First "Real-Life" Initiation

[PurplAstrlMagma]

I didn't quite know where to put this, it involves lucid dreaming, kind of, but it was also the first 'crack' in my perception of reality that allowed me to learn all that I have.

It was late 1976, I was cutting high school freshman class and hanging out at the Washoe County Main Library. That was something I did all the time, along with quite a few homeless people. One such guy and I tended to read a lot of the same books, books on psychic phenomena, magick, etc. We never spoke to each other, the few times I tried, he just glared at me. Anyway. The last day I ever saw him, I was sitting about 15 feet away, and he was reading one of the first books on Lucid Dreaming. Suddenly he looked up and said: "I see! All you have to do is wake up!" The book dropped to the floor, and he wasn't there anymore. I freaked. Later, when I tried to talk about him to the library staff, no-one ever knew that he was ever there. Some people have tried to convince me that he was a ghost, but after several years I have discovered with what I call 'Reality Navigating', when you do it completely, the people in the Reality that you have Navigated to do not remember the Reality that you Navigated away from, because they were never there.

Anyway...
Biggest Brightest Blessings!!!

Soon after that, I met a couple of college guys at the Library, and we had an interesting conversation about magick. Gradually I became involved in their unofficial, co-ed "Frat"-house. Most of the guys were involved in Psychology somehow, and they ran their own experiments. I did not realize that I was one of their main subjects until long after. One of the guys was always ready for me to 'find charged quarters'. He would have several dollars worth of quarters, and some of the them would be 'charged'. I had no idea what that meant at the time, but he let me touch a charged and an uncharged quarter, and I could feel the difference. Anyway, he would throw them all onto the lawn, and if I brought back the charged ones, I got to keep them all! Later, he changed the game so that I would have to do it blindfolded, and I found that I could find the charged quarters even faster that way. Without realizing it, I got passed to the next guy, who had a beginning telekinesis-test set-up. I never got anything or anywhere with this, evidently, I am a complete dud at telekinesis. So I got passed on again, and this one was the most interesting. By then I was 16, and Star Wars had come out (made a difference for talking about 'feeling' things blindfolded). The testers were a college guy and his girlfriend. The test was that he would throw orange balls at me, and I was supposed to tell by 'feel' which ones were which. I was supposed to move so that the orange pool balls did not hit me. I was supposed to block the oranges. I was supposed to let the orange tennis balls hit me. We started out at 15 feet away, and as I improved, increased the distance. The price of failure was fairly obvious, enough so that I wasn't all that interested in participating, until he told me the reward for complete success (fellatio from his girlfriend). Sorry to be so revealing, but that's the way it was. When the distance had been extended to about 80 feet, which was about as far as he could reliably throw the balls, I 'graduated' to being blindfolded. I got hit with pool-balls a lot as I learned, and I once broke a finger trying to block a pool ball. But I also got completely rewarded three times.
Soon after the last reward, the police broke the "frat" up and these people drifted out of my life.
But I had begun to learn something that I now call 'truth-sense'. It doesn't sense the absolute truth, if that is even possible. It senses what is best or worst for me to believe, or do.

Biggest Brightest Blessings!!!

Fairly soon after that I got involved in the local province of the Society for Creative Anachronism, greatly expanded possibilities of face-to-face Roleplaying (with dice, not underwear), and some of those people introduced me to involvement in the spiritual thing they had going, which was a Wiccan Group that met on weekends of the Full Moon (for more details, look for my post "First Astral Projection with Ullr".)
Anyway, after a few months of knowing me, one of the members suggested that I check out Anton LeVay's Satanic Bible.

Seated in the High Priest's living room, not paying attention to the possibility that any place repeatedly made into sacred space might have the barrier between worlds quite a bit thinner than 'normal', I began to read, and immerse myself in page after page of pure hatred. Hate God, hate life, hate everyone... and as I began to seriously contemplate life while believing these things, my ability to sense without seeing the difference between an orange and an orange pool ball seemed to 'flex' somehow, and I became aware of a tremendous female presence silently saying: "No! If you want to thrive you have to love God!", and I proceeded to get four hours of automatic writing that I call the Teachings of Shekinah. Very powerful, very informative, very positive. Among other things it informed me that God had a mate that the Patriarchs hid, a mate named 'Wisdom' the way that He is named 'I Am', that She invented the idea of death and mortality as a way for Angels to learn faster and adapt to changes more easily, that the first planet in this system to host life was called 'Tiamaat', and that the Earth was made from parts of Her; that in the allegorical 'garden of Eden' tale, Lilith really was Adam's first mate, and Eve was their daughter. It's all coming out very bald here, She told it to me far better than I am telling to you, but I wanted to get across some basic ideas, like the fact that there were and are even now Patriarchs who decide what it is best for them that you know, who run society not through any kind of conspiracy or gathering, but through disempowering decisions and applications of propaganda.
Anyway, after that tremendous burst of personal gnosis, my ability to sense what is best for me to believe in, follow, & use was no longer limited to fast-moving, orange balls. I began to write notebook after notebook of philosophy, science fiction stories, game-world ideas. I began to get inspirations on psychic and magickal techniques to try, and my development took off.