Robert Wolff, Autor eins meiner Lieblingsbücher „Das Lächeln der Senoi – was es bedeutet Mensch zu sein“, wurde von Clinton Callahan interviewt. Er hat mich mit seiner Lebenserfahrung und Weisheit tief beeindruckt. Damit dieses Transkript nicht in irgendeinem meiner Ordner ein verstecktes Dasein fristet, stelle ich ihn frei zugänglich auf meine Website. Ausnahmsweise ist dieser Beitrag in englischer Sprache und ziemlich lang. Die deutsche Übersetzung ist in Arbeit.
Clinton Callahan
And if you could just explain to me what I can do and how to do it, to actually focus and send the energy and all the do’s and don’ts the things that you were explaining, that would be wonderful.
Robert Wolff
Okay, I’ll start with that. I discovered long ago that I can talk to myself. I can talk to my body, to my innermost self, my brain, my body. I can start earlier than that. When I was eight years old, I was living in Sumatra, where I grew up. And there were people who worked for us. And they had a little sort of a village behind our house and behind buildings. I spent a lot of time there because they were very comforting to me. My mother was very strict and very definite in what she wanted me to become or be whatever. But these people behind I hate to work servants, but they were working for us and their wives and their husbands and the mothers and the babies and so forth. Anyway, those people accepted me as I was, and that was a very great feeling. They know perfectly well who I was. And then I was white, and I had preferences. I had possibilities that they didn’t have. But for the moment, they accepted me as I was. And I have felt that in other primitive people they were not primitive, but I felt that primitive people. And it’s a very important part of what I will say that you accept that. You have to accept what is who you are, what you are at this moment, at this second. And then I discovered when I was eight years old, I was sitting on the walkway between the house and the buildings. Our house didn’t have a kitchen and a bathroom in the house. They still have the same thing here. And in all the Pacific Islands, bathrooms and kitchens all belong outside, but not inside the house. Anyway, I was sitting on the walkway between a house and the kitchen and so forth. That was a separate building. And a woman came who was not part of our village. And she said, come with me. I went with her and went around the garage. And behind that was the village. I call it the village, but I think there was six houses. She said as we came around, I saw that all the people there were standing around the middle of the staff and on the top of the phone and on the platform was a tiny little monkey at the same height as his face.
And he had curly hair, which meant he was not a Malay. He was another kind of ethnic background. And I remember that athlete came around. She said to me, can you tell me something about this monkey? And I said, oh, the monkey is dying. And she knocked me in my ribs, which is a very unbelayed thing to do. And she said, Never talk about death. I said, okay. And I remembered that. And then as we came closer, she said, where other people could hear us. What do you see with this man and the monkey? And I said, the monkey has a little leather thing around one of his feet and his ankles. And he’s tied down to this platform, and this thing around his foot is very uncomfortable. Can that be cut away this month, he’s not going to run away. He’s been living with this man all his life. And so a boy ran to his house and came back with scissors, and they cut this leather thing off. And as soon as it goes off, the monkey stretched his leg. And then he jumped on top of the head of this man in the crowd.
And everybody smiled. Everybody was very happy that this monkey was now signs of being happy. And so I went back and then the woman came back to see me, and she said, you have a God given gift. Don’t start asking money for it. And I had no idea what she was talking about, absolutely none. But ever since then, I have discovered that when I see somebody and my children, when they had a bruise or hurt or scratch or something, I could feel it. I could feel that when I had my hand above it, I could feel that there was something wrong. And so one day I said without thinking about it, I didn’t say it out loud, but I said it in my head. I was talking to the boy. I know the son. His name is Chuck. His name is Scott. Anyway, I talked to Scott in my head. I didn’t really Scott word. And I said, you can do something about that scratch. I know that inside of your body there are a lot of things you can do to scratch and not feel the pain. It just came to me. I didn’t think about it.
And the next day the scratch was gone. And so I realized that you can talk to yourself. Much later on, when I was professor at the University of Hawaii, I had a very big project in micronesia. I don’t know if you know where micronesia is, but it’s a series of Islands from Hawaii to Guam, down almost to Indonesia. There’s six different districts, as we call them. Now they’re independent, and we’re in charge of the United Nations and the United Nations gave the charge to the United States. First group we used as a place to bomb with our atom bombs and we were doing research with that. Yes. And found out all kinds of horrible things about what it does. And I remember that my project was my project work with nine students and place students in all the six districts. And they would ask the people what they thought about birth control or family planning as we call it. But you can’t recall family planning because in Polynesia or micronesia or everywhere else, family doesn’t mean mother, father, children, but it means all grandfathers, aunts and uncles and good friends. So anyway, we call them birth control. Anyway, my job was to first place each of these teams of students to one of the Islands.
And the Islands were very primitive. There are no hotels, there’s no nothing. But there was a plane that flies from one to the other. And then when I came to the end, I had to go back to the beginning and check how it was going. So I was flying back and forth and the whole thing took six weeks. And during that time I had an infection and I knew where the infection was because I had gone to stock to before I left and I knew what it was that was not going to kill me. But in this area unpleasant. And very painful. So in one of those Islands, it’s called Chuckles, a big lagoon. And I went to one of the houses. Had become one of the points of the moon shape. And I had meditation on top of them myself. And I realized that this sickness that I had, this infection I had was very painful. And so I said, this infection. I know that when I hurt. When something hurts on me that it is a message. That body tells me, Pay attention. I am in pain. And I said, I get your message. I know what you do, what is happening. But I can’t do anything about it at this point. Because I’m traveling. And there’s no doctor anywhere. So I have to wait until we get it back to our room. And I repeat it several times. And I said to this infection, tone it down. Just remind me every now and then, don’t give me the hurt. And I found, to my own surprise, that it worked. I lost the pain, but I didn’t lose infection. And so I went back. After the whole thing was over, I went back to Honor. And they gave me some pills.
And it kept better. So I found out, you can talk to yourself. You can talk to somebody else inside. And it’s really talking without words, okay? It’s in your mind. It’s in your brain. Without words. I call it. It’s communication without words. The essence of the communication is that you tell, you talk to the body of yourself or somebody else. And you tell the body, don’t be too loud with what you’re asking my attention. You never say that when you talk to your brother. And I don’t mean talk. But when you talk without words, you don’t say cancer. Never to give it a name. But you tell the body of your brother and his mind with your mind.
Clinton Callahan
Yes.
Robert Wolff
Can you tell him? I know that there is something in you that is not working, that is not good, that is not present. I know that you can do something about it. I know that there are powers in you that can either heal or at least make it better. Because our bodies. We live in a society that is so concentrated on asking other people to help us. As soon as you have a pain, you go to a doctor and you get a painkiller. And you get aspirin. And you get this and a shot and a treatment or radiation or whatever. But there are a lot of things that we can do within ourselves. Our body is much stronger and much more able to do things. And this is a fact. I mean, it’s a medical thing. We have changed our living style by relying on outside things. We’re relying on first aid. We’re relying on cars. We’re relying on doctors and specialists and machines and all kinds of stuff. But we have forgotten. And we pass it around. We pass it. The abilities we have is in ourselves. And there are many things that we can do within ourselves.
There are ways that our bacteria inside ourselves can do something. Ourselves can do things. Our brains can do things. We should use that. And so what you do is you suggest you can keep going. Usually a session that I do three quarters of an hour. And I keep telling the person. Or actually the inside, the deepest south of the person. Use the qualities you have. Don’t rely on the outside to do something about this thing that is not working properly. There are lots of things you can do. And I know I’m positive of this. That’s the essence of what I’m doing.
Clinton Callahan
Okay.
Robert Wolff
Talking without words or communicating without words. But what you communicate is a positive attitude to the body. You’re talking to the inside of the person you’re talking to, not his brain. From your suggestions, do you understand that? What I mean?
Clinton Callahan
Yes.
Robert Wolff
It takes some practice, but I am fairly convinced that many people can do this. I don’t know whether everybody can, but I know in my own life I have lived with people who were very good at that. I’ve lived over.
Clinton Callahan
Yes.
Robert Wolff
But my time, I do have originally changed my life. Because I’m quite sure they communicated without words. And I adopted and learned to hear what they communicated. And I could communicate back to them. It’s not unusual. I’ve known children, very young children. Who all of a sudden came up with something that they couldn’t possibly know. But they knew because they could hear something. Because here inside, it’s hard to explain these things. Because our culture is so opposite to that whole idea that we have no words for it. Yeah, but it is something that I am sure that we are going to develop when the whole world crashes. And I think that’s going to happen within ten or 20 years.
Clinton Callahan
Okay.
Robert Wolff
I think that the world is so awfully out of touch with who we are. Who we really are inside. We have power kitchens that do all kinds of crazy things. And we listen to that. And we listen to creatures and to all these other people. But inside of us, I know their stories. The one that comes to mind now is when I was walking with these three boys. And the oldest was probably 17 or 18. And the other three younger. And as usual, when I was with the average. Nobody says anything. They don’t talk. But I know. And I can see on their faces that they’re thinking and doing with each other. Somebody smiles or somebody not to talk to somebody else. I know that this is going on. And so all of a sudden, we were walking along fairly slowly. But they’re walking along. And I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. And the three of them stop. And I walk one more step. And then I have to step back and I will look at them and say, what’s going on? And the oldest boy says to me one word, Matti. Matti is Malay for dead. And I said, you’re not dead.
And I spoke English, which they didn’t understand at all. They didn’t understand Malay. They had their own language. And I didn’t know very much of their language. Apparently they knew this one word in Malay that was Matti dead. And they all smiled and they said, no, they were not dead. And then something came into my head. I can’t say it any other way. What you mean is we are dying out. And they all yes, yes, yes. And so that was like a confirmation that I can hear what they say. And so then I said to them also in English, Why do you think that you’re dying out? They said nothing. But the thought came into my head. Because the way we live is impossible in your world. They all nodded. They were not smiling, but they all nodded.
Clinton Callahan
Yes, that you got it. They could see that you got it.
Robert Wolff
It’s true. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to live a day with. I was very simply. I don’t like money, I don’t like to buy food, I like to eat what goes around me. And for a long time I could do that. Now that I can’t see very much it is difficult. We have such talent inside of us, all of us. And we don’t use those talents, those inner talents. Inside ourselves, inside our mind. We have so many talents that we don’t use because we are in a world that says the world belongs to you. You have to build a world on top of this planet. No, we can’t build a world on top of this planet. Look around you. I mean, we are destroying the planet. We are destroying the atmosphere and water and the soil of this Earth with everything we do, because we have the wrong attitude underpinning. We believe that we are different than nature. We’re not different than nature. Nature has enormous power to control and heal itself. And I know that your brother has healing power within himself and that the cancer can be stopped. Basically what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to educate the inside of this mind.
Look into yourself for healing. What I say when I do it, I don’t do it anymore because it lost me, my job, my career. You have talent, you have possibilities, physical things. I mean, your body can feel what is going on in your body if you trust it. When I do that, I never touch a person. But my right hand feels where something is not going on properly. It’s not working. And then my thought is, make yourself as normal as you can be. I’m not asking you for vehicles. I’m not asking you for things that you cannot do, but you can make yourself as normal as you could be. Make yourself as normal as you can be. Just I keep repeating that. I think I did the story in an earlier thing on my website that in the 1970s I was traveling a lot in South Pacific and we always had to go because it was on a grant from the United States. So Congress no less. But we had a grant for a million dollars and University gets 43% of that. But I was chairman of the Department of International Health and we had the management of the rest of that money.
That was $560,000 a year. And I had to travel to a lot of Islands in the Pacific. And it took time and it took problems because at that time there were no Airlines. So I had to go by boat or something like that. Anyway, when I came through Guam, in Guam, there was an American Airline in Guam. When I came to Guam, I used to stay in a hotel until the connection came and I could go to Honolulu. I used to stay in a hotel, but I knew these people. I knew them very well. The husband was a judge and she was a doctor physician. She was the head of Maternal and Child Health. And I knew that she had had trouble with a blood clock and her left thigh. So after dinner, I usually have dinner with them on the night that I was leaving because the plan always leaves at 01:00 at night or something so that it can come at Honolulu in the morning, I can go to work. So between dinner and midnight there was sort of a dead time and the judge went into his room. So I was sitting with Joy. I was sitting with Joy. And so she showed me a whole stack of X rays, I mean like five or six inches wide.
Clinton Callahan
Wow.
Robert Wolff
Anyway, she showed me all these X rays and they all showed that there was a blood clod quite long, 2 or 3 inches. Had changed it a little bit, but it kept being there at the same place. And so she told me that she had made an arrangement with the University of California, that they would do surgery on it and take it away because if it gets loose it goes to your heart.
Robert Wolff
But the hospital had told her wait until we have time to do this properly. And so she was waiting and she had all these X rays ready for the trip. So anyway, they took me to the airport and I arrived in a room at 8 o’clock in the morning. I went to work and it’s too early in the afternoon. I had to travel by United or Panama, but she could travel another area. And so I came to a move at 2:30 in the afternoon. She called me from the airport and said, when we came back from the airport to see you off, I had a phone call from Los Angeles and they said, come as soon as you can. I took the next place, which happened to be a Japan airline. So I’m waiting for my connection to go to L.A. And I can’t come to see you and you can’t come to the airport because we’re almost leaving. And for the next two and a half weeks I never even thought about it. To me, it was a very minor kind of thing. Oh, yeah. After dinner we were sitting and after she told me all these extras, I said, Would you like me to do a healing? And I can kill myself wherever, can I? Why not? Nothing to do. And so she knew they got and I remember she they got up and I sat behind her leg and held my hands over the place where I knew this thing was. And I kept saying, make yourself as normal as you can be. Make yourself as normal as you can be. I didn’t say it out loud in my head. So it was quiet for like 40 minutes. And then we talked about something else. We never mentioned it. So she left to the surgery to Los Angeles. I forgot about the whole thing. Two and a half weeks later, my Dean there was School of Public Health, and I was in school public Health. My Dean with my friend said, can you come down and see me? And I thought we were going to lunch. We did that quite often. But he put me in a chair on the other side of the desk and he kept asking me questions about my mother and her religion and my father and his job.
And I said, you know all these things. We’ve been having lunch for years. And I told you my whole life, finally. Then he said, do you know somebody called Joy? I said, yes, of course I know her University, Michigan. At the same time she was in medicine and psychology. And he said, did you know that she had an embolism? I said, yes, because she showed me all these Xrays. And then he said to me, when she came to UCLA, she had shown them all these X rays. But of course, UCLA had to do their own X ray. And this is like two and a half days after I had been there, not even that lesson. Then this X ray that the hospital took showed nothing that was so embolism. And then they did a blood test and they found out they never had been because when it disappears, they can see it in the blood or something like that. So anyway, all of a sudden it dawned on me what had happened. I didn’t even know that.
And I imagine that after they found that she had nothing, I was told later on what had happened. The hospital had called the Navy hospital in Guam and they said, your X ray machine is wrong because of insurance, because this woman didn’t have a embolism ever. And so the hospital in Guam got really mad and they called the Navy in Washington, DC, and the Navy sent somebody out to look at the X ray machine, and the Xray machine was completely okay. Then the Navy and the hospital in Guam and hospital got into big discussion. And what about your Xray machine? And they must have asked her, what did you do? What happened between the last X ray and you’re coming here? And she must have mentioned my name and I was professor of public health. And so at that moment the doors ranged open. I was sitting at the Dean’s office, the doors range open, and the Dean of the medical school, which was separate at that time, comes in, read in the face and point at me and says, you charlatan and all kind of bad words. I’m going to sue you for practicing medicine without a license, and no student of mine is ever going to be able to take your courses again.
And on and on and on. Well, I’m not good at that kind of confrontation. I have all kinds of things that I could have said, but I just got up and walked out. And so I thought about it. And the next morning I went down to see my Dean. By the way, I knew that the doctor did that the Dean of the medical school was very much against the Dean of the public health because he felt that public health was part of medicine, which it isn’t. But anyway, five years after that, the medical school did absorb the school of medicine. But anyway so I walked out and the next morning I came back to the Dean and I said, I don’t know what to do, but nobody can take my course anymore except people from other professions. And I have had a very good I had a course that I taught. It was called culture, something like that. It was a very popular course with medical students as well as other medical students. And in the course, because it’s a graduate school, you can choose how many students you want. And I always chose no more than twelve.
I taught that course for many years, and so I did experiments with them. One of the experiments I did, I’ll tell you, I said, put your hands on the table. And then I went around with a thermometer and wrote down in a book that I had the temperature of their left hand and their right hand around the table. And then I said, now make your left hand colder and your right hand warmer. There were always people that said, oh. I said, no, just do it. So after two or three, four or five minutes, I went around and tested all the hands again, and I found out that almost 50% of the students could do that. The left hand actually did get colder and the right hand did get warmer. And so I told him that, and I asked how did you do it? And the white people, the American people said, oh, I did this with blood pressure and veins and arteries and all this bullshit, but it didn’t work. The people who work from a small island, and they were a doctor or a nurse or something like that. They shared their shoulders. I just said, Get colder, but will get warmer. And that works. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. You can do that, but you can’t give instructions to your body. You can’t tell your body do this, do this, do this. Your body knows how to do that. And so I discovered I did other tests like that, quite a few of them. And I found out that people who are not from Western society, they’re not bound by all these perfections and drugs and surgery and all that kind of stuff. People are more primitive. They don’t know how to do that. They can do that if you ask them. You give them the idea you can do a lot of things. I don’t know whether you can heal the cancer, but you can certainly do something about the pain the cancer gives you, and you can do something about the cancer. You can stop it to grow. I’m actually convinced of that. It’s not me who is healing you. You’re healing yourself. Just give the suggestion to the person and don’t get into details. Don’t tell how to do it. The body knows that. Don’t mention cancer. Don’t mention the word in your mind. I know that there’s something in you that is not working properly. Make it as normal as you can be.
Make it as normal as you can be, and you’d be surprised how much a body can do. I’m actually convinced of that. I’ve dealt with many people.
Clinton Callahan
Robert, let me ask you one little question about that, which is when you were working with Joy, you asked her, you said, Would you like me to give you a healing? And she said, yes. And so it seems to me that that’s an important ingredient to the process is that the person either asks you or agrees to the process. The healing, because it doesn’t seem like it would work if they didn’t.
Robert Wolff
I don’t know where you have to ask and agree, but he has to trust you. I mean, I’m talking about your brother.
Clinton Callahan
Yeah.
Robert Wolff
I need to trust you. And you can sit with him and say, I have something that I want to talk that I want to give you, but it’s nothing worse. You can put your hands on, not on, but in front of his face or something. You can make some gesture that you want to help him, but it’s not in words. So tell him, I just want to be with you. I’m just going to be with you and give you some good energy and give you some good feelings. It’s a quiet thing. You don’t say anything in words, and he doesn’t have to say anything. I would be surprised if he doesn’t say something after he’s done this for half an hour. I think he will feel something. I tried, you know, I tried for three nights because I cannot do much during the day. Because I have too many other things that people call noises and stuff. The best time for me is like between six and nine in the evening when it’s quiet, when it’s kind of everything is sleeping. I’m not sleeping but going to sleep. And so your defenses are down. So go to your brother and say, I would like to just be with you for half an hour or whatever, 20 minutes.
I won’t say anything. You don’t have to say anything. I just want to be here. He can hold his hand or something like that. I have thoughts, but don’t tell what you’re doing. Don’t explain. It’s just in your mind. The idea is make yourself as normal as you can be. Look at yourself. Don’t get distracted by outside, by pain, by feelings. Remember that you have powers. You have abilities within yourself that can do something about something that is not working. It’s a short course. It really works. I don’t know whether it’s just me or other people can do that, but I know that other people can do it because I had talked to other people. I don’t know.
Clinton Callahan
Thank you very much.
Robert Wolff
It’s been difficult for me because I got so distracted by, I couldn’t sleep that one night. Because I kept trying and trying and I had slight three times I had slight feelings that I had contact. I could see him in my mind, but it’s too far away. And I think the main thing is the time because at 07:00 in the evening, here it is, 07:00 in the morning over there and 07:00 in the morning. It’s not a time for reflection like that. It’s a morning and the light is coming up and people coming in, get breakfast, whatever. My sister lived in Holland, died in September and we had it finally. We worked it out that if we called each other it would be between six and seven. My six and seven is in the morning and her six and seven in the beginning of the evening. We found out that’s the only time we can communicate with words. And she died in September last year and rather suddenly. And so I talked to her quite a few times. One time after another.
It was very difficult for me because I had a son who died and I was with him. And I hold his hands when he died. And I worked with Hospice in California and Hospice in that Hospice. There are different hospices but that hostess trained people to be with people when they died. And so I was trained for six weeks, excellent training in nursing essentially, but to be with people when they died, to be aware and to give them your love and your attention. So I learned a lot about dying and I learned that almost everybody that I sat with when they died has all this energy in the head going on. But it’s pain and confusion and it’s forcing and rejecting and feeling. All these things are happening. And I can see it like around the head and everything. And all of a sudden it stops and it’s peaceful. And I had that with my son. From 1 second to another. Death is like a birth. The baby comes through narrow canal, is forced, is pushed, is squeezed. And all of a sudden foot in my childhood. But I’ve also learned I have lived my life after knowing the Aborigines.
I had a career in public health, and I had to give that up because of this being a medical screen. So I quit. And then my second half my life is very different because I decided I went to Seattle. I didn’t know what to do because my divorce was finished at the same time. And so I felt I couldn’t be there in Honolulu anymore. Everybody knew me. I had a clinic and I had a program and a video. And all of a sudden there was this with this man, but he’s doing. He’s a rich. It was very difficult. So I went to California. And when my car came, I debated where to go. I had no idea what I was going to do. I was 56 or something. I had no idea what kind of life I was going to have. So I decided, well, I’m just going to live my life day by day, you know, in and out. That’s what I had learned from the average. You don’t know anything about the future. You don’t know anything about the past. All the rates is now. I said, I can’t live here.
I can’t live in the city. I have to live somewhere else. But I didn’t want to go to the East Coast. I didn’t want to go to the south. I didn’t want to go to Midwest. So it was either like Northwest or Southwest. But for some reason, I decided to go northwest to Washington, Oregon, Washington, that area. And so I drove to the mountains, to the sea, to the mountains. Nothing appealed to me. Nothing struck me as this is where I want to be. Until I came to Seattle and I realized that my travel checks were gone. I have one left. And so I called. It was Sunday. I bought a paper newspaper. I looked for apartments, and I found an apartment and close to where it happened to be. And I called up and the man said, don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right there. I rented that apartment. It was not furnished with nothing in it, but the floor was pocket. So I stayed. That night I had one big suitcase and a little suitcase. And the next morning, for some reason, I thought I should call my parents who were in Holland, rather than my children who are in Hawaii. I don’t know why, but I did. So I changed a lot of dollars into quarters to put in those machines on the street. And I called my father and he said, oh, I knew you were going to call because your mother had a stroke, can you come over? Sure, I can come over, I have nothing to do. So I went to a travel agency, and she told me the best thing to do is to drive to Vancouver. And then there is a direct flight from Vancouver to Amsterdam. And there’s a motel in Vancouver where you can stay one night, and then you can park your car there and they will take you to the airport and pick you up when you come back. So I did that. And I went to Holland and my mother was getting better, and I stayed two weeks. And I said, I have to go back because I don’t want to stay here.
I want to go back if I went back. And when we arrived in Vancouver, it was like 2:30 in the morning. It was dark, but it was getting light in August. And I was driving down from Vancouver to Seattle and it was gorgeous, gorgeous. There’s the sun coming up. So I knew that I had to go north of Seattle, not east or south. So I went every day. I just drove around. I didn’t have any idea where I was going, checking it out. And then I came on the highway. There was a big sign to left the arrow to the ferry. So I thought, oh, that’s interesting. I’ve never been on a ferry before. I drove west. I got on the ferry. It was a dollar or something like that. It was 20 minutes over the water. And then it landed with island. And after the ferry I knew this is it. This is where I want to be. So I went to the first real estate agent, which I saw and which was like a few miles north up on the highway. And I went inside and I said to this Lady, I’m looking for a cabin in the woods.
And she said, Where? I said, well, here. And she said, well, have you been here before? I said, no, I just came off the ferry. She said, well, why don’t you take some time, some days and drive around? Because I don’t know whether you want to be on the west side of the island where the ocean is this way or on the east side, or the ocean is another way or in the middle, whether it’s a forest or in the town, drive around to get to know this place. So I did that. And then she said, Come back Tuesday and I’ll have five addresses for you. I did that. And I came back Tuesday and she gave me five addresses. I went to the first one. I knew this was not it. I went to the second one. As soon as I drove in, I knew this was it. There was a cottage and in a beautiful wood out of very quiet, green, beautiful, gorgeous place. And so I went back to this real estate agent and I said, this is it. And she said, Boy, are you lucky. He said, this woman who owns that place left this morning to go to Florida for the winter and reduce the price by $10,000. And she’s willing to take payments for it. I don’t have to have a mortgage.
And the payments were like $110 a month. And I had to live on $600 a month. So I said, okay, I’ll take it. So I moved in. The next day was in October. And I found out that the house was just wonderful. More than good enough. It has one bedroom and one space and an old fireplace that didn’t work I found out. But it didn’t have any water. There was a dog wall 60ft deep, and it had gone dry. I didn’t know that. I thought, well, maybe this is how people live on this island. So I went to the nearest town, Langley, and they had a park with a shower. So I went to Langley every other day to the shower and got some water and bring it home. And after a while I worked. I found out when I got to know people that you can have a well drilled by people with machines. And so I called the drillers and they came over two really strange people. They said, oh, we can draw in your well house. Very cute little thing overgrown with Moss and so on. But then we have to cut this tree and this tree and this tree.
I said, you’re not going to cut any trees. They shrugged their shoulders, okay, but we can’t come today anyway. Every time in two weeks, they gave me a date and they told me how much it cost, so much per foot. And then on top of it, they have to do something that the state requires. And so I could figure out how much it would cost. And then about thing was a fixed price. And then you had so much per foot down. I went back in the house and I went to find Willows. I thought I was going to dose for water. And then I couldn’t do that. It didn’t work. And so I kind of forgot about it. I forgot about it. And so the night before they came, afternoon before they came, all of a sudden I realized the more these guys are coming and I have to tell them where to go then I have no idea. But I remember by that time, I knew every tree. Walked around the place.
And I knew every tree. And so all of a sudden I had this idea a tree over there. I went outside, got a stick, put it in, and I looked at it and I thought, no, it’s not exactly there. So I took the stick out and put a foot and a half behind it. I said, this is it. So when they came in the morning, I said, this is what you’re going to do. And the manager was going to take out and he said, no, leave that. That’s where it is exactly. There. They showed their shoulder, okay. And I said, you can only go 148ft down because that’s all the money I have. And they said, come on, your neighbor on this side has routed is 286 down and on the other side it’s 315. But all I have is the money for 148ft. Okay, they shrug their shoulders. I have to pay them anyway. So I went in the house. An hour later, one of the men came to the front door, which is on the other side of the house, and he said to me, what are you, some kind of witch or something? We found water at 147ft and it’s so much water that you could have two houses here because it’s the crossing of two aquifers.
Clinton Callahan
Exactly at that point.
Robert Wolff
Exactly at that point. So I learned in America, people are trained to look straight ahead. I mean, I want to become a doctor. I want to become this. I want to study this. I want to have a job. I want to have so much money. It’s all straight ahead. It’s like walking with Brinders. I found out if you open yourself up and you walk around in the now there might be a door on the left and there are lots of doors on the way by I found out. And so you look into that door, doesn’t look very good. You go on, there’s a door on the right. Look at that. Oh, I’ll try that. So my life was like that. November I realized that I was living there. I had water by then, but I didn’t have any income. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. What could I do if I would? So I walked around and I found out that there was an organization that had a bulletin board. So I put on the bulletin board. The organization was on the highway and it had five different or seven different things to do. Continues to be sort of a social work saying on this island, it’s quite isolated from the rest of the state.
And so I found out that I put a little note on the property that I had bought was a tiny little cabin that had one bed in it and a table and a chair, no water, nothing. But I said, I have a little standing cabin for rent for $50 a month. And I put that note on. The same afternoon, a woman called up, came to my house, looked at the cabin and said, that’s perfect. We have hired she said, I’m the head of an organization that’s called Help. And the organization has all kind of programs and I am working for them. But I’m really in the program with a daycare center. But he has hired a man that was at that time, local American Peace Corps, not outside of it in the country. So the people got paid a little bit, and they could afford $50 a month to pay my house. She said, this is perfect. And we got to talk to him. So she said, I really don’t like the job that I have with Operation Help. Would you like to be the director of Operation Help? I said, sure, I’ll be the director of Operation Help. I did. And I got $600 a month. And so I did that for a few weeks. And I found out that all it was was a lot of paperwork and a lot of bureaucracy and having to contact this Bureau and this company, and it was really strange. And every time I had to go to the board of directors and get their permission or their signature or something like that, and they were all kind of existing this whole thing. So I said to the gentleman of the board, I said, we should have a meeting. And so we had a meeting, and I had some big pieces of paper that I hung on the wall. And I went around and there was six people, I think seven people. And I said I want everybody to tell me what you expect from Operation Help for, say, five years from now. What would you like to have? And so they all talked, and I wrote it all down. And after that, I said, you know, I get the impression that you really want to get rid of it. And they all said, yes, we would like to get rid of it, because this started as a soup kitchen during the time that they were hippies and they came and they didn’t have any money. And so we had a street kitchen, but it has grown and it has other things now. We don’t like to do all this stuff, all this bureaucracy. So I said, okay, I’ll take six months if you pay me $600, and I’ll place all these programs in other programs and get rid of Operation Help. So he said, okay. So I did that. I started and I got rid of many of the programs. But the daycare Center I couldn’t get rid of nobody wanted to do that. So I got the parents together. I said, I want to have a meeting with the parents of children who go to the daycare center. And I explained to them that we couldn’t get rid of that we had to get rid of the program, but nobody wanted it. And so one of the women said to me, well, we can start a daycare center. Would you help us start a daycare center? I said, sure, I’ll help the daycare center $600 a month. And so I did that. So I started the daycare center. I appointed somebody, and I like, we got a house and we got an organization. And the paperwork was unbelievable.
We had to contact the city and the county and the state and the federal government. And they all had to be had to do things. The windows could have to be so many inches from the floor and crazy things. I did all of that really terrible things to do, but I knew how to do that. The daycare center is still going now by now, which is like 40 years later. And then I started something else. I learned that when I just go along with whatever comes in front of me. It worked. After six years, I moved from the island and I felt healed from what happened in Honolulu. And I went south again, trying to find out the place where I would like to be. And I ended up in the middle of California. I always forget the name of the place.
Clinton Callahan
Pismo beach, something like that. Santa Barbara, Oxnard.
Robert Wolff
I have a problem with my mind because I’m 93 years old and ten years ago, my oldest son lives on the mainland, and he has a degree in tropical medicine, tropical agriculture. And he knows this land that I live in now, six acres. And he knows all the plants. And he planted some of the trees and stuff. So every time he comes in the summer, we walk around and he tells me this tree, but he always knows it by the Latin name. And I hate these Latin names because I know the same trees and I know the plants because I used to walk around all the time. But to me, they’re identities. I hate that. So I told my mind, don’t remember these names nowadays. Three years later, my mind forgets names. I can’t help them anyway. When I was in this town, I had just bought a computer, and I was frantically wonderful about this computer, what I could do. And so I did graphic design, and I got all kinds of clients. And then one man said, I have a stall in the mall of that city, of that town. It is very famous because it goes around and around it’s curled around it’s not one space.
And I have a space in there, sitting there with your computer and your printer, and people can come in and ask you to do something. I said, sure. So I sat there in the mall and people would come in and say, I need a business card design. I need a logo for my business. Can you type this for me? It’s an application for a job, all these things. Okay, sure. I did all of that. I made a lot of money. So one company was going to just started, and they went to me and they said, we did design a logo for this company. So I did that. And they liked it so much, they gave me $1,000. And then they said, Would you like to be the artist for our company? $10,000 for a year? I said, yes, but not much work I didn’t work seven days, five days a week. I work one day a week, perhaps making business cards for everybody, making forms for sales or this or that. I don’t know what. So anyway, I made quite a bit of money during that time. And then at the beginning of age I didn’t know anything. Nobody knew anything about it. But it’s beginning time when people started to die. I went to the Hospice people and said I want to do this training and they train me. It was very excellent training. And so then I spent the next two years doing that. I had some wonderful experiences. I mean really heart wrenching. That wonderful experiences with people who could help die. That’s a whole other story. Anyway, the point is that I discovered in my life that I have to live every day. By the day I live in it now. And I’ve also learned that everybody has more ability to heal himself or themselves than you think. Because we don’t think that way. We have learned to think that when you have headaches, you go to a doctor. When you have two headaches, you go to a dentist. When you break an arm, you go to hospital. I mean, there are things that we can do ourselves. I’ve learned that with many people and so that’s what I’m trying to do to tell you. And it’s nothing worth. You don’t talk to your brother, but you just be with him. And in your mind you say make yourself as normal as you can be.
Clinton Callahan
Robert, thank you very, very much. I’m full right now.
Robert Wolff
Yeah, I know I have a lot more stories but I have something in mind. Okay. Thanks for calling.
Clinton Callahan
Yeah, thank you very much. It was wonderful to listen to you and to just get the information and we’ll be practicing.
Robert Wolff
Okay? Alright.
Clinton Callahan
Okay. Be well.
Robert Wolff
Alright. Thanks. Bye.
Clinton Callahan
Okay, bye.
Mit Gefühl macht AH! 