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. 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.

So here are the limits. I won’t travel, you’d have to come to me. I won’t put you up at my house. And I will veto anything or anybody I don’t feel good about. If I feel any sort of games being played, you’re out. My empathy only goes so far.

I’m not going to trumpet this offer anywhere. It’s definitely not designed to market my business—as you might be able to tell, I keep my last name and business name off this blog in the distant hope that random people can’t Google me and find me that way.

And I’m definitely not saying I’m some great health care god, because I’m not in the best shape myself, and because I still have a lot to learn about all aspects of medicine. So let’s dispel that right there. Nor am I saying that I’m the only or the best option. In fact, one of my friends and former teachers, up in Portland, runs his whole practice on a gift economy basis. He’s been in the business longer and has a more suitable model for long-term care.

I’m just putting this out there because it’s what I would’ve wanted, back when I was an aspiring primitivist with health problems; because I’m tired of the business side of my business and want to work with worthy people; and because I want to support a movement I currently don’t have the energy to participate in much.

If you’re interested, and you’re in Oregon, or will be, contact me. Let me know who you are and what you’re all about. Include a picture, if at all possible.

Of course, I reserve the right to discontinue it if I get too overwhelmed. But as long as this post is up and still says the offer’s good, then the offer’s still good.

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?

All around me, I look and see ways of thinking and acting that only reinforce this sense that you are only as much as you do, you are only how outwardly interesting you are. If you don’t do anything that looks or sounds interesting, you just aren’t meaningful.

But that’s backward. It seems to me that the elevation of content has totally overshadowed the fact that the content is supposed to be only a manifestation of the deeper process of continuous birthing of meaning and significance. We attach so much meaning to obvious events in our lives because we have no language for the subtler nuances, and therefore no way of speaking of them. But they are the origin of meaning.

If I were to recount to you my day, it would sound like a recitation of events. I got up, ate breakfast, saw patients, had lunch, saw more patients, came home, had dinner. Somewhere in there I might throw in a funny story or talk about a hard case, but that just reinforces the sense of meaning being embedded in the act of doing.

When I observe myself engaged in such content-driven activity, I notice an energetic wall that blocks my body from feeling. It’s like I have to encase myself in a certain degree of numbness or lack of awareness in order to perform my daily tasks. I have to do this because otherwise those daily tasks would make no sense. Tasks make no sense to a mind that recognizes nothing but the present moment. Or, if they make sense, the tasks themselves remain secondary to the lived experience of them.

When I open myself to the multidimensional nature of perception of the moment, of all the little things that surround me in each moment I perform my mundane little daily tasks, suddenly the world takes on texture and richness. Meaning is expressed everywhere around me, in every iota of space and time. And it is sublimely beautiful.

It feels violent to switch from one to the other. I suppose that’s what I was trying to get at in my last post; I wish my daily tasks still nonetheless reflect this deep meaning that I can only access when I let down my barriers and guardrails that keep me in this world.

I get hints of it every now and then in my practice. I had a new patient yesterday who came in for jaw pain. I did the intake then got him on the table, and I inserted a few needles in his foot and asked him to move his jaw around. He did, amidst an awed laughter. In that moment I saw him experiencing a wider world than he had known possible—he put needles in my foot and it made my jaw stop hurting!—and that sudden widening is so awesome whenever I see it happen, and whenever I experience it for myself. But it’s so rare.

My ability to do it waxes and wanes with the pressures and obligations on me. Nonetheless, there it is, the secret of happiness, the meaning of life, consistent with the principles of what every religion, exoteric or esoteric, say: Just be present and open your heart to the Great Mystery, and the answer appears.

But let’s start from the beginning.

In my personal existence, the phenomenology of my daily life, I experience two states of being that seem to be pretty far apart. One is the mystical beauty of the Great Mystery. The other is the mundane little world most of us call home. It’s been my ongoing effort to bridge the gap. The only way I see is through that broad category called spirituality.

I divide spirituality roughly into the mystical and the magical. The mystic is concerned with experiencing various higher states of consciousness. The magician is occupied with effecting change and manipulating reality. In their pure, caricatured forms, they’re kind of far apart. Ideally, though, the paths merge. On the one hand, as higher states of consciousness are attained, more abilities are naturally developed (e.g. the siddhis). And, on the other hand, one learns to manipulate reality by accessing different states of consciousness; and by doing so, the path toward attaining higher states of consciousness becomes manifest.

I tend toward the mystic end of things, myself. But I think there’s a profound problem in that end of things, which is that you can become very content with the established social order, so long as it doesn’t inhibit your ability to enter your mystical states of consciousness. The purely mystical route is an intensely internally oriented one, and only indirectly does it inform you how to deal with the social world. You can sit down for hours and shut your ears and eyes to the world.

Of course, in a healthy esoteric system, this would be considered an imbalance. Still, some methods encourage or tolerate it more than others, or even build it into their philosophies or cultures. (Witness the celibate monk.)

Magic bridges a gap. It forces the question of what it means to manipulate this world and this life—essentially, the ethics of wielding worldly power, and the dangers. In this sense, then, magic is just a subset of any power gained and used (and abused) in the social world, occupying the same category as wealth, charisma, sexual attractiveness, political power, and the like.

But magic, uniquely, is closely tied to mysticism, in that in order to advance, the consciousness itself must be shaped and developed. Mystical practice enables magic, while magic, as a vehicle for exploration of consciousness and its implications, advances mystical practice.

All right. So what’s folk magic got to do with all of this?

Spirituality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. But I once wished it did. In my spiritual search, I’ve gravitated toward those methods that I perceived to be relatively free of the limitations of my time, place, and culture. I’ve seen firsthand how being identified with a particular ethnicity, race, nationality, sports team, or whatever has caused problems. I’ve always distrusted “culture” as having a great potential for insularity and bigotry. I thought, and still think, that a true spiritual path should be able to exist beyond local customs and patterns of thinking. That means a method that focuses on experimentation, critical thinking, deep self-exploration, practice, and direct experience and independent verification of results.

It’s to my great relief to have settled on a curriculum that allows me to be as independent, scientific, and self-paced as I want to be. I feel content with the core of my spiritual practice.

Nonetheless, a gap remains. And I couldn’t quite identify it, until I read a book called American Shamans, by Jack Montgomery.

Let me back up a bit. I’ve heard of mystics, magicians, shamans, healers, etc. from many different exotic cultures. Milarepa, the black magician who was converted and became enlightened, and is now an honored figure in Tibetan Buddhism. Tales of Daoist immortals and their magic. Jesus, Moses, Abraham, and their feats, and also lesser-known rabbis as well. The ancient Druids of the Celtic peoples; the priests of ancient Egypt. The shamans of indigenous peoples all over the world, including of course the Siberian tribes from whom the word “shaman” came. Contemporary accounts of North American medicine men like Black Elk, Fools Crow, and Rolling Thunder; descriptions from people who went to South America to take ayahuasca with healers in the jungles of Venezuela.

But it wasn’t until recently that I heard that there were traditions a lot closer to home.

American Shamans was my introduction to hoodoo, rootworking, and powwow. They’re basically unique varieties of American folk medicine and magic that come from a hodgepodge of influences, including African slaves, Native American, and European cultures dating from the colonial era. Influences also include Kabbalah, medieval European magic, and, according to one powwow practitioner, possibly having the same origin as East Indian religions.

It’s one thing to read Castaneda’s apocryphal meetings with a mysterious Yaqui Indian, or even the accounts of more modern, and verifiable, Native American medicine men like Rolling Thunder. It’s another to read about this hodgepodge kind of folk tradition. They somehow seem more relatable, less exotic. They just feel like another breed of American. That feels more comfortable.

It strikes me that I’m bereft of the comfort of a guiding tradition. I’m Chinese by ethnicity, Taiwanese by my parents’ nationality, but entirely American by birth and culture. I was raised in a Judeo-Christian religious setting. My spiritual rebellion came in the form of studying channelled entities and pursuing Native American inspired ways of living. I now practice a system originated by a Czech man, whose books were translated into German before they were translated into English. I do practice Chinese medicine, but I’ve been taught almost entirely by Westerners.

In a sense, it’s no wonder that I’ve sought out a spiritual system that could be ported from culture to culture. How would it otherwise survive my travels? I needed to find something that could maintain its integrity in the many different settings I inhabit, i.e. something that wasn’t dependent on outer trappings.

But in the same vein, it’s no wonder now that I remain keenly aware of the gap between my spiritual practice and the social world around me. I have nothing to wrap around me and make me part of the world. I have no deep solidarity with the Chinese or Taiwanese to fall back on, no longtime church or community to bask in. I just have a particular spiritual curriculum. It’s the magical version of being home-schooled. I kinda miss the soccer games and class parties, you know? Even though they’re beside the point, if you take the point to be academic progress.

And I think that’s what fascinates me about these folk magic accounts. It’s not so much the powers that are described and attributed to these practitioners—impressive as they are, they’re consistent with powers described of the many other traditions I’ve named. I have no particular interest in developing other skills or chasing magical powers.

No, for me the fascination is that each practitioner’s magic is a unique concentration and accumulation of culture. For example, powwow folk remedies often invoke “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” or involve the reciting of Biblical verses, a practice that is consistent with powwow’s origins in Germanic immigrants, among whose numbers include the Amish and the Mennonites. The method and the culture interface in the practitioner uniquely and with some consistency.

It’s that interface that interests me, because I lack it. And this is why I say I think I need a “postmodern” folk magic—postmodern in the sense of being able to survive in a fragmented postmodern era, yet still is “folk” in the sense that it draws on a living culture as a medium for existence and action.

It’s not power that I’m after, it’s the embodiment and manifestation of power and consciousness within the trappings of the culture that surrounds me. I want to learn how to be a chameleon, to be a mystic and be magical in the social world I inhabit, to survive by taking on the trappings of the surrounding world without giving up my integrity—ideally, I’d go one further, and learn to use that accumulation of culture to enhance my mystical and magical practice. I want to learn how to do all that and yet remain sane.

But maybe my fears about the impossibility of this task is precisely because I live in an insane culture. If I were to try to concentrate and accumulate the “culture” that surrounds me, to become such a “pop-culture” folk magic practitioner, what exactly would I be concentrating and accumulating? Media images, corporate logos, celebrity fetishes? What real social fabric, what commonly held mythologies can I draw on can I draw on to inspire my mago-mystical explorations? The worship of political power and wealth? Or the endorsement of sports teams?

How abhorrent. No thanks.

Modern life has fragmented the cohesive fabric of traditional life. The benefit is that I can be Taiwanese-American with a Judeo-Christian background and pursue a Native American inspired lifestyle before settling into a Czech-originated German-translated spiritual path. The drawback is that I must do that precisely because of the deep spiritual emptiness in modern life.

These images of folk magic inspire me. But the way forward? I don’t know. I have deep ambivalence. There’s such a rapacity in the insane creature that is modern society that I can’t see myself tapping into that for inspiration or comfort, much less the creation of a folk anything.

So, I end the way I began, pondering the conundrum of bridging the gap between the higher levels of being and the broader social world …

These are pretty frivolous and peripheral examples, of course, in the sense that none of them impact my daily life or constitute any central part of my identity. But here are a few that come a bit closer.

Both of these examples essentially remove a certain element of experience from valid consideration.

I was browsing through the forum of a group of acupuncturists dedicated to spirituality and the evolution of consciousness, and the main teacher wrote this:

I’ve had no interest in mysticism since I was a kid. On the one hand “mystical” might imply “beyond the grasp of the mind” and that’s ok because, frankly, I’ve found the spiritual path involves surrender to and establishing conviction in a mystery. But most often I associate it with the theosophists and new agey things that involve feeling states, the lower type of faith, and believing in things that one has no experience with.

What ensued was a discussion about the definition of mysticism, but most people shared this line of thinking. The thing that stood out to me here was that here was a group of people dedicated, not just to acupuncture—already a fringe type of career—but to the “evolution of consciousness” in relation to acupuncture, something even more fringe, then pointing to another collection of fringe thought and dismissing them out of hand. Elsewhere things like occult powers are dismissed as mere superstition.

I guess I don’t really have a problem with people dismissing occult powers as superstition. I have a problem when people who have had direct experiences of transcendent states of consciousness, and what they imply, dismiss the possibilities inherent in other, unconventional states of consciousness. It confuses me. I understand that maybe they’re reacting to the other polarity, those people who get obsessed with altered states for the experience, like junkies, rather than seeing them as stepping stones to catapult the consciousness. Maybe they haven’t encountered people who use them productively. I agree it’s rare. But there’s a lack of nuance in some of those ways of thinking.

Here’s another example. This is about the concept of energy, controversial in the mainstream but, I thought, had a good deal of acceptance and consensus among magick-y types. I guess I was wrong. This is from the blog post of a published author, Patrick Dunn:

Obviously, since I’ve written two books based on an alternate interpretation of magic, I’m not a fan of “energy” talk … I don’t have violent thoughts when I hear it, but I do tend to think it’s a bit sloppy if the person using it doesn’t recognize it as a metaphor.

… To those who believe in a literal, actual energy moved by thought and used in magic, let me offer you a few questions:

1) How many joules does the Middle Pillar [a magical ritual] raise? If you do the ritual of the movement of the body of light, or something similar, how many Watts can you move?

2) Energy … is really a mathematical reality, a characteristic of mass. As such, it can be transformed easily—in fact, we can think of work as the transformation of energy from one form to another. For example, if I pick up a rock and set it on a table, I’ve performed some work. I’ve taken chemical energy locked up in ATP, transformed it to kinetic energy to move the rock, and now that energy is in the rock as potential energy (minus waste heat). If I tie a string to the rock, wire a bulb to a motor, and wind the string around the shaft of the motor and let it fall, I’ll transform the potential energy into kinetic energy, and then into electrical energy, light energy, and heat energy.

So here’s my question: if magical energy is energy, transform it. Move this rock with your mind. Turn on this light. Light a candle. The usual excuse for why we can’t easily do telekinesis is that it “takes too much energy.” Really? It takes a joule to lift an apple a meter. I can do that without breaking a sweat. If breaking the bonds in a few sugar molecules is enough to power that kind of motion, then what a feeble thing is magic.

This is a strange set of arguments to my mind. It really doesn’t take just a joule to lift an apple a meter. It takes a joule in addition to all of the energy and preexisting structures in place that constitute your living body.

To make his argument is like saying a shirt only costs four bucks at Wal-Mart, and if you can’t make a shirt for that cost then you don’t know what you’re doing. Really? I see a whole lot more into it than that, including the cost of growing and processing the material, labor in processing the fabric into shirts and transporting them to the store (possibly involving whatever shady slavery practices Wal-Mart employs overseas), etc. A lot goes into a four dollar shirt, of which we only see the end-product.

Another way of thinking of this is, can you lift an apple a meter by blowing on it? How much effort does it take to create a joule of force through blowing really really hard? Think you’ll break a sweat then?

I’m reacting a little bit emotionally to this, I think, because the experience of vital energy or qi has been very direct for me and, literally, palpable. It’s hard for me to fathom a magician saying these things, because magicians are also, by definition, people who believe in “spooky action-at-a-distance,” who believe that mumbling magic words and doing ritual movements or whatever can create effects from afar.

People confuse me. I get really confused when I read, on another discussion forum, this one populated by skeptical scientific and tech types, someone describing an experience of healing through acupuncture or homeopathy, or having had a number of psychic predictions come true with uncanny accuracy, or mysterious ghost stories, only to be dismissed as anecdotal or coincidental, often with a great degree of certainty on the part of the respondent. (As in, literally, “That didn’t happen. Your mind made it up. There are no such things as real ghosts/psychics/etc.”) What happened to weighing the evidence of direct experience?

This confuses me, not because people hold skeptical beliefs, but because these are typically individuals who explicitly align themselves with Science but profoundly disrespect the spirit of scientific inquiry, all in one package. The real questions when confronted with such phenomena are, “What happened? What’s the mechanism? What’s going on?” But the dismissals are broad and crude and absolute.

In my mind, it’s a vast world out there. So much isn’t explained, so many things surprise. They’re still finding new things. Some flies live for less than a day. Some trees live for thousands of years! The most mundane things can blow your mind. How can you definitively say something’s wrong?

I guess I can agree with dismissing some things out of hand just because if you get into the nuances of every little thing, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day; some things have to be oversimplified. But why can’t more things just be kept open as a question? Time and again I’ve formed a solid opinion about something only to have someone come along and shake that up by telling me that they have, in fact, seen its crazy opposite. That’s why I’ll hold out a little bit of openness even to the moon landing or Holocaust hoaxers.

Perhaps, on a deeper level, it’s a matter of identity. In my first example, the people populating that forum were not so much opposed to occult matters, as they were considering them mostly irrelevant to their mission of evolving consciousness or enlightenment, or however they term it. And I can resonate with that. In my own medical practice, I don’t care so much about various types of surgery, not because I don’t believe in them, more that they’re irrelevant to and outside of my scope of practice. Nonetheless, it will color my beliefs and my identity, and it runs the risk that I will actually exclude the possibility of referring a patient for surgery when appropriate and necessary. For people aimed at “absolute enlightenment” or whatever, who consider mystical states as irrelevant pitfalls or traps along the way (which they can be), they nonetheless exclude whole swaths of human experience that may well lead to a more profound and multifaceted life on this earth, and which may in fact lead more quickly to “enlightenment.”

For the second example, it seems to me that this individual, with whom I’m not otherwise acquainted, has a bone to pick with the concept of magical energy. Here, too, it probably has something to do with the territory he’s staked out for his identity, just as, conversely, my endorsement of the qi concept as literally real has something to do with the territory I’ve staked out for my identity. Nothing wrong with either, in and of themselves; it’s just useful to note, because ultimately it’s not so much about what beliefs are held, as it is about what’s done with those beliefs and where they lead to, and whether they enhance the living of one’s life and the advancement of one’s purpose or not.

I’m always reminded of a workshop I took with Victor Sanchez, in which we did this exercise wherein we took a random topic and argued with a partner, then switched positions. I remember picking an absurd topic to argue about, something about whether coins should be circular or square, and really getting into it. It was surprising how easily the ego gets involved, and in that case it’s clearly not so much about the content as it is about the identity getting a sense of importance around how well it presents itself.

Still, as a matter of usefulness for myself, I will continue to hold my beliefs that magic and the occult do in fact play a valid role in life and in the spiritual path, as misused and abused as they might be; and that vital energy or qi is in fact a literally real phenomenon with real properties and uses.

The reason I hold “crazy” beliefs is because the world seems so vast as to be crazy in a lot of places, and because my experience corroborates this basic principle. So what’s to lose by keeping the mind cautiously open, especially when something useful can sometimes come of it?

Again, on a deeper level it’s important to know that these beliefs are not significant in and of themselves, but draw their importance from how well they allow me to advance my purpose and reach my goals in this life.

So I’ll believe what I believe until it’s more useful to believe something else, and same with others, I suppose.

But still. Come on, people.