WE THINK THAT ALL PEOPLE MUST WANT WHAT WE HAVE & WHAT WE VALUE…

Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing is a a catchy and inspiring real-life journey of Robert Wolff, a psychologist who spent a lifetime with the indigenous people from many parts of the world, including the Sng’oi in Malaysia. During this time, he learned their language, shared their food, slept in their shelters and came to love and admire the indigenous people who respect silence, trust time to reveal and heal, and live entirely in the present with a sense of joy.

We’ve had lots of interest from our readers following our original post (found here), so we decided to write more about this amazing book.

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.

Because our world has become a world of chaotic over-abundance, 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 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.

We call this mad dance freedom. 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 even to imagine their consequences. We are choosing in a fog.

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

GIVEGROWGO highly recommends Original Wisdom!