The Great Mystery shimmers at the borders of my awareness.

I find that the consciousness associated with dealing with the tasks of normal, everyday life occupies a very narrow range of vibration, like just a tiny, 2 MHz turn of the dial on an FM radio tuner. And it’s pretty full of static, at that. There are lots of different things coming in all the time, songs cut in and out, news cuts in and out, sometimes it comes in clear and other times there’s nothing but static.

On those rare occasions when I have a more extended period of time to set aside my daily worries, I can glimpse what’s beyond that narrow band of consciousness. But a number of problems crop up. First of all, it sometimes seems threatening to move away from the familiar frequency I’m tuned into, because all of my problems are waiting to be solved there. And second, actually tuning into a richer state of consciousness is like tuning in to frequency that’s actually clear and loud. If I allowed myself to go there, it could be powerful.

I can begin to glimpse what it means to go into mystical ecstasy. It’s a bit frightening.

So those are the twin restrictions that I face: One is a reluctance to move away from, the other a reluctance to move toward.

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What I’ve been poetically describing as the Great Mystery is described in some Hermetic circles as essential meaning. The experience of the Great Mystery is contingent upon one’s ability to perceive it, which in turn is dependent on one’s focus and clarity. Consider a telescope: A number of factors must be just right in order for it to observe, say, the Pleiades. It must be solidly grounded and aimed correctly. All of the optics and lenses in it must be correctly manufactured, clean, and positioned correctly. There must be no obstructions between the telescope and the sky. And the observer must know what he is doing.

In Hermetic terms, training on all levels must be undertaken in order to hone the kind of perceptual ability that leads to the experience of essential meaning. The difference, of course, is that the instrument is the Self; and in order for the Self to be clear and focused, many things must be developed: Willpower, discipline, concentration, emotional equilibrium, physical health, among others, are the prerequisites.

I think that my experiences of the Great Mystery and these vibrations are what might be termed indirect perception of essential meaning. I catch glimpses, but to me it is like listening to people speaking in a foreign language, through a wall. I can hear their tone of voice, and get impressions of what’s going on that way, but many specifics are lost.

Direct perception of essential meaning is a different beast.

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An e-mail from someone visiting family in Pakistan. Via reddit:

My mom, brothers and sister in law and I were shopping when I received a text from my father asking us to come to the hotel because he feared for our safety since Benazir Bhutto had been shot. I ran inside the store to tell my mother this, and as we were running out of building filled with small shops, all I saw was mass amounts of dust in the air and people running all over the place panicked. All I heard was people yelling and telling us not to go outside because people might be shooting in the streets and told us to just keep going upstairs. We all started running up the stairs and stopped on the second floor and I noticed that my mother was panicking and crying. I realized that my legs and hands were shaking and I felt a sense of helplessness that I can’t even explain to you at this moment. I only kept thinking of the fires I had seen being set to markets in the past when there have been riots in the city and my only thought was that if this happened to this building, how were we going to escape.

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My recent experience of “rough vibrations” has led me to a further refinement of the language I use to frame my experience. The Great Mystery is a more all-encompassing term, but in many cases the experience is, more accurately, one of vibrations.

But to introduce this topic, I decided that instead of trying to come up with an entirely new description, I’ll just present an article that someone else has written (he posted it to the Teaching Drum discussion forum). It’s very interesting; clearly he’s gone farther down this path than I have at this stage, but the basic experience I’ve been having fits with his descriptions.

The author calls them ripples.

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I’m sitting at an airport gate with Abigail, waiting to board my flight home. An older couple sits in the seats next to us. They are maybe in their late forties or early fifties, and seem like nice people. Nothing remarkable. She’s blond, he’s grey and grizzled, and they seem companionable with each other. Like a pair of comfortable shoes broken in.

Then it’s time for us to board. The two of them are each talking on cell phones to different people; they make no move to get up. Obviously they’re not on our flight.

Abigail and I gather our things, get up, start walking. I lag a little bit behind for some reason. After ten or fifteen steps, I hear a shriek and the man’s voice, “I’ll call you back!” as the woman runs by me like a madwoman. The man, having abruptly ended his own phone conversation, chases her down, grabs her, stops her. They’re standing three feet away. She’s still on her cell. She’s shaking and crying and having a complete nervous breakdown. The man frantically asks what’s wrong, and through her completely overwhelming grief I hear her wail half-incoherently:

“My kid was killed!”

I think I’m the only passerby close enough to be able to make out the words.

The man cries, “What?! Who?!”

She says a name: “Sarah.” And dissolves, as he helps her, utterly broken, back to their seats.

I have only a few minutes to weep for them before I have to board my plane back home.

“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

– The Kybalion

I’m in the Los Angeles area visiting family for the holidays. Being here again is intense. In a way, all the sensitivity that I’m developing really works against me here; in another way, it shows me more directly and viscerally the violence that the senses are dealt.

I notice that every single square foot in this city is controlled and manmade. Roads, sidewalks, signs, buildings. The patches of green here and there are strictly circumscribed, trimmed, mowed.

I go to the nearby mall, and it’s the holidays, which means that it’s a hell of a time to park. I circle for twenty minutes in this huge parking lot before snagging a spot. Then I go inside, and the lights and sounds and people and everything are all bright and flashy and plastic.

And I think about how the way of nature is to blend and harmonize. And I think how the way of modern society is to cry out for attention: Advertising, fashion, cars, people. But the net effect of so many voices yelling so loud is to numb.

I feel everything as vibration and energy, and around here even the bushes, trimmed into profanely round shapes, vibrate with a pseudo-artificial buzz. The colors and sounds and conversations and machines all jostle and scream with the discord of a heap of humanity not knowing its purpose or place in the scheme of things, having forgotten about the rhythm and ritual of sacred life, and aligning instead with the vastly entertaining and ultimately illusory artifacts of the material world.

I feel the vibrations screeching like a cat being dragged across a blackboard.

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This is strange.

It’s been four or five years since I’ve even attempted to make a fire by friction, let alone do anything else primitive skills related. Something’s shifted though. Maybe it has something to do with having written that lengthy critique of Teaching Drum. I think writing that essay helped me to differentiate the good from the bad, and therefore gave me a little more space to start remembering that there was a lot of good.

Last night I went to an end-of-school-year party, and people were trying to start a fire. I couldn’t believe how ineptly it was put together. You can’t just toss logs and sticks in a pit, light a few pieces of crumpled-up newspaper, and expect it to burst into flames. So I patiently sorted it all out and fed the fire gradually, properly, and fended off attempts to add lighter fluid. Slowly but surely, I helped the fire grow.

And somehow, feeding the fire fed my soul as well. It woke up a wild part of me that remembered what fire means to a man living in the woods, depending on ishkode (the Ojibwe word for “fire”) for heat, and light, and cooking, as well as for holding the center of the community.

Last night I felt shades of that: Lots of food, lots of conversation, lots of laughter with friends and acquaintances I’ve come to care about in my two years here in Florida, all while relaxing around a fire in a yard. It reminded me of the heart-filled talking circles and feasts and casual get-togethers around campfires at Nishnajida. It reminded me of being at home in the woods.

That’s a very different tone than I described in my critique. It’s a different tone than I tend to remember much of the time about primitive living.

Today my body has continued to hum with that memory. So I dug out my old bow drill kit, went out to the backyard, and cranked on it for awhile. I remembered a lot that I had forgotten that I knew, little things about posture, arm angles, notching the fireboard correctly, etc. It’s been awhile, but if you make fire primitively several times a week for a whole year, and don’t get to have a fire otherwise (i.e. no lighters or matches), then you sure learn. And sure enough, my body remembers.

It took me about four or five tries. But today I gave birth to my first primitive fire in some years. It felt real. It felt holy.

O, Ishkode.

There’s no place quite like the Teaching Drum Outdoor School.

For nearly ten years now, under the guidance of Tamarack Song, the school has offered its unique Wilderness Guide Program, a program unlike any other that I’m aware of, one that takes people from a life in civilization and casts them into the woods for one year, to live and learn from that best of teachers: Experience. That includes the experience of nature itself, the experience of one’s own raw struggles, and the experience of living intimately with a small community.

There are a few other primitive skills opportunities out there that are in the same general field, all with different focuses. I don’t have much experience or contact with any of these others, but my sense is that, still, Teaching Drum is rather unique in that it focuses not only on skills or philosophy, but on building culture and relationship skills. In essence, it is, or attempts to be, more of a “complete” experience, aiming to align the student, mind and body and soul, to the Old Way.

When I took it in 2001-2002 (anyone who’s unfamiliar with my story can read a summary here), it was in its third year, and we were, at eleven people, by far the largest group to have committed to the yearlong. Since then, many students have come and gone, and many have gotten a lot of growth from the program.

Elsewhere on this blog I’ve described extensively many of the struggles I had at Teaching Drum, and many I continued to have after leaving. What I have largely left untouched is the fact that I was hardly alone in the types of things I was feeling. I haven’t returned to visit since 2003, but I’ve continued to have periodic contact with people associated with the school, and in doing so I’ve noticed that, year after year, for most people there have been similar issues, which leads me to believe that the problem is not individual (or rather, not only individual), but systemic. Among all of the positives that result from taking the yearlong, I also observe that many people emerge feeling exhausted, guilty, conflicted, and with an increased addiction to food and various other substances. Many don’t make it at all, and drop out after a week, a month, or six months.

In this article, I’d like to offer what is hopefully a constructive critique of some of the causes of these problems. Although the experience I had in the yearlong was enriching, what I have come to realize is that it also carried danger, and these dangers have manifested as physical, emotional, and mental health problems among myself and other students.

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Recently I read something that resonated with me, in a weird and oblique way. This is an excerpt from a blog post by a guy with a lot of real-life experience with violence.

One of the most basic problems is in the realm of how martial artists are taught to move. They are taught to move right. They are taught to strike or throw or lock correctly. This works, in a controlled environment.

It’s the same with basketball players: Throwing free throws, they can do it with precision and consistency that any sensei would applaud … but they can’t deliver that kind of precision in a free-for-all. At some point each player has to transition from moving right to moving well, just getting the ball through the hoop from an unstable platform against resistance.

Most martial artists take it to exactly this level with sparring and think it is enough. They forget (or don’t know) that all live training has built-in flaws for safety. At the best, the flaws become habits that can get you killed … at the worst, they become “the right way” to do the technique. The part about safety flaws is an aside. The meat is this:

Games are simple. Life and violence are not. If you take the basketball player who can really move well but suddenly the basket is defended by a rugby, soccer or lacrosse team, using their tactics, his moving well has to come to an entirely new level. When he is not allowed to know what kind of team he will be playing against in advance, that’s another level. And in real life, sometimes putting the ball through the hoop isn’t the way to score. Sometimes it is and you don’t know until you are there.

So most martial artists learn a collection of very specific ways to move. It’s like having a toolbox filled with pre-cut jigsaw puzzle pieces and jumping into a jigsaw puzzle and hoping to find a gap that happens to fit a piece you have. It works sometimes, but people in real life actually say, “He attacked me wrong.”

What the practitioner needs to do is to soak all of his puzzle pieces and mash it into a sort of paper mache that you can cram into any hole you can find. It won’t look pretty …

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As my education progresses, Oriental medicine continues to reveal to me more and more methods and perspectives of extraordinary perception into a person’s being. I’ve been learning a detailed system of pulse diagnosis and asking diagnosis in school; I just came back from an extracurricular training in Japanese meridian therapy that involves significantly more emphasis on sensation of qi (or ki, as it’s called in Japanese), and various other methods of diagnosis. The totality of it is staggering to me.

So, to help organize it in my own mind, I’ve decided to present a brief little introduction to Oriental diagnostic methods, so far as I’ve experienced them in my brief sojourn into the medicine.

Oriental medicine rests on what is called the Four Examinations, or the Four Pillars of Diagnosis. They are:

1. Looking
2. Listening/Smelling
3. Palpation
4. Asking

However, it gets much more in depth than this! There are many, many systems and microsystems that can be examined and plundered for information, and all of them rest on the assumption that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. That is, that a small area, like the ear or the pulse, is a holographic representation of the larger whole of the human body. This means that nearly any part of the body can be an image of the entire body. The methods that I list here are only a few of the major ones.

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