My year in the woods has been a powerful influence on my path of personal growth. As is always necessary for such a rich experience, though, it has been absolutely necessary for me to sift through that experience and discover what it is that remains useful, and what hasn’t, as I change and my life circumstances change.
The truth is that I have deviated significantly from the path of the primitivist, and for a long time I felt very confused about it. It’s been a long, hard road, with a lot of deep soul-searching, to come to a place of acceptance of who I am: a civilized person.
My friend and fellow yearlong member wrote an article called The Journey from Civilized to Primitive Living. He, and many other people associated with Teaching Drum, have continued to develop in their practice of and dedication to primitivism and primitive skills, while I have gone in the opposite direction.
I feel that I’ve done the right thing for me. These posts trace my path to this conclusion.
Living in the World
This is my initial expression of confusion, my first attempt to clarify my basic stance toward primitivism, to begin to understand how I was different — and to accept those differences, even if they lost me some friends. It sets sort of a practical baseline for my trajectory away from primitivism, and served as prologue for the following series.
- Living in the World, Part 1
- Living in the World, Part 2: Seeking the “Primitive”
- Living in the World, Part 3: Facing the Future
Evolution of Consciousness
This was a more in-depth examination of some of the underlying assumptions of primitivism and the anti-civilization crowd, and a development of my own distinct perspective, based on some very different sources than that usually seen in or accepted by primitivist circles.
- Evolution of Consciousness, Part 1: The Point of Civilization
- Evolution of Consciousness, Part 2: The Value of Prepersonal Consciousness
- Evolution of Consciousness, Part 3: Fall From Grace
- Evolution of Consciousness, Part 4: Trans-Tribalism
- Evolution of Consciousness, Part 5: Rudolf Steiner’s Perspective
- Evolution of Consciousness, Part 6: The End of the Beginning
- Evolution of Consciousness: The End
[...] confusion and exploration for me, and was the reason why I’ve since spent so much energy exploring and deconstructing my relationship with primitivism. Primitivism provided a useful story for me, and still does to some degree, but it failed at giving [...]
[...] 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 [...]