I can’t decide if it is ironic or appropriate that after finishing writing the last post, on Teaching Drum, I found Tim Nelson’s guest post over on Dmitri Orlov’s blog. (Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse, which discusses the coming collapse of civilization, from the perspective of his having witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

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.

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It’s been almost ten years since I first went to Teaching Drum, the school where I spent my year in the woods. I was there for the summer of 2000, and the whole year from April 2001 to April 2002, and then I left. I went back for a brief visit in 2003 and have not been back since. Yet for some reason it still pulls at me.

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.

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In my recent “contraction” of spirit, based on fears around money and aversion to business, and the desire to cater to impatient patients—the pressure to get symptoms fixed fast, to get rid of problems without facing into the quiet depth of the root of healing—the spirit of the medicine has gotten a bit lost for me. This is unfortunate, because it’s the spirit of the medicine that keeps me alive and interested.

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.

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Philip Carr-Gomm, Chief Druid of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, has posted on his blog an excerpt from an upcoming book by William Mistele. Mistele is a follower of Franz Bardon’s Hermetic work, and he’s someone who has inspired me with his writings.

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.

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When I began to trace, and justify, my journey from primitive to civilized living, I was mired in fundamentalist primitivist beliefs that were making me miserable. They involved, not just the factual analysis of the harm that civilization has caused, but the moral denigration of the civilized just for being civilized—its own version of Original Sin. It was a heavy weight to bear and I could not shake it, until I wrote that series. The writings of Ken Wilber played a significant role in shaping a set of statements sturdy enough to counter those attitudes.

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.

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Welcome to everyone who just found me through Ran Prieur’s site, as well as my regular readers.

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 just wrote this to an old acquaintance I found on Facebook. It speaks for itself, for the most part.

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.

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Here are a few videos related to the yearlong. I’ve never met any of these yearlong students (I believe they are from the 2008-2009 program), but the motivations, joys, and challenges they describe are consistent with the ones I faced in my time at Teaching Drum. And, it looks like the approaches of Tamarack and other staff at Teaching Drum remain consistent with those that I’ve explored and criticized elsewhere.

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:

I’m a little bit horrified at myself.

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.

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I recently took a business seminar for acupuncturists. It was good, but one thing I’m still reeling from was the presenter’s unabashed enthusiasm for business. No bones about it, he was good at it and wasn’t afraid of expressing contempt for people who had a smaller practice out of choice.

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.

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