2022-05-27

LL_Central

4/22 – 5/26

Search Engine: One of the principal goals of L/L’s new library website is to create more “surface area” for a virtually endless library of information. That is, to make it more accessible, useable, researchable, and helpful. Toward that end, we are VERY HAPPY to report that on May 25, L/L’s new search engine went live! For the first time in the history of the universe, readers, including us, may search the entire breadth of the Confederation channeling—the Law of One and almost five decades of conscious channeling—as a single, synthesized body of material.

Prague: We are excited to announce that we are resuming holding gatherings outside the US! In collaboration with our friends of the Czech translation team, we opened the Prague Law of One Gathering from Aug 12–14. More information here!

Coming Home Gathering: Opened in the previous BW cycle, registration still open.

Channeling Circles: Our small group continues meeting regularly to receive messages from the Confederation. Semi-monthly we meet in Jim’s living room for our Intermediate Circles, and though we have hit a delay this past month, we plan to continue also meeting once a month for our C/C channeling circles. And thanks to our amazing transcription team, a number of transcripts have gone up these past weeks:

RC Youtube: Trish and Austin (mainly Trish) continued on with the Ra Contact Youtube project, inching ever closer to the finish line:

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  • Working with Translators
    • Chinese – Worked to assist the intrepid Li-Yun as she nears completion of translating A Concept Guide into Chinese, including content questions and the challenges of formatting. | Dialogued with Wen about her great effort to produce a new Chinese RC and our policies on machine translation | Welcomed YiTong into the translator family, connected them with Sean and Terry, and thanked them as they embarked upon a translation of Voices of the Confederation. Thank you, all three!
    • Serbian –Dialogued with Sheyla about Dejan’s effort to produce a Serbian RC. Sheyla is a very active person who loves exercise and lots and lots of work. So huge translation projects are right up her alley. ; ) (<– A note for her if she reads this.) Thank you, Dejan and Sheyla!
    • Danish – Received first contact from Thomas, a fellow interested in translating the Ra Contact into Danish. Worked with Thomas to establish terms and relationship, and off to the races he went. Subsequently assisted with some translation related questions. Thank you, Thomas!
    • Russian – Received from Marina some Russian transcripts and assisted with some interesting questions, including how to translate Latwii, as it risks looking like the country Latvia, and the ever thorny questions of noun gender (such a strange concept to a native English speaker). Thank you, Marina! | And dialogued with Catherine about starting on a new book and translating Carla’s audio lectures from her Basic Principles course into Russian. Thank you, Catherine!
    • Farsi  – Publishing Meysam’s work to the website has ended up being a bit more of a difficult task than initially thought. Daniel has had to do some special coding and reviewing thanks to the right-to-left text, which has also caused some issues thanks to our graphic software stubbornly and pointlessly omitting right-to-left functionality. But after some work and cooperation with Meysam, it is almost ready to go… but before it is launched he will translate a couple more items so that the official Farsi page on our site will have more content in all of the sections. |And a huge shout out to Zachary Horn who helped us to green light a way to lend some additional support to this project. Thank you, Zachary!|  And a beautiful quote from the one known as Meysam: “Indeed, finding the material was like coming across an unexpected oasis after a long but hopeful walk along the desert. That blissful feeling of reading the confederation words has stayed with me every day. Having the chance to share the source of that feeling and knowing that it might be the same for many is the greatest reward.”
    • Portuguese – Had some dialogue with Edgard and Pedro about following the Farsi model (and Bulgarian, actually) by publishing batches of sessions of the material. First batch + front matter of the book shouldn’t be far behind.
    • Romanian – Received from Horia not only his usual insightful reflections on the spiritual journey, but a revised Romanian translation of Esmerelda. Thank you, Horia!
    • French – Received outreach from Geoffrey and after setting up terms and relationship, connected him with Misha and Jochen. Look forward to sharing Geoffrey’s work!
    • Italian – Received from the ever-fun Mauro a few new Italian transcripts along with lovely dialogue. Thank you, Mauro! | And received the annual report from Stazione Celeste of the Italian publication of AWH from Susanna. Thank you, Susanna!
    • Korean – And just a couple of days ago, received outreach from Haru, a reader interested in producing a Korean RC book. Explained that that project was actually already underway and then initiated our processes of setting terms and relationship. We’ll see how it goes!
  • Coming Home/Homecoming/Prague: Even though much is being taken up by L/L’s new Event Manager, particularly in terms of processing registrations and responding to attendee inquiries, still tons of logistical work on our end for three events, from scholarships and using the online store to track and process registrations, to budgets, travel, lodging for us, lodging for the Coming Home event (the first time we’re managing all attendee lodging at a retreat), to coordinating with Vojta for Prague, to Misha and Jochen for their attendance and subsequent activity, to filling out Homecoming, to a variety of attendee-related questions. A lot! Much thanks to our new Event Manager and to Emilly, a Law of One reader and Vojta’s partner, who helped a great deal with some of our European lodging! And a special thank you to the HC attendee who is anonymously contributing a couple of scholarships!
  • Seeker ministry: With our new hire on board, and Trish taking up responding to seeker emails as well, the weekly load of emails from seekers around the world is spread out a bit more and feels more manageable. It is still one of the greatest honors of our position, to connect with seekers looking to share their stories and the fruits of their seeking, to ask questions about the material, or just looking to find some connection.
  • Search Engine: While announced above, there was a lot of work in this! Most of which was on Daniel’s shoulders, but the plenty of design and function-related questions and tasks for us to work through, among which was writing the Guidelines Page, many thanks to Joanna for first drafting that one!
  • Audiobooks:
    • For a while now, we’ve been working with Juliane, a wonderful soul in Brazil who has been editing the audiobook for A Wanderer’s Handbook. She’s been a joy to work with, and has done a great job. The work has been delayed some due to life circumstances, and she has recently opted to set it down completely so that we can find another editor. Thank you so much Juliane!
    • Worked to find, for the first time, a professional third-party audiobook editor to get our long overdue audio library of Jim’s narration to publication!
    • Trish adds: “The process to find a professional audiobook editor definitely took me out of my comfort zone – in a good way, though. I’ve never been in a position where I was the sole individual in charge of deciding who should be hired for a certain role. I would much rather act as a sounding board/cheerleader to an individual making a decision than be the actual individual making the decision. (Do not ask me where I want to go for dinner because that is way too much pressure for me. And honest to Bob, I almost certainly have zero preference anyway. “Is there a salad on the menu? Cool, I’m set.”)  Adding to my discomfort, my personal vocabulary for this particular job is, well, limited. I edited the audio for our TRC audiobook, but I did so as a novice. The processes I developed to edit that audio were largely discovered through trial and error. So for me to find the language to dialogue with a professional audiobook editors required some finagling. I very much felt like a high schooler interviewing a post-grad student. But thanks to a combination of intuition and help from my home team, we signed a contract with an amazing 4-person company. I genuinely look forward to hearing what they produce.”
  • Typo Project: We reported in the previous Blogworthy that a reader discovering typos in the 40th Anniversary Edition of the Law of One books became a bit of a can of worms. Since then, that can of worms have become a barrel of worms. Perhaps an oil tanker of worms. The publisher has been working kindly with us to sort out the issue, but it has necessitated a significant amount of effort on our part to begin to unravel their mistakes so that they can be undone by a reprint. A thorough process is unfolding of meticulously comparing three different versions of the text to note both mistakes made during an OCR scanning process and edits done without our approval. Trish began the process by discovering around 163 errors in the five books just by an eye scan alone. Since then, we had to create a process to compare three different documents in order to ferret out the additional errors and wrongfully made edits, and anywhere from 2–3 of our team have been working on it at a time. | Had a couple of video meet-ups with the publisher on the matter and various emails. Maybe another week or two and it will be finished.
    • Trish adds: “Fun fact: Between editing the TRC audiobook, creating the YouTube videos that utilize the original channeling audio, and going through this second round of error-finding, I will have essentially read the books just for these purposes five times now. And each time I am discovering juicy li’l nugs of inspiration. ❤”
    • “I have never researched grammar so much in my life, BTW. I feel like I have a pretty robust understanding of the English language. But dang does this project make me question the mechanics of hyphenation more than ever before.”
  • Social Media/Printed Book 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.
    • Shipped book orders around the world and managed the online store, with various customer inquiries to process.
    • Implemented edits to channeling transcripts on the website and continued to support the volunteer transcribers in the question to fill in some holes in our channeling library.
    • Continued project of digitizing channeling audio, including discovering channelings and meetings that have yet to be transcribed/added to the website. The sometimes haphazard way that cassettes were recorded and recovered over and non-systematically stored at the time is humorous.
    • Continued to work on editing and finalizing podcast transcripts. Completed 3 podcast transcript edits this period.
  • Prison Ministry Program
    • Chose 5 volunteers to work with us on the Prison Ministry and onboarded them to the systems we use to manage our correspondence
    • Since the program re-launched, our volunteers have helped to send out 5 letters.
  • Nuts & Bolts:
    • All of the typical maintenance, typo correction, etc. with the library site and the online store. |IT stuff – addressing software issues, investigating solutions to problems, integrating technology into our processes. All regular activities in our daily rounds.
    • Online store issues, again: Over the past few weeks, multiple random issues have popped up . The platform is an open source piece of software, which has its benefits, but among the drawbacks is that there is no real professional help available, and more unique bugs that don’t necessarily affect the whole community will often be ignored. So we have to scrape by with our own limited skillset.
    • Took another step on the long journey with a tangled copyright question with the help of attorneys, this one bringing us much closer to resolution.
    • Could not find the time to perform the in-depth analysis for our annual tax returns, so sought and gained an extension.
    • Pursued all sorts of questions with the Law of One publisher related to underreported and missing sales (due not to foul play on their end but mechanical mistakes…. that persist) and other related logistics. Fortunately they are cooperative in good faith and continue to work toward resolution.
    • Completed five weeks’ worth of the bookkeeping
  • Smatterings: Helped to facilitate Jim’s ongoing work with the final student of the “Basic Principles” course | Held some dialogue with the CSC | Had a video meet-up with the Swedish translator and our friend, Lana, after a long lapse in communication | Held rounds of dialogue with Aaron Maret, seed of the AVLLOO study group, about efforts to teach the LOO | Enjoyed a couple emails with the Tarot deck team | met with a journalist for an online magazine who had questions about the Law of One and L/L | Made a push toward completion of editing the transcript of the Nov, 2021 interview with Morris about early L/L history after a long hiatus. Just a few pages away!

  • Daniel: If Daniel made his own report, it would be a long one all by itself. The Trello Boards we share with him for website work are filled with cards as far as the eye can see…
  • Intermediate Circles: On our own time, joined Kathy and Jim at Jim’s on 4/28 and 5/11 for two intermediate circles. 4/28 was about the tension between surrender and responsibility, and 5/11 held space for individual questions.
  • C/C Circles: Did not have our monthly C/C circle due to Austin receiving a bullet in his leg (see post above this one), Gary’s Dad passing, and Trish being blessed with a breakthrough case of COVID-19 that laid her out for a week.

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Personal Sharings

Gary: Celebrated Jim’s 75th birthday in this period. He is still full of vigor and energy for service and seeking.

And then on a less celebratory note—unless the completion of the incarnation is celebrated, which seems appropriate on the metaphysical level—after a few years of advancing dementia, my father passed away peacefully in his sleep on April 27. We will hold a service in June to say goodbye as a family. In the meantime I wrote a little piece.

About My Dad’s Closing Chapters

I think we have two basic fundamental choices regarding how we relate to our suffering. Do we dig in and face it in order to learn, grow, and be better than we were, thereby transmuting the misery into expanded being? Or we do resist, run away from, and avoid our difficulties, thereby extending their duration and increasing their intensity?

Most of us vacillate between these two, I believe. My dad often chose the latter path. Whether through alcohol or a cocktail of pharmaceutical numbing agents, he spent a lot of time not facing himself. I don’t judge him for this, particularly as I see similar threads in me—my dad just didn’t have the tools or the wherewithal to really dig into those things that troubled him in the deeper layers, and to face the fears and pains buried there. Instead I want to share my admiration for what he *was* able to accomplish.

Beginning sometime in the late 2000s, sometime after the divorce when his own long dark night got underway, when he began to turn increasingly to prescription medication for some kind of solution, some sort of false release from pain, he made a conscious, intentional vow to himself to release his anger and “negativism.” For him, this meant to no longer complain, to not speak ill of others, to not waste an extra minute of his life in anger, to see the positive, and to be grateful for the blessings that life gifts all of us.

In the very difficult subsequent years—driven in large part by his deep well of guilt and self-punishment for perceived wrongdoings—he held onto that vow tightly. And from the trenches he somehow managed to fulfill his promise. Gradually he transformed. He released his anger. He became such a soft, gentle, and kindhearted man. He expressed love and gratitude so often. As suffering has a way of doing, he was humbled. Underneath the daily game of running from pain, his chief wish in life seemed to be to relate to others with love.

After the stroke and onset of vascular dementia, that process of opening his heart accelerated. As dementia stripped him of his memories, he became so innocent, so much more in his heart. He seemed to express even more love and gratitude. He was a light.

And what few memories he could hold onto he cherished. Endlessly he loved showing everyone his “memories” in the form of pictures hanging up around his walls. And in every conversation he cycled through the handful of memories he could recall. (He seemed to have a different set of for everyone he talked to. His favorite with me was remembering how he and I marched in our hometown Memorial Day parade together in our military uniforms.)

Due to his years spent self-medicating and then the dementia, it feels like we’ve been losing him for a long time such that the actual passing feels like a formality, an official confirmation and graceful close to the long unfolding separation, like seeing the boat you are watching grow smaller from the shore finally vanish over the horizon. So there is great peace in my heart with his transition.

But the tears come thinking that that great and proud man who I called “dad,” who as a little kid was a giant to me, is no longer here with us, at least while we live and breathe on this side of the veil of forgetting.

For all your human imperfections, and the inadvertent pain you brought to others, you did your best, Dad. Of this I have no doubt. I admire what you were able to accomplish in this life. I see your perseverance when you were at bottom and wanted to end it all. I thank you for those gifts which are too many for the counting, among which includes the gift of life, the gift of your years and long hours of hard work to provide for us, the gift of giving me the protected space in a difficult world to grow into who I am, and even, in the end, the gift of your vulnerability as you became a portal into innocence for us.

And I thank my brother Adam for the mountains he moved to offer that fatherly service in reverse to our own father, and my sister-in-law Lori who so lovingly carried that weight alongside of Adam, and to my Aunt Sue for the selfless love of a sister that sheltered and sustained my dad’s heart through challenging times, and my mom who underwent her own hard times with my dad but put aside her suffering to stand by him in mutual service to their four kids.

Dad. I love you. We will meet again.

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