by Al D

Al D was a British practitioner based in Scotland who wrote some of the most vivid experiential accounts on alt.religion.shamanism in 2005–2006. His extended series on the enchanted woods of Dorset — the encounters with spirit presences, the Ansuz rune stone, the iron-age burial mound — established him as one of the group's most consistent voices.

This post from April 2006 describes something different: not a walk in the landscape, but a breakthrough in seated meditation. After a period of feeling stuck — "nothing much seemed to be happening; I wasn't breaking through into the new ground that I intuitively knew was ahead" — he found himself in two places at once. His bedroom. And a riverbank in the village where he grew up.

The experience he describes is consistent with what practitioners in various traditions call a "thin place" experience or, in shamanic terms, a spontaneous middle-world journey: the felt reality of a second location overlaying the physical present, so vivid that both seem equally real. His method of grounding — perfecting his posture and focusing on a channel leading upward toward what he calls the Divine Light — is practical and specific.

I have been making the effort to meditate more frequently lately. For some time, I have felt as though I've been at an impasse in meditation: nothing much seemed to be happening; I wasn't breaking through into the new ground that I intuitively knew was ahead.

Last night, I did break through into something new. It was a unique and startling experience: I was sitting cross-legged (Sukhasana pose) on my bedroom floor. I had some Indian music playing quietly on the stereo (I don't usually play music while meditating, but this time I did). Suddenly, I found myself seated not on my bedroom floor, but next to a river in the ancient rural village where I grew up. My eyes were wide open, and on the one hand I could see the objects in front of me in my bedroom, but the actual feelings and the atmosphere I was sensing was so powerfully of this place by the river in the village where I grew up, that I was as though I was really there. Me and the little altar in front of me, and the objects thereon, had been seemingly teleported to this riverside location. It kept seeming like I couldn't tell for sure which reality was the "real" one: my bedroom or the riverside location.

It crossed my mind that I and my surroundings were, in reality, nothing other than a field of energy, and that either my bedroom, or the village location was being projected onto the "ether" in front of me, like a hologram.

I remember feeling a degree of fear too, as though I might be in some kind of danger of being discovered by some "thought police" or whatever. I overcame this fear by perfecting my posture and focusing, with reverence, on what seemed like a channel in front of me, leading up to what might be called the Divine Light. In so doing, I felt untouchable and safe, being in tune with Higher Power, in which fear has no place.

Some time later during the same meditation session, I found myself in another location in the same village — this time a hundred yards or so from the first location. Now I was sitting in the gutter at the side of the main road that runs through the village. Again, I felt the same uneasy fear of persecution. And again, I found refuge by homing in on the channel to divine light straight ahead and upward, in front of me, and going with the flow.

I have had similar experiences before, but never quite like this one.

Colophon

Written by Al D (Al Deveron) to the newsgroup alt.religion.shamanism on 3 April 2006. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Al D posted from Scotland through 2005–2006, during the same period in which he documented encounters with land spirits and sacred sites across southern England. The village he describes returning to in this vision has not been identified; the river may be the Deveron, a salmon river in Aberdeenshire whose name he appears to have adopted as a handle.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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