilization had driven them to the most inaccessible parts of the world. They lived off the land or the ocean. They did not have to rely on the outside for any of their needs. They could find all the food they needed to sustain themselves, they could find or make material for shelter and clothing. They carved canoes and made blowpipes, they rolled a powerfully strong rope from the fibers of coconut husks. And beyond what they could find and make in their environment, they did not need anything, nor did they want anything more. They lived life. Life did not live them, as it does us. They enjoyed each other and constantly reinforced the bonds they had with each other by touching: They huddled around a little fire, they slept in a big ball, they often fed little tidbits of food to each other, and they combed each other's hair. In that they were like animals who groom each other."

I was exiled to cry myself to sleep in a crib as soon as I was born—thrust from the complete security, belonging, and maternal support of the womb into aloneness for hours and hours at a time. I can only imagine—and it feels wrenchingly true—that this must've been torturous and incomprehensible for me when I had no sense of time yet and couldn't even console myself with the thought that she—Mom—would return at some point. How could I possibly know in those early days that she wasn't going to be gone forever, that I wasn't completely abandoned? All I could've known was I need and no one is here for me.*

Let me make something unmistakably clear, though: I don't blame my parents one bit for what I experienced. It would have been a near-miracle for them to somehow overrule all their own acculturation and the authoritative pronouncements of the medical establishment of the time telling them that the way they raised me was the way children should be raised. I don't doubt they really thought they were doing the best they could by me, and I love them both dearly.

I slept alone throughout my childhood, too, though I shared a room with at least one of my brothers until I was 18 or so. As an adult, I have almost always spent my nights alone, sharing them only on those occasions when I was in a sexual relationship, which, truth be told, hasn't been all that often. These days I do have a regular bed-companion, of the hairy four-legged canine variety, but, as much as Maggy is dear to me, that's not enough. I need to be sleeping with my own kind, and I do mean sleeping. I'm not euphemistically referring to sex, though I need that, too.

I find the way of life Wolff described almost inconceivable. I wonder if, having been raised in the detached Western way I could ever handle it, yet I still ache for that kind of intimacy.

More, this time specifically about the Sng'oi:

"In time I grew to know them better. But it was when I began to overnight in their villages that I learned that they literally lived in another reality. When it became dark, people huddled together for warmth and companionship. In the tropics there is no long period of dusk; it grows dark quickly. The air would become cool and people would move closer together, reaching out, touching a neighbor, perhaps holding hands. Women might run their fingers through the hair of the person sitting next to them."

And:

"As it grew late, one by one people would get up, go into one of the houses (often little more than lean-tos, or rickety huts on stilts), and fall asleep. Eventually each of us had found an empty spot on the floor of one of the shelters, and, wrapped in our sarongs, we huddled close to whoever else slept in that house that night. The houses did not belong to anyone—it seemed that each of the four or five little shelters was for all of the people living in that settlement at the moment. We would fall asleep where we chose to go—and, I am sure, with whomever we wanted to spend the night.

"Yes, people had sex, but even that was gentle, quiet, and discreet. Occasionally someone might turn over and bump into a couple being a little too acrobatic or noisy, and there would be a grunt. Or people might move away from a couple that made too much to-do about their lovemaking. Passionate lovemaking between young people most often took place during the day outside in a more hidden spot in the jungle, I was told."

Imagine that. Imagine a culture in which sex isn't something to be hidden away from everyone who isn't taking part in it (or, sadly, paying to observe it), in which sex is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to get embarrassed about—in which sex is perfectly, utterly normal and accepted—and the only reason to do it in private is so you don't disturb everybody else who's trying to get some sleep. Imagine being part of a culture where it's accepted that sex is a basic need in much the same way hunger and thirst are, one that must be filled if a person is to be healthy, and so the culture as a whole supports its fulfillment. Imagine.

I want to be part of a culture like that, my friends—I do, I do, I do. While their ways might seem strange to you, in the context of the untold thousands of human cultures that have existed over the span of our evolution, I bet you those who sleep either alone or only with their sexual partners—those who narrowly define what kinds of touch are acceptable, and shut sex up away from the rest of their lives—are the strange ones. I bet those who treat sexual desire as something to be suppressed except under certain very rigid constraints are the ones who find their societies ridden with rape, sexual abuse, and other perversions. I bet.

After spending time with and coming to be accepted by the Sng'oi, Wolff discovered that the name he'd been calling them, the Malay word sakai, originally was equivalent to "slave." He attempted to apologize around the fire one evening. A long silence followed, and then:

"This time, again, one person answered. He—a rather adventurous young man, I was told later—spoke slowly, simply, for my benefit perhaps. 'No,' he said, 'we do not mind when others call us Sakai. We look at the people down below—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.' He paused, and then added, 'No, we do not mind when they call us slaves.'"

Over time, Wolff began to notice inexplicable occurrences, instances when one of the Sng'oi, or the community as a whole, would…know something when he could find no rational explanation for how they came to know it. He began to realize that they were somehow able to access a deeper pool of collective knowing, something like what we would call intuition, but more profound and revealing than the intuitive feelings most industrialized people are aware of. When it comes to their knowledge of plant medicines and foods, Wolff wrote:

"The explanation Western scientists give for how people all over the world discovered the healing qualities of plants without the benefit of our sophisticated science is always the same: trial and error—as if primitive people tried this bark, or that leaf, and perhaps experimented with cooking it, eating it raw, shredding it, baking it until, in the end, they kept what worked.

"In reality, the preparation of many native foods and medicines is often so complicated, requiring so many steps that it is hard to imagine how people would use trial and error to learn what is good and safe to eat, or which herbs prepared which ways prove to be medicinal.

"How would people discover through trial and error that curare, a quick and deadly poison that can be applied to blow darts or arrows, must be prepared by collecting the sap of the plant and cooking it down to a thick paste, being careful, the whole time, not to touch it with their hands? (Touching often means ingesting, for those who do not frequently wash their hands.)"

In time, Wolff was invited by the Sng'oi to learn their ways of knowing, and he accepted, though the curriculum ended up looking nothing much like our ways of teaching and learning. Of his first experience of feeling this kind of presence as part of the world, he wrote:

"The jungle was suddenly dense with sounds, smells, little puffs of air here and there. I became aware of things I had largely ignored before. It was as if all this time I had been walking with dirty eyeglasses—and then someone washed them for me; or as if I were watching a blurry home movie—and then someone turned the focusing knob. But it was more than that—much more. I could smell things I had no name for. I heard little sounds that could be anything at all. I saw a leaf shivering. I saw a line of insects climbing up a tree."

In time, Wolff came to trust this new way of experiencing the world, learned to rely on it to give him guidance and wisdom beyond his intellect. He even learned that it can be turned off as well as on, and must be at times when it would just be too painful to remain so open, particularly when he returned to civilization.

Scrabbling through Wolff's words, I found myself inexorably drawn to learn this way of knowing myself. I'm not sure how to do that in my circumstances, without aboriginal teachers, but I suspect it begins with some sort of intentional awareness and openness. You can be sure I will seek to learn more, particularly since a list of related books is given on the last page of Original Wisdom.

As you've probably intuited by now, I highly recommend this book. I think it's an evocative introduction to another culture and their ways of knowing and living as part of the world. I did find myself wanting more glimpses of these ways of knowing than Wolff provided. He actually shared only a small number of the "stories of an ancient way of knowing" the title refers to. Perhaps they were all he felt he could share.

I was taken aback by Wolff's pessimism about the survival prospects of aboriginal peoples and the other beings they share their homes with. Early in the book, he wrote the following:

"Aboriginal people of the world will be as extinct as tigers will someday be."

No!, I say. It's up to us to make sure the world never comes to that bitter point. It's up to those of us who care to make sure as many of those ancient ways of life—and those magnificent other beings—as possible outlast civilization's ecocidal rampage. It's up to us.

Wolff does offer hope in the face of that bleak prospect, however. He wrote:

"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."

I…know that he is right—he must be. The knowledge of thousands upon thousands of aboriginal cultures has already been wiped out, across great expanses of the world, leaving no human alive who truly understands how to live well there. In time, I am confident our descendants will learn to open themselves to the shared knowledge of the world as our ancestors did, for they will have come to know with unshakable certainty that they truly are of this world and no other.

May the light shine on that day soon, for all our sakes.