Ðe Auþor

Þeedrich: A Short Autobiography

Born 1938 June 9 in Detroit, Michigan, I was brought up in Detroit until high school age, with a bucolic one-year intermission in Grayling, Michigan.  My family was Roman Catholic and I was by nature religious, so I chose to undertake to become a Catholic priest and attended a seminary in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the four years of high school.  At the end of this time I realized that I was too interested in the opposite sex to be a priest, and left the seminary.  After a few months in college I dropped out for three years and toured the Orient as a weather observer in the U.S. Air Force.  Thereafter I returned, older and wiser, to the University of Detroit where I took my A.B. (major: German; minors: French and philosophy) cum laude.  Receiving a Fulbright fellowship for overseas study, I went through the Middlebury College Master’s in German program of a year’s study at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität (Universität von Mainz) in Mainz, Germany.  It was there that I met my future wife, another American student, of German extraction.

With my new M.A. in hand I began studying and working as a Teaching Assistant at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1964.  This was the year in which the first student riots broke out, starting on the U-C Berkeley campus.  They were, of course, aided and abetted by the Enemy, but it was certainly fertile ground for them, since Berkeley is a Leftist’s heaven and a Rightist’s hell.  So at the end of the 1964/65 academic year (and the birth of the first of our seven children) I left academe for a year.

1966 found my wife and me in New York State where, after working for Ma Bell (the now much smaller AT&T) for a year, I recommenced teaching German at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Long Island).  Shortly thereafter I also resumed work on my Ph.D. in German and Germanic linguistics at New York University, where I received my doctorate in June, 1970.

For another two years I taught German, then, failing to get tenure, took my family to Germany where I taught English to German ten-to-fourteen-year olds in Neustadt bei Coburg, Germany, for the Bavarian State Government.  At the end of that academic year, in 1973, we returned to the U.S., ending up in Phoenix, Arizona.  After a year of intolerable heat, we escaped to the Pacific northwest where I began teaching German, philosophy, psychology, Latin and comparative religion over the next seven years at various colleges and junior colleges around the area.

By 1981 the educational market had deteriorated so that I was unable to make a decent living teaching any more, even though I had tried to supplement my teaching by selling real estate.  So I took up the study of computers and, within a few years, was working in the computer field, where I am today.  By the early twenty-first century the United States had entered the final phase of its imperial existence, which means that there may be additional challenges to come.  These I will take up as my abilities and the situation permits.

Throughout all of this variegated history I remained fundamentally very much interested in the physical, psychological and spiritual bases underlying the nature of life.  After an atheist phase, typical for many young know-it-alls, I began to study the paranormal and the phenomena which transcend the purely physical, while at the same time trying to connect them with the evolutionary understanding of life and the universe as presented by the modern physical and life sciences.

In this intellectual development, the discovery of Rupert Sheldrake and his hypothesis of Formative Causation represented a key step, since this philosophical view provides what is otherwise a "missing link" between the parapsychological and physical components of animate and inanimate nature.  With Ian Stevenson’s newly published "Reincarnation and Biology," I feel we have made additional major strides in understanding the puzzle of life.  Likewise, the new breakthroughs in the neurobiology of the brain have aided this understanding greatly, proving that we are the living, breathing memories of our ancestors.

I have discovered that the ancient northern European religion of Ásatrú, based on the way of life of our ancestors, provides a free and natural context for the expression of the religious and cultural impulses written in our genes.  Other folkish Ásatrúar - all splendid people - I have met have almost without exception recognize the poisonous cultural environment of our time and place, and share the same determination which I have to live a life as free as possible of this psychic contamination.  That is why I am attracted to it.

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