It is really difficult to explain in any simple way, or brief, the philosophy on which Tim Starbuck grew and worked. It was unusual, because it was, in fact, something we were experimenting with, the trial of some serious hypotheses.

Tim’s philosophy asked for a complete commitment to growth, not in the interests of personal appeal or success, but in the interests of service. Convinced that such growth could not be achieved through a solo enterprise, it also asked for deep commitment to partners in the effort. Of the hypotheses he had committed himself to try with his own life, none was more fundamental than the hypothesis that mind, body and spirit are, in this life, no way separate, that the separation of them into competing interests in us is an error which, for the sake of the health of both the individual and the society, we must now correct. Tim was peculiarly capable of making these commitments without reservation. The remarkable expansion of his skills into so many fields, including the chiropractic, only deepened his convictions and his commitment to them.

I suppose the crux of the difficulty in explaining Tim’s growth as a person and his effectiveness as a chiropractor lies in the fact that the method—and it was very deliberate—just flies in the face of common deeply held assumptions. Tim did not assume that we grow as persons or that we gain skills with greatest efficiency, or even authentic individuality, through the heightened definition or delineation of one’s self as an individual. The mind that thinks and the voice that speaks of “I, me and mine,” grew ever gentler, softer, less insistent in him, not through repression, but through the substitution of other intents and goals. Such substitution, of course, does not occur quickly or automatically upon our perception of and inspiration by them, but through many years of exercise, through countless difficult choices and then the application of one’s total being, including the muscles, in the execution of those choices. Hence the importance of such mundane tasks as the Christmas tree work, and even more the cooperative decisions and labor required by the Locust Hill project.

Through years of what would probably, if one is to speak with accuracy, have to be called emotional training, alongside the also important but more conventional training of the specific skills, Tim, building on native goodwill and a strong heart, educated (educed) another mind, another voice, latent in some degree in us all, but much broader, much richer, much more fulfilling than what we typically attend to in ourselves.

Interestingly, Tim spoke very little in any situation. But almost everyone who knew, and many who only met him, felt a strong presence there. His patients got it more directly, it seems, through the hands. Did he, through his touch and attention, communicate a deep infusion of whatever degree he had won of human wholeness, native to us all but submerged beneath our ego-centric preoccupations and pursuits, our misinterpreted individualism--a constant source of dis-ease in our lives and societies?

Of course, we can’t be sure; but we do think it may be so.

Waren Stetzel, May 4, 1999