Evolution of Consciousness: The End
February 26, 2010 — Favorite Posts, Living in the World, Magic & Spirituality

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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Posted at 1:01 am —

 

An Offer for Those in Need
February 25, 2010 — News & Updates, Health, The Path of Oriental Medicine

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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Posted at 7:14 pm —

 

“Fag”
February 23, 2010 — Stories, Experiences, & Memories

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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Posted at 9:00 pm —

 

Teaching Drum on TV
February 20, 2010 — A Year in the Woods, Reflections

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:




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Posted at 9:55 pm —

 

A Quiet Invasion of Greed and Judgment
February 19, 2010 — Magic & Spirituality, Living in the World, The Business of Living

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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Posted at 11:11 pm —

 

In Business to Fail
February 16, 2010 — Magic & Spirituality, Living in the World, The Business of Living, Health, The Path of Oriental Medicine

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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Posted at 12:07 am —

 

What Makes Life Meaningful?
February 11, 2010 — Living in the World, Magic & Spirituality

I’ve gotten to thinking lately about what makes life meaningful. From the way many people talk, it’s the things you do in your days, the activities you’re engaged in and the events that happen to you. When you catch up with somebody you haven’t seen in awhile, what does the conversation revolve around? “Well, I’ve been working, and I went to a wedding, and my parents came to visit, and other than that not much is going on.”

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.

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Posted at 11:46 pm —

 

Toward a Postmodern Folk Magic
February 10, 2010 — Living in the World, Magic & Spirituality

The title of this post is kind of an oxymoron. Folk magic, or any folk tradition, is by definition traditional, part of a whole lineage. Postmodernism tears things to little pieces. This is the conundrum I find myself in.

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.

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Posted at 12:43 am —

 

Crazy Beliefs and Why I Believe Them
February 7, 2010 — Magic & Spirituality, Health, Qi

It’s always interesting to me when people are selective in the kind of “crazy” they are. And I include myself in that, of course. For instance, I’ll put more credence in some 9/11 conspiracy theories, but none in moon landing hoax theories. Or, I’ll be willing to entertain the idea that Hitler didn’t die according to the official histories, but be pretty skeptical about the theory that the whole Holocaust was a hoax. All of these are things that would be pretty universally derided in the mainstream, but I pick and choose.

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.

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Posted at 1:55 pm —

 

 

 

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