BYRON UTAH JORDAN, a Cambridge-based holistic healer with a name as brazen as his attitude, doesn’t live in the same world as most Americans. According to Jordan, the world that modern Americans inhabit is "upside down" — an inverted order where the "mind-controlled masses" revere Britney Spears instead of Mother Teresa, where people claiming to be virgins dress like trollops. In Jordan’s world, people looking for "sexual battle" are unambiguous: they slap on war paint.

To Jordan, everything is sacred: the fleas, the bees, the seas. The wind is alive too, and he chats with it. He also talks to trees. He says they speak back. Plants are much more intelligent than humans are, he reasons, since we go to herbs for healing. And as humans, we’re stupid to think we’re superior: everything on earth is equal, from the mosquito to the bear.

As a teacher and practitioner of "earth medicine" — an abstruse strain of alternative medicine Jordan learned from two Cherokee healers named Two Trees and Sun Bear — the 50-year-old Southerner bases many of his ideas on the ways of bears. It says so in the first sentence of Earth Medicine: The Way of the Bear, a booklet he wrote that introduces the foundation of earth medicine (available by e-mailing Jordan through his Web site, http://home.attbi.com/~earthmedicine): "I walk an ancient path, following the footsteps of ancestors who followed the tracks of bears and learned from these sacred animals their healing knowledge. Even Hippocrates wrote of studying bears and learning medicine from them." From studying bears, Jordan says, the ancestors of his Cherokee mentors discovered "the truth": i.e., the cure is where you stand.

From where you stand, Jordan asserts, you can remedy everything from malignant lumps and crippling arthritis to premenstrual syndrome and attention-deficit disorder. Right under your feet are the restorative tools for easing headaches, relieving nausea, controlling diarrhea, even shriveling a tumor. In Jordan’s world, there is no need for Pepto-Bismol, Midol, Maalox, health insurance, or bottled milk. And chemo is not therapy. Because in Jordan’s world, healing begins and ends with the earth.

I WAS LIKE everybody else," Jordan recalls. "On the treadmill, working full-time jobs, wanting to be famous for my genetic creation. It was some sick stuff I was headed for."

A one-time merchant seaman, Jordan was described to me as "a big guy." Wearing a brown button-down and jeans, he’s average size, a little under six feet tall — definitely not strapping. Yet the longer he talks, the easier it is to see how someone would picture him large: like most preachers, he swells as he sermonizes, his presence nearly swallowing the room whole. His face is a pageant of expression, changing spectacularly from crazed to friendly in less than a second, morphing from a wild-eyebrowed Grandpa Munster to a doughy-faced Cabbage Patch Kid.

Jordan’s first encounter with what he calls "the mystical" was as a teenager in the late ’60s, when a Dallas psychic predicted a college scholarship in his future. Back then, Jordan was a C student with a thirst for beer and no appetite for academics, so he knew his fortuneteller must be a wacko. But seven years later, after a stint sailing the ocean, Jordan applied to the University of California, San Diego to study biochemistry and the school offered him a full ride. And that’s when he started to wonder.

His parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, but by the age of 27, Jordan was a "scientific atheist." Then, one day, while jogging along Black’s Beach in San Diego, he ran into buddies who were building a sweat lodge with Cherokee medicine man Sun Bear. "When I was introduced to him, he asked me — he looked at me kind of funny, like — and asked me if I wanted to join his sweat lodge," Jordan says. "And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’d be interesting.’ I didn’t even know that people still did sweat lodges." The experiences of that night awakened Jordan’s spirituality. "Even as a devout atheist, the presence of God was so overwhelming in that little hovel, sitting naked on the earth, it affected me dramatically."

Soon after, Jordan’s mother suffered a stroke, which was followed by what he terms "a miraculous healing through Christian prayer." It cured him of skepticism. "If someone else had told me their mother had recovered from a stroke through prayer, I’d have been, ‘Yeah, right. Sure.’ But it was my mother," he croaks, with emotion. "From then on, the world was a much scarier and weirder place."

In the early 1980s, Jordan himself fell ill with debilitating migraines, chronic fatigue, and memory loss. The deterioration dragged on for so long, with doctors unable to provide a diagnosis, that he left school. Eventually, he ended up in North Carolina, and there he met Two Trees, the person he credits with "saving my life." Two Trees diagnosed him on the spot as having an infestation of the fungus candida, and over the next year, he taught Jordan the elements of earth medicine.

Eleven years ago, Jordan relocated to Boston to get married. Within three months, he ended the engagement. "I realized it wasn’t going to work," he grins. "She does research for Mass General. And that was when I started getting weird."