Wolff, Robert, and Thom Hartmann. _Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing._ Rochester: Inner Traditions International, Limited, 2001. # Progressive Summary Western culture suffers from too much choice. Choices are increasing at a rate faster than we can develop our own ethics of choosing. And we know we can't trust the experts either. # Resonances # Highlights > There are so many choices, so many alternatives to everything we do, or want, that we have had to learn that sometimes the best choice is not to choose. > > We may not want to choose a doctor, or a lawyer, or a plumber, or a new dress, or another career. Perhaps we want to trust luck, or whatever comes our way, or what is available while staying within a budget, or what is available in our neighborhood, or choose only on days that we feel like it. > > Because our world has become a world of chaotic overabundance we feel stressed. The stresses we feel are in large part the result of the overwhelming number of alternatives we must choose from, but also the result of the fact that we have had no time to develop an ethic to help us choose. The headlong rush into new technologies and new ideas, without the time to consider consequences, makes it almost impossible for us to choose. How can we have an opinion about something that did not exist yesterday? > Not long ago, most people—almost all people—had few choices they could make. > > A million years ago I did not have to choose what I ate. I ate what I could find or catch. I did not have to choose whom I married, or where I lived, or how many children I had. > > Even a few hundred years ago—almost everywhere in the world, except perhaps western Europe—I spent my life where I was born, with the people of my tribe. I did what my father did, or perhaps what a maternal uncle did. I married the girl next door, or at most a few doors away. I ate what everyone else ate, most likely what there was available to eat. I wore whatever everyone else wore. I belonged to the religion of my forebears. I died and was buried in the same cemetery where my parents and their parents were buried, or was cremated as they were cremated. I did not have to choose much. > Today we go on a vision quest over the weekend. We take shamanic training at a two-day workshop that is repeated every few weeks for others who want to learn whatever it is that a particular teacher has to say about shamanism. There are a hundred others who will teach us differently about what they think shamanism is. There are undoubtedly catalogs that will list the various shamanic traditions we can learn. > > Having so many alternatives serves only to devalue all of them. > > What has made life in the Western world so stressful is that we think we must choose among a chaos of products and services. Frankly, neither the products nor the services work well anymore—we are in too much of a hurry to give much thought to consequences while we make money, invent new gadgets, start new fads, create new everything. Our very existence on this planet is threatened because, in our haste, we have made—and continue to make—bad choices. > 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. > 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 otherness. 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.