Original Wisdom (2001) is a memoir by the psychologist Robert Wolff about the years he spent among the Sng’oi, one of the Orang Asli peoples of the Malaysian mountains, and the ‘way of knowing’ he believed they lived by, a direct, wordless sense of the world as one living whole, which he came to experience himself. His claim is that this knowing was once normal for all humans and is still inside us. It sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s picture of the animist way of being that modern people have lost and can recover.
Who wrote Original Wisdom? #
Robert Wolff, a psychologist and educator who spent much of his life in the tropics. Raised by his Dutch parents among the Indigenous peoples of Indonesia, he later lived and worked in Suriname and South-east Asia, taught at the University of Hawaii and lived on Hawaii’s Big Island.1 Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing first appeared in a shorter self-published version in 1994 and was published by Inner Traditions in 2001, with a foreword by the writer Thom Hartmann. Wolff says that the events in it are not fiction, but are filtered through time and his own point of view, and that the dialogue is his own free translation.2
Who are the Sng’oi, and how did they live? #
The people Wolff calls the Sng’oi, ‘the People’, are also spelled Senoi; the Malays call them Orang Asli, the original or ancient people, believed to have lived on the Malay Peninsula from ancient times. In Wolff’s account the groups he knew were seminomadic, moving every few years, and rarely planted crops, harvesting what they needed from what grew wild in the jungle. He saw much gathering and very little hunting; a few settlements kept small gardens of sweet potatoes, and some ate rice. They had few possessions, were active until midday and rested in the heat, and sang, joked and laughed a lot. Meanwhile the jungle they felt part of was being cleared and planted with rubber trees.3 Wolff calls them preagricultural; by his description they lived largely as gatherers, with their forest being cleared around them.
Anthropologists describe the Senoi peoples more generally, of whom the Semai and the Temiar are the largest, as shifting cultivators who clear a plot, farm it for a few years and move on, growing upland rice, cassava and corn, whilst also hunting with blowpipes, gathering forest products and trading.4 Wolff’s account is of particular groups in the mountains at a particular time, and it is not a general survey.
What does Wolff mean by knowing? #
A sense he could not name. After a long, silent apprenticeship with a Sng’oi shaman called Ahmeed, walking the jungle day after day without explanation, Wolff learnt to stop thinking, planning and analysing, and to sense from the inside, not with his mind. One day, standing over a leaf holding a little water, his perception opened until there was no separation between water, leaf, plant, soil, animals, earth, air and sunlight; everything was one living whole. In that state he found his way through the jungle by knowing alone.5
He calls it a sense of knowing, probably a quality everyone has to some degree, which works when he can experience without having to understand, name, judge or categorise; like a muscle, it has to be used or it fades.5 The Sng’oi seemed to live by it all the time. People knew he was coming before he did; they waited for visitors on the path; one person spoke for the group without being chosen. His conclusion is that this is not something unusual but simply how humans are. Anyone in touch with the natural world can sense the energies and intentions of people and animals, and “all we need to do is give up being in charge”.6
What other teachings does the book record? #
Several, each told through a story. The Sng’oi held that the waking world is a shadow world and the real world lies behind it; at night people visit the real world, and in the morning they sat in a circle and built a story from what each had seen, which set the tone for the day.7 Sickness, for them, was a signal to change a behaviour, thought, feeling or word, and healing lay largely in the sick person’s own hands, the healer’s job being to find what was wrong and perhaps open the way for healing energy to enter.8 They refused a government rubber scheme because, as one man explained, after you cut the forest and plant one kind of tree, the soil is dead.9 And at the end of Wolff’s training, Ahmeed told him that Tiger was his animal-that-helps; Ahmeed’s own was Snake. Such a helper is never talked about, but kept in the heart.5
Is the story of Senoi dreaming true? #
That depends which story. Kilton Stewart, an anthropologist and psychologist who had travelled among the Senoi before the Second World War, wrote about them in a 1948 doctoral thesis and a 1954 book. As the psychologist G. William Domhoff summarises it, Stewart described morning dream clinics in which families discussed their dreams and children were taught to control them, and ‘Senoi dream theory’ became popular in the United States from the 1960s. Domhoff, first in 1985, argued that the theory is largely unsupported: anthropologists who later worked with the Temiar and the Semai found dreams and trance taken seriously, trance central to healing, but no morning dream clinics and no teaching of dream control, and he concludes that the Senoi do not have an unusual theory or practice of dreams. Supporters of dreamwork reply that he overstates the case.10 Wolff’s book stands apart from that argument. He describes an informal morning circle that pooled dream images into a shared story, not a system of dream control, and he does not mention Stewart. Hartmann’s foreword says that, to his knowledge, no one else who had written about the Sng’oi had lived among them and spoken their language, though Wolff himself says he learnt a little of it and never became really fluent.11
How does original wisdom relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, in its picture of what humans have lost. In animism everything is alive and conscious, and this is far more than a belief, for animists actually experience the world this way and experience themselves as part of nature, not separate from it; understanding shamanism means trying to experience the world as an animist does, not just believing it.12 Wolff’s leaf of water, opening into one living whole, is an experience of exactly this kind, and Wolff’s description of the Sng’oi, whatever the group’s formal classification, with all the time in the world, echoes what is known of hunter-gatherer life generally, which typically left a large amount of leisure for socialising, play, music and shamanism.13 His point that knowing works only when he stops naming and categorising is close to the way journeying is taught, as a deliberate move away from left-brain thinking into creative right-brain allowing, the hemisphere that deals with feelings, intuitions, hunches and impressions.14 See What is intuition, and can we trust it? and What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?
There are differences too. Wolff’s knowing came through years among a living forest people and a teacher who would not explain; Therapeutic Shamanism is a method for people who have no such village, and it does not imagine a mass return to a hunter-gatherer way of life, since there are far too many of us now; the way is forward, adapting shamanism to the times.15 And Wolff’s Tiger should not simply be read as a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer. The term ‘Power Animal’ is often used loosely today for many relationships with animals that indigenous peoples would have had separate words for, and in Therapeutic Shamanism it is kept for one particular bond, a lifelong, committed relationship with the whole species as a Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer being, its Oversoul.16 See What is a Power Animal?
