Andrew Rutajit – Bio
This extended bio is an excerpt from my book, "The Vestibule": I never made a conscious decision to become a Christian, it was a decision made by my parents. I was adopted into a wonderful family just a few days after I was born. As a matter of fact, I was adopted through a church organization and my adoption had a clause that required my adopting family to not only be Christian, but Lutheran. A minister was present during the entire process. As a result, I would then be baptized and become the “newest member” of the local Lutheran Church in the small town I called home. I was a Christian! I had been human for less than a month and my beliefs were already preset for me in stone…quite literally, on two stone tablets. I grew up learning about the Ten Commandments; I memorized creeds, bible verses, and songs. As I grew older, I became very active in the church; I was practically raised in the church. I was an acolyte and I assisted the minister during most Sunday services; I also recorded the sermons onto audio tape to send to the sick and the elderly, I was voted (and reelected) president of the church’s youth group, I played softball on the church league, I was an usher, I rang the big bell to announce the start of every church service, I even played a trumpet once and a while with the choir and organist. Some Sundays, I did these things twice because we had a “Sunrise Service” and then a later church service for those who wanted to sleep a little on Sunday. I arrived early and stayed late. I was willingly being groomed for a lifetime of work in the church. As an acolyte, I wore the white gown with black trim, I did my job setting up and lighting the candles, and then I sat down directly across from the minister for the remainder of the service. My church had a historic floor plan, so I was elevated above the congregation by three steps and could watch the congregation quite easily. I remember sitting in church as a boy and really looking at the people who were attending. I saw elderly people who attended church like it was a social club, I saw parents with newborn children coming to church for the first time in 20 years; but by and large, through my young eyes, I saw other kids who were just as confused as I was. I was also learning how people use the Christian label to their advantage; some promote their careers, some enjoy the out-of-church activities while only attending church on holidays, some just like to sing, some like to be seen coming from or going to multi-million dollar churches the size of basketball stadiums, others favor a small church that has a nice elderly social group. I went to church because it was my life; even in my preteen years, I would lie in bed at night and dream of one day becoming a minister. However, I was slowly learning that I was different in this regard when compared to my friends or even the elders in my church. All through my childhood, I thought that the people who ran my little church were all on the (same) right path…the only path leading away from Hell. I soon found out that children of some of those highly respected people I looked up to within the congregation were doing things like sneaking behind the church to smoke, lying, stealing, doing jail time, drugs, drinking and driving, fighting, having sex and getting pregnant before marriage, and many other things that Jesus would never do. Some families had lives they presented to the members of the congregation on Sunday morning, and completely “other” lives that they actually lived the rest of the week. I actually enjoyed being at church. My father was an usher, an elder and the church’s treasurer. My mother was a Sunday school teacher, she sang in the choir, and devoted her life to Christian philanthropy. On any given Sunday morning, I would be assisting in the service, my father would be either the usher or assisting in communion, and my mother would teach Sunday school in the morning and sing in the choir during the service. I was at church with one of my parents for one reason or another (meetings, practice, service, etc.), at least 4 times a week. But so were some other kids my age, so I was a kid among other kids; life could have been much worse. By visiting the church so frequently, it became a less sacred place to me; it became my playground and I lost reverence for some of the sacred areas of the church because I walked around like I owned the place. Crawling underneath the sacred altar to wire microphones somehow makes it a little less sacred. I would go to a dark and gloomy liquor store with an Elder of the church to help carry the bottles of wine to the car and then into the back quarters of the church that housed the wine and crackers. I thought it was peculiar that one could purchase a carton of smokes, a porno magazine, tequila, AND the blood of Christ from a man covered in tattoos at a drive-thru liquor store. I helped prepare for communion by setting the little communion cups in the tray and getting the communion wafers out of the prepackaged boxes; I would unwrap them and set them on the communion set with the wine. Almost every Sunday, I took some communion wafers with me to eat during the church service. They didn’t taste very good, but I ate them as snacks all the time. Perhaps my relaxed attitude while I was a Christian helped give me the courage to start thinking outside the Christian box later in life. My experience was a bit of an extreme example, but my morals and dogmas back then were no different than a Christian’s today. Most Christians will surely agree that being a Christian is not just about getting dressed up on Sunday morning and going to church. A Christian does not see Christianity as something they do once or twice a week or even as something they incorporate into their lives; it is their life. It’s amazing that I was so active in the church because I was notorious for asking some rather bold questions. I was told by my school teachers that there was no such thing as a stupid question, and then I would go to church and be made to feel as though that were untrue. When it came to questions about my religion, I had plenty. Behind all of the softball games, the youth camping trips, the pot luck dinners, the Christmas plays, my friends, and all the distracting fun we had; there were a lot of areas of my own religion I just didn’t understand. But even worse, I knew that my friends and even their parents the same questions but were afraid (or just didn’t care) to ask. I wasn’t sure how being a Lutheran was any different than being Methodist or Episcopalian or even how Christianity differed from Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim beliefs…it was just never discussed. Being Lutheran, we were taught about Martin Luther but not in any great detail. Until I was about twelve years old, I actually thought all people of all religions on earth were worshipping the same God (and Jesus); as if each language variation told the same story, just a little bit differently. An open discussion about the similarities and differences between the different sects of Christianity was extremely rare at my church and the beliefs of other religions and cultures were NEVER discussed; they were just taboo and wrong by default. There seemed to be a very large, gray area in this black and white, good and evil, God and devil world that I was being shown via the eyes of the church. In order to keep peace in a mixed community, the church didn’t dare speak out against other religions; actually they preached religious tolerance and still today, most Christians genuinely respect the beliefs of others. I see this to be hypocritical. If you saw a child drowning in a swimming pool and you thought you could jump into the water and save that child; you probably would. The Christian perspective of this world is that a person is either a Christian and accepts Jesus Christ as their savior, or that person (and/or that person’s soul) will burn in Hell forever. Hell is a place of eternal pain and suffering…eternal damnation. A Christian who condones religious tolerance is like an onlooker, watching someone drown without attempting a rescue because they don’t want to get their feet wet. If you truly believe it - be a teacher, be a missionary, or be gone.
Like many kids my age, when I went to college, I was suddenly on my own. I was living in Florida, two-thousand miles away from home and for the first time in my life, I was going to church much less often. I spent many Sunday mornings feeling guilty for not going to church, and I did get dressed up every now and then to go to a local church – skipping around from church to church, unwilling to make a commitment and careful to never say, “see you next week” to anyone. I went to several churches but, no matter what church I went to, it always seemed to come down to the same sermon: “…you are a sinner and you know it, don’t you feel bad? If communion, confession, or prayer doesn’t take your guilt away, perhaps the collection plate will.” Thousands of miles from home, I sang the exact same songs, prayed the exact same prayers (word for word), and chanted the exact same creeds that my other church did. Christianity became less and less special to me the more I learned about it; and the more I learned about it, the more ambiguous my beliefs would become. The bimonthly communion was not communing and the sacrament was no longer as sacred to me as it was when I was younger and not allowed to participate. Soon, I completely stopped going to church and it was over a year before I went back. One particular Easter morning, feeling guilt ridden for not going to church in such a long time, I decided to go. I woke up early, put on my best suit, and drove to the local Lutheran Church. I sat in my car in the parking lot for about an hour while a life-changing debate took place in my head. This was the very moment when the pendulum of my life hesitated momentarily before swinging in the opposite direction. I started the car and went back home. I soon started doing my own research at home and at the local library. I did what many Christians refuse to do; I read non-secular books, I studied pre-Christian mythologies, and I studied pre-Christian religions, rituals, and cultures. I challenged my faith by reading books by authors speaking out against Christianity. I figured doing so would either solidify my beliefs (getting my religious life back on track), or it would give me a reason to stop feeling guilty for ditching church so often. I was shell-shocked with what I was learning! The truth was becoming obvious and I was utterly dumbfounded. I had no choice; it was back to the drawing board for me. I had to ask myself, “Without Christianity – Who am I? Have I made peace with death? Am I afraid to “cross over?” etc, etc…the very basics. At this point in my life I was torn because I still had a belief in a higher power but I knew I could no longer call myself Christian. I don’t pretend to understand or have the words to define this higher power; but I felt as though one did indeed exist. What I have trouble with is the middle man, and for a long time, I thought that the only way to believe in a higher power is to attach myself to the Christian religion. I thought that atheism was the answer. If I wasn’t a Christian, I must be an atheist, right? That’s what I thought until I read more about atheism. I first read that atheism had nothing to do with the devil, which almost reassured me that I was an atheist. After all, how could I not accept the Christian version of God, yet continue to fear the Christian devil? I have been quoted as saying, “All Satanists are Christians.” I meant it as a joke but I said it because Satan is a huge part of the Christian story from the Christian bible; the Satan character does not exist outside of Christianity. I think the Christian version of “God” is about as skewed of a concept of a higher power as one can fantasize. On the other hand, I think the Native Americans and other indigenous cultures have a fantastic grip on the concept of God…meaning, God can be found within nature (not in a book). Soon, I would discover that there were people who had been in my position and they were eager to teach. The first author that impressed me was Dan Barker who wrote a book called “Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist”. Then I found another key to the puzzle – Jordan Maxwell. It’s hard to believe that this one person could have complied so much research…it was one of Jordan ’s videos (I believe it was called Symbolism Sex and the Stars) that completely changed my life – I soon bought every Jordan Maxwell book, video, and audio cassette that I could...he and I are now friends. (Today I’ve done that with Jordan Maxwell, Manly P Hall, James Arthur, and Terence McKenna, Wilhelm Reich, Freke & Gandy, Acharya S, and others). So I was entering into a new persona; an initiation of sorts…once you learn the truth, you can’t un-learn it – and to this very day, I have stayed on the path that I set out on at this very point in my life. I no longer consider myself an atheist, but I have learned that one needn't be Christian to hold a belief in the "Great Architect of the Universe". I’ll be honest; I had a difficult time understanding some of the bible when I read it for the first time. But even theological scholars agree that the bible is a very difficult read. I had trouble understanding what Jordan Maxwell was saying sometimes, many of the books that I read were over my head, my teachers were using words that I had never heard before and didn’t understand. They were talking about events in history that I had no idea ever took place…I was being forced to do my own research just to understand what these teachers were saying. At this point in my Life (in my early 20's), as far as a spiritual understanding was concerned, I was confused (but still seeking). I knew that there were stories in the bible about places in the temples where even the priests were not allowed to enter. Places in which only the high priest could enter once a year. This suggested to me that there must have been something actually happening TO the person who went in there. It also suggested to me that the masses (even in biblical times) were left out of the loop when it came to the essence of their beliefs. When I asked about this back in Sunday school, I was told that these priests were talking with God at a level that far surpassed prayer, or something vague like that. Years had gone by since I first asked about that, and over time I also learned that similar rituals happened in other cultures. I read that throughout the history of religion; the priests, Shaman, medicine men, witch doctors, etc. would deliberately exclude certain traditions from the "common" members of the community (as well as all other tribes and communities). As if they were protecting their secret or something. The thought of trying to understand this concept was quickly shifting from sitting in the back of my mind to total determination. Everything was telling me that this was true, that there was a higher level of my spirituality; this concept soon became my mantra as my quest for a true religious experience had begun. Minimal research told me that the Native Americans recently fought for their right to ingest a psychedelic cactus in their ceremony. The Mazatec Indians in Mexico use a Sage plant and/or psychedelic mushrooms in ceremony; in the Amazon, Ayahuasca (also called Yage) is consumed as a psychedelic brew made from a combination of plants; in Africa, Datura and Tabermanthe iboga are the sacred plants of choice; In Siberia, the Amanita muscaria mushroom is the local sacrament. This list could go on and on, but the point is that ceremonial ingestion of sacred plants are (and always have been) a worldwide phenomenon. Every region seems to have their own sacred plant that will propel the local shaman (or medicine man) into out of body states of consciousness. This is the technique that is practiced behind closed doors, the technique that is left out of the more straightforward and public rituals. This is what Christians are symbolizing at communion when they "take and eat" At one point in college, I found myself sitting at a friend’s kitchen table, staring at jar of psychedelic mushrooms that had been soaking in honey for several months. The honey itself had taken on the blue pigment and psychedelic properties of the blue-bruised mushrooms floating within. I was a psychedelic novice and proper mushroom dosage was a mystery to me. We were all ingesting this “blue honey” for the first time and none of us had any idea how to judge the potency of this stuff (we all weighed in the neighborhood of 170 lbs, so we all ate the same amount). We filled up the toaster with bread and then proceeded to cover the toast with the psychedelic-laced honey. We all had a lot of energy. As a group of friends, we walked through a huge field, talked and laughed and horsed around. Then, like a piano dropping from the sky and landing on my head, I was hit by the intense sensations of the mushroom. It felt like it took an eternity, but I finally found a place to recline. When I found a bed, I remained there for 6 hours with my eyes wide open as I ebbed and flowed out of body and back again, over and over. Movement was not an option. I could see a giant disk above me and it was spinning like a record. It seemed as though this record contained all of my memories and I could pick and choose where to “put the needle on the record,” so to speak. Some of the time, I could pick and choose which memory to review and they were all crystal clear. Other times, memories would surface that I had all but completely forgotten about. Everything surfaced that night, from my earliest memories, memories of watching my father die, even events that happened earlier that day. The thoughts in my head were so clear, it seemed as though a disembodied voice was guiding me through the entire experience. The next morning, even though I had slept for a couple hours, I was still partially under the influence. I went outside for some fresh air and to shake the cobwebs. As I stood on the porch, looking at the fresh mushrooms growing with the dew in the field where we played in the night before; I was overwhelmed with the sudden realization that I had just spiritually evolved. I realized that I had just eaten something that grew in nature and it had altered my consciousness to a point where I had a complete review of my entire life. My life didn’t “flash” before my eyes; this experience took six hours to complete. This was coupled with an extreme sensation of déjà vu that lasted the entire night. I knew that these mushrooms have been on this planet for millions of years, and I was not so naive to think I was the first to have such a profound experience after eating them. I was so shaken by the experience that it took me two years to get to a point to where I wasn't visibly upset when describing what happened that night. I was starting to do the math and realize that such an experience must have found a place in history somewhere.
Ironically, I was literally standing on a porch that morning and figuratively speaking, I had reached The Vestibule. I was standing at the entrance of the great temple of gnosis in pursuit of a link between my previous night’s experience and religious history itself. By standing on the porch that morning, realizing the historical weight these mushrooms must have, I was standing at the cusp of an endless rabbit hole filled with religious symbolism and secrets guarded with the lives of many men throughout history…that is how this my research began. I soon chose the pseudonym, “Andrew Rutajit.” I thought to myself, “What’s in a name?” I was adopted at birth and all of my family members had passed away. All through my childhood, literally everyone called me “Andy,” but even that wasn’t my real name. My mother’s side of the family was Italian and she chose the name Anthony for me. My father’s side had a family name of William, so that became my first name by default. As a little kid, I couldn’t say “Anthony” too well and it came out sounding like “Andy.” My last name, “Schuelein”, means Small School and William means Will of God (Will of I Am). So, my Christian name means “Doing God’s will in a small school.” Fitting because I was raised in the church and groomed for ministry. Not so fitting when I decided to strike my own path. In honor of my parents, I have choses to use my original initials (W.A.S.) for my new multimedia production company - WAS³ Media. The 3 is to reflect the fact that I am the third generation to use that name and those initials. After my eyes were opened to the truth of religion, I knew I had to choose a pseudonym for a couple reasons. First of all, I was no longer doing God’s will anywhere; at least not the will of the Christian God. Also, the real truth regarding religion can really piss people off and I felt a pen name would separate my family from anyone angered by my writings. Now that my family has all passed away, and because information is so readily available, none of that really matters anymore. I also felt that I needed to change my name because I was no longer the person I once was. Thanks to my new wife, I am evolving into the person I feel I was always meant to be. Who was I during the three days between my birth and my adoption? For three days, anything could have happened. What if I had been adopted into another family? What would my name have been then? It was a bit pretentious but I chose the name Rutajit because of its meaning. Rutajit is an Indian name meaning, “conqueror of truth.” This was much better in my opinion that any Christian name and certainly much more fitting than – doing God’s will in a small school. The small school was Christianity and I had just blown the doors wide open to all world religions. Perhaps it was sheer curiosity but I somehow felt obligated to piece together that great, cosmic Humpty Dumpty egg that fell and was shattered into thousands of shards and clues…or to at least try. This is how I’ve felt since childhood. Which came first, the goal or the effort to reach it? I strongly believe that one must become a clear conduit or nursemaid for this information to receive you. I've been at this for a very long time and I'm realizing that I’m only now beginning to understand. Although I have taken my studies to degrees, which most people do not; I know that I have much more to learn about life, about myself and my areas of interest. I had spent so much time asking questions and seeking answers and so little time expressing myself by simply being myself (Si talia jungere possis sit tibi scire satis). As a result, I decided to publish a book of my own essays reflecting my views on the world. My book, “The Vestibule” was a book I began writing long before I ever considered becoming an author. A vestibule is an entrance or a foyer leading into building such as a great temple. That’s exactly what my book is; a collection of my first essays leading you to what I hope to become a great body of work. I’m glad I grew up with such a profound understanding of Christianity. I honestly don’t think I would have cared enough to spend so much time and energy researching the occult (or hidden/secret) side of Christianity if I hadn’t invested so much of my youth in understanding the basic story. As someone who has stood on both sides of the fence, I can assure you there is a safety net on the other side. Furthermore, eating mushrooms is not a necessarily a prerequisite to understand this “other side” of religious history. The light of truth is all you need and it only takes a spark. The truth might sting a little at first but as cliché as it sounds, it can set you free as well. After all of this, I now know the answer to the mystery of life - and it is not a word or a phrase; one must become the correct answer physically, mentally, and spiritually. I like to refer to this as, “the becoming;” it feels a lot like curing a life-long illness. It is as though I’ve had the answers since childhood and I have spent my entire life asking the questions and seeking the keys to this type of understanding. The question I find myself asking as of late is, “Did these keys open the doors of understanding or the doors to Pandora’s Box”? The jury is still out on that one. Today, I live in the middle of nowhere on the West Coast…more than 3000 miles away from the town where I went to school and began questioning my beliefs. My wife and I found a nice place in the mountains, far away from the buzz of the city and much closer to nature. We literally live within feet of Oregon’s lush natural forest. It’s nice to actually see stars in the sky at night and not haze or light pollution. Here, we are producing a new film. I feel as though set and setting when writing (as well as during many other activities) is key. Those who you surround yourself with play such a huge part in your life...I am only recently understanding this. My bride, Jennifer has really helped me come out of my shell and become the person I've always wanted to be! The Pharmacratic Inquisition DVD would not be the same without her input; my second book, The Vestibule would have never happened without her encouragement; and she has made my current film possible – it is just her and I producing this entire film! My personal life and my professional life wouldn't be the same without her! I've really found an amazing partner to share my crazy world with. You can find me online in many places...please keep in touch and feel free to contact me for any reason! Stay tuned! |
I’m an author and lecturer in archaeoastronomy, alchemy, shamanism, and symbolism. I’ve written two books and one documentary film; in my spare time, I freelance as a ghost writer. I have an odd sense of humor…odd because I’m able to laugh at some things that many people take quite seriously. Humor is a good way to deal with all the self-inflicted ignorance in this world. I love stand up comics and I have a lot of respect for those who take center stage and speak their mind. Joe Rogan is one of my all time favorite stand-up comics.
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