Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing

Introduction

As I am preparing this collection for publication again I think back to my childhood. I grew up in a very small town in Sumatra. My family—mother, father, and one sister—was small, but we lived among a dozen people and their families who helped us live a rich and comfortable life. Those people I thought of as my other family. During the hottest part of the day, when we were supposed to rest, I often joined them as they sat around in the shade, sharing gossip and stories. The stories were fables, I knew, but even after many retellings they never lost their wonder. Over the years fables became lessons that began to tell me what the world out there might be like. Even now, so many years later, I hear the rhythm of the Malay language, I see people sitting around, leaning against a pole or against each other. Life was never hurried. I learned without being aware that I did. I still remember the time when it dawned on me that relations between humans can be very complicated and difficult, but nevertheless it was impressed upon me that humans always exist within a larger context. I knew that people, despite great differences, are related as humans, as we are related to the animals and plants around us.

Now I am an elder myself. The fables I heard when I was a child have faded into the background of stories I have lived, my own stories that continue their life within me—wherever it is that stories are kept.

A number of years ago I began to write down a few of these and then put some of them together in a book, which I published in 1994. The book found its own readers; I never marketed it. Now, a new version of this collection may find its way to a larger audience.

My life has spanned what must be a unique period in the long history of humankind: a period of immense changes worldwide. The human population of the world has more than doubled in the last forty years; we have pumped more oil out of the ground after World War II than in all history before then. In the last fifty years, the millions of cars and millions of miles of roads we have built, and that have become commonplace, have changed the face of the planet forever. An ever-growing number of humans has access to facilities and luxuries kings could not have dreamed of even fifty years ago.

Westerners, who are in the vanguard of these changes, see them as progress, an assumption rarely questioned.

Perhaps because my perspective includes memories of a kinder, gentler world, I have become acutely aware of what we have lost. In our haste to create a world entirely based on artificial—that means man-made—things, we have thrown away much that is part of our heritage as creatures of this planet. By divorcing ourselves from Nature we have also removed ourselves from the wisdom that comes from living as part of What Is.

In this age it is not unusual anymore to visit and even live in faraway lands. We travel halfway around the earth for a week’s vacation or for an assignment of a few months. Where French was the language of diplomacy not all that long ago, English has become the language of world trade. Tourists travel to outlying islands to find the perfect beach, or to an exotic big city for bargains.

And yet it seems that the easier it becomes to travel, the more difficult it is to meet people in their own world.

I feel blessed to have been able to meet the people who changed my life, a tribe of aborigines in Malaysia. In some ways they reminded me of the people I knew as a child, but they were more primitive. I can easily imagine that they are a rare remnant of humans as we used to be a few thousand years ago.

After leaving Malaysia, where we lived for a few years, I began to read all I could find written by travelers and scientists who had known other aboriginal people. The more I read, the more I realized that Bushmen and Pygmies in Africa, Eskimos in the high Arctic, Australian aborigines, and isolated tribes here and there around the world were described in very much the same words: peaceful, nonviolent, nonaggressive. All the aboriginal people who survived into the twentieth century lived in areas of scarce resources: dense jungles, arid deserts, snow-swept ice fields. They lived in isolation, far from civilization. They were shy. They were nomadic, with few possessions, and their communities did not have elaborate hierarchies of power. And there was something else these groups had in common: they could not be tamed, to borrow the word Laurens van der Post uses to write about the Bushman of the Kalahari Desert.

I wondered what it was that affected me so deeply about the Sng’oi of Malaysia. Certainly, they had a kind of integrity that I had not sensed in other people. I loved their joyfulness, their ability to be in the present, their utter simplicity. When I was with them I was moved by the strange synchronicities (C. G. Jung’s term) that so often occurred. How was it possible that people without a telephone knew that I was coming to visit, when I did not know myself until a few hours before I left home? How could one person know what another was thinking and feeling and dreaming? But perhaps more than anything else, with the Sng’oi I basked in a kind of unconditional love that is rare in Western societies and in societies that have become Westernized. I now know that I could find them only if they wanted to be found. They trusted me.

My love for a people who experienced reality directly, rather than through layers of learned concepts of what the world should be, allowed me to rediscover a reality of my own that is as immediate and intimate as the world of the Sng’oi. I recognized that I had hidden this reality deep inside myself. I had always known that the world and I were inseparably one, but had suppressed that knowing, buried it under words and theories.

My friends the Sng’oi, and others of these stories, helped me regain the reality of being part of All-That-Is.

Westerners are intolerant of other ways to organize society, other ways to be human. We cannot accept that others may value different ways of being. We seem to be stuck in the idea that all people must want what we have and what we value—all those things that we believe prove that Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement, the best, the future.

Science is so sure that it is the only truth that it has become incapable of accepting other ways of learning about reality. Medicine, as a scientific discipline, for instance, is certain that all other forms of healing are quackery and are not to be tolerated; they must be rooted out, destroyed. Such arrogant insistence has eradicated much knowledge and wisdom in the world.

I always knew that there were other, older ways of healing.

For many years my work took me to many parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. I recorded and collected what I could of methods of healing and herbal medicines. I became obsessed with the thought that I ran a race with time, that soon it would be too late because no one would remember ancient traditions. It seemed that all such knowledge was being erased by our intolerance of other-ness. I was deeply saddened by what I believed was an irreparable loss. In our rush to create man-made chemicals, we rejected age-old knowledge of the riches of the earth that are freely available all around us. We invented machines, but ignored talents and abilities we must have in our very genes.

My agony over what I thought of as a great loss stayed with me until one day when I was in Tonga, an island kingdom in the South Pacific (Tonga is one of the few countries that have escaped colonization, although not the overlay of a Western religion). I mentioned my despair over what we had lost to a woman who had been pointed out to me as a gifted native healer. So much knowledge and wisdom, I said, was lost through our crude but persistent efforts to eradicate native cultures.

She thought about that for a long time. Finally she said, Yes, I know what you mean. Yes, we too used to have healers and much knowledge of healing and herbs. Most of that is gone.

She paused again for at least a minute, then she sat up straight and looked me in the eye, her voice becoming stronger and more affirmative: But—and she pointed her finger for emphasis—that is not the whole of it. You see, there have always been people who know. When we most need it, someone will remember that ancient knowledge.

She sat back, smiling. "So you see, traditions may be lost, but the information is in here and in here," she said, pointing to her head, then her heart, and when we need it most, it will be inside us, for us to find.

She was referring to herself, I knew. Her gift of healing did not come from a Western education, nor did it come from training in traditional healing. It came from within.

I must believe what she said is true. I have experienced that knowing. There were times when I needed knowledge of the plants around me—and it came to me. Instinctively I knew where to find the knowledge (now we would say information) I needed.

The same is true in other areas of skill and experience. The ancient art of building canoes may have been lost, but when I was a passenger traveling on the open ocean in a fourteen-foot Boston whaler for twelve hours with no land in sight, the sailors who manned the vessel remembered again how to find their way by the stars at night, and during the day by the currents and the little winds, as some Polynesians say. It is true that what remains of old traditions is no longer a coherent system of knowledge and skills, yet individuals everywhere are rediscovering and recreating what their forebears had.

There are kahuna (priests) again in Hawai‘i. A century ago, missionaries did what they could to eradicate all remnants of heathenism, but somehow enough ancient knowledge survived. I knew a modern-day kahuna well; he considered himself a kahuna lapa‘au, a healing priest. He agreed that what he knew did not always come to him in a straight line, from father to son, from teacher to pupil, but rather from his own 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 toward other ways of being caused great pain, and eventually the destruction of almost all indigenous cultures in these latter years.

That was brought home to me most searingly when I visited a small island in the Pacific with a few coworkers. I had no part in the job the public health people had to do that day, so I asked one of the local people to show me around the island. I told him that I was particularly interested in learning about what I called native medicine. When he seemed doubtful I explained that, obviously, people who had lived on a small island, far away from other islands, must have developed ways to heal wounds. Certainly they must know how to assist in childbirth—perhaps even know ways to set a broken bone. Oh that, he said, yes, there are some people who know.

We walked around the island. He introduced me to a woman who knew herbs, and to two sisters who were midwives. We met a man who knew which of the many different kinds of seaweed could be used medicinally, and several people who had other healing skills.

I took copious notes, although I soon discovered that people were not happy when I made notes in their presence. So between visits, my guide and I would sit on a rock somewhere and I would write in my notebook. We talked.

It was afternoon when we came back to where the boat waited for us to take my friends back to the main island, and to take me back to the airport. The island did not have a harbor or much of a beach, so we had to be ferried to the boat in local canoes. I was in the last canoe. Just as we were about to manhandle the canoe into the water, my guide of the day rushed up with a gift. He wanted to thank me, he said breathlessly:

You are the first [white man] who said some things we have is worth.

His words made an indelible impression on me. I realized that what he said was probably true. Other white men may have visited his island, but nobody had ever taken the trouble to ask them about their lives, their practices, their beliefs, their knowledge—because we are so sure that whatever indigenous people have is not worth knowing.

The stories in this book are true in the sense that I lived them. I share them to honor the worth and wisdom of the many people I came to know all over the world.

Assumptions

My first career position was government psychologist in Suriname, a developing country in South America. I had worked before, of course, but this, I thought, would be the first step on my career ladder. Little did I know that this ladder not only went up, but it also went around the world.

While we were in Suriname, Life magazine photographed the jungles around Paramaribo, the capital city, for what later became the issue on the tropical rain forest in the series The World We Live In. The country lies a few degrees above the equator. It is hot and humid and densely forested. Then, there were few roads—one traveled on the rivers in steamboats or dugout canoes.

Suriname had been a colony first of England, then of Holland, and now had a new sort of independence. The original population was Native Caribbean American. They call themselves Arawak. They were displaced by African slaves a few hundred years ago. Because of the dense jungle, a majority of slaves escaped almost immediately and were never captured. Instead, these slaves who liberated themselves established a seventeenth-century African culture in the interior of Suriname. A hundred years ago they made peace with the government of the Netherlands. The Djuka, as they called themselves then, controlled the interior; the Dutch ruled a narrow strip along the coast, with the capital, Paramaribo, and a few other small towns. Today Suriname is independent.

The colonists were certain that they were unable to work in that climate. They were probably right: they wore too many clothes for a tropical jungle, but they also thought themselves vastly superior to people who did not have their kind of civilization. So workers had to come from elsewhere. After the abolition of slavery, people from South Asia (now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) and later from Java could be talked into signing contracts as indentured laborers. Although the contracts guaranteed that they would be returned home after their term was served, many chose to stay.

In Suriname all people mixed indiscriminately. The palette of skin colors there is unique in the world. There may be few African blacks (also called blue-blacks), but there is, every other shade of black, brown, beige, yellow, and almost-white.

Suriname has aluminum ore that is mined by ALCOA, the United States aluminum company. Some people worked for ALCOA, a few people grew food—and a few even found gold nuggets in the jungle and smuggled them to Miami—but there was not much of anything people could do to make a living, except work for the government, the largest employer in the country at that time.

Very soon after we arrived I heard that some of the department heads and other bosses felt that workers were lazy and unambitious. That surprised me because people I had