I found this neat story, by martial arts practitioner Allen Pittman.

When I was 24 years old, I took off to Taiwan to find a teacher of traditional Chinese Martial Arts i.e. Kung Fu, Tai Chi etc…I had spent 7 years with an American teacher and unsatisfied, felt it best to go to the source and try to find someone who knew the art I was looking for (it is called Ba gua). Moreover, I wanted the adventure and had realized in order to understand an art it required intense training WITH a teacher. So I had in my mind a silken robed, venerable old pale monk with refined manners and many eccentricities. I visualized intense mystical training in an isolated temple being carefully groomed to become the next Jedi!

The first thing that happened was my first choice of teachers died a month before I left the country! Still my friends in Taiwan insisted I come over anyway and look for a teacher after I arrived. So with a return ticket, $150.00 of travelers checks, and a job as an English conversation teacher awaiting, I left.

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I started out trying to dress up this post so that it didn’t look like a random rant, you know, so it’d be more “spiritual.” But I failed. So I’ll just be honest: I’m venting. I found this thread on a discussion forum, the latest in other, similar threads on the same forum over the past several years, and it pissed me off. I get pissed off when people act like they’re taking the high road, but they’re actually doing the opposite.

This forum happens to be the online home of a school for martial arts and healing. I’ll call it Golden Dragon Kung Fu, and I’ll call the head instructor of this international school Master Bob.

It all started when one guy, who I’ll call John Doe, makes a post, which, it is critical to note, is his only post in this thread. Then the fun begins.

This is John Doe’s post, in its entirety:

I have wanted to talk about this for a long time, but have held back because I don`t want to come across as disrespectful to Master Bob. But now I feel I must be honest and speak from my heart.

So please understand my words are meant with genuine respect and good intent.

As Golden Dragon is a compassionate art, meant for the benefit of all beings, why do we, as a school charge so much money for courses, classes and healing?

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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,” a more targeted, rational dissection of the program itself, 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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