Bill Hegeman was born in 1958. He started his spiritual explorations in earnest when he was 14. When you do a progressive fast for 40 days and ask God for the wisdom of Solomon, and you get that vision, who cares. What matters if I can bring value to you from all of my life’s adventures. Service to others besides yourself, whether it is God, community or the world, is what is important.
My memories start when I was barely 2 years old. What I remember is seeing 2 spinning Orbs with millions of multicolored dots where the overall color was a gold, and they spun around a moving center. Many years later I found out what they were. Two descriptions that I have read, weren’t quite accurate either. That is for a discussion with advanced students.
From the age of 7 until I went into the military at 17, I lived in a small exit community in upstate New York. People falling out of Middle class and people working hard to enter it. My neighborhood had 2 drug gangs and its own low class bordello. Surviving this with morals, principles, and not falling into the insanity or joining any of the gangs was a feat only a few managed. Many have died from Hepatitis, Aids, and from Drugs. The few that escaped fell into conservative religious Christian churches. I was in a Baptist church until I returned from the Marines.
Proverbs was my first instructional manual. The second was a book on “Tibetan Yoga, Secret Doctrines” by Dr. Evans Wentz. Buddhism as I understood it then wasn’t about god or any gods as so much as the development of ones mind and spirit. The core practices of meditation, and energy cultivation, is instrumental to my development. And after years of study, they are core practices of any spiritual tradition. Few if any are followed by any of the Neo-Pagan communities that I know of. Spirit led me into many adventures. Before I left the Marines, I had performed 2 exorcisms, 2 spirit(soul) retrievals, banished demons, all without any formal training. When I learned of other metaphysical disciplines, groups my experiences outstripped many of the initiatory processes that these groups had. And in the late 70’s many of the groups existed only as a spiritual and political outcome of the feminist movements. Again, I failed to meet or fall into those social qualifiers of that time.
Since then groups and the beliefs people had, pagan movements served to justify their beliefs and the relationships they wanted with each other and the world. When people are looking for beliefs and religions that feature empowerment, after being disenfranchised in society, their social development was stymied, and could only be developed past their teen age years in groups of people with equally dysfunctional skill sets.
My outlook during these years of personal chaos, I looked for anything logical, and Commander Spock was my role model from Star Trek. I too, became socially inept, of all the social and emotional nuances of society and peer groups. I had to learn it scientifically and by practice of acting, versus the natural informal way of learning social skills as a teenager. Again my experiences and methods didn’t fit the accepted understanding or perceptions of my peers.
I’ve been an outsider looking in and without for decades. I may have insights into situations that most people take for granted the way they function without any self auditing or reflection. And to find out, this self auditing and reflection process is absolutely necessary for spiritual development. So there I was, no kidding.
A kid from a bad neighborhood, learning martial arts to survive, an IQ of 180 at 10, a target of bullying, practicing meditation (frowned on by the church that validated ones morals), developing psychic skills (being told that was of the devil by the same church, family and others), joined the marines ( and found it a more pleasant place to live), studying and pursuing truth and wisdom, often being lead by forces out of my control, and I survived.
My life is the definition of a lack of congruence.
After all that I still care. I want to see people do better, evolve, and actually be and fulfill what humanity can be.
Back in the BBS days of the late 80’s, I ran a Computer Bulletin Board Service named Wizard’s Workshop. I held classes every other Sunday. The main focus was to help people accept that their psychic skills were real, and deal with self acceptance. With the rash of sociopaths creating random groups, that they didn’t have to believe what these people said. Help them to develop critical thinking about these situations and groups, and offer knowledge to help select their own paths. We did psychic development exercises, and discussed what we read at length. Some of us went to conventions and gatherings that focused on the Neo-Pagan, groups, practices and beliefs. I hope I served them well.
Work, Wives, and Families intervened for years, perceptions, studies and other circumstances, I changed my spiritual direction drastically. Usually pick a formal tradition and maintain it. I looked at it from a distance, and chose to start fresh from a different direction. This journey is outside the scope of and understanding of most traditions. I developed a rich understanding of the gamut of choices and practices. I focused on the core developmental methods and the basics. This has given me some unique insights into all the practices and methods I studied. I can only hope I share what I have learned.
Archonstone was a handle I took on shortly after the BBS days were done. Internet and IRC’s (Internet Relay Chat) was in vogue. My original moniker was “Witan”. Only to find out it was ubiquitous and disturbed people with egos the size of I can’t imagine. I picked a unique name. Archon was a Greek term for a elected leader that was used to describe the beings in Gnostic beliefs of who held the space and represented the epoch and current “classical” age. Since then I discovered that an archon was a servant of the more typical Gnostic beliefs of the Demiurge. I still think of a new age. A stone is a worked rock, and was a metaphor for grain and a skull, which had many overladen symbolic metaphors that struck me as useful, to push me to be ever better and become something that would help our world in a new age. And if a being such as an Archon were to swallow me, as a stone I would pass unscathed. Dark survival humor was developed not only from my childhood, but also from my spiritual experiences. Although I find the New Age concept of new age conflated and not what others make it out to be, I still find it apt personally. I like the idea of a new aeon.
Oddly, I find it means more of a steppingstone from one age to another age. If it is to keep your feet dry on your travels versus walking the waters of these realties or prevent you from falling and being carried away in the current stream of things, may be, just maybe, I might be of some use.
I had hoped technology would help propel our society out of this insanity, until I found corporations own that whole process and you own nothing. I studied social sciences, and found that without immense power, people and time, you can’t change a society. The only other venue is religion. And in and of itself, it helps and then falls into corruption easily also. This is why I am in service to a tribe and developing a diverse spirituality, to create a culture that would be a model for others in a future. If you have better ideas, please let me know.
Archonstone
