NATHAN BATALION ND, MA, CPA
BIOGRAPHY
Nathan Batalion was a competition-winning math prodigy who at the age of 17 suffered a high fever. This affected him similar to a brain stroke or where his left-brain functions temporarily shut down, including his math abilities. He became also aphasic (unable to speak in whole sentences). This was similar to what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke and thus gained an inside view of disorders she routinely studied in the lab. Nathan later recovered but was likewise never the same. This experience inspired his decades of study of what is the essential nature of our inner consciousness. It led to a revolutionary philosophy of life with deep insights and powerful prescriptions. Nathan came to the radical conclusion that our modern root and foundation philosophy of nature, and thus our own nature derivatively, is misguiding; that nature's essential essence is not pointed to by the language of mathematics points unveiling mechanical relationships around an atomic model. He differentiates the surface appearance of mechanicality from an opposite essence core essence of nature composed of life and consciousness.
Nathan's revolutionary view is highly relevant to our modern developments of global chemical pollution, increasing climate changes, the proliferation of atomic weapons, growing pandemics like cancer and diabetes, and the impact of genetic engineering to threaten organics. These all can be seen as derivative developments of a worldview that fails to yield a deeper and better guiding understanding of nature.
Here is Nathan's extraordinary story in his own words:
EARLY UPBRINGING IN A HOLOCAUST-SURVIVING FAMILY
I was born in 1949 after World War II in Germany and into a Jewish Holocaust surviving family. As a result I can still remember the war-torn streets and burnt out buildings that were left after World War II. More importantly, the suffering of my family was profound. My aunt and step-dad both barely survived Auschwitz. My parents and grandparents lived through the hell of Stalin's Russia in Siberia. Most members of my extended family, however, were less fortunate and lost their lives during the war. The knowledge of such experiences was imbedded deep into my soul as a child, and I have continued to carry these feelings inside of me for all of the rest of my life.
One of my mother's suitors was Joel Brandt. He was famous for having sat down with Eichmann to negotiate the lives of one million Hungarian Jews for a certain sum of money. Can you imagine? Many did not believe Joel as he travelled around the world to try to collect that money. The impact of such childhood memories has made me extremely sensitive to global sufferings, both human and non-human - including current health pandemics and the vast "eco-holocausts" we are still undergoing.
AFTER THE WAR
After the war, my parents separated. My father, Samuel Milek Batalion organized and was headmaster of a building trade school for young Zionists wanting to emigrate to Israel. As to my mother, one of the first steps she took to heal her suffering experiences was to surround herself with an abundance of food and gaiety. She opened a Russian restaurant in Frankfurt called the Troika. I remember best the joyous music and dance, learning Russian folk songs and dances myself. This was also during the period of the "cold war." At that time my mother opened letters which arrived at the restaurant that she wasn't supposed to. They described intrigues of Russian spies (who posed as musicians at the restaurant). She turned over these letters over to the CIA, especially about murders they were planning in different parts of Europe. This caused my mother to fear for our lives
Thus at age seven, we emigrated to the US, first living in Newark, New Jersey and with my uncle and aunt who were also Holocaust survivors. There in the US, I felt very different than the average Jewish boy. From all my post-War European experiences, I became interested in the deeper questions of life. No doubt, I had come from a world more torn apart than most of my American Jewish friends could ever imagine.
My mother soon remarried in the US, and to a Holocaust survivor with a great heart and a sweet soul, my step-dad Gabriel Bross. Later I took his last name as my middle name on my citizenship papers. He had come from a very poor village in Poland and where even having one piece of meat a week appeared being "rich." Not surprisingly, he became a butcher in the US, also surrounding himself - like my mother - with an abundance of food. Later my parents opened a grocery store, and subsequently other businesses such as a delicatessen, beach stand, liquor store and later a health food store. Being surrounded by nourishment of all kinds, no doubt, made them again feel "rich," fulfilled, or feeling well taken care of in the universe.
AFTER-EFFECTS OF THE "SAD" DIET
For me, as a child, this also meant that foodwise I could have whatever I wanted, and at any time. This included candies, soft drinks, ice cream, canned goods, you name it. Our grocery store was in an Afro-American or ethnic ghetto neighborhood. We offered certain luscious ethnic foods like fat-back, chitterlings, hog moss, and pig's feet - all extremely fatty. During this great time of my life, I followed what you might call the "you see it" diet or ate whatever I wanted of the Standard American Diet ("SAD") I ate whatever our cutlure attracted me towards - like things with colorful of wrappings and coating - M&Ms and gummies - not aware that they were full of chemical ingredients.
Soon my immune system began to suffer from the junk food. As a young teenager, I got hepatitis and was hospitalized for a week. Later at age 17, I also had a high fever that made me quite ill. It caused me to drop out of school for years. The latter experience, combined with my feelings as a child, led me to become an intense truth-seeker. After 40 years of inner explorations, there then evolved a philosophy of life and nature I call raw-wisdom which has a radical perspective on our world.
TEENAGE YEARS AS A MATH PRODIGY
Before all this happened, my schooling had been uneventful. In Newark I attended an orthodox Jewish private school, learning Hebrew and Jewish liturgy in the morning, and English in the afternoon. Thus I kidded with friends that English was my "third language." When we moved to the suburbs (Springfield, NJ) a highlights of my life included having a science teacher who had designed rocket fuel for Cape Canaveral plus having met Martin Luther King (who gave a sermon at a synagogue across from my junior high school). However, my academic performance up until then seemed routine.
Then at age of 12, bored one summer, I signed up for a math course on Channel 13, the only educational channel available in those days. Somehow this course fascinated me when the discussion was about the intricacies of differential and integral calculus. There was a catch. To follow these TV lectures I had to pick up more elementary books from the library, such as on Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry, Trigonometry, etc. I gravitated toward the older math texts which (much like old carpentry books) were more interesting to me. Then by the end of the summer, and before entering high school, I passed a proctored final exam in differential and integral calculus. This was given inder the auspices of this TV course at Fairleigh Dickenson University.
When entering high school, they didn't know exactly what to do with me. It wasn't until 1971 that John Hopkins University first started a program to help prodigies - see Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) program. John Hopkins has since been tracking and helping approximately 200 math prodigies each year in the US . This equates to about 5,000 prodiges over a 25 year period among the one-in-a-million who have such skills. At the same time, NJ state requirements mandated then that I still take some basic math courses. I adamantly refused to take the basic geometry course, and God knows but they obliged me. The allowed we a weeks time to study their required geometry book, memorizing its propositions/theorems, and then passing their final exam. I was, however, forced to take Algebra I in my first high school year. Bored out of my mind, this inspired my philosophical pondering over the meaning and role of the simplest of math symbols.
What does the number "1" really mean and point to? What value and significance do symbols like + and - have, or the equal sign? I further became interested in a larger philosophy of knowledge and I recall how a high school English teacher being impressed by facility with Renaissance philosophy and she asked to teach one of her English classes on this subject.
Then in 1964, I won the Union County regional math competition, and by a wide margin. Later in my junior year I wrote a critical paper on Godel's Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Naturalis and Related Systems. Already early on I sensed something deep was missing in the completeness of our extraordinarilly math-based ideology of nature. I call it an ideology, a stuck cultural fixation rather than an objective view. But what was wrong with that math-bound vision? Was Godel onto something rather huge?
Also around this time, I scored two perfect 800's on math college entrance exams, and the highest score in physics for my and surrounding high schools. Then at age 16, I couldn't stand anymore what my high school had to offer, so I matriculated at New York University's Washington Square College in their early admissions program. This was due also to my interested in NYU's famed Courant Institute of Mathematics.
COLLEGE YEARS
The college years were an incredible time for me, especially living in Greenwich Village during the 1960's. But at the beginning of my academic career, I was oblivious to the surrounding cultural turmoil and rather tuned into again the disciplines of mathematics, physics, logic, the philosophy of knowledge, or just about everything we might call the result of a "left-brain dominant" view.
Economics was also among my interests and partly because of my mother's influence. Having survived Stalin's Siberia (where the "roads were paved with blood" as she put it) my mom was an enthusiastic follower of Ayn Rand, a brilliant writer who was also a Stalin-survivor. She was thus an avid anti-communist and passionate laissez-faire capitalism proponent. So by age 16 I met Ayn Rand and her key followers, including Alan Greenspan, who at that time was virtually unknown except in Ayn Rand circles. I also sat in on a course taught by the famous Ludwig von Mises, an economist idolized by this clique. Lastly, linguistics was a major college interest, and I studied several ancient languages, most notably Chinese, and especially during a summer at the University of Hawaii. Hawaii then was unbelievably pristine and magnificient, and this was one of the greatest summers of my life (except for a bicycle accident that broke a front tooth).
Overall I was flying high then, at least intellectually.
LEFT-BRAIN SHUT DOWN
Then one auspicious day everything in my life changed.
We had moved to Hillsdale, NJ by then and I happened to be home from school when I suddenly got a high fever. I imagine it must have been 106 degrees or more because there was subsequent nerve damage akin to a stroke. For the next morning I woke up and was definitely not myself. My mind was racing out of control, and I couldn't catch words swirling through my brain cells at top speeds. I could barely speak in whole sentences, a condition known as aphasia. I don't think I had a stroke, but rather damage to the corpus collasum that connects the two sides of the brain.
Needless to say this was traumatic. I literally cried for a week, thinking my life was coming to an end or maybe I should better commit suicide. I was cut off from the high levels of math, logical and linguistics skills that had been integral to my ego sense of self. I was now lost trying to deal with who I was or what to do with my life, especially since there seemed no effective medical help.
Curiously if one multiplies the chances of being a math prodigy (one in a million) times the chances of being aphasic (1/3 of 1% of a given population) and then times the chances of recovering (25-40%), the final result indicates a kind of one-in-a-billion or unique predicament. Also who was I to turn to for advise who might have been in my shoes? And thus I started a journey of exploring my own inner world. What I learned was profound. It led me to a revolutionary philosophy, one that actually challenges Newton's kernel vision of a mechanical, clock-like and math-based cosmos. This is an understanding that has guided humanity for the past 400 years. What the philosophy of raw-wisdom implies is that there is a different life-centered understanding possible, and wherein the classical math-centered view fundamentally misunderstands our world and misleads us to effect many of the major environmental, social and health crises we now experience in our times.
But first I struggled quite immensely in the dark, and for years, and to just get back to my basic faculties working. I tried turning for help to others, but with little avail. My father in Germany, estranged from my mother, blamed all my inner troubles on psychological factors having to do with my mother causing me some emotional harm. Freudian psychology was popular in the 1960's. My step-dad was comforting but not guiding to a solution. My mother desperately led me to several physicians, but the drugs they administered were very toxic and made things worse. Since she could see that clearly, she stopped taking me to those doctors. This was my own first taste of a medical system that can sometimes do more harm than good. So all this left me with a serious sense of abandonment, especially helpless to verbally express and defend myself. This was quite a frightening experience at the age of 17, and caused me to yearn for a deeper inner, wordless understanding of myself, my consciousness and the world around me as one. I had to solve a problem far greater than any mathematical riddle I had ever encountered, and how to bring my life back on course and into balance.
ON A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
What I decided was to study things then quite out of the box. My mother took me to Israel to attend my sister's wedding, and on the way back, through London, I let a chartered plane take off for the US without me. I thought I might go from England to India on a spiritual journey. But after about two weeks, I relented, returning to America and re-matriculating at NYU. There I took a job as an errand boy for the NYU School of Continuing Education, and which required no mental skills, plus this helped me pay for everyday expenses. And now the courses I was taking were no longer on topics of mathematics, physics, or linguistics. The subjects changed to things far more "right-brain fulfilling," such as art, dance, and poetry. I also remember a religion course taught by a Dr. Perry, where the final exam was a poetic essay that didn't need to make logical sense. With some ingenuity, I got by. Living amid the free-spirited and inspired culture of Greenwich village helped as long as I avoided the drugs. Overall, I thought to myself, if my parents had survived the Holocaust, I could survive this no matter how difficult. I would do what it takes.
For numerous reasons, however, I found my continuing stay at NYU and in New York City almost impossible to bear. I thus dropped out and moved to an intentional community in the more rural reaches of Warwick, New York. There I had far better support for my physical and emotional survival. The community was (and to this day remains) called The Barn and was led by a Willem Nyland who was a disciple of the Russian philosopher Gurdjieff.
Two things were most important in this move. First I didn't have to tax my mind and could be employed doing manual labor, from picking fruit in orchards, to helping with simple chores in a machine shop, to working on construction sites. These skills also stayed with me for the rest of my life and as a balancing and grounding influence. Secondly, the group followed a spiritual path that gave me great insights, and exactly what I needed most to extricate myself. They chiefly taught a method of self-observation or to learn about myself as if from a distance and with enhanced objectivity.
I thus had time to heal my mind, though I finally left the community when I was able and ready. Four years later, in 1971, I returned to finish a few courses at NYU as needed to graduate and with a BA degree in Religion - not mathematics! While my mind healed enough to function minimally, almost normally it appeared sometimes to others, my body nevertheless was stressed. On the construction sites in Warwick, I had often been drinking umpteen cups of coffee with white sugar and processed cream, and otherwise eating poorly. I was still following the "you see it diet." In the intentional community there was relatively little health guidance, as the philosophy of Gurdjieff showed relatively scant integration of diet and spiritual disciplines.
And so I became interested on my own path to the healing arts, including via matriculating at Seton Hall University to work on a Masters degree in Asian Studies, and writing a thesis focused on the early history of Chinese medicine. This was also derivative of my fascination with the Chinese philosophy of a universe composed of yin and yang forces, as an alternative to the western view that I knew already then, and for some time, made no real sense to me.
In between, my dad in Germany had access to tax credits for sending a child to college. He also expressed pity that I had little or no professional skills, or make a living and support a family so he offered to send me to either medical or business school. I had a taste of what modern medicine was all about, and thus I opted for business school with such a choice. This led me to get an MBA in accounting from NYU's Graduate School of Business.
FAMILY & PROFESSIONAL LIFE - STRETCHED IN TWO DIRECTIONS
I then got married to a former classmate at NYU, and needed to actually make a living, especially with a child on the way in 1977. This led me to work in the accounting field and fro a small regional firm. In my teenage years I thought accounting and law were two of the most boring of all subjects in the world! Still I was no longer a math prodigy, and this was a practical, relatively easy skill to acquire, and so it made sense. Paradoxically given my background and deep spiritual inclinations, I became a very practical CPA and have been ever since. This helped me support my family, and my two beautiful children. My daughter Shira is now a cantor and religious educator and my son Aaron is a successful entrepreneur (one of the founders of www.livingsocial.com)
In my professional career, I first worked again for a regional CPA firm and then very soon thereafter set up a practice. Over the years, tax shelters became popular and this led me to get a securities license. Ultimately this redirected me to work on Wall Street, twice as head of securities firms with over a hundred employees and engaged in investment banking. On the one hand, this was just another way for me to make a living - even if it was not what my heart and soul really wanted to do. Still I was grateful to be there to, on the other hand, become an observer, learning about life in the "belly of the Behemoth" - on Wall Street which really reflects a major part of the soul of western civilization. I soon tried to drop out of that kind of lifestyle and thus went for two years' training at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, and for a degree in Oriental medicine or as an OMD/acupuncturist. During that whole period of my life, I also became a vegetarian (1981) and then ran several NYC marathons with the Gary Null Natural Living and Running Club and worked helping Gary Null on his radio show and assisted other health activists. I organized a hunger organization called Food & Water which later changed to become the leading organization fighting food irradiation. In NYC, I ran a "nature of consciousness" study group sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. At Pacific, I wanted to see how effectively the ying/yang philosophy of nature's consciousness worked in the healing arts. Ultimately I was disappointed as my expectations were higher. A turning point was when I was working in an acupuncture clinic and they forbade me from giving nutritional advice to patients because their insurance didn't cover the same I had studied nutrition with great teachers like Dr. Bernard Jensen and this injunction didn't quite sit well with me. That and unrelated financial pressures made me decide, months short of qualifying for a license, to drop out, or not to become an acupuncturist as a life-long profession. I went back to help rescue my partners and their handling of the Wall Street brokerage, if just briefly. During that time, and as soon as we got some money out of our venture, I helped envision, fund and organize the Gerson Wellness Center at Sedona, combining my business skills with my passion for holistic healing and the revolutionary therapy of late Dr. Max Gerson. This clinic only existed for a year but it has inspired other centers since. At the clinic, we reversed the cancer of many patients with natural therapies, including the Stage IV or metastatic melanoma of a chiropractor from Oneonta.
Then with seeing more of Wall Street's corruptions, I decided to pack up. I sold my house in Nyack, and moved to live in Oneonta, N.Y., attracted to move there by a girl friend. I have since loved living in this small town, despite the cold winter weather, but where there is a much cleaner environment and ample opportunity to build community. The first year in Oneonta, I lived on funds from selling my home, and had time to write 50 Harmful Effects of Genetically Modified Foods plus engage in health activism especially to fight genetic engineering. However, as funds ran out, I took a job as an assistant professor of accounting at Hartwick College, again to practically get by. The job was demanding and this left me no free time for what I really loved. I didn't even have time for finding a publisher for my book on genetically modified foods. It was thus posted for free on a website in 2000. In the years that followed I had largely done nothing to promote it. Then to my surprise, I found it ranking high on Google, as it was being linked to by countless sites all over the Web.
PLANNING FOR LIFE CHANGES
During my years of living in Oneonta, I also realized I had very little retirement savings, so I began buying some nearby homes to renovate, thus applying and enjoying the use of my construction skills from living at the Barn, my art skills that I had learned in college, and my knowledge of stained glass imparted by my uncle, Ignaz Fabiarz with whom I was apprenticed for six months. See www.viewallrentals.com for pictures of these renovations. Overall it has been very gratifying to create such beautiful living spaces, mostly for students, and in Oneonta and surrounding areas. This led to managing a full-time construction crew, the maintenance of many houses, plus my accounting practice. In short, this led to a very busy life. In my mind I still really wanted to get back to holistic pursuits and on a full-time basis, and despite having turned away from the acupuncture career.
RETURNING TO HOLISTIC PURSUITS
So in 2004 I took additional courses sponsored by the American Naturopathic Certification Board, got credit for the work at Pacific, and earned a naturopathic certification and licensing. Additionally I received a certification at the Ann Wigmore Institute in living foods. Subsequently I taught the great findings of Ann Wigmore, and Victoras Kulvinskas and others in a five month course in healing modalities in Oneonta. A teacher teaches what he needs to know the most, so I also began to myself transition to a raw vegan diet. This was for ecological as well as health reasons, and to in my senior years avoid the major diseases of our times (cardiovascular, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, Alzheimer's and digestive ailments). It was the fortunate reading of the China Study that finally helped me make the transition. This was one of several major studies that confirms and corroborates such findings - and I have posted many of these research studies on this site. Then a most important turning point was my life partnership with Melinda Elliott. This was begun in 2005 when she moved up to live with me from her home in Virginia. We are committed to each other and to helping others, and our whole planet make a healing shift. In the past two years we've also been transitioning to a highest quality diet, not merely organic, but again whole, raw and vegan to further empower our work. What I was gradually discovering, the hard way, was that while I avoided the major diseases of civilization, I still had lingering inflammations, serious stiffening of the back, loss of energy, fungus infections, skin outbreaks, and this and that - so that further adjustments needed to be made. The aging process was still sneaking up on me, until we decided to make these important and countercultural shifts.
And with this in mind, we have travelled to Sedona, to the Raw Spirit Festival to meet thousands of like-minded people and especially Dr. Gabriel Cousens at his Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center. After that trip, we decided to become a branch of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center. Both these visits inspired us to move further along our respective paths. Also I have recently attended two international symposiums on the science of consciousness, one sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies in Arizona and the other by Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Taiwan to present my unique views - making many networking contacts. See CV link below for more details.
CURRENT PROJECTS
The above has been a prelude to completing my PhD at Binghamton University and with a thesis entitled Raw Wisdom: Moving from a Death-Centered to a Life-Centered Vision of Nature. A gist of the first half is posted. We are also working on building an online community via this Raw-Wisdom website, sponsoring events, and creating a local raw-wisdom community. Lastly, and from time to time we offer naturopathic counselling and educational services, working in conjunction with a local healing center - the Waltja Center in Troy, NY.
LOOKING FORWARD
We invite you all to kindly support our life-long and passionate effort, especially to make a global mind change that will turnaround some of the key crises of our times. This concludes my life story and I look forward to hearing also from others - as to your inspiring stories, experience, and teachings.
Yours in leading the world toward raw-wisdom. Nathan Batalion ND
Nathan's Curriculum Vitae (CV): click HERE
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