Look closely—that’s a mouse or vole that Tim’s roasting, probably from a deadfall that he set. I’m pretty sure I made Tim pose meditatively just for this photo.

Tim is an old friend from Teaching Drum, and one of the most hardcore primitivists I’ve known. He’s done the yearlong for three years, gone on wilderness solo trips, as well as tried his skills in various places throughout the country. Whenever I see him he’s dirty from his adventures, got some craft or skill going on, and still living rough.

In my memories, I imagine Tim most in buckskins. When I picture him wearing even old ratty clothes, it just does not fit that well.

Tim has some crazy stories about hitchhiking, sleeping homeless, dumpster-diving, etc. He’s also been to a ton of Tom Brown classes—as I recall, every one that was available at the time.

Last time I saw him was after Rivercane Rendezvous in Georgia. I drove up from Florida to meet him and some others. We stayed in a motel and I paid for a room for the four of them, and even so Tim was actually considering climbing up and sleeping on the roof—because he just wasn’t used to sleeping indoors.

So anyway, I read his post, then I started reading the comments. The best one was:

Somehow when I finished reading this, I imagined Tim Nelson sitting in a cubicle in an “office tower” in Minneapolis/St Paul, or Milwaukee, where he works 8-6 daily in a suit-and-tie, and commutes in a Cadillac Escalade while talking ceaselessly on his Bluetooth.

Because it’s just too bogus, this story he shared.

And then a few people started trash-talking Teaching Drum—incredibly, partially based on my essay, which was really weird, especially considering the extreme conclusions they drew.

So I had to write a comment. We’ll see how it goes.

At any rate, here’s Tim’s post.

Hi, I am Tim Nelson. I live out in the woods of northern Wisconsin, four hours north of Madison, and I run a mean drum circle. These are my credentials, upon which I base my opinions, mixed with more opinions, concerning Industry’s Parting Gifts.

I have been practicing primitive skills while living out in the woods all over the USA for twelve years, with a few breaks of homeless urban living, and the closest I have ever come to entering the System in my entire adult life was during the three months when I shared a one-room house with seven other people. I haven’t had to survive a real famine yet, or a real collapse such as that of the Soviet Union, but I have experienced slow starvation, where there was not much to eat, nothing to do and nowhere to go for months on end.

This is not a point of pride, but I do count myself, and others like me, among those few modern Westerners who have been living a third-world lifestyle, and who could take a slow collapse in stride. I only use a few hand tools, I live as part of a clan, and I know from experience just how hard it really is to survive without access to stores.

In all my years of living on the fringe and practicing primitive skills, I have met few people who couldn’t survive because they lack courage. But in a fast crash, there would simply be too many things stacked up against us. Not that we won’t try, even if we must eventually succumb of starvation, violence, disease or heartbreak. If the crash continues to happen faster than we can adapt, then we won’t stand a chance. If we don’t have the time to start gardens and to learn to raise chickens, and the chance to make a few mistakes before we become good enough at it, then we are down to depending on dead animals to sustain ourselves. In a cold climate, if there isn’t enough animal fat in the diet, people die. It’s not possible to survive on just winter squash and potatoes. When the supplies run out, there better be dead animals to eat—and I mean entire animals, internal organs included, not just the choice cuts.

I honestly can’t see how jobs making tools that last a lifetime, or having these tools, would make that much of a difference, unless the crash is slow enough to sustain complex society for the duration. And just how likely is that? Is it likely enough to bet your life on it? Most of us can feel it in our bones that there are just too many of us. That’s what it comes down to every time, and if you aren’t ready to live on a starvation diet, work all day and remain efficient while listening to your kids complain of hunger, while suffering from diarrhea for weeks at a stretch, while nursing a few mildly infected cuts, while living in close quarters with a few other adults whom you grow to resent more and more with each passing day as they slowly lose their will to live—let me tell you, if you aren’t ready for that sort of thing, then you are in for one hell of a rude awakening!

Am I pessimistic? You bet I am! But I am not selling any books meant to cheer you up. I am just living in woods with my clan, humbled by their honesty, checking hare snares, gathering firewood, eating imported food (while supplies last), sleeping in a wigwam, dreaming of my baby boy, crapping under the open sky, wondering where all the whitetail deer have disappeared to…

I spent the first few years after the yearlong sorting out my feelings about it. My interest in the primitive skills, or anything to do with the outdoors, waned, and I fled to massage school. I nursed my wounds. Eventually a narrative of trauma began to surface. I felt great fatigue, pain, and anger. I wrote a series of posts, Evolution of Consciousness, trying to dissociate myself from some of the ideology and beliefs that kept me in the Teaching Drum mindset. All the pieces fell into place with my magnum opus, my critique of the yearlong program, “Town Doesn’t Exist,” which was cathartic and liberating in the writing of it. After that, I began to feel free.

That was three years ago. But here I am, talking about Teaching Drum again. I posted videos of Teaching Drum just last month. I recently revised my critique, and now I’m having a discussion in the comments about it. And I still see friends every so often from those years, or have interactions with others who have been to the Drum.

And I continue to have feelings about the school.

I need to be clear. Some might get the impression from things I write that the place was a major negative force. But really, the relatively low intensity of the flaws there, and the low level of fame the school has, and the relatively small number of lives it touches, does not warrant that simplistic judgment. I will not categorize it with cults like Scientology, or spiritual leader Andrew Cohen’s community, or Carlos Castaneda’s hoaxes, or the abuses of various qigong masters.

Still, some of the seeds are there. And it bothers me. But the real question is, why does it bother me, almost ten years later, many years removed from their influence? And does anybody care about the grumblings of an ex-student of a tiny, not-famous not-cult?

Who knows about the latter. I can answer the first question though: Why do the failings of Teaching Drum still bother me?

Because I love Teaching Drum.

Teaching Drum gave me my formative experiences in the epic narrative of the Primitive, the Native. Reading books by Tom Brown, Jr., and attending his weeklong Standard class, initiated me into the world of primitive skills; and doing the Kamana program taught me a lot as well; but Teaching Drum was where it all came alive for me. A whole circle of people, living in wigwams, making bow drill fires, canoeing, drinking lake water.

I remember, that first summer, eight of us piling in a minivan to go to a restaurant, at night. On the way, we spotted a roadkill deer, made a note of it. Went to have a nice dinner at a nice restaurant, where this was taken:

And on the way back, we stopped by the deer carcass and piled it into the back of the minivan. Then, we stopped at a convenience store for ice cream!

Then, the next day, this happened:

My first time ever skinning a deer.

I loved it.

I was wide open in that period of my life. I was new to it all. You can see, I was a clean cut little college grad, wide-eyed at everything, never having done much more than a week in a canvas tent at Boy Scout camp. I ate it all up. I bought everything they were selling. I absorbed so deeply the ideal of the Native, the ideology of the primitivist, the philosophy of living close to the earth. I made good friends that I saw every day, breathing clean air, drinking fresh water. I had crazy experiences with new things that still make for good stories.

I felt closer to these people than I did to my own family—the more so since I was having severe troubles with my parents at the time, as they didn’t understand why I would be trying to live a life so similar to the kind of life they had worked so hard to escape, at the expense of a secure financial future. To me, my parents didn’t understand, but these people did.

My yearlong cohort became my brothers and sisters. In our open-hearted circle talks, we would talk until we laughed and cried. And Tamarack, well, he felt like a father to me, a father who said that this way I wanted to live was, in fact, legitimate.

And damn if I don’t want all of that back.

But the cracks were there, even in the beginning, like in any normal, dysfunctional family. Some of my needs, I eventually had to acknowledge, were not met. One of those cracks, those neglected areas, was a comprehensive approach to physical health. That lack led me on a journey to where I stand today, as a practitioner of Chinese medicine. Another crack involved the submersion of true, spontaneous self-empowerment to primitivist ideology. The problem was that sometimes the healthy direction lay in the direction of civilization, but according to primitivist ideology, anything of civilization was irreparably “sinful.” Yet another crack encompassed personal flaws I began to notice in individuals in positions of authority.

As I write this, in my mind these complaints have the distinct sound of whining. A whine is different from venting. Venting was necessary in the beginning, just to allow the feelings that were repressed to surface. Then I had to organize and formulate and articulate all of those feelings, so that I could give a name to the demon that tormented me. Once named, I could begin to grow beyond it. And so I have, and now that I speak these complaints again it’s like I’m going back developmentally, to a time when I needed to complain about these things.

And I don’t want to regress. I want to move past it all, and let Teaching Drum be just a neutral past experience for me, let it be a place for others to find their own joys or traumas, but not for me.

So what holds me in this place?

The yearning for the myth.

I think I’m stuck, developmentally. In this emotional dimension, I’m stuck in a pre-rational developmental stage that clings to simplistic myths. This is facilitated by the mythic quality of the school itself; they define themselves by their myth—otherwise, they’d just be another school teaching primitive skills. And it was never the skills I really wanted, anyway; I realized that the first day I arrived for the yearlong. It was the transformation of consciousness that the myth promised.

It was their myth of Eden, the Native Promised Land. Their narrative was that we had lost Eden, but they would show the way back. Part of me still wants to believe in that.

In developing cognitively, in beginning to question that myth and narrative, I lost my contact with the wondrous. I lost my slack-jawed awe. I gained, instead, a rationality that questioned and analyzed and explained and dissected. It was a necessary process, a catabolism to counterbalance the anabolism. The culmination of this was my writing of a very rational essay that poked holes in the mythic approach of the Drum, thus rending from me my promise of Eden even while it freed me to progress developmentally.

But the journey is only half finished. I am separate, but alone. I’ve achieved independence, but not reintegration.

I’m still waiting, in fact. Still waiting, I realize, because I let them define the myth for me, and once I set myself free, I never took back that power. Oh, I tried, but I could never quite invest myself in another myth system with the same trust. So I never succeeded in finding a new way to bring all of the pieces back together.

So, lost at the end of the path, I look backward, yearning, wishing for the old days when everything was still unified and undifferentiated, when Eden was imminent. But since I can’t go backward, I try to throw my own perspective at them, vaguely as a lifeline, in the irrational hope that if I can just critique, convince, control enough of the right people, eventually they’ll come to see things my way, we’ll reconcile, and we can all have a big happy reunion and live happily ever after.

Still waiting for that to happen.

I lie to myself, too, because as long as I can keep looking back and finding fault, I can deny that the responsibility for everything that has happened to me since I left the Drum has been in my own hands. That even the traumas that I experienced while at the Drum have been in my power. That my stasis on this path of development has been, ultimately, because of me.

But I deny that responsibility, because, deep in my heart, I am achingly lonely. I am without the religion I grew up with, without the ethnic community I belong to but can’t identify with, without the ties of childhood friends or college buddies, without a geography lived in for a long time—and now, if I let go of Teaching Drum, I am without the companionship of my second family—even if that companionship has degenerated into something as distant and pathetic as occasional thoughts and snipes, it is still a returning to the familiar, like talking about a family member makes you feel a little bit closer. To let go of critiquing Teaching Drum is to relinquish my hope of reunion.

To face forward and move forward is to let Teaching Drum be what it is, for better or worse, and to continue on my journey, that much more alone.

It’s hard to do because that place gave me so. fucking. much. I would not be the person I am today without Tamarack and Teaching Drum. My wife met me when I was there, and I’m so grateful for the skills in communicating and relating that I learned there, because otherwise we would not have made it through the first week together.

Without Teaching Drum I would not have some of my closest and most interesting friends. I would not have the clarity and complexity of political views that I have, some of which came from having lived through 9/11 while living in a wigwam.

Without Teaching Drum I would not know what it is like to personally experience the process from butchering a deer to eating her meat that evening. You do not really know how to be truly thankful for your meat until you see where it came from, and the life that was given in order for you to continue living.

Without Teaching Drum I would not know the glory of spending the winter in a wigwam I helped build, and going out late at night to watch the aurora borealis shimmer across the sky.

Without Teaching Drum I would not know deep belly laughs around a campfire, heartfelt circle talks, powerful sweat lodges, and nighttime treks across thick lake ice.

Without Teaching Drum I would be so much less of a person than I am today.

I cry as I write this.

Now I realize that I must leave this behind, and I’m loathe to.

See, it’s not just the myth. It’s the memories. It’s the warm happy feelings, the incredible closeness I felt for that year which was, in terms of density of experience, far more than a single year. It’s the deep connection that I have not found since, with anybody except my wife. The closest I came was my class at acupuncture school, and that ran a very distant second, though we spent three years together instead of just one.

But see now how I look back and color all of my memories a warm fuzzy golden. Not so different from looking back and seeing only the dark shadows, the awful dramas and traumas.

My clinging to the myth of the Drum and the memory of connection have kept me from forging ahead in the present and toward the future. Maybe I just didn’t have the energy till now to do any forging anyway, I don’t know. Maybe I still need to do some work before I can move forward.

I ache for what I had and I wish that I could have it back. That’s the long and short of it.

Letting go of the memories as well as the myth, I’m bereft, and unsure where to go.

The path from here on in is fraught with uncertainty, and not a little terror.

And, I miss my family.

I don’t know what comes next.

So, for my own edification, here are a few reminders of the wisdom of deep understanding.

First, two anecdotes from my lineage grandfather, John H.F. Shen.

Around 1910, a famous doctor, Cao Gang Zhou, in Su Zhou, was a physician to the Qing Emperors. One day, he was called to treat a patient suffering from typhoid fever. After having seen the patient, Dr. Cao returned home. Minutes later, the patient’s wife rushed into the doctor’s residence and asked if he had mistakenly taken fifty dollars which had been by the patient’s pillow. “Yes”, said Doctor Cao. He then gave her fifty dollars. Later, after the patient had recovered, his wife found fifty dollars among the sheets.

Realizing then that the doctor had never taken the money, they returned the fifty dollars to Dr. Cao and were curious to know why he admitted to having taken the money. He explained that since the loss of the money had led to suspicion, even about their own physician, it had indicated how important the money was to them.

If he had not admitted to it, and they could not find the money, it may have caused the patient too great an emotional stress. In turn, his illness might have gotten worse, and might have killed him. So the doctor was ready to give his own money to save a life.

In 1933, I was living in the province of Jiang Su. A newly born child of a wealthy household had been crying almost continually for a full month.

The family consulted with a Dr. Chu, who looked around their yard. Then, after he had seen the baby, he said that there was nothing wrong with the baby. He simply pointed out that the baby’s diapers were dried under a tree whose flowers stuck to the diapers.

The baby was crying because of the itching. He recommended that the baby’s bottom be rubbed with a kind of herb powder. The baby stopped crying.

These two anecdotes show instances where physicians used their compassion and wisdom in their work. On the surface, they may seem simplistic. In fact, they are not. They illustrate that in treating a patient, it is not a matter of just dealing with the illnesses. One must also be concerned with the patient’s psychology and surroundings.

Such things emphasize the subtle and the seemingly simple, and how small things can profoundly influence health and the soul. These are important things to keep in mind in an age of “bigger, faster, louder.”

Accordingly, here’s another brief reflection, from a former student of Dr. Shen.

Anyone who has spent a fair amount of time with Dr. Shen either privately or in seminar can attest to his sharp-minded, probing questioning of the patient and the history and progression of their illness. After this questioning, he would intently feel their pulse, then he would look at their tongue, then he would look at their lower eyelids. Then he would lean back and begin to say something like, “This problem started when you were young, maybe you went swimming in very cold water during a hot, hot summer, you remember?” The patient would think back and then you would see the understanding begin to dawn on their face as they nodded in agreement.

Then they would ask, how could something that minor, that long ago, develop into this disease I have now? Dr. Shen would say, “It only takes a small spark to start a big fire.”

This is something so true, yet so difficult to convey to the vast majority of my patients who want their problems fixed fast, for cheap, without much reflection into how or why they are the way they are.

Finally, another pulse practitioner describes one of his own experiences.

Recently I listened to a man’s pulses. He had concerns about his heart and was seeing a doctor. He only wanted me to read his pulses and tell him what I could about his heart. Within a minute of touching his pulses, a tear fell from my eye. I felt at first that it was my own empathy, but during the half hour to an hour of the pulse reading tears kept rolling down my face until my sleeves were wet.

I kept on listening to the qualities and changes of each pulse in spite of the tears. There was a wiry stagnation in the spleen. There was irregularity in the pericardium. I asked the pulses what had set this in motion. A small deep pulse appeared in the proximal positions of each wrist. The word ‘fear’ came to mind and an understanding of what was behind that fear. I said to him that there was an event in his life that caused him fear, this fear changed him and led to his heart condition and unsettled emotions. I explained the nature of the event and how his life changed after it according to what the pulses were saying. He had become unsure of himself (irregular pericardium) and sought to master the details of life (wiry stagnation of spleen). He kept silent during the pulse reading.

When I was done, he wanted to tell me something. He said that such an event had happened exactly like that and he had just wrote about it 3 days earlier in his journal. He was in the process of dealing with it. He felt he needed to confirm for me that the event did change his personality like I had seen in the pulses.

We talked about forgiveness of the event and the people involved. Since then he is making steps to recover his original nature.

He also said that he had been fighting depression for the last 7 years. Then the tears made sense to me.

Apparently I was not just listening to the depth of his pulses but to the depth of his being.

I have had this type of experience, though not, I think, with the same depth of listening. It’s something I aspire to.

His book, Undines: Lessons from the Realm of Water Spirits, is coming out in July. Here’s a fascinating excerpt.

Let us do an astral equilibrium study of the human race as a whole in terms of the four elements. Our current situation is rather terrible.

Think of an individual with great will power (fire), ever expanding knowledge (air), and tremendous capacity for hard work (earth). But there is almost no capacity for feeling (water). That is the human race from the point of view of the elemental realms as I understand them.

We have a race that has just created antimatter in its laboratories. Antimatter only exists in the explosions of supernovae and at the beginning of the universe. This is a cosmic level of creation in the external world. It is a big change. Two hundred years ago we were riding horses and using them to plow our fields.

Yet there has been no increase in our wisdom or religious understanding in the last two hundred years that equals our advances in the element of fire and the application of electronics, or in our other masteries over nature.

The balance required is in the area of water, not as an external power, but as a soul capacity to feel what others’ feel anywhere on earth. Water as the undines know it offers an inner sense of shared life, not just the twitter and blog sense of knowing intellectually what is going on with others which is not water but the air element.

So, if we had this water element weakness in an individual, with the other three elements very strong, we could foresee certain problems occurring. This individual (and so humanity as a whole) would end up causing great harm to others. He would do this simply because he does not understand when his rapid advances in knowledge and experimentation harms others or himself for that matter.

He would ignore all sorts of warnings about bad things coming his way: he would take excessive risks that threaten his well being and safety because the quest, pursuit, and exercise of his will are far more important to him than the mere feeling that it is important to live in peace and harmony.

And he would not be able to do what people with strong water can do—they can feel if something is right or not without having to think or analyze. The undines, by contrast, have an inner stillness that can sense or see the future.

Our water deficient individual would not have the ability to dare, not in the sense of taking risks which he is very good at, but in the sense of daring to change his own nature–to dream and imagine how to be complete and whole in himself.

For conscience to operate effectively it needs all four elements equally strong and positive. Water offers a sense of the rhythms of life. It tells you when to step back from your many activities in order to renew yourself. It tells you when to let go and flow because it senses within your own soul the natural, non-artificial way in which your dreams will be fulfilled.

Water offers a sense of connection to others. You can feel what they feel and with ease unite with them from within. Water annihilates loneliness and isolation and it dissolves anxiety and insecurity. It destroys sadness and sorrow.

Those with strong water can hear what others say, both in the words and in the heart. If you know someone with very strong water, you probably have a friend who at a glance can see if the deepest dreams in your heart are unfolding with harmony and beauty. A close friend or lover or caregiver with strong water unites with you from within and so for your entire life offers you an inner sense of renewal and completion. Their very presence in your life offers inspiration.

Take away the water required for balance and you get our world in which the human race can easily end up pursuing different goals that are mutually contradictory and at war with each other.

The worst case scenario for humanity is that we have no disasters in nature that set us back decades. The result is that we so change our own DNA and connection to electronics and nanotechnology that we cease to be the same species. We become multiple new species that cease to be human beings. We become technological marvels in which the soul or heart is vastly diminished.

I have seen at close hand how twisted good intentioned, well-meaning, and highly ethical people can become just by immersing themselves in the industrial revolution, the work ethic, and the scientific desire to know and apply new knowledge. People do things without any conscience coming into play in regard to the consequences of their actions. So I can easily imagine how inhuman we will become if we start further changing ourselves with technology.

I lived in Detroit. Detroit had a more effective system of apartheid than South Africa. But it worked for many decades. Everyone was advancing in opportunity or so it seemed until they had to call in the National Guard to stop the rioting. I was on the last airplane to land in Detroit before they closed the airport because of the riots. The city was on fire.

None of the CEO’s of the big three automakers, for example, saw the increasing disaster that was occurring in health, education, and job opportunities for the inner city workers. And of course the unions had no insight to offer in regard to the future. Placing themselves at odds with the corporations, they were consumed by their own cause and so did not look around to notice the disaster coming their way. They could not feel that things were not right.

For me, growing up in Detroit was a taste of hell. It never felt right.

From the point of view of this one realm of undines as compared to the sylphs, gnomes, and salamanders, the human race is really out of contact with the spiritual purposes of this planet. We are so out of touch with the purposes for which this planet was created that it is very easy to see that another race will appear after our time here is over. This would be a race more aligned with the astral, mental, and akashic resources and purposes that exist on earth.

I jokingly tell people, the 350 earthzone spirits who are guardians of the evolution of earth are bored out of their minds because human beings almost never consult with them. And the undines view humanity as a race that has no feeling for water.

Sure, we have submarines, surfers, scuba divers, sailors, and swimmers. Google charts the bottom of the ocean.

But I ask you seriously, in whose eyes have you ever seen the dreams of the blue green sea or in whose voice have you ever heard even a hint of the songs the sea dreams at night?

But with my latest experiences—first, my distaste for the business methods promoted by a wealthy acupuncturist, a former oil executive who makes almost $3 million a year doing acupuncture; and then, the realization that I had insidiously come to hold some of the more contemptible attitudes of the pro-civilization perspective—I feel that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.

So I’d like to stop and assess the conceptual framework that has brought me here, and consider where to go next.

Ken Wilber’s framework of evolution, as outlined in Up From Eden and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, was the inspiration that led me to where I am. It is, in a general sense, a linear model of human evolution and the evolution of consciousness. I doubt he’d accept my characterization of it as linear; nonetheless, it’s been my experience of it, and on that count it’s been quite useful. Why? Because Teaching Drum’s version of primitivism was also a linear model, one that says that going “backward” all the way was the only right way.

Wilber’s idea is that going “forward” is the way, in the same sense that individual human development is always forward growth—you don’t go from middle age to childhood. He’s got this big thing about the pre/trans fallacy. Briefly, the idea is that nonrational states of consciousness should not be all lumped together. The prerational state of bliss enjoyed by the infant is not, in fact, the same as the transrational state of union with God experienced by the mystic.

So, this kind of thing clearly untangles everything into what boils down to a linear model of evolution.

That’s not that useful for me anymore.

Well, that’s not quite true. Regarding the above acupuncturist, I recently saw someone criticize him for being very “orange meme”—that’s a term from Spiral Dynamics, a “colorized” model of developmental theory that Wilber has adopted for his own uses. And that’s kind of useful, to be able to categorize people and value systems according to developmental levels. There is truth in the idea that different people and different perspectives are developmentally unequal. I would say that ferocious racism and even-handed racial tolerance, for instance, are definite indicators of different stages of maturity.

On the other hand, I look at Wilber’s general framework and I begin to distrust it, particularly in light of two of the areas that have had the most significant impact on my life: the lifeways and belief systems of indigenous people, and magical, “supernatural,” “paranormal,” or occult practices and perspectives.

The topic of indigenous people is one he hardly touches on, except to place them at a low stage of development compared to modern humans, due to their beliefs in myths, spirits, rituals, “superstitions,” shamans, and animism.

In this critical essay on Wilber, “Primal Spirituality and the Onto/Phylo Fallacy,”, the author summarizes Wilber’s stance.

… Wilber argues that primal peoples were at a pre-personal level of consciousness. The hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic Era belonged to what he calls the typhonic stage of evolution, which is characterised by “magical thinking”, including voodoo practices, taboos, and an animistic worldview. The farmers of the Neolithic era, beginning around 10,000 BCE, belonged to the mythic stage, where individuals begin to realise that magic no longer works and instead projected the existence of elaborate systems of gods, demons and other forces.

… In other words, according to Wilber, primal peoples are actually less spiritual than us, both in the sense that their average level of consciousness was lower than ours—and therefore further away from the transpersonal spiritual realms̬and in the sense that their exceptionally developed individuals could not “leap” as high as us (or at least far fewer of them were capable of doing so) … He contends that, like young children, earlier human beings were at the pre-operational stage of cognitive development and a pre-conventional level of morality, and therefore egocentric.

Regarding their degree of evolved consciousness, Wilber likens the developmental stage of indigenous people to the infant’s “animism,” wherein the child’s undifferentiated consciousness believes that everything happens because of him.

I don’t find them comparable at all, except in superficial ways. I find him committing his own error, his pre/trans fallacy.

I find this assessment of primal consciousness just plain wrong. Everything I’ve read about indigenous peoples, past and present, and my pitiful encounters with attempts to live in their way, shows a tremendous canniness, intelligence, diversity, and sophistication according to many different measures—just not the same measures we modern humans are accustomed to, such as technological complexity or specialization of roles. And, at base, you can’t be in an infant state of immersion in your surroundings when you have to make really clear distinctions in order to avoid getting eaten by predators!

On the other matter, belief in magical practices, indigenous or modern, are generally looked down upon in his model of spiritual evolution. I recently listened to one of his talks, in which someone posed a question about how you know where methods of divination, such as astrology and tarot, fit in his model. Wilber’s response (outlined in the first section of this article) was first to make the claim that astrology was scientifically proven not to be empirically valid at predicting anything, then to state that those practices were absolutely fine if it was understood that they were lower-stage practices, and that they could be used as inspiration for higher stages but were not indicative of higher consciousness themselves—and if you see anyone actually claiming that they were empirically valid methods, watch out!

My experience points in the opposite direction. My encounters with so-called paranormal phenomena lead me to discredit Wilber’s blanket assertion. Not least because an astrologer I’d never met wrote me a long essay describing features of my personality hardly anyone knows, based on my birth date and location; and because this astrologer also predicted general events over the course of a year that all turned out to be true.

In my eyes, these things challenge some of the very foundations of Wilber’s theory. If those early stages of development are, in fact, very advanced, then how can you speak of an evolution from then to now? That evolutionary theory is exposed as just another version of the myth of progress that we’ve been hypnotized into believing in.

Thus, Wilber’s theory loses its strength for me.

But I was really only using it for my own ends anyway. I just adopted it to have something to hold onto while I freed myself from the clutches of fundamentalist primitivism. Both of them cling to a linear idea of evolution, they just weight things in different directions. Fundamentalist primitivists celebrate prehistorical humanity in a too-simplistic way for my taste. Wilber and his cohorts want to keep “pushing the edge of evolution.”

Worse, embracing the linearity of Wilber’s model has led me to this place where I’m running into the “orange meme,” and according to the model, I can only move forward into higher levels of rationality and transrationality.

And what I’m realizing lately is that I don’t want to move forward along those lines. Neither do I want to move backward. I want to move … sideways. And step out of his model, the same model that says indigenous spirituality is less developed and scientific reasoning more, the same model that says that ritual magic is prerational and mystical states of yogic meditation transrational.

I think I do want to conflate what he considers prerational and transrational. I begin to feel that the differences are not as he believes, at least when it comes to cultures and whole peoples. And if so, I want to commit the pre/trans fallacy. I want to throw it aside and just dive in to see what’s really real—for me.

I want to leap out of this whole mess.

The party line when I was a primitivist was that civilization is the dead-end, it’s the death knell, it’s our doom. When I reversed course and adopted Wilber’s track, I came to see civilization as a halfway point for wherever we are going next.

And now? Now I don’t fucking care. I just want to focus on my own individual evolution, and let the historians and philosophers decide what all of this stuff means later.

I feel it’s time to step off the train, time to stop joining one crowd or the other, time to take back my power from both parties and focus on what I know best—which is the exploration of my own consciousness, through its own alteration and expansion.

Whither civilization? I don’t know anymore, and I don’t care too much anymore either, in the sense that having answers is no longer as important to me. Let’s just go face actual situations and make actual decisions, and see what complex, morally ambiguous, or profound lessons there are to learn in this life—there’s plenty to gain from that kind of learning, even without having vast ideologies overlaid on top of it all.

Yeah, I still believe we’re seeing the sunset of modern civilization. The facts are all there. I don’t care so much about which ideology to adopt in its face though. I’m a little bit more accepting of my mortality and the limits of my power. It’s time to focus on what I have power over, and do what I can do to develop and prepare and evolve in my own being.

I’m an acupuncturist. More than that, I have a particular passion and interest in the narrative of your physiology, your energy, your symptoms, and your history, and your life path, hokey as that last might sound. It’s diagnosis writ large.

I have a soft spot for primitivists, rewilders, back-to-the-landers, etc. Especially to those trying to carve out something different in this rapacious world. I’m also keenly aware that you all are the least likely to have funds to afford the amounts of money I’m forced to charge my regular patients in order to remain solvent as a business.

So I’m making this offer, just to you primitive types. Based on my time, energy, and health, and your motivation and attitude, I’m willing to have a consultation with you about your health problems. An hour or so, up to two hours. A treatment might be included. Mostly, I’d sit down and talk to you about your issues, and I’d spend some time taking your pulse, one of my specialties. The cost is nothing; it’s all free. Donations are welcome, but definitely not an obligation.

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I was probably in 5th or 6th grade when the incident I refer to happened.

Dear C________,

You may not remember me, or on the other hand, you may remember me all too well. We used to play in group violin lessons together. I’ve been trying to find contact info for you off and on for a few years now. There’s something I’ve been needing to tell you.

(If for some reason I’ve got the wrong person, then just ignore this message!)

My last memory of encountering you is a very shameful one. What I remember is that my friend Johnny and I were trick-or-treating and we came to your house. You answered the door and gave us candy, and I don’t remember what we said to each other except that I started calling you “fag” with a big grin on my face. And I kept yelling it at you as we walked away. I recall that you hardly moved or reacted.

I’m writing this because I can’t tell you how ashamed I am that I did that. I hope you’ll believe me, that at the time I really had no understanding of what the word “fag” meant; I thought it just meant something like “jerk” or “idiot,” and I was trying to use it in a teasing way, even affectionate way. When he heard me calling you that, my friend Johnny tried to tell me that it was a bad word but I insisted to him that he was wrong, even as your reaction clued me in that something was not quite right.

I don’t know when I found out what it meant. Either way I was probably way too chicken to go apologize to you. In any event, not understanding what the meaning doesn’t excuse my having used it, at all.

Please understand that it doesn’t matter to me whether you are straight or gay, it’s the hatefulness of the word itself that I’m ashamed of having spewed.

Anyway, it’s been on my mind for a very long time. Maybe you remember, maybe you don’t, but in any event I thought that you should know my end of it.

I most deeply apologize, and I deeply regret having done it. I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. So this message, many years too late, is the best that I can do.

David

This brief (about 11 minutes total) segment, split into two parts, is from a show done for CBC, the Canadian public broadcast network.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Also, MTV’s series profiling real people, True Life, did a show on a couple of other people who participated in the same yearlong.

Watch the full half-hour episode on the True Life website.

I have to say, after watching these, that I felt both ends of the spectrum. I continue to be grateful for my experiences there, and I resonate with the sense of empowerment and the joy of connecting with other beings that is learned in such an immersive setting. And, my negative feelings about the school, the way it’s run and its blind spots, as I outlined in my critique, are affirmed and validated.

All in all, I’d say that, cool music and snazzy video editing aside, these people’s experiences are much along the same lines as my own.

I was reading last night about the concept of nonattachment, and in chewing on that, I started to realize how the process of attachment to the contents of my daily activities, of identification and losing myself in the roles I play, has really been corrupting me.

The majority of my daily life is geared toward the activity of healing people and making money. They are not separable, the way I am doing it—which is to say, the same way that just about every other health care practitioner in a capitalist society does it: Health care for financial return.

The fact that it’s consumed my energy day after day has meant that, step by step, I’ve started to align myself with the needs and concerns of a business owner. I remember one distinct step I took was when I was searching for an office to lease. I developed a schema for “For Lease” signs, and now I see them everywhere, and they remind me of the state of the housing market, etc. Or, having a machine to take credit cards, I’m now aware of the fees vendors pay Visa and Mastercard in exchange for the privilege of taking customers’ credit cards, which makes me more keenly aware of the effect I might have on a store’s bottom line whenever I myself use a credit card.

Those are the more innocuous things. What is not as innocuous is a gradual but profound shift in a direction of being powerfully concerned with money in the course of my days. Oh, my main concern is still the health of my patients, but in some ways it’s inseparable from the financial state of my business—one depends on the other.

This has led to me gradually adopt a position of alignment with, well, just about everyone else around me who’s in a position of needing to be concerned about money. Then I find myself being hard on myself when I didn’t make enough or if I spent more than my budget allowed. And then, I find myself turning that outward and beginning to look down on people who aren’t as financially successful.

And I just woke up from that, literally, like, yesterday. It horrifies me, that I can begin to see people in that way. But I understand it a little better now, and can have a little more sympathy for those who were very hostile and not understanding of my time spent learning primitive skills—a field that certainly has, at least among the people I encountered, a proportionally higher population of lower-income and lower-class individuals, and which, moreover, will never lead one to make much money unless they manage celebrity status a la Tom Brown, Jr.

Nevertheless, such a position is not right, and not real. And, you know, I do understand that people who make more money and become familiar with and secure in themselves about it can afford to be more generous and have more power and money to distribute and donate to those who need it. And I do understand that many people without money are also those who cast themselves in the victim’s role, or simply do not have the time or energy to expand their consciousness beyond putting food on the table. But this isn’t really about that. It’s about the sense of moral superiority, that one state or another is morally or even spiritually better for some reason.

I develop such a moral hierarchy in order to make sense of what would otherwise be a deep sense of terror in a world that demands an esteem of money or else you lose. So I grip tightly and learn the rules of the game, and as I do so I insidiously begin to internalize those rules until I begin to judge people who don’t play by those rules, or people who aren’t winning according to those rules, as inferior.

I can’t speak for others. I just know that, for myself, coming from a past of having valued other people more fully simply for what truth they could speak, to find in my mind the beginnings of a contempt for those less fortunate than I is disturbing. And really speaks to the contempt I hold for myself for not being more economically successful (yet), a contempt reinforced (perhaps subconsciously) by people like the presenter at the recent seminar I attended and blogged about.

As I wake up, I remind myself that this is not what it’s all supposed to be about. My worth is neither in my wealth nor in my status nor in my success or lack thereof.

The problem is that the worth that others attribute to me is dependent on those things. So I have to be clear and strong in my purpose if I am to withstand the influences of others.

And what is my purpose? Well. That’s the question. What has ever been the purpose of a deeply spiritual path? Encapsulate it in a word, if you will, something like enlightenment, or heaven. It still lacks the succinctness and concreteness of, “I want to make a million dollars.” There’s an earthy ferocity to such a statement that more people can connect to than can relate to nirvana. So to set that aside and aim for something seemingly more ethereal is like fighting a tide. And it’s aiming for a distant star that I can’t even name. It’s opening and trusting. It’s a lot of things, see, that can’t be boiled down to a mission statement.

All I know is that I violated that purpose by internalizing the rules of the financial game I’m made to play. So this is the dangerous temptation of avarice and the existential anxiety from which it came: that playing the game to survive degenerates into playing the game for the sake of the game.

This is not what I’m here to do. I’m meant for greater things. We all are.

Or, in his words, “Why would you be in this business to fail?”

He said that he interviewed other acupuncturists in his home state before starting a clinic, and found that most of them saw between 5 and 10 patients a day, which he found shockingly low. He was genuinely bewildered and even seemed kind of angry about it, and said, literally, that this was due to their “narcissism and ignorance.”

At ten patients a day, by the way, you could make a decent middle class living.

But this comes from a guy who runs the largest acupuncture clinic in the United States, by volume, and grossed almost $3 million a year, and his clinic probably sees around 600-700 patients a week.

This is a guy who initially got his workload up to 120 people a week, but then got frustrated because he couldn’t get it any higher.

This is a guy who started out as a hardcore meditator in the sixties, but, in a classic case of reformed hippie syndrome, eventually turned around, made a fortune in the oil business, then started doing Chinese medicine.

Now, I’ll admit to having a lot to learn in the realm of business, and I’m sure there are a lot of lessons that I could learn from becoming a great success. In the face of this guy and his successes, and the attitude he wields, I guess I have to ask, though, whether it’s something I want.

Actually, it kind of reminds me of that time when I had taken tai chi for a couple of months, then attended a weekend workshop with a very good tai chi master, and subsequently quit tai chi. I quit because I saw my future if I stayed on the path and somehow, it didn’t feel worth it. Nothing wrong with the master, in fact he seemed like a really good person, not just good at what he did but very decent as a human being. I just realized that I didn’t want to dedicate my life to learning to beat people up.

I feel a little that way with this guy. He is without a doubt a modern master of the acupuncture business. The guy even has a PR person on his clinic staff. He hired lobbyists to lobby the state congress on behalf of the acupuncture field. My state needs a guy like that. A rich, motivated, and competent guy like him.

And yet, I don’t want to be him.

I don’t want to be him because, I’m realizing, I don’t have that kind of drive, that kind of passion.

For me, the practice of acupuncture misses something, and it misses something even more if I consider seeing dozens of patients a day.

The one thing that most contributes to meaning in my life is awareness of deeper perceptions and higher vibrations. I just don’t see that having any place in a clinic where I see a patient for a few minutes at a time. And sure, maybe not every patient needs that kind of attention. I could stand to go faster and have more patients that way. But still, therein lies my ambivalence.

I would resist having a hugely full practice, because I’m not that happy—not with my profession, but with the stock-photo, stenciled life I’m living, that excludes the range of mysterious and strange phenomena and experiences that do not fit into people’s perceptual schemes. And daily, even in a setting that I built, I have to conform to other people’s perceptions in order to maintain contact.

I don’t want that. I’ve got somewhere else I feel like I need to go, and all this work I’m doing, it ain’t taking me there.

And there’s a broader objection, one built around the pressure to do more, more, more. More is better. It really smacks of an almost Calvinist zeal to proving your moral status by the volume of your business.

Max Weber, in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, quotes a Puritan named Richard Baxter, saying,

“If God shows you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to accept His gifts and use them for Him when He requireth it.”

The stance is essentially that:

As a performance of duty in a calling [wealth] is not only morally permissible, but actually enjoined. The parable of the servant who was rejected because he did not increase the talent which was entrusted to him seemed to say so directly.

This is entirely at odds with the kind of lifestyle detailed by those such as Marshall Sahlins in his classic essay on hunter-gatherer living, “The Original Affluent Society”. And obviously the primitive ideal is one that has strongly influenced me and still resonates strongly.

A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.

The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being, which left them plenty of time to spare.

This brings up the very broad question of how to live. But answering that question is really obviated by the fact that those choices have already been made for me, and are very difficult to change.

Which society do I live in? One in which the classic 9 to 5 workday is now considered to be a luxury. One in which things are not valued if they do not lead directly to greater and greater financial reward, because the state of our collective finances is so awful that only obsessive discipline with them can sustain us. One in which the ethic of hard work consumes us, and is but masked by the massive engines of entertainment and escapism—which are all too easily proven hollow.

Yet this is the atmosphere in which I was born and grew up, and in which am trying to eke out my existence. I know of no other way to live and to conceptualize my life, and I don’t know how to even begin.

So this fellow at the seminar, speaking at times with the zeal of a preacher, and with the certainty of an evangelical, struck all the nerves in me that have been, and are, vulnerable—made vulnerable by my continuing, profound ambivalence about how to live a righteous existence in a world that doesn’t seem so right at all, and by my fears of being myself a reformed hippie, a former dirty dude dressed in military issue olive drab, who made it through a year of primitive living, only to go on to have the respectable job with the six-digit income, the nice house, the 2.5 kids.

This obviously taps into a deeper and broader issue, one having to do with the implications of living in the midst of mainstream society, without the security of an ideology or practice to attach to—something I gave up when I dissociated myself from Teaching Drum and let the primitivist ideal mature into something with more shades of grey. And it has to do with who I am and who I want to be, as an individual, in this type of society and this kind of world.

In a culture that is very heavily centered around business, who am I in relation to my business and the economic aspects of my self?

Who am I? And where am I going?