robert wolff's Ancient Way of Knowing

"My luck was to find people who were human in an ancient way. My luck was to recognize and reclaim a humanity rooted in the earth. ..."

If you want to understand what transformed the Enlightenment into the Declaration of Independence, and that into the United States of America — and where we’ve done well and erred from there — you must first read robert wolff (he prefers the lowercase usage).

Although wolff's book Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing doesn’t once mention the Enlightenment, Jefferson, or even the USA, it’s nonetheless one of the most essential books to read for anybody who wants to understand the genesis of this nation and the original understandings of our Founders.

This is because fifty years ago in the deepest forests and jungles of Malaysia, wolff — a psychologist who, when Louise and I last shared time with him at his home in Hawaii, was well into his late 80s and one of our wisest elders — made the same discovery that had fueled Rousseau's 1754 masterpiece Discourse On Inequality which, along with Rousseau’s later book, The Social Contract, was a primary influence on the most idealistic of our Founders.

Rousseau opened The Social Contract (and jolted Enlightenment thinkers, including — in a big way — the majority of the men who signed the Declaration and wrote the Constitution) with this sentence:

“Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains.”

Similarly, in Original Wisdom, wolff writes about how the Malaysian slang word for the Sng’oi people of the Malaysian jungles was “Sakai,” a word that once meant “slave,” and how when he first met the Sng’oi, he naively referred to them as Sakai:

“After I grew to know the Sng’oi, the People, and when I knew they accepted me, I apologized for having spoken of them as slaves before I knew what they called themselves.

“We were sitting around the embers of a little fire in the early evening. There was a flickering oil lamp shedding some light on the porch of one of the little shelters. In this settlement there were four houses; no more than fifteen people lived here. After the sun went down, we sat around, talking now and then, mostly just being together.

“I had learned a little of their language, I tried to understand some of what they were saying, but I never became really fluent. My apology was a simple phrase. I said I hoped they did not mind that I had called them Sakai. I was not sure whether I had said it right, and for a long time there was no reaction at all.

“I imagined that I saw smiles on a few faces, but it was dark. I could not be sure. Long silences were not unusual among the People. Often someone would say something that would be followed by silence until, finally, one person would answer. This one person obviously spoke for the group, but I often wondered how he or she knew what to say for the group.

“This time, again, one person answered. He — a rather adventuresome 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.’”

When I first encountered Original Wisdom it was titled “What It Is To Be Human” (a phrase I’ve borrowed for this magazine/website), published by an obscure press, and out of print. A friend had shared it with me, and I was so astounded — and transformed — by the experience of reading it that I immediately did two things.

The first was to call a publisher I knew, Ehud Sperling at Park Street Press/Inner Traditions, and tell him I’d found one of the most important books of our generation, that it was out of print, and that he had both an opportunity and an obligation to share it with the world. (After reading the book, Ehud agreed, which is why Original Wisdom is now back in print.)

The second was that Louise and I got on a plane and flew from Vermont to the big Island of Hawai’i to share a week sitting and talking with — and learning from — robert wolff. He has been one of my best and most insightful mentors ever since.

In the first centuries after European contact with the “savages” of North America in the late 15th century, the Founders of this nation were reading — in their day — the then-equivalent of robert wolff's modern work.

And they were, in many cases, living with experiences eerily similar to those he documents in “Original Wisdom.”

Nearly all are now either out of print, or in obscure academic publications; most are written in the style of the 17th and 18th centuries that is, today, considered largely unreadable.

As I noted in my books “What Would Jefferson Do and The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living?”:

“So much in answer to your inquiries concerning Indians,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in June, 1812, “a people with whom, in the early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated. Before the Revolution, they were in the habit of coming often and in great numbers to the seat of government, where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Ontasseté, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg.”

On June 19, 1754, when Jefferson was only nine years old, Ben Franklin introduced the Albany Plan of Union at a meeting attended by both his pre-revolutionary compatriots and a delegation from the Iroquois Confederation.

Franklin had earlier attended an Iroquois Condolence Ceremony in 1753, and used Iroquois symbols both in his language and his design for early American currency. In 1770, Franklin wrote:

“Happiness is more generally and equally diffus’d among Savages than in civilized societies. No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

Similarly, John Adams replied to Jefferson’s letter on June 28, 1813, by saying:

“I have also felt an interest in the Indians, and a commiseration for them from my childhood. Aaron Pomham, the [Indian] priest, and Moses Pomham, the king of the Punkapang and Neponset tribes, were frequent visitors at my father’s house, at least seventy years ago. I have a distinct remembrance of their forms and figures. They were very aged, and the tallest and stoutest Indians I have ever seen. The titles of king and priest, and the names of Moses and Aaron, were given them, no doubt, by our Massachusetts divines and statesmen.

“There was a numerous family in this town, whose wigwam was within a mile of this house. This family were frequently at my father’s house, and I, in my boyish rambles, used to call at their wigwam, where I never failed to be treated with whortleberries, blackberries, strawberries or apples, plums, peaches, etc., for they had planted a variety of fruit trees about them. But the girls went out to service, and the boys to sea, till not a soul is left. We scarcely see an Indian in a year.”

It turned out — although it’s rarely mentioned in history books because so many White families with members who “deserted to the Indians” felt deeply shamed by the experience — that many of the Europeans wanted to become “savages” and live among the Indians.

Over the next hundred years, as more and more whites encountered Native Americans, the incidence of whites joining Indian tribes dramatically increased. Derisively termed “White Indians” by the colonists, thousands of European immigrants to the Americas simply walked away from the emerging American society to join various Indian tribes.

Ethnohistorian James Axtell wrote that these early settlers joined the Indians because “they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity…” Axtell quoted two White Indians who wrote to the people they’d left behind that they’d found, “the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.”

In 1747, Reverend Cadwallader Colden wrote of the growing exodus of whites for Indian life:

“No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to come Home, in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of living, and ran away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them.”

While most people in the modern world think of contemporary tribal people as hungry to join our civilized world, wolff found the Sng’oi just as happy with their own democratic culture as Colden found Native Americans in the 1700s.

Similarly, Colden wrote:

“Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet, I think, there is not one Instance, that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of living.”

Not being fettered to eight or more hours of work a day to enrich some person or corporation at the top of an economic food chain, people in democratic indigenous cultures spend much of their time interacting with their children.

James Bricknell, who was captured by the Delaware in the early 1800s and lived among them for several years before returning to his family, wrote in 1842:

“The Delawares are the best people to train up children I ever was with… Their leisure hours are, in a great measure, spent in training up their children to observe what they believe to be right… They certainly follow what they are taught to believe right more closely, and I might say more honestly, in general, than we Christians… I know I am influenced to good, even at this day, more from what I learned among them, than what I learned among people of my own color.”

Similarly, in his afterword to “Original Wisdom,” wolff writes:

“The stories in this book are about people who have worldviews different from the Western one. They know their world differently. ... My translation into English words and an English sentence structure can only clumsily represent another view of reality. ...

“It is difficult for Westerners to accept that people and their worlds are inseparable. Now all ancient worlds are threatened by our greed, our machines, our civilization. A young Sng’oi man told me the People are dying out; others have told me they have no place to run to anymore. As Hawaiians say, Hi’ina mai ki puana — Let the story be told! ...

“My luck was to find people who were human in an ancient way. My luck was to recognize and reclaim a humanity rooted in the earth. ...

“May these stories help others remember.”

Reading Wolf’s book is a truly transformational experience. It gives you a deep and profound insight into what humanity once was and hopefully will one day again become.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

“It was very dark outside and stars were glittering overhead. There was no moon. He shivered a little, not because he was cold, I think, but because of the solemnity of the moment. At last he turned to face me, relaxing his body, as if to say, The ceremony is over.

“He said again, ‘You are alone.”

“Yes, I was alone with my newfound knowing, without a society or a culture to support me. Then again he added, ‘Strong.’

“I thought of a coach telling a player who is walking to the field, ‘You can do it.’

“This had been my Initiation, a solemn occasion, even though it was not a public event. I felt as if he had passed on some ancient knowledge. I was intensely grateful for what he had given me, and just as grateful for how he had given it: I learned what learning is.”

Reading wolff’s book is a truly transformational experience. It gives you a deep and profound insight into what humanity once was and hopefully will one day again become.

Most people who read the book are entranced by what can only be described as the seemingly supernatural experiences he shares, but wolff, who held PhD’s in both anthropology and psychology, is an extraordinarily careful and studious observer and chronicler of an incredible experience, one most likely beyond anything the rest of us have ever touched.