medicine – degree or no degree????

don't know that artist - thank u - the piece speaks millions - peace to the taken n the taker

the commodification of everything has had me running like the last man alive in an apocalypse over a dissolving bridge between two towering mountains. i don't know. i've been struggling with deciding as to how to go about advancing my studies on the path of a medicine man in this commodicological frequency we r living in.

in the absence of any direct connection to villages and any living family (r.i.p to my dada and foofaa, both of whom were traditional village medicine men) connected to the traditions of ayurveda/unanani/yoga, i have been defaulting on going through the route most westerners do in getting their traditional on. part of me feels like i'm cheating, like this is privy knowledge and there must be paths to cross before i can arrive at being granted the teachings and training. part of me feels that there has to be more than a money exchange that should give me access to learning and growing on this path. i would rather have gone through the traditional channels, like dude from autobiography of a yogi or bruce lee or other disciples who sought out teachers and teachers who either accepted or didn't their students, and when they accepted determined what that education was going to look like for the individual they were dealing with. teachings that were layered with meaning, that for one student might involve cleaning floors and windows to learn the value of discipline, and tucked in there, hidden techniques that the teacher decided you needed to learn.

part of me, the soul part of me, the ancient part of me is moved by the stories of workers-artists i've met along the way. jewelery makers like the women i met on my way out of the grand canyon and into the navajo reservation. i asked each of them how they learned to bead, make jewelery. every one of them told me the same thing - their mother or aunty or some family member. and when i asked who their teachers learned from, they said some other family member, and they went on in this way till we were centuries back. i was moved by the stories of some indain artisans i met a few years back - the rajastani sculptor, the bengali miniatures illustrator, the gujerati shawl-maker. when i asked each of them how they learned their craft, they told me the same thing – from my father/mother/uncle/aunty and they learned from their father/mother/uncle/aunty. for the shawl-maker the lineage went back atleast 2000 years, “that's as far as i could trace back,” he said. this is the gurukul style of education, a rich ayurvedic business man in kerala told me four years ago, when i first arrived on these shores to seek the sacred teachings. sacred has a hefty pricetag these days. the businessman, who was extremely knowledgeable on ayurveda, explained that even if it's not family or a family lineage, the gurukul style of education is one between a disiciple (student) and guru (teacher) and that both must accept each other and the guru is fully entrusted with the guidance s/he thinks the disciple needs.

so now in my 3^rd month of an ayurveda panchakarma program, i am certain that i'd like to go deeper, much deeper in my training. i appreciate learning/education,  but would rather not reinforce the system where nothing is sacred, where everything is for sale, and where the learners aren't necessarily those who thirst the most for this knowledge and path, but those who could afford it. in this contemporary paradigm the sellers sing the hymns of ancient texts to pander to the spiritual impressions of the buyers, just as levis and diesel jeans play the songs of cold play and common. the marketing is enticing, but something feels off about the shopping. a keralan yogi brother, who i met earlier on the beach today, said that they (the sellers) cheapen ayurveda and yoga by making it so expensive, by making it a business.

so in moving forward, degree or not degree feels like the question of real or not real – which for me comes from the ashes of the concrete-jungle generation of eighties ny that i was hemmed by. “keep it real,” was a common expression in early nineties new york. keeping it real was defined by what wasn't keeping it real. turning to the cops for resolve or the authorities of any sort - from the criminal justice system to the medical system, to the education system. before the deeply philosophical street culture of new york became a packaged hip hop item for sale ('sometimes the rap game reminds me of the crack game” - nas), there was a healthy distrust of the system. there was a sense that placing faith in any portion of this apparatus (that coalesced into a cohesively anti-life masonic system) - with the principle underpinnings malcolm x (r.i.p) referred to as tricknology - was inherently injurious to the soul. selling out was giving into the profit-system, going commercial with what was priceless and in turn not keeping it real.

so how do you keep it real in the babylon system of traiditonal medicine? do you get a degree from this same system, which makes it illegal to practice traditional medicine in the traditional way? do you pay a bunch of money in exchange for an education and reinforce the pillars of the for-profit ideology? is their training even enough? are there other ways to get a traditional medicine education that doesn't require phd programs or wads of money? what do u think young?