The aboriginal Sng'oi of Malaysia -- pre-industrial, pre-agricultural -- live without cars or cell phones, without clocks or schedules, in a lush, green place where worry and hurry, competition and suspicion are not known. These indigenous people - as do many other aboriginal groups - understand themselves to be part of all things, living and nonliving. From this understanding comes their acute and uncanny sense of the energies, emotions, and intentions of their place and the beings who populate it, and their willingness to follow this intuition and use it to make decisions about their actions each day.
Psychologist Robert Wolff, who has spent a lifetime with indigenous people from many parts of the world, lived with the Sng'oi during the years he spent in Malaysia. He learned their language, shared their food, slept in their shelters, and came to love and admire these people who respect silence, trust time to reveal and heal, and live entirely in the present with a sense of joy. Even more, he came to recognize the depth of our alienation from these ways of living.
Much more than a collective document of a disappearing people, these stories hold a mirror to our own existence, allowing us to see how far we have wandered from the ways of the Sng'oi. And ultimately they challenge us, in our fragmented world, to rediscover within ourselves the Sng'oi's humanity, trust, and sense of connection to all creation.
Robert Wolff was raised among the indigenous peoples of Indonesia. A psychologist and educator who has lived in Suriname, Southeast Asia, and Europe, he has taught at the University of Hawaii and currently lives on the Big Island.
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