Gnosis Diary: Life as a Heathen

My personal experiences, including religious and spiritual experiences, community interaction, general heathenry, and modern life on my heathen path, which is Asatru.

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Sonoma, California

Posted by on in Paths Blogs

Continuing the story of my early experiences that led me to my heathen path, when I was 9, my family moved from Ripon, California, “Almond Capitol of the World,” to Sonoma, California, the wine country. By then I had really connected with the desert and its natural ways, but I was happy to move to a place where one did not have to belong to a Christian church to have any friends at school. My Fifth Grade teacher was openly Buddhist, and that really impressed me. She wasn’t a Christian and they let her teach children!

I studied martial arts, and learned meditation. My mom told me that I had been a telepath as a child, telling me the Dr. Blackbag story I related in an earlier post. When I was a teenager, I told my brother I wanted my telepathy back. 

He gave me exercises to try to pierce my own mental shields, but it didn’t work.  Here and there I caught snatches of things, but they were unreliable, no better than imagination.  When I talked to him about this, he suggested I try projection.  As he directed me, I stood in the stairwell of the main building at school, between the first and second floors, watching through the window as the other students left for the day.  I picked one person out of the crowd and tried to make her turn aside.  Just a simple command, turn right.  It didn’t work.  I tried and tried on a succession of strangers, but no one turned.  Then I decided that instead of issuing a command, I should try to figure out what might interest a person in the direction I wanted them to go.  I picked a boy out of the crowd and thought at him, “That building is interesting.  You want to look at the building.  You want to go over to the building.  There is something there that you want to look at more closely.”  He turned aside.  He turned like a military marcher, decisively and sharply, and walked over to the building.  When he got there he peered at the wall, trying to see if something interesting was there.  Of course there was not, and I was no longer projecting at him.  He looked up, puzzled.  I followed his gaze to a school bus pulling away from the curb.  I had made him miss his bus.  I felt no triumph at all.  


“This is wrong,” I said.  “I won’t do this again.”

Edited:

This post has been edited to remove quotations from a book that is no longer for sale. 

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Erin Lale is the author of Asatru For Beginners, and the updated, longer version of her book, Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path. Erin has been a gythia since 1989. She was the editor and publisher of Berserkrgangr Magazine, and is admin/ owner of the Asatru Facebook Forum. She also writes science fiction and poetry, ran for public office, is a dyer and fiber artist, was acquisitions editor at a small press, and founded the Heathen Visibility Project.

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