Month: December 2021

2021-12-13

LL_Central

11/20 – 12/10

Intermediate channelings: Jim, Gary, Trish, Austin, and Kathy continued meeting regularly to receive thoughts and inspiration from the Confederation in our Intermediate Channeling Circles. Thanks to volunteer transcription from Wen and Suzanna, two transcripts were published in this period:

100,000: After receiving the semi-annual sales report of the original Law of One books from the publisher, our tally indicates that a(n ultimately arbitrary) threshold has been crossed: Over 100,000 copies of Book 1 have been sold over its lifetime, beginning with its first printing in the early 80s. That’s a fuzzy number because we do have a small gap in our records, and that number does not include the number of times the material has been read at Lawofone.info or LLResearch.org, or the number of times PDFs have been downloaded. It also doesn’t take into account any stats from the Ra Contact, or the most helpful understanding of all and our greatest hope: whether the material was of help to the seeker in catalyzing their self-healing recognition of self.

Though such a threshold does bring us joy, L/L Research doesn’t place a strong emphasis on such numbers. As you know, we don’t advertise or proselytize. We do our best to offer our services for those who are drawn to it. As Ra said, “To serve one is to serve all.” But we humans also celebrate and measure threshold-crossings, whether birthdays or anniversaries or “I was this tall at age 7 and this tall at age 12.” And for the lonely wanderer missing their community, a number such as this might be a boon to the soul in the knowledge that one is not alone, that there are others, many others.

**************

  • Translations: The volunteer translators, who dedicate their free time to a service that allows the Confederation’s message to be shared to new segments of the world, continued their amazing work. Once translators finish their work, they send it to us for us to format properly and publish to the archive site. New translations were published this week in Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and German; thank you Mauro, Horia, Erik, and Jochenm respectively:
  • Working with Translators:
    • Korean – Continued the journey with the surprise Korean translation that was delivered to us by a Korean family (who wished to be unnamed) but that was a uniqique hybrid version that needed to be upgraded to Ra Contact standards. Toward that end, worked with Sienna to identify all the revisions that needed made and outline the scope and sequence of the job. Blessed be, she’s up to the task and moving forward. Thank you, Sienna, and thank you, other family!
    • Portuguese – After receiving outreach and establishing terms, welcomed a new volunteer translator into the collective effort to help the Confederation philosophy reach interested seekers around the world. She will commence with translation of the Transcript Library beginning in 1980. Thank you, Marta! Also, did something that we love doing and connected otherwise previously non-connected seekers by linking Marta with Edgard and Pedro, the Portuguese translators working on the RC.
    • Arabic – Received from B. sessions 31 – 40 of TRC in Arabic! Thank you, B.! Along with enjoying lovely dialogue with this lovely, dedicated entity who is in love with his and his partner’s baby daughter and wishes he could have a dog but would take the blessing of his baby a hundred times over.
    • Spanish – Continued receiving and publishing the work of Henry, thus resuming the effort to translate the Confederation into Spanish that stalled after the previous translator turned her focus elsewhere. Thank you, Henry!
    • Italian – Dialogued with Mauro on his work to make slight revisions to the Italian RC Vol 1 and 2, but even more importantly, a big congratulations to he and his (now) wife for their recent marriage after many years together!
    • Serbian – Dialogued with Alex and Sheyla about their joint efforts to create a Serbian glossary of terms to support their work in translating the transcripts into Serbian, and congratulated Sheyla on her big recent move back home to Europe! Alex is interested in launching a LOO study group in Ontario, so if any among the handful of people who read these bullet points lives in the area, let us know and we’ll connect you with Alex.
    • Farsi – Received a wonderful update from Meysam about his and the team’s efforts in translating, and a unique animal encounter with a fox. Meysam recently expressed what is a theme in variation in the work of other translators: “I have never had the chance to sit with the text the way I am doing these days. And translating it is a whole different story than reading it. It is such a self-fulfilling time for me. I cannot imagine how happy and excited Don, Carla, and Jim felt when they had the contact.”
    • Romanian – The powerhouse Horia continues engine’ing away, sending a few transcripts every week, often accompanied by musings about the material he’s translating. In the windows he shares, one sees another aspect of translators’ work: the evolution of their own spiritual journey.
    • Dutch – Received a new session from Erik. Thank you, Erik! Along with insightful discussion into the happenings of our fragmenting societies and its effect on the personal outlook.
    • Czech – Worked with Romi and Vojta, a couple members of the Czech team, on the question of the recently delivered machine-produced translations of the Ra text and how to process this surprise, one byproduct of which might be to reinvigorate their operation from its largely dormant state. Also, congrats to Vojta for completing his meditation training! He’s also built a meditation course: How to Start Meditating in 7 days. 
  • Fundraiser: Last time we reported that we were in the latter phases of sending out the physical fundraiser mailing. Since then, the thousands of letters were stuffed into envelopes, organized in a specific way compliant with the USPS protocols, and delivered to the ever-mysterious USPS Small Business Mailing Entry Unit. And then came time for the email campaign! So we went the process of gathering, culling, and organizing new email addresses, designing an email to send, and coordinated with Daniel to put a banner on the archive website to officially launch the fundraiser. (After Amazon SES scared us with a misplaced probation placed on our email account.) Donations have been coming in for a couple weeks now, and as always we are utterly overwhelmed by the love and support shown by such generous seekers wanting to support our work. Thank you! (With a special thank you to Jeff and Zhang!)
  • Online Store: In the last report, we shared that we were in the process of transferring data from our old store to a new fresh install of a more recent version, in order to resolve some issues with a server upgrade. After some intensive effort and some support from Steve, all customer data, product data, category data, and order data was transferred! Then another intensive process unfolded to get the store up to standard, which included coding mods to both customize it to our liking, and coding mods to fix a myriad of bugs or bad coding decisions made by the developers. Issues continued popping up out of nowhere and stretched our ability to weave code together to fix everything, but after about a week of intensive effort, the online store should be totally squared away.
  • Seeker Ministry: Continued the weekly and neverending efforts to lend support as best we’re able to the wonderful mix of emails that L/L Research receives from around the world, a mix of story-sharing, question-asking, and gratitude-offering. “Wonderful” may seem like we paint too rosy a picture. No, we are not always in a constant state of inspiration. Yes, it can tax the bandwidth to try to show up so consistently for the unique and varied needs of others. No, not every email received is a ray of sunshine. But overall, people who write are sincere and compassionate, interesting, and not infrequently inspiring. It can be humbling for us, especially when bearing some witness to the tests and trials that others endure in this hard world. Overall, it is an honor.
  • New future growth project: The announcement referred to last time is about expanding staff with a new part-time hire. That project continued development, requiring lots of intense brainstorming, lots of difficult research, and drafting lots of copy, and multiple meetings. There are still a few steps left to totally square it away, but the biggest hurdle has been crossed!
  • French A Concept Guide: Jochen is in the process of finalizing Misha’s French translation of ACG, and some of the illustrations included in the text needed to have labels translated, a task requiring access to the Adobe suite that the images were initially designed in (which we have and were happy to oblige in aiding Jochen).
  • Social Media Sharing of the Confederation’s Message:
    • Updated Facebook and Twitter with Confederations quotes, created and shared Instagram images, and updated Patreon with L/L news and offerings.
    • Continuing working on producing the Ra Contact YouTube Videos.
  • Smatterings:
    • 102: Finalized a plan for editing Jim’s manuscript for 102 with the goal of getting it published in 2022.
    • Bring4th: Worked lightly with the CSC and enjoyed catching up on responding to wanderer stories.
    • Jonathan Tong: Received invite from Jonathan to do a zoomcast with his Seattle LOO study group and worked out some plans.
    • Jochen and Misha: Really enjoyed a great video meet-up with the inestimable Misha and Jochen, sharing personal news, learning about Jochen’s efforts in his new location in Berlin, and diving into other L/L Research questions.
    • Christmas cards: Updated and printed the list for Jim’s annual Christmas card send.
  • Nuts ’n bolts:
    • Bookkeeping: Completed a few weeks of bookkeeping since the last report to keep the financial universe in order.
    • Budget meeting: After all of November’s numbers and reports were completed, made the forecast for December to complete the year’s numbers and put together a budget for next year, scheduled it with the board, and assembled the other pieces for the package listed above (the new hire) to solicit board feedback.
    • Website maintenance:  as with the old library site, there are always small mistakes to correct or other random types of maintenance to perform.
    • PO Box: Made the typical runs to the PO box and bank for shuffle around the various things that our society deems appropriate to put on paper.

Intermediate Channeling Circles: Met on our personal time for a channeling circle on Dec 1 that focused on a group question about self-judgment. (Got another session tonight.)

**************

Announcements & Personal Sharings:

Gary: I had wanted to catch up on an Oct/Nov roadtrip that Trish and I took to Louisiana and Texas, which included meetings with a couple LOO study groups, but two days ago, Friday night, a weather disaster occurred nearby that made global news. At 220 miles long from start to finish, it was the longest tornado in US history, and 200 miles of it laid waste to parts of Kentucky, our home state. Drone footage of Mayfield, KY reveals a town that was leveled—it looks like a hurricane ran through it. It’s estimated that 70–100 people lost their lives, with many more suffering from injury or severe damage to or destruction of their home. It’s devastating.

If interested, here is a list of ways from Louisville Public Media you can help offer disaster relief to those affects by the storms.

Categories: Uncategorized