Category: Uncategorized

2023.02.27

LL_Central

11/5 – 2/17

Multisite Launched! Starting with German, we began rolling out the multisites, that is the foreign-language versions of LLResearch.org. As of this writing, parallel versions of the library website are available in German, Indonesian, Portuguese, Greek (its debut on the website at language #23!), Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese, with the remainder coming around the corner.

You can read about the scope of the project and its function in our news announcement: https://www.llresearch.org/news/2023/multisite.

One of our greatest joys is to see this material translated into other languages. It advances our core mission to help spiritual seekers by making this information available to all who seek and may benefit. So it is something of a dream to see L/L Research’s library site become so readily available in other languages. Carla would be beside herself to see it! (From the incarnational perspective, that is.)

Thank you so much Catherine, Edgard, Erez, Erik, Fatiha, Gabriel, Hakan, Horia, Jochen, Julien, Kirilina, Lana, Laszlo, Margarita, Mauro, Meysam, Misha, Pawel, Pupak, Roman, Sean, Sheyla, Terry, Vasilis, and Vojta! And thank you as ever, Daniel, who could fill a long list of bullet points all his own were he to chronicle his adventures in web development. 🙂

[In future development, there will be a translation option that will allow the reader to toggle between the various languages available for a particular transcript while preserving the position of the transcript, making for easier one-to-one comparison, particular with the English original. Also, we will add fields to make visible and give credit and honor to the translator(s) and editor(s) responsible for any particular work. Among other updates.]

Ra Contact YouTube Series Completed! The project has reached its conclusion. All 106 sessions of the Ra Contact have had their audio combined with the text in video format and shared freely on Youtube. When we first tested out the format, it struck us as a meaningful and unique way to present and experience the material. Its message transcribed on screen; something so much greater than the voice which delivered it; something sourced at an inconceivable distance, yet intimately familiar.

It was with this sense—combined with a desire to make the original audio more accessible and available to interested seekers—that a project was born in May, 2019 to synthesize the audio of the 106 sessions of the Ra contact with the text of The Ra Contact books. As of December, 2022, we are thrilled to announce that the long, 3.5-year journey has come to completion.

While listening to the original audio is not the best way to study the material—it moves at the speed of a tortoise—it creates an immersive, even meditative experience. And for the exceptionally patient, it does offer a means of going directly to the source to receive, for one’s own consideration, the philosophy of the Law of One.

On our YouTube page, you can find the full playlist of the 106 sessions of The Ra Contact, including the final seven sessions created since the last Blogworthy.

Events Launched: Thanks to Trisha’s hit-the-ground-running hardwork (more below), we’ve launched two events back to back. The 2023 Homecoming Gathering and the 2023 Prague Law of One Gathering. To our surprise, the first filled up in 24 hours of opening the public registration. It is a reality we are still adjusting to. The second still has seats available if interested. We are so excited to see faces old and new.

Podcast: Gary and Austin met to record what was supposed to be Episode 104 of the Law of One Podcast, except it turned into a two-episode series all focused on meditation. Given that it is a central topic in the Confederation’s messages, there is more than enough for us to cover about the subject to fill a whole series of podcasts. You can check out the episodes on our podcast page.

Channeling Circles & Public Meditations: For the first time since before the pandemic, we resumed the public meditations. And for the first time, the whole channeling circle joined Jim  in channeling replies to questions from the circle.

We non-Jim instruments were all a bit nervous to cross the threshold into the public meditations. One limitation of our training up to this point is that we have selected only questions curated to be highly suitable for this type of contact. (Whoever is doing the selecting doesn’t share the question until the moment that it is asked.) And it is nerve-wracking know that your channeling may have impact upon a seeker. We therefore wanted to prepare ourselves for questions asked of Q’uo that might skirt the boundaries of free will and/or move far beyond the instrument’s knowledge (a limitation inherent to conscious channeling). So at the 11/10 and 11/16 channelings, we simulated an environment to test and prepare ourselves, presenting some questions that we as instruments might encounter out in the wild. It was very helpful. And then with strong encouragement from Jim, and a supportive and understanding circle, we leapt into the water… and swam.

It’s been particularly inspiring being with seekers again on a regular basis in our home town. There are some old friends and a bunch of new faces holding a vibration of authenticity, mutual care, and joy/gratitude to be gathered together. Among those new faces we’ve come to appreciate, we made a few friends at last year’s Coming Home gathering in Asheville who have made recurring trips to the meditations from Chicago.

On our own time, we met for Saturday meditations on 11/26, 12/10, 1/14, 2/11; Intermediate circles on 11/16, 12/14, 2/15; and we even squeaked in one C/C on 11/10.

Audiobooks: Another two audiobooks have joined our audiobook library, thanks to Trisha’s efforts working with an audiobook production company. You can now check out A Wanderer’s Handbook and Voices of the Confederation. A Channeling Handbook is currently in the works.

EM Transition: After some soul searching due to unexpected life transitions on her end, including plans to launch her own equine therapy non-profit, Tiffani found that she needed to lovingly relinquish the Event Manager role. She still plans on continuing to attend as many events as she can, and volunteering. As she communicated recently to us, “L/L has been with me for 22 years and my heart continues to share that space and oneness with us all.”

When we in Louisville met to consider how to move forward, Trish raised her hand and indicated that, so long it was in harmony with the operation, she would love to take on the responsibilities. We considered it over the next few days and it became obvious to all of us that Trish would be perfectly suited.

Among Trisha’s qualifications and the benefits to the organization, she has been helping with and involved in event production since 2012, for most of those years as a volunteer or well beyond her recent years of compensated time, particularly in her round-the-clock work at Homecoming; she built and manages the reservation system for the public meditations; she already manages the online store and bookkeeping, has a positive rapport with our event collaborators, requires much less onboarding than anyone else, is already in attendance at L/L events, is already practicing space holding, knows many of those who attend and is something of the de facto “house mom” for Homecoming, and her proximity to Gary (L/L’s primary EM since 2005) will make for an easy and timely flow of communication and coordination. And because this would happen in the context of her existing work, there would be no additional cost to L/L and its presently tight budget. She is ready to meet the challenges head on in service to the readership.

We had a great time working closely with Tiffani and remain grateful that she helped us to oil up the rusty gears to resume holding events after a three-year hiatus. Thank you, Tiffani!

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  • Translations: Another large batch of transcriptions made their way online since the last Blogworthy report, as translation efforts continue to increase and the amazing volunteers who offer their services persist in bringing the material to different segments of humanity:
  • Translators, working with:
    • Multisite: Lots of work with and from nearly every active translator in building the multisite (see announcement at the top). Most everyone has turned in their translation homework, and has been an active participant in reviewing and editing a preview version of the multisite before it goes live.
    • Romanian Ra Contact: Worked with Jochen and Horia to bring the Romanian Ra Contact translation into printable form, which includes the formatting and typesetting to fit the printer standards, along with generating the cover art, after which Jochen carried the ball to the finish line and brought a printed version of the Romanian RC Volume 1 into space/time manifestation! If a Romanian reader wants a printed version over the free PDF online, they can not get it from this print-on-demand service.
    • Chinese Concept Guide: Li-yun’s steady and skillful work translating A Concept Guide into Chinese has made another L/L work available to a large segment of our planetary population. After generating the proper cover are and getting it situated online, it now has a home in the Traditional Chinese version of the library site.
    • Portuguese: Worked with Edgard along with some correspondence with Pedro about moving forward and rebooting the Portuguese TRC project.
    • Greek: Received L/L’s first transcripts in Greek. Thank you, Vasilis!
    • Russian: Received a manuscript from Serge (translator of the Russian TRC) of his in-depth and comprehensive independent work on the archetypes that looks outststanding. | Onboarded a new Russian translator, Margarita, who is working on a new Russian TRC to share the road with the existing one, along with a YouTube series on the Ra Contact. And received a transcript from Margarita. Thank you! | And Vladimir, despite limited circumstances, persisted in his dedication and sent in a couple transcripts as well. Thank you, Vladimir!
    • Serbian: Received from Dejan his latest installment in his ongoing work to produce a Serbian TRC. Thank you, Dejan!
    • Farsi: Resuming work through political uncertainty and violent upheaval in his country, M. & team sent new Farsi translations of TRC, but our greater joy was in learning that he and his immediate family are okay.
    • French: Did some work with a potential French editor that didn’t pan out.
    • Bulgarian: Received from Kirilina new sessions of TRC in Bulgarian. It has been a slow-burning project for her as most of her time/energy is consumed, but she persists when and where she can. Thank you, Kirilina!
    • Hungarian: Received from Laszlo his revisions in a longterm project to update the Hungarian TRC. Thank you, Laszlo!
    • Polish: Received an updated TRC from Pawel, thank you, Pawel! And new transcripts from Marlena. Thank you, Marlena! And learned that Pawel had connected with Marlena and her group, and Marlena had launched a website, and enjoyed some productive correspondence about the desires and dreams for service to the Polish readership. And added the Polish study group to the Directory!
    • Hebrew: Dialogued with Erez about several matters, including the certification that the Hebrew translation of TRC is underway!
    • Vietnamese: Heard from the Vietnamese publisher that they expect the Vietnamese 101 to be available by April.
    • Dutch: Received a few Dutch transcripts from Martine. Thank you, Martine! And caught up with Erik about her surgery to remove a tumor.
    • Spanish: Onboarded two new translators, one from Uruguay, the other from Peru, and received multiple transcripts from both. Thank you, Maite and Octavio! Had fruitful dialogue with Gabriel about the Spanish TRC about the meaning of words/concepts as he endeavors to produce a Spanish TRC.
    • Arabic: After over six months of silence, received an update from B. Life, as it does, has just claimed all of his available energy, to the point of exhaustion and even some despair at times. But the translation is a service that he feel is important and close to his spiritual path, so he intends on resuming in order to finish the final pieces for an Arabic TRC. Thank you, B.! May your being find improved circumstances in which to rest and to seek the Creator.
    • Turkish – Worked with Hakan on some questions aobut the Turkish AWH, and received outreach from Nihal about a Turkish AWH, incidentally, and the Turkish Law of One. However, this work and correspondence was put on hold due to the colossal catalyst of the February 6 earthquake and the subsequent aftershocks. More in the personal sharings section.   
  • Seeker Ministry: Each week we divvy out the incoming email to L/L Research from around the world and do our best meet seekers’ needs, limited though that is by email and organizational bandwidth. We do our best to avoid being authorities, and we definitely clarify that we don’t have answers about the seeker’s personal journey. Instead we just share something of our own study, properly disclaimed. We wish there was more space in the days’ packed schedules to share little snippets and anecdotes of the stories and moments we receive that evoke a full range of emotion and insight. Do want to shine a light on correspondence with Jeannette, one of the co-facilitators of the Hawaii Law of One study group. After a ton of spiritual and practical work, envisioning, intention setting, prayer, etc., they were on the cusp of acquiring a small patch of land to launch a land-based community and healing effort for Gaia, but due to circumstances outside of their control, connected probably to capitalistic forces, the deal dissolved. Admired their strength of spirit and tenacity in moving forward with an open heart.
  • Prison Ministry: We continue to offer our correspondence service for our incarcerated friends thanks to the help of our prison ministry volunteers who helped us send 21 letters and 11 books. To help deepen our collaborative efforts and to learn more about each other, our team held a Zoom Holiday get-together in December with our prison ministry volunteers. This meeting offered our team an opportunity to personally thank them for their service and to learn about each of their unique spiritual journeys. It proved to be a very fruitful gathering that helped to strengthen the commitment we each hold for this special ministry.
  • Podcast Transcripts: Joanna has also continued her hard work editing and uploading 10 additional podcast transcripts to our Law of One Podcast page. It is one of our goals to have transcripts available for all our auditory material because it makes it more accessible for our international friends who have an easier time understanding English in written form than they do listening to it, along with for those who find it easier to read along while they listen, and makes the text available to the search engine – a huge gift!
  • Events Work 1:
    • Built and issued a survey to the ~100 people who attended one of L/L’s three events last year to see what worked, what didn’t, what we could do to improve to meet needs, etc. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive with some constructive thoughts for refinements here and there.
    • Built event production guides to create a reference/instruction manual for producing an L/L event along with a template of questions to answer in determining venue eligibility as part of a means to record and transmit Gary’s and L/L’s institutional knowledge for use for the organization.
    • Improved the budgeting and worked with Trish to design Trello boards for planning, executing, and tracking event production.
    • Worked with our friends of TOTOH in Asheville on the Coming Home event to land a new venue for 2023 as the 2022 site was beautiful but didn’t quite meet our needs. They scouted out a new place that has some potential but was quite $$. They couldn’t research further as TOTOH’s bandwidth is being taken up by their new projects. We congratulate them on developing a program and putting all the considerable wisdom they’ve gained over the years in intentional community to work! They have so much to offer. That means though that we’re flying solo this year in determining a venue, time, and location for a fall Coming Home event.
  • Events Work 2: As mentioned above, Trish took up the EM (Events Manager) role with gusto and dexterity. Homecoming and Prague were both launched over the weekend and she spent the weekend replying to each new registration, logging the registrations, etc. Here’s her report of EM work.
    • Began training with Gary to understand the processes of event production
    • Co-created a comprehensive and streamlined task management system utilizing the Trello application
    • Co-created 2023 event budgets, collaborating with both L/L Research Kentucky team members and the Czech translation team
    • Researched and communicated with local restaurants ahead of the 2023 Homecoming Gathering, with the goal of settling on catering services for the event. [GB note: This is a big thing. For the first time since 2013 or so, Trish is releasing the preparation and cooking of the weekend’s food in favor of catering, something a chorus of people from last year’s Homecoming recommended (given that she misses much of the event being tied to the kitchen), and in light of her new EM responsibilities.]
    • Drafted documentation for all event announcements, attendee communications, and other items of import for the 2023 events
    • Created announcement pages for events on our library website
    • Created online store listings for event registration
    • Managed registrant communication for 2023 Homecoming and Law of One European Gatherings
    • Began work updating the Events page on our library website to include our 2022 gatherings
    • Began research for other potential venues and locations for future L/L Research events
  • Healing Circle Retreat. One of L/L’s board members, Beatriz, is a longtime practicing healer who has helped people from all around the world. She conducts small healing retreats for those seeking healing on all levels, whether physical, mental/emotional, or spiritual. In response to painful events that have occurred in our lives, she offered to come to Louisville to conduct a retreat at Jim’s for a small gathered group, each who would be bringing something that they want to work toward healing. It was the first that we experienced one of these healing circles. It was powerful, the outcome, amplified by the shared focus and purpose over the course of the weekend. We approached Beatriz about the possibility of L/L promoting a couple of these events to the readership. Our current events are healing and transformational for many, but L/L does not offer intensives with a single focus upon healing, nor with the catalyst of a surrendered and skilled healer. More to come! And meanwhile, Trisha shares her personal experience in the Personal Sharings section below.
  • Law of One Forums: Touched base with Patrick and Steve on their operation over at the Law of One Forums. Gave gratitude for the efforts, Patrick in particular, for maintaining a focused and safe online space under the L/L banner for shared Law of One study.
  • 102 editing: It’s has been quite a while since Jim finished writing and doing the first round of edits on Living the Law of One – 102. He has been incredibly patient as the project has started and stopped several times, getting lost in the maelstrom of busyness. As we rededicate our efforts to give it a thorough edit, we are restructuring the workflow and bringing Joanna in to fold, knowing that she’ll be a perfect fit for helping to bring the book to full completion. So the project was redesigned and she was oriented to the process, while some cleanup and organizing was done on the chapters that have been in various stages of editing. She’ll start at the beginning to get a full understanding of the book, and in the meantime Chapter 5 was fully formatted and brought close to the next stage in its life cycle.
  • Brown Notebook: A reader pointed out via email recently that there were some issues with the Brown Notebook, and a unified PDF of the book was not available. This required some investigation and utilization of the internet archive to figure out exactly what was going on. After generating a PDF for her, the reader generously volunteered to create a list of mistakes needing to be untangled. | Additionally, Jim recently received a trove of materials that are related to the group that first compiled the Brown Notebook, including potential additions to the material from that time period. So there may be an effort to expand on this work that played a crucial role in L/L’s history.
  • Pyramids: Worked with Joshua, facilitator for the “Reading the Law of One” online study group, through email and Zoom on a project to create 3D printed 3rd spiral pyramids and meditation pyramids per Ra’s specifications, the former for placing beneath the head for the energizing effects of the third spiral, the latter for meditating inside of to enhance the meditative experience.
  • Social Media/Printed Book Sharing of the Confederation’s Message:
    • Completed the final sessions of the Ra Contact YouTube project!
    • Updated Facebook and Twitter with Confederations quotes, created and shared Instagram images, and updated Patreon with L/L news and offerings
    • Explored and implemented a third-party service that allows us an ability that we used to have but that Facebook removed, that is to add a first comment in a scheduled post, a necessity for sharing the link for the Confederation text to the source on the website.
    • 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.
  • Newsletters: The Winter edition of Light/Lines was created and sent out both through email and snail mail. We’ve also utilized our Gatherings Newsletter list to make several announcements about updates to L/L Research work, as well as the year’s coming gatherings. If you want to be kept up to date, be sure to sign up on the Gathering’s Newsletter page.
  • Nuts n Bolts
    • Fundraiser: The last BW report took place at the climb-up to our annual fundraiser. The entire fundraiser came and went during that time, which included all of the many pieces coming together for generating mailing lists, creating and printing letters and envelopes, stuffing those envelopes, and navigating the labyrinth of the USPS business mailing system in order to send out the mailing, not to mention the (much simpler) digital campaign. It was a strong year in raising ~53k. We again are humbled by the generosity of seekers who respond so generously to our request. L/L Research relies on the funds raised from the fundraiser to continue its operations, mostly the many items you can read about here in the Blogworthy. Thank you to everyone who is able to offer their support in any way.
    • Year-end thank you’s: Went through the complex logistics to create and send year-end thank you’s to various donors.
    • New online store: Consistent readers of the Blogworthy will probably know that we’ve had issues with our online store platform for some time. The OpenCart platform was adopted nearly 10 years ago because it was free and, being open source, had a lot of community support. But after the most recent update basically broke the store so that maintenance had to be consistent just to keep up, investigating a new prospect became necessary. Much has changed in the past 10 years with ecommerce platforms, and so the decision to migrate to a new platform was made. So with some effort, customization, and endless tinkering, a new storefront was launched using Shopify. Already the lifting of the burden of the old broken store has been a blessing.

      But of course it doesn’t come without its own bugs a quirks. Things like the international are quite unintuitive and took a lot of trial and error to get working correctly, and getting the options for gathering product pages sorted took a fair bit of effort as well, and there are still many little things to sort out. But overall, it has been a boon.
    • Year-end tax and HR stuff: The end of the year always comes with some effort needed to ensure that payroll taxes and HR stuff is functioning the way it should. Our payroll service thankfully takes care of a lot of the tedium, but it’s still our responsibility to ensure that things are filed properly and that we are in compliance with the various laws and regulations of the federal and state governments. This involves reviewing the filings and payments made to the now four tax agencies that we report to, ensuring that our data is up to date for unemployment insurance and worker’s comp, ensuring that the W-2s and 1090s are filled out and filed correctly, and all of that fun stuff. The new year also necessitated some rearrangement of how payroll handled part-time hours and designing a PTO system within the payroll system to make sure everything is logged and reported accurately for the various labor regulation agencies we fall under. 
    • Tech and online services: Diligent BW readers may also know that we occasionally touch on the nature of our software and digital framework that has become central to the workflow and administration of L/L Research, and crucial aspect of fulfilling our mission. Much has changed since we started working from home during the pandemic lockdown, and we continue to grow and learn about how to manage a mostly digital workflow with so many different moving parts. Gary’s brother, who works for Microsoft, very generously offered an informal consulting sessions to display the potential of Microsoft’s Teams suite. While we use Microsoft for some aspects of our work, consolidating the various parts of our digital workspace and domain could potentially bring some serious benefits in terms of optimization and collaboration. But given the established other services we use, it will take some research and careful planning to make the migration successfully.

      But the effort is underway, with the goal that the various tools available to us through this suite will allow for a fresh workflow that has more room for creative projects and other exciting things that have been on the backburner for so long. This involves a lot of research and testing for how to properly and safely migrate all of our various types of data, files, emails, services, etc. L/L’s administration is so well-established digitally that ensuring nothing goes awry and that everything will work properly once the transition is made is very important. Some initial investigation and testing is also being done to try to migrate our publishing workflow over to Adobe, which will be a pretty steep technological learning curve, but could potentially
    • Website tweaks: Made grammatical and spelling corrected on published channeling transcripts (part of my process of going through the channeling archives from 1974 until present day)
    • Law of One Publisher: In the last BW post, we reported that the typo project with the Law of One publisher had wrapped up and the new books had entered the production pipeline. Since then, the new books have been printed, received, and reviewed for further mistakes, bringing the saga to somewhat of a conclusion. The books are thankfully back on sale and free of the myriad of mistakes introduced by the publisher in the process of creating the boxed set edition. Another project in collaboration with them regarding a card deck has been in limbo as this situation ran its course.
    • Bookkeeping: Completed bookkeeping every week for the organization, keeping the yellow ray shining. (GB sidenote: for the budget meeting, I had to review another year of Trisha’s bookkeeping. It is a highly complex and large volume of data that she inputs and manages. And I found only a few tiny errors, a most impressive feat as it is nigh impossible not to make an error with a jungle of details. I miss the bookkeeping. The usual L/L workload is mentally intensive. Constant decision making involving often novel situations. High volume of correspondence. Etc. Bookkeeping, tho complex and still problem solving, used a different part of the brain. But, Trish has mastered it.)
    • Meetings: Had a few different annual meetings, between ourselves in Louisville, with Joanna to review the year and look ahead to the coming, with Daniel to plan for web development work over the year, held a budget meeting with the board, and prepared for the upcoming AGM.
    • ISBNs: With the LOO publisher’s new versions combined with the typo fiasco, ensured that all of our ISBNs were correct and up to date, logging them all so that we know which version is which.
    • New laptop for Jim: Also recently, Jim’s laptop decided that its job here on Earth was done and it was time to move on. What should technically be a relatively simple fix actually required a complete replacement because of the proprietary nature of laptop assembly. But…the backup software that was supposed to keep Jim’s files safe apparently decided that it also didn’t like its job and stopped working without any notice. (It was actually the software company that simply decommissioned the software without warning.) But with some surgical efforts and creative problem solving,
    • Bits and pieces: There is the ever-present list of ongoing work to keep things running smoothly, such as regular trips to the PO box and the bank, discovering and/or fixing minor typos or issues on the Library Site or online store, resolving more regular and mundane tech issues and general tech maintenance, making all of the big and small decisions that come to us on a daily basis. The mundane work is always offset by the great privilege and honor of serving in the capacity that we do.
  • Smatterings: Discussed the potential of using/sharing colorized RC photos. | Finalized the text of the interview with Morris, just need to give it a once over and publish | Celebrated the 42nd anniversary of the RC. | Performed an analysis of the website related costs, Bring4th, library, search engine, online store, forums. |We continued working with a producer at Gaia TV to help them with presenting some aspects of the Ra contact in a coming series. | Published 15 previously-missing channeling transcripts, going as far back as 1974 to as recent as 2006.

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Czech

Some updates from the Czech translation team in their quarterly reports

  1. Published S64 on the website
  2. Viliam (VV) (our new addition to the team) translated S71, 72 (next: edit & proofreading)
  3. Nadia roughly translated S69   (next: edit & proofreading)
    Up-to-date translation assignments:
    – S65 (Radim/V), S66 (VV edit), S67 (V), S68 (V/VV?), S69 (V edit), S73 (VV), S74 (Bara), S75 (Romi)

Special task for Q1/23:

  • Translation for the L/L website (Romi + Vojta)
  • Locking the dates and plans for Europe / Berlin gathering in January with L/L
  • After returning from the states, I plan on working on printing the Ra contact. We will work together (mainly with Austin) on the final pre-print formatting and edits after we lock in the process.
  • Also, another thing is for me to organize a meetup, with translators and offer it to some attendees of our last Gathering. It will be in Prague and I will aim for something in February-March, locking the date in January via email voting for the date

German

And from Jochen of DGDEV

  • I’d like to highlight the production of the Romanian Ra Contact Volume I, which came to its completion after our globe spanning team effort. It always feels very special to me to work with the Ra Contact and I am glad to be able to so for the Romanian seekers. I thank you, Gary and Austin, and Horia again that we accomplished Volume I together.
  • Other important activities were definitely the preparation of the German L/L Research website version through Daniel’s professional expertise and Gary’s very patient coaching, and that I participated in a number of zoom calls offered by Daniel from Berlin through the European Telegram group.
  • As Misha reported, were the French activities that Misha completed the French L/L Research website translation, and continued in small steps, despite challenging health catalyst, translating A Channeling Handbook.

Europe Law of One Study Group

Daniel Hodapp shared the following from the Europe LOO Study Group

I hope you had a good start in 2023. Our Law of One – Europe Telegram Group had their first zoom call this year last Saturday. We have some new members from all over Europe. The group grown to 39 members now. In Saturdays call we had a open talk to introduce new members and share also some activities. I was very happy to get to know that is also grow with our friends in Poland. They currently have a work group which review polish translation of Ra- Material. Furthermore it turns out that 2 members of our group from Scotland met first time in our Telegram Group and find out that both of them just live few miles away from each other and study Ra-Material, but never know each other before. Such stories make me very happy and was initial idea of this group for networking and sharing for student of Law of One in Europe.

Personal Sharings

Gary: In the course of some internal group correspondence, this exchange occurred between Joanna and Austin that struck me for its light. They each gave permission to republish here.

Joanna: Like Ra said, there is love to be found in every moment. And although [L/L’s friend who is experiencing medically difficult catalyst] shared that it’s been hard for him to be in that spiritual headspace during this difficult time, I think that him showing the courage and vulnerability to share that with us is a part of that search for love. While I haven’t been dealing with matters of life and death, I feel that I am experiencing some difficult feelings and emotions that likewise make it hard to be “spiritual” all the time. But I just realized through this interaction that the courage to share our struggles *is* the act of seeking love through difficult moments even though it doesn’t always feel like it. :green_heart:

This makes me think of a concept I received through meditation a few weeks ago. Imagine the game of Jeopardy…Law of One style. No matter the “answer” the “question” will always be, “What is Love?”

When someone cuts you off in traffic. Answer: What is Love? You receive bad news about your health. Answer: What is Love? You are experiencing internal torment. Answer: What is Love?

See, if the question is not “What is Love?” then you either have the wrong “answer” or perspective, or you’re not playing the right Game.

Well, thank you all for offering this space to share some of these thoughts. I’m so grateful for each one of you!

And in reply:

Austin: Joanna, thank you for sharing about your own difficulties. I think that sometimes the harder it is to “stay spiritual,” the more we know we’re on the path. It’s like your Jeopardy analogy, it’s easy when you say “I’ll take ‘The Second Distortion’ for $100, Alex.” and the answer is “A beautiful day and everyone is smiling happily.” But then sometimes we take the same category for $1,000, and the answer is “Everything in life seems to be falling apart.” The question for both is “What is love?” but one is much more obvious, yet the harder one is worth more cash. Thanks for the analogy to play with. 🙂

In other sharings…

My father passed last year at 66 years old due to stroke-induced dementia. I wrote a piece about it in a personal sharing last year. I recently found a great picture of him at my aunt’s (his sister’s) art studio. I’ve retroactively added the pic to the May 27, 2022 post. If you want to see my pa, just scroll to the bottom.

In talking pyramids with Aaron Maret, he sent me this link to a 3D model of the Great Pyramid that you can navigate through and look around. You have to create a free account to use the site, but if you’re like me and have been fascinated with the pyramids most your life, it will be worth it. I’ve never experienced so detailed a virtual, interactive model of the pyramid. Little things I wasn’t aware of, like the niches in the Grand Gallery floor, or the ways the passages intersect, or the height of the Grand Gallery. It is no substitute for the in-person experience, but much more immersive than my previous forays. Particularly how long and narrow the descent is down into the resonating chamber. Holy cow, that alone might rattle the psyche, especially if you hear a giant stone slab shut behind you…

Our friend and Romanian translator, Horia, shared this beautiful personal creation with us on youtube.

Recently I put together that Ra’s total third-density population is almost the exact equivalent of the current population of Canada (and around the same as California and Tokyo). Can you imagine, they had a whole planet to themselves. Venus is very similar in size to Earth, though we don’t know the amount of landmass that was available in their third-density experience; and of that, how much was inhabitable. But still, lots of space compared to our densely if not overly populated world.

And about the sorrows of our world… Soon after the the devastating first day of earthquakes that hit eastern Turkey/northern Syria, we received outreach from a shaken Hakan, the kindhearted Turkish translator, asking for help in the form of sending love/light in our meditations. The whole L/L team, staff + board, mobilized to meditate a few hours later, and we issued a request via social media to join us in the effort. We invite all to continue to be of support, energetically and financially if possible. Here is a collection of charities with various services in the area via Charity Navigator. If interested: https://www.charitynavigator.org/discover-charities/where-to-give/earthquakes-turkey-syria/

The magnitude of the loss and the suffering is difficult to comprehend. We try to remember the nature of eternal life in these moments, and we look to the Creator in the trust of things we do not understand, but the heart also vibrates pain for the total devastation of communities and families – a lot of which would have been prevented if the buildings had been built to code, it seems – and a trauma to the wider region. May our divisions and bellicosity melt in the increasing light of love as we move toward the fourth density of evolution.

Categories: Uncategorized

The Art of Self-Healing Weekend

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Trish: This is the journal entry of my experience at the healing circle retreat conducted by Beatriz last month (mentioned in the Blogworthy entry above).

Sincerely, I do not know how I would begin to describe this weekend. The first word that comes to mind is powerful, but even that feels far too one-dimensional to fully encapsulate my experience. So perhaps starting from the beginning and working my way to the present is my most effective and efficient means of putting words to this event.

I have long struggled with low or inexistent self-worth. Feelings of self-hatred and self-condemnation go back to early childhood. I never tried to understand from where those feelings were sourced, mainly because I figured that I brought them with me into this incarnation.

As I grew older and experienced catalyst, I chalked up those moments of challenge to be reflections of my inabilities. “I had this experience because I am unable to [love/be loved/understand/be understood/etc.]” I could recognize my own part in catalyst, and I could grasp the idea that all is as it should be. But I lacked the perspective of co-creation, and I allowed immense wells of guilt and judgement build up within me.

In this incarnation, I have found that allowing that guilt/self-judgement to grow unchecked can lead to a vicious feedback loop of self-sabotaging behavior, which further compounds the guilt and self-judgement. Work in intensive group therapy and individual therapy sessions definitely helped me to find ways of coping with this internal dynamic, however healing the wound at the core of the cycle was never accomplished.

Flash forward to earlier this year when our dear friend Beatriz offered to share her self-healing practice with us over the course of a weekend. In preparation for the weekend, she recommended reading one of two books: Anita Moorjani’s Dying to be Me and/or David R. Hawkins’ Letting Go. I went with Anita Moorjani’s book and found so much inspiration from her experience and wisdom.

A central message of her book is that true living requires one to fully be themselves without fear or judgement. That message caused me to realize that I really do not know myself. I have seen myself through foggy lenses for most of my life. Hence, my assumed identity was based upon untrue assumption and judgements I held for myself. So before I could ask myself to love myself, I needed to actually get to know myself.

And that became my intention for the weekend: I will know myself. And through knowing myself, I can then take steps to love myself.

The hours leading up to the healing weekend were so sweet. We got to welcome dear friends from Vermont, Ohio, Texas, and Colorado into our home. We swapped funny stories over a shared meal. Just really jovial moments with loved ones.

We began the healing work Friday evening, with Beatriz sharing pieces of her own self-healing stories which were incredibly moving. After a bit of tuning and some logistical planning, we went our separate ways to adjourn for a night’s sleep.

Saturday was the day when the work really started to ramp up. I don’t mean to imply that this work was arduous, simply that it was the work we were there to do. Through a process of vulnerable sharing, each in the circle created a collection of statements meant to help steer the process of healing. It was through that sharing that I had yet another groundbreaking discovery: I could now pinpoint the exact moment in my incarnation when my low self-worth took root. It was an incredible realization that not only provided me immense insight but also genuine understanding for that catalytic moment so many years prior.

With intentions and new information in hand, Beatriz guided us through her self-healing practice. This simple process takes only 30 minutes, but those were some of the most transformative minutes of my life. I knew from the second we started that huge shifts were occurring within me. The tears began the instant I closed my eyes and did not stop until the process was complete. I, at once, felt reborn.

Beatriz gently concluded the practice, informing us that the healing was already in motion and that its results may begin to manifest in the coming hours. We shared a dinner and then separated once again for the night. As I laid in bed, my exhaustion was overpowered by my excitement. My being felt lighter than it had before. There was much more peace in my soul.

In my case, Beatriz was right about results. I woke up Sunday morning without a negative thought about myself. This is truly extraordinary as my mind’s baseline processes have been chronically mired in self-judgement and self-hatred prior to this experience. Imagine my disbelief when I went to bed that night without having witnessed a single hurtful or unkind thought within myself that entire day.

And that healing continues to this day.

Again, I cannot fully explain how remarkable this weekend was. I am a more fully realized entity now – one who is loving herself as she discovers her true nature. I will forever be grateful for Beatriz and her sharing of her healing practice. I will forever be grateful for the other-selves who helped co-create this healing circle and shared so vulnerably their own desires for healing. And I will forever be grateful for the catalysts in my life – even that one experienced so long ago and that had such an impact on my ability to love myself. 💙 Trisha Bean

Categories: Uncategorized

2022.11.21

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7/16 – 11/4

Law of One Gatherings: After a three-year hiatus, we returned to form and held three major gatherings in August and September! Scroll down to the posts below this one to read write-ups for all three, or if that would break the mouse to scroll that much, go directly to the:

Channeling Circles: There were two channelings offered at our recent gatherings, along with our continuation of the Intermediate and C/C Channeling Circles:

Youtube: The Ra Contact Youtube project is nearing its completion and should be done by the end of the year! There were several sessions published in this period, along with one narration from A Book of Days read by Jim:

One-Year website: For those who have been with us over the years, you may have some awareness of what a long and challenging journey it was to build a brand new website from scratch that would house, organize, and share the library of L/L Research’s work with the world. Thanks to the considerable skill and sweat of the one known as Daniel, our dream became reality when we were able to launch the new LLResearch.org on September 24, 2021.

A year later we still pinch ourselves that the site exists and continues to evolve. Over the course of this past year we launched the first search engine capable of searching the entire span of the Confederation philosophy through L/L Research channels. (The search engine is the second most visited page on the site). And not a month has transpired without improvements made. The 6,000-page* library website has met and wildly exceeded our hopes for serving the readership and sharing the work of this mission with the interested seeker, with lots of evolution yet ahead.

We invite you to lift your glass – of water, tea, kombucha, or something for adults – in celebration of the new LLResearch.org’s first birthday! And if you have any feedback about the site, please feel free to reach out.

*If you printed everything on the website, from transcripts to books to web text, you would get, we don’t know, 10–20x that number of pages. 6,000 is the number of unique web pages on the site (designated with a unique URL).

Audiobooks: We had made a decision earlier in the year to outsource the editing of our audiobook library, with many books having been recorded, but requiring editing and post-production, an incredibly intensive process. Despite the best efforts of Julianne, the demands of life overtook her dedication and spirit, so Trish broke the sound barrier in the production of audiobooks. She located a professional team, dialogued with their lead and got everything set up so that they could edit and master Secrets of the UFOs. And we’re excited to announce that TWO whole audiobooks have since been published! Thank you Julianne for all of the work and effort invested. Check out the new audiobooks on Audible:

And Voices of the Confederation should be up in the next few weeks!

Since Austin first joined Gary over nine years ago, and with each new addition since then, the Blogworthy Report has been designed not to identify authorship of any given task or project if it was completed internally. That way, the work becomes the unified work of L/L Research, whoever undertakes it. However, in this case, we give shout-outs to Trish and Joanna a couple places to identify their authorship in this collective report.

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  • Translations publish: Many translations were published in the months since the last Blogworthy, demonstrating the incredible dedication of the translators working to make this material more available around the world. These include:
  • Translators, working with:
    • Pinged 21 translators for help in building foreign-language versions of the website. See next main bullet point, “Library website,” below.
    • Bulgarian – Received more individual Ra Contact sections along with gaining greater familiarity with the funny and synchronicity-traveling Kirilina. Thank you, K!
    • Chinese 1– After multiple rounds of dialogue in this period, received from Li-Yun a completed Chinese Traditional-language A Concept Guide! (That will make ACG available in French and Chinese, will Polish to begin soon.) Thank you, Li-Yun! And to Terry, for his support!
    • Chinese 2 – Dialogued with Sean about the backlog of Chinese-language channeling transcripts and the event solution that will allow Sean and his partner to publish them directly to the site as they edit them. (👋Hi Sean!) | Added a Simplified Chinese-language place of study for the Law of One to the existing Traditional Chinese on the Community Resources page. | Connected a new Chinese translator, Iris, to Sean and Terry after onboarding her. | Received the semi-annual sales statement from the Taiwanese One Center, a traditional publisher who publishes a few L/L titles in Chinese.
    • Czech – Received from the Czech team the first volume of the Ra Contact completed! Thank you, Vojta/Radim/Romi/Bara!
    • Dutch – Received from Erik a few Dutch transcripts. Thank you, Erik! (See Personal Sharings for a prayer request for Erik as he undergoes cancer treatment.) | Connected Erik with to other once-Dutch translators. | Onboarded a new Dutch translator, Martine, and received a couple of Dutch transcripts. Thank you, Martine!
    • Farsi – Received our first ever Farsi (Persian) piece for publication, a Farsi translation of a transcript. Thank you, Meysam, Pupak, and Julien! And dialogued about the development of the Farsi Ra Contact. Meysam wrote about their work: “It has been such a joyous process, this co-editing journey; The quality of the translation has improved immensely; Many bright ideas have shown up, so many refinements made to the text. thank Pupak for initiating this change of plans right at the time. Two minds are better than one, and I guess this is the kind of work best done in a group. The more we proceed, the more it becomes clear how miraculously the three of us found each other and how this service evolved.” (See Personal Sharings section for a prayer request for Meysam, a resident of a violence-torn country right now.)
    • Greek – Onboarded Vassilis, a Greek translator who is going to take on the Ra Contact. Welcome, Vassilis! And after establishing mutual interest, connected him to he who had previously made the same attempt, also Vasilis (one “s”) to a very positive meeting. Received from Vasilis his work up to that point (the front matter of Vol 1 + Session 1 of TRC) and our first ever Greek piece for publication, a Greek-language transcript. Thank you, Vasilis and Vassilis! May Ra enter the language of philosophers.
    • Hebrew – Onboarded a new Hebrew translator, Alina, welcome! And connected her to Erez and Ori. After three incomplete attempts by other translators so far, Alina will help Ra enter a language of the Logos.
    • Hindi – Received one of two Indian-language volunteers offers, this one from Ishan for Hindi. Onboarded Ishan through our standard procedure of establishing relationship and familiarity, and agreeing upon upon terms, including the necessity to remain faithful to the English original, whether by literal translation of the words or non-literal conveyance of the same meaning. Welcome, Ishan!
    • Indonesian – Received two significant works in this period from the ever-positive Faitiha, including an Indonesia Secrets of the UFO and TRC Unified Index. Thank you so much, Fatiha!
    • Kannada – And for the second Indian-language appearance, received contacted from and onboarded Prajwal for the language known as Kannada, a south Indian dialect. Welcome, Prajwal!
    • Polish – Dialogued with Pawel on the Polish TRC, and connected him with Jochen so that they could explore the prospect of printing the Polish translation. Also, set Pawel up to begin translating ACG into Polish. Good luck, Pawel!
    • Romanian – Dialogued with Horia (who we got to meet at the Homecoming Gathering and whose energy in-person was just as great as it is over email), about some last-minute refinements to the Romanian Ra Contact, and received from Jochen a version formatted for eventual printed publication. Thank you, Horia and Jochen!
    • Russian – Received from Vladimir his first Russian transcripts. Thank you so much, Vladimir! His desire to serve is all the more impressive in light of his present circumstances.
    • Serbian – Had an amusing but enlightening discussion with Sheyla about the differences, if they can be so-called, between two virtually identical languages, Serbian and Croatian, and the politics that go into it, for the library website. Received an update from Dejan about his work on the Serbian TRC. Thank you Sheyla and Dejan!
    • Spanish – Received loads of transcripts from the ongoing Henry. Thank you, Henry! | And from Gabriel dialogued about some updates re his work on the Spanish TRC.
    • Swedish – While in Berlin, we re-met Klas (our last meeting being at the 2019 Prague event) where we learned of his interest in taking up or supporting the Swedish translation of TRC, a project of one of our dear personal friends, Lana, that has been quite stalled for some years. When about to connect the two, Lana reached out with notification that, after some personal dark night + transformation experiences, she is resuming the work! Subsequently connected Lana and Klas to explore working together. We have a sense that it is just what the universe ordered.
    • Turkish – And received from Unity100 a translation of the search engine pieces we sent out several months back. Thank you, Unity100!
  • Library Website: Celebrated one year! (Described above). And…
    • Foreign-Language versions of the website: Starting with a lunch meeting while Daniel was in town in September, began a large project that is still underway. Presently, if you click on one of the 21 (soon to be 22) foreign languages (available on the home page, or in the upper-right corner of any page via the icon of the “A” merging into a Japanese character), the site opens a simple “Welcome” page that lists the works available in that language. In an evolutionary step forward, we will offer foreign-language versions of the website itself. The foreign-language versions will include:
      – The Home page
      – Library page
      – Channeling page
      – A language-specific search engine
      – A dedicated Ra Contact page
      – A means to toggle seamlessly between the English original and other available languages that preserves the position of the text.
      – And essential site-related information for the foreign reader
      On the front end, we identified every piece necessary to create a foreign-language version, assembled it, tailored it for the non-English reader, and reached out to a list of 21 translators seeking translation support. Thank you (so far) to Sean, Terry, Laszlo, Faitha, Mauro, Pawel, Edgard, Horia, Catherine, and Gabriel for your contributions!! On the back end, Daniel has been a coding and re-coding machine.
    • Search Engine refinements: Worked with Daniel with some intensive dialogue his updates to the search engine to make it more mobile friendly, clearer, ready to accommodate more search filters as projects get underway to make the Library site a stronger resource for spiritual seekers.
    • Collaboration & Revision: Digested Daniel’s youtube tutorials, put together a short guide, and dialogued on his updates that allow revision histories and create more collaborative tools for publishing to the website.
    • Mobile Menu: Examined and talked about an upgrade to the navigation menu on mobile that will now allow for sub-menues.
    • About & Connect pages: Made updates to the Connect page following the closure of Bring4th and the Patrick and Steve’s launch of the Law of One Forum (see below), and planned for coming updates to the About page to better convey the new team.
    • Transcript edits: Made edits to errors in past transcripts.
    • Study groups: Two study groups were born out of the Coming Home event, added Philly (thank you, Luis!) and Chicago (thank you Greg, Peggy, and Stephanie!) to the site. And then had a series of dialogue with a group in Mumbai who live translates and discusses the material in Hindi whose info we added to the site. (Thank you, Ginni!)
    • User roles: Thanks to Daniel’s tutorials, Joanna and Trish trained on using our content management system, and with Austin’s training, Joanna is learning how to format books for publication to the website and recently completed the majority of the work for the Indonesian translation of (same book) Secrets of the UFO, in addition to being a machine in getting a backlog of foreign-language transcripts + podcast transcripts published to the site.
    • Otherwise: After checking in with Daniel he said that he is “mostly focused on updating the website to handle translations better, upgrading a lot of code and cleaning up a lot of things that were out of date, because the website is already 2 years older or more since we actually started coding. Changing the way menus load on the website so it’s more dynamic, updating the design to handle different languages better.”
  • Interviews and podcasts: We joined the unstoppable Jonathan Tong for a few more lively Q&A sessions:
  • Law of One Podcast transcripts: Thanks to Joanna’s hard work, we have been able to publish a total of 23 new Law of One Podcast transcripts that we had waiting in a backlog, mostly thanks to Christine P. You can read them on our Law of One Podcast page.
  • Bring4th: A lot happened in the Bring4th world since the last Blogworthy Report, including the closing and archiving of the previous MyBB forums (read more on the Bring4th homepage). But the valiant Steve and Patrick took up the task of envisioning a new discussion forum and management approach that could solve many of the issues behind the archiving of the old Bring4th, and they launched a new iteration – the Law of One Forum!
  • Light/Lines: The Fall edition of Light/Lines was published, the transcript dealing with the Divine Feminine and Harvest.
  • Public Meditations: Trisha writes: After many moons being on hiatus, we are happy to announce that we will be resuming our semi-monthly public meditations. When our area went into lockdown in March 2020 due to the pandemic, we made the painful decision to refrain from holding any public gatherings. While we love communing with fellow seekers, even if the time/energy commitment can sometimes be quite challenging, we felt a responsibility to safeguard public health.
    These meditations will also include a new panel of channels (now that’s a pleasing rhyme!). Jim will be supported by students Kathy, Trish, Austin, and Gary. We look forward to continuing in our journey of stepping into the unknown alongside the company of dear fellow selves.
  • Seeker Ministry: Trisha writes: The Seeker Ministry continues to gift us with opportunities to hear from seekers all over our planet. It is ever and always our goal to respond to every email we receive from a human seeker. (Sorry, robots. We do not have the capacity to respond to your message asking us to verify our Netflix account or notifying us that we have won some kind of sweepstakes or offering us some kind of great deal on Bitcoin. Perhaps next lifetime. And thank you for the lessons in discernment you provide.) Each week, these emails are divvied up between four of us that we may answer questions, engage in spiritual conversation, offer humble guidance, share stories, accept appreciation (always with immense gratitude), offer prayers, and just act as a place for a fellow seeker to feel heard. The practice is one we cherish deeply, for we strive to show up for our fellow selves, and we benefit greatly from the connections fostered.
  • Morris Interview: Finally returned to this slow-burner project. Processed edits Morris made, dialogued with Jim, and reached the penultimate step before getting this little addition of L/L history published to the website.
  • Tilting at Windmills videos: And speaking of the backburner… received from Ken the almost-almost final versions of all the videos! Found a way to compress them to share with Jim for private viewing. Each passing week there is an attempt to find time to begin the final chapter of the journey: To determine which footnotes to add to the video, and which questions might benefit from the text being on screen, and then to figure out a system for editing that into the video. And with each passing week it keeps getting pushed back.
  • Meet the team: After working with Daniel for over three years, and working with Joanna for half a year, got to meet them in person, at the same time! They both came in for the back-to-back Coming Home and Homecoming Gatherings, where we also converged with Tiffani. See the “Homecoming” post below to read more about the meeting.
  • Gatherings: In the opening text above, we link to write-ups of the events. This bullet point is an even drier detailing of some of the logistical work, because it was a significant amount of work in these period. It included: Tons of inter- and intra-team communication and meetings | Attendee correspondence. | Training Tiffani, incl designing new systems | Handouts | Travel | Working with venues | Designing curriculum and group sessions | Figuring out balanced covid policies | Food coordination and preparation | Our first ever damages bill from a venue for some damages that took place in a room that sent us on a Scooby Do-style investigation | exploring creating a live digital version of the open space grid for attendees | rentals | building and sending out a survey to all attendees of all three events to get feedback for improvement | and scouting for the venue for the 2023 Coming Home!
    If you wondering about the scholarliness of these events and, you are envisioning a gathering of expert scholars, you are envisioning a different event, as we communicated to one attendee. Everyone gathered has different depth of experience with and grasp of the Law of One, but there is generally a collective attitude of humbleness in the approach to understanding the Law of One. The beautiful thing about it being such a thoroughly advanced and transcendent philosophy is that it makes it challenging to claim and assert expert-level status, no matter how accurate the recall. Not to mention that it’s ultimately about things ineffable.
  • Prison Ministry: Joanna writes: Over the last few months the prison ministry has received dozens of letters from spiritual seekers across the country. In response, we work with our ace team of volunteers to coordinate replies to their in-depth letters. We also send free books by request to interested incarcerated seekers. Many of the seekers write to us saying that they heard from a fellow inmate about our offer of service, which always brings a smile to our faces and a warm glow in our hearts. To know that love and light finds a way to shine and be shared amongst other selves even in the most oppressive spaces is profoundly inspiring.

    There are several seekers who write to our volunteers regularly. It’s such a touching experience to witness the beautiful connections and growth that can happen through handwritten letters and dedicated service. We could not be more grateful to our gracious volunteers for serving an integral role for this ministry!
  • Nuts & Bolts:
    • Fixing online store: The platform we use for our online store was upgraded some months ago and the upgrade did the opposite of what upgrades are intended to do. The upgrade was necessary because of a needed update to our Bring4th server, but it introduced a game of whack-a-mole that has been unceasing ever since. The most recent issues are caching issues that are preventing the proper product pages to be created for the new audiobooks, and a stubborn CAPTCHA addon not doing its job and allowing fake accounts to be created. Both have required an unreasonable amount of investigation without any real progress so far.
    • Fundraiser: Several weeks before this Blogworthy, we began the yearly pilgrimage known as the annual fundraiser. It’s a long and tedious process with many stages to gather all of the necessary information and materials in order to generate an appropriate list of addresses, print envelopes and letters, and stuff the envelopes. Thankfully, the envelope stuffing is complete as of this week, and the email campaign will be launched next week, and we’ll officially be fundraising! While it is a large and difficult task each year, it is always a humble honor to connect with seekers who wish to offer their support to the work of L/L Research.
    • Bookkeeping: On a weekly basis, completed bookkeeping for the span of this entry, which, if we count on all our fingers, is sixteen weeks. This comes with many of its own sub-tasks, questions, and occasional challenges that engage a different portion of the brain than the one that is attempting to see the Creator in all things.
    • Disbursements: Issued semi-annual royalties to Tobey for TRC sales, and to Jim for audiobook sales. And disbursed into the operating funds the very first disbursement of the endowment, a one-third portion of the annual allotted amount.
    • Form 990: With the extended deadline coming up, finally returned to this project to review the CPA’s draft of the 990. Found various small tweaks and places to ask questions, but thanks to the past few years of intensive investigation and note-taking, was able to use the notes to understand how the 990 was built. Got it submitted!
    • Typos and publisher: Since the last report, we officially wrapped up our process of untangling the mess introduced by the publisher and triple checking their work before it went to press. The production timeline after all materials are complete takes several months, but this past week we had a meeting with them to get word on when the corrected versions will be available, and circled back around to the card deck project they had introduced before the typo debacle consumed all of our attention.
    • Tech and online services: There is also an ever-evolving need to stay aware of the various online services that have become vital to our operation. Recently, one giant updated the way their non-profit Cloud Organization system worked, and thankfully the changes were all positive. (One of the biggest issues with being reliant on these companies for operations is that they could, at any moment, decide to change something that breaks a vital part of our processes, as Facebook recently did.) We also had to do some shuffling around with our other account that required some investigation and hair pulling. We are still trying to figure out how to optimize our newsletter email service. It’s a bit of a constant juggling act.
  • Smatterings: Met with Jim to re-record portions of the audiobooks and troubleshoot recording discrepancies | Designed, built, and implemented a reservation system for attendees of the meditations. | Held a meeting with Aaron Maret about developing an online course to be built on a donation basis, but this project is likely not a near-term prospect | Worked with a seeker interested in donating artwork | Planned to soon rededicate ourselves to the 102 project | Migrated many of our accounts away from an old email address to a new one | In dialogue with Jim, supported him in declining an offer of a third-party to create a Don Elkins bio in light of a strong sense of commercial motivation | Updated the seeker connector page | Planned for and scheduled a healing circle retreat facilitated by Beatriz for the L/L team next year | Dialogued with a longtime reader about their nascent eco-village in Hawaii | And enjoyed a catch-up with the one known as Scott Mandelker who is always a joy to exchange sound vibration complexes with.
  • Channeling Circles of all types: Met for the various channeling circles, which, save for the two that occurred at the two gatherings to which we are honor/duty-bound, are on our own time, on 7/21, 7/29, 8/14, and 9/18.

German and Czech Operations

Czech Q2 – Q3 reports:

  • Focus mainly on the preparing of the gathering
  • finishing the RC vol.1 translation aiming for Q3, we’re getting there >]
  • had public and private meetings online, seems like we are kind of going back to our original group, but we weren’t really advertising it much. Which is okay. 
  • compiled and checked the Vol. 1 and put it into PDF
  • published S57-71 on the website (meaning it’s done and after proofreading)
  • also updated website with the new PDF for Ra Contact, and update some other stuff to keep it up to date
  • sent the newsletter and made a call for a translator, and one person responded, working now with a new translator Viliam (already translated and edited some sessions)
  • getting involved in the Europe group with Daniel
  • everybody on the team has something assigned if they have time
  • will explore possibilities of printing after the final PDF is nice and cooked, seems like the time for finding a good printing vendor is not ripe yet x] so I will also exercise a little bit of patience >]]

French/German Q2 – Q3 Report:

Celebrated 8 years of working with DGDEV (Das Gesetz des Einen Verlag)!

  • from her study group two members seem to have found other occupations, at least currently, but that she did have daily contact with Vassilis.
  • and that Misha completed the revision of a channeling session (2016) with Q’uo, translated into French by a newcomer: Geoffroy
  • First 47 pages of ACH into French
  • Connected with Pawel to discuss publishing a Polish Ra Contact
  • Misha, Trisha, Gary and Austin met at Misha’s and spent a wonderful time together, and Misha turned to the magic age of 80 trips around the Sun
  • … and continued translating of the “Channeling Handbook”, as much as possible despite difficult circumstances.
  • But what stood out in that quarter leading up to the 8th anniversary of DGDEV was our meeting and events in Berlin and Prague. I feel that we opened up a much deeper chapter in our relationships and cooperation. And how many people we inspired! These events shine the light and and bring people together.

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PERSONAL SHARINGS

Trish: In my personal time, I began a personal project of reading and digesting the conscious channeling archives from the very beginning as a means of both expanding personal knowledge and to better understand how L/L’s particular school of channeling has evolved over time. It is illuminating.

Gary: If you have a few moments to open your heart and from a place of compassion and sincere intention, send some prayerful energy to:

  • The Farsi translator is in that country you’ve probably heard about in the news where protests centered on women’s rights are rocking the nation. He and his family have been directly impacted. Prayers for them and for their country are requested.
  • The translator of an aggressive country has needed to take drastic measures to protect he and his family. His spiritual outlook remains strong as he processes the moment through something higher than the priorities of the material realm, that is to say, with the eyes of hope, faith, and love.
  • The Dutch translator, Erik, was diagnosed with colon cancer earlier this year. The hope was that radiation and chemo would stave off the need for surgery, but alas, a portion of the colon with have to be removed. He goes in for surgery on November 23. A father of two and a husband, his journey has been a challenging one, to say the least, but his reflections along the way thanks to this hard catalyst have been a source of inspiration and insight.

    For instance, Erik wrote: I’ve begun to hear so many stories of illness now of neighbors, friends, family who suddenly come out with their own stories because I am now ill “too” and am beginning to realize that there is more than enough suffering going on right here and now, behind closed doors or in hospitals, that you normally never think about. But it’s a kind of suffering that is just “there”, there isn’t really anything to be done about it, there’s no injustice or perpetrator to get worked up about such as with war or social injustices. This kind of suffering just goes hand in hand with life.

Congratulations to Wen, a volunteer transcriber, for her new first baby, a girl named Willow! Who is beautiful, by the way.

And then I recently learned of Google’s Books Ngram Viewer. It is incredible. From the year 1800 to 2019, it shows you how words and phrases have occurred in books in English (and other languages). Instructions here. Like other things Google has done, it is a social memory complex-level power, at least at the diaper level.

Here is one that I put together that shows that love and friendship may be on the rise in the thinking of the collective mind. 💚💙

love,fear,hate,courage,anger,resilience,despair,depression,enemy,hope,friend

Categories: Uncategorized

Coming Home to a New Earth Gathering 2022

LL_Central

While this piece is written by that strange entity known as Gary Bean, The Blogworthy Report is contributed to by four people total. The usual bullet points will resume soon. Today, a report on our recent two gatherings and the expanded team.

This is the first of two posts.

Planning

As you may have read in our last BW entry, the L/L home team expanded to include those positive presences known as Daniel, Joanna, and Tiffani. The third in that group we’ve had close relationship with for over 20 years. Daniel and Joanna we had never met in person. All were scheduled to converge in space/time for our two back-to-back events: Coming Home Sep 8–11 and Homecoming Sep 16–18. We were very eager for this pow-wow.

How did two events come to be on consecutive weekends? With a September Coming Home in Asheville, we were originally aiming for an October Homecoming, but upon seeing Jim’s mild sadness that an Oct date would risk the first frost, we reconsidered. He works all year in his gardens with the expectation of showcasing his flowers and plantings at Homecoming. So, Trisha proposed holding the event the weekend following Coming Home. I gasped—that is huge. That is something we’ve never done before. We might die. Austin said… Let’s be legends. And when we realized… Wait-a-minute… that might make it possible for all of Team L/L Research to be in attendance for both events, we knew that destiny was calling to us. And so we ran with our madness.

To Asheville

Following a full day of travel from South Africa, Daniel landed at Muhammad Ali International Airport (Louisville’s airport was recently rechristened a few years ago in honor of its most famous citizen) on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Joanna made the journey from the other coast of this country. And on Thursday we set off together to meet Tiffani in Asheville. In her role as Event Manager, Tiff had landed at the retreat center outside of Asheville on Wednesday to begin prepping for the Thursday event.

[Sidenote: I realized recently that Muhammad Ali and Carla had very similar lifespans: Carla: 1943–2015 | Ali: 1942–2016. Moreover, both were from Louisville. Both two of the Greatest of All Time. Both service-to-others oriented beings, just one with a better right hook.]

We’ve had lots of correspondence and video meetings and shared work over the months/years, all to great harmony, but one can never know for sure what it will be like to meet an other-self in person, especially for an extended duration. It was really, really good. Our individual notes harmonized so well that, while we weren’t singing along to Weezer’s blue album (a favorite of mine in the 90s) on the 6hr drive to Asheville, we were making melody. I’ll offer some of my characteristically positive portraits later on.

Trish, Daniel, Joanna, Austin

Arrival Asheville

It would be great to detail all the fun, stressful, and banal logistical and interpersonal aspects that go into the pre-production of hosting an event, but I’ll just focus on a unique role Tiffani played this time. Coming Home was being held at a retreat center where nearly all attendees would be lodging during the course of the event. It was our first time using this center, and the first time we had to manage all the lodging: motel-style rooms, tent and RV sites. So, in addition to usual event production, she was something of a retreat manager for a weekend.

Tiffani breaking it down to Aaron

Tiffani arrived early to ensure that everything was set up as it should be, get the handouts together that we mailed, and coordinate with the staff on site. We arrived Thursday afternoon, a gorgeous mid-70s sunny day, to find that everything was in good order and that Tiff was at the front door greeting early arrivals. We all hugged, introduced, and smiled big. Then, with enthusiasm, we met with our Carebear cousins, Jess, BJ, and Aaron —our friends of TOTOH (Temple of the Open Heart) with whom we collaborate on this event. It was from them that we learned Open Space Technology, and it was in partnership with them that we launched the Coming Home series in 2018. Among their services to this event, we were very grateful that Jess had led the way in coordinating various drivers for the airport arrivals and departures.

Aaron, BJ, and Red setting up the grid for Marketplace

We got settled into our rooms, and then my brain went to preparing for the sequence of evening events to kick-off the 3.5 day gathering, starting with the cold open.

Opening Night

Moment One: It’s always the most nerve-wracking moment for me. People from all over the country, and sometimes world, are gathered in the circle for the first time. Many don’t know what to expect. Many are nervous or anxious. Some or many have never attended a Law of One-oriented event. Some are even quite new to the material.

Their energies are individual. They are not yet blended. It is silent—an expectant silence. And you become their first voice and point of orientation. This role does not harmonize with that confidence-challenged part of yourself that wants to hide and not be looked it, that doubts your ability to be of much service, that is sure you are a buffoon. But you push yourself off the cliff, you don’t falter, and you share what you came to share; which, in short, welcomes everyone to a safe, inclusive, and inviting atmosphere; emphasizes the beauty and the possibilities of healing and transformation when together in a container of shared seeking; and deemphasizes any specialness on the part of the event facilitators or our corresponding organizations; and calls oneself a monkey, which I did.

AVL Welcome: From there, Aaron welcomed the circle and introduced TOTOH on behalf of their team. Our friends in Asheville are beautiful human beings who are always on the beam, not of perfection but of doing work in consciousness, particularly the hardest work of them all: how to harmonize with one another. We’ve learned a lot from them over the years in cross-cultural conversation.

Logistics: Tiffani gave a weekend logistics report and opened for questions. It was her debut, and she knocked it out of the park.

Open Space Introduction: Austin introduced Open Space Technology, further priming the group for the design of the weekend.

Meditation: And then Trish held a silent meditation with an inspirational closing prayer she made before dinner in the dining hall.

Round Robin: Upon returning at about 7pm, we conducted one of my favorite activities: the Round Robin. Going around the circle clockwise, each introduces themselves. The ice breaks and the blending of energies deepens when people have the chance to speak their voice into the circle.

Banishing Ritual: Following the Round Robin, our friend Zachary Adama stood in the center of the circle, the sun already set, and conducted his variation on the Banishing Ritual. Unlike L/L’s practice, which uses a very intense and sharp enunciation of each word and gesture, Zachary chants (what to my ears are) variations on the words while gracefully flowing through the ritual.

ARG: And then, BJ and Jess, with some help from our mutual friend Red (formerly Jana), conducted the Authentic Relating Games. The first time I heard that term some years back, my culture-soaked brain thought: now that’s cheesy. But upon seeing the games in action, I was immediately converted. There are lots of variations, with the principal goal being to encourage releasing our barriers in order to facilitate authentic (aka: true, real, non-pretentious) connection. In my experience, these exercises help me personally break out of my own shell, somewhat.

Concluding around 9pm, the games were a hit. So far as I could perceive, everyone seemed loosened up, more open, and ready for the weekend to come.

BJ, Red, and Jess modeling one of the games.


Venue
Our host venue was a Christian retreat center that Jess, BJ, and Aaron scouted. At first, we weren’t sure if they would have a dogma-sourced aversion to our group. But they hold an attitude of inclusivity and open-heartedness. We felt embraced. And the grounds echoed the human energy. It was beautiful. Green abounded around us, interspersed with a mixture of facilities, stone buildings, open spaces, gardens, and adjacent small mountains.

Now, everything wasn’t perfect. Our main meeting space was a balcony with three open sides. Aesthetically, it was really pleasing. Acoustically, not so much. Our first evening featured roofers pounding away on a building nearby, along with some nearby lawn equipment, and some cars moving in and out of the parking lot just below the balcony. It was a panoply of aural accompaniment. And the food was pretty conventional and underwhelming, even under-serving some of our vegan friends. But it seemed to mitigate little against the purpose and positivity of the weekend. We’ve made a detailed analysis when considering a venue for next year.

Marketplace
As communicated in the Prague Law of One Gathering write-up:

We utilized the Open Space format that has proven so successful in the past. In this format, each attendee has an opportunity to pitch their presentation to the circle during the morning Marketplace portions. With feedback from the group, they then determine in which venue and time slot to situate the presentation. Offerings can run the spectrum of brain hemispheric activity—from the left-brained intellectual lectures and discussions to the right-brained artistic and emotional explorations—to body exercises, group activities, and everything in between.

Except that this was double the attendance of the Prague event and included an extra day. It was a buffet of spiritually productive offerings. I wish I could have attended many more.

BJ and Aaron DJ’d the first Marketplace on Friday morning, sharing both the spirit and the technical workings of OST. The large grid of columns (time slots) and rows (breakout spaces) began to fill rapidly as people stood in a line to pitch their offerings to the gathered group.

Presentations

As I wrote about for the Prague gathering, no two attendees have the same experience. Each time slot presents at least two, sometimes three or four, options. You can see the full lineup here, with tabs on the bottom for each of the three days, or tabs on top if on mobile. (Thank you to Trish for typing and organizing them.)

Here’s a quick synopsis of those I can remember attending, just a sampling of the many offerings available:

  1. Presence Play – Improv Workshop – Stephanie has innovated techniques through her work using improv with troubled teens as a means to help them express and heal in university-sponsored group settings; and she’s done stand-up at Second City. She led the first improv experience I’ve ever attended that was equal parts uncomfortable (because of my personality), fun, and insightful, and that blended in humor really well. And it got off to a good start when, during her intro talk, I leaned back on my chair and it folded underneath me, causing me to fall on my ass in front of the gathered circle. Red-faced, I offered my fall as tribute to the improv session.

  2. Harmony Council – Jess and Red shared their work pioneering the women-powered Harmony Council, which is best described in their own words from the Marketplace grid: “The Harmony Council is a template for a process we’ve developed in community over the last 3 years or so to resolve conflict at nearly every level, from person to interpersonal to community. It is a way to harness the transformational power possible when we’re willing to be surrounded by, and surrendered to, a circle of sacred witness and the open-hearted mirrors of our other selves.”

  3. Seeker Seeks the One – This was my offering. We discussed the mystical seeking of unity, springboarding from quotes that I had collected and passed out to everyone.

  4. Meet the Monks – First, some backstory: One attendee, Helga, was a riot just by being herself. Hailing from Appalachia, as she described it, she had an unmistakable presence, projecting her voice with candor and salt-of-the-earth humor. Helga reached out to members of the conference of black-robed Anglican priests which was happening at the retreat center simultaneously to us. She asked if they might want to speak to our group! lol. Surprisingly, they said they would.

    Also… she took the print-out of Ra quotes (that I had distributed in the session mentioned above) and gave it to the priests at lunch. After she told me of this interfaith exchange, I looked over to the other side of the dining hall to see the 8.5×11 stapled printout being read with studiousness by a priest robed in black, then passed to the next, and the next, each holding a poker face that didn’t reveal what was going through their minds. I can only imagine! Given that the quotes I selected were centered on the mystical seeking of the Creator, I would like to think that there were spiritual essentials that might resonate with their dogma-bound but God-loving hearts.

    Well, two of those priests came to speak to our group. They shared some of their biography and their religious path. Honestly, it was great. For me, not so much because they and we learned something about our mutually odd beliefs, but because we shared ourselves across different worldviews. They didn’t proselytize or seek to gain converts. They were actually quite brave in showing up in such an open spirit when they could have rejected the offer or sought to utilize the opportunity to serve their specific religious mission in some way.

  5. Negative Greeting – Red led a group discussion on the ins and outs of navigating, identifying, and responding to negative greeting that did a great job exploring it through theory and personal example.

  6. Essential Principles of Soul Evolution – Shahla, someone with whom we had corresponded but not yet met in person, and who was a delight to meet in person, led a discussion on spiritual evolution grounded in quotes collected from the Law of One.

  7. Start a Study Group – Aaron led a talk about his years of facilitating and co-facilitatating the Asheville Law of One study group, along with discussing the principles of coming together for shared study. It was interesting: four of the facilitators for three Law of One study groups were present at Coming Home: Aaron and BJ for Asheville, Luis for Austin, and Rhonda for Birmingham, among other members of the various groups. The same happened with different people at Homecoming the next weekend. They were all cross-pollinating the flower-strewn Law of One field. 🌻

  8. Sexual Energy Q&A – Suzanna, a longtime friend and board member, offered a second talk opened to everyone (the first was a women’s circle) to explore sacred sexual energy transfer. It was illuminating in revealing greater possibilities.

  9. Spoon-Bending – In the over 19 years since I moved to Louisville, it is surprising that no bizarreness like this has come up on a group level. Daniel, L/L’s web developer, facilitated a group activity on what’s called “quantum spoon-bending.” It’s not spoon-bending using telekinesis alone. Instead, there is some visualization performed on the spoon, along with a request made, followed by a sensitivity to receive a response from the spoon, as it were. When it cues you, then it’s ready to bend with ease using minimal mechanical action from your hands.

    Much to my astonishment, most everyone fulfilled the exercise as I watched them bend spoons with little applied effort. I didn’t, despite sincere intentions. The spoon I was working on felt like steel. I could bend it with applied force, but it would require two hands and some juice. Eventually I surrendered and passed the spoon to Trish. She did the exercise for a second time (having already mauled her first spoon) and, sure enough, when the time was right she bent that spoon like it was a paperclip. Amazing.

    Inspirited with newfound confidence in the group’s spoon-bending prowess, we took an unplanned step further and attempted a Matrix-style, mind-only spoon-bending. We gathered in a circle around a vertically situated unbent spoon. Throwing together an ad hoc procedure for how to go about harnessing our collective mind-lasers to bend this spoon, we checked in with Daniel, the session’s facilitator, about what request we might make to said spoon. Laughter erupted when he quipped, “Please bend spoon; please, please, please.”

    Despite that powerful incantation, and a period of intense silence and group focus, the spoon defied our collective will and remained in its full upright glory. But we had a great time.

  10. Ten Fire Dance – The retreat boasted a sizeable firepit with concrete benches around which about 30 people could sit comfortably. On Saturday night we were treated to poi fire dancing by Ten, a professional fire dancer. It had a sacred edge to it as the talkative crowd gathered around the bonfire became silent to witness this dance of fire against the night’s blackness.

  11. Creating 4D+ intentional community – Karin and Jess gave a presentation and opened the discussion for Q&A about their work building and sustaining intentional community modeled on fourth-density positive values.

Austin and Aaron each also offered a group study session using quotes from the Law of One, with one about service to others and the other about deepening authenticity.

Suzanna and the expanded L/L team
Most of the Coming Home circle

Closing

What a continuation and intensification of the energy experience in Prague and Berlin held just a few weeks prior. Intensified because it was an extra day, there were more people, and we were all lodging on site. It was spiritual caffeine, and with longer lasting effects than its chemical counterpart and without the jitters.

Judging by various conversations I had combined with the reports at the end—that you can read here courtesy of the notes that Trisha took—everyone eased into the event really well. Gratitude was widespread. Many committed to returning as long as the event would be held.

Attendees contributed about a third of L/L’s scholarship funds for the event which helped people be there (thank you!). It was a big group for us. We’re uncertain about the net value of a group that size. Is important intimacy lost? Shouldn’t we try to meet the need as best we can? Questions we must consider, which will be aided by a poll that we’ll issue to gather attendee thoughts.

But it, along with the Prague/Berlin events, and the subsequent Homecoming gathering, really stoked our fires. We hope to have more next year, including online opportunities.

Also, two new Law of One study groups sprung from the Coming Home gathering: one in Chicago and one in Philly! And incidentally, at the same time they formed, we heard from a group in Mumbai that meets online to study the Law of One in Hindi. Ra’s ripples in the mass mind ricochet around the planet.

BJ welcomes the 🌞 with her own Logoic self

This post continues below with the Homecoming Gathering.

Categories: Uncategorized

Homecoming Gathering & Meeting the Team

LL_Central

This is a continuation of the post above.

To Louisville

The day following the event’s closing, we got to introduce the L/L crew to the Village, which is just the name that our Asheville friends have for their loose intentional community where many of the group live near one another. We enjoyed one of their daily communal meals. We met for a meeting to discuss the plusses and deltas of the Coming Home event and to plan for next year.

Austin, Daniel, BJ at Betsy (a house in the Village). The topic of conversation is probably spoon bending.

And the day following that, we embarked on a six-hour roadtrip back to Louisville! As a full group this time, with Tiffani in the van. (Cumberland Falls is just a few minutes off I-75 in Kentucky on the way. We stopped for a minute. The second largest waterfall east of the Rockies after Niagara, it is beautiful.)

A pit stop at Cumberland Falls

Preparing for Homecoming

Upon arriving home, our six-person crew—Daniel, Tiffani, Austin, Joanna, Trish, me—forgot all about the event that just occurred in order to clear our minds and bodies for the event that was just 2.5 days away! In all my years, I never thought we could pull something like this off. Homecoming is a very intensive production effort, converting a suburban home into a weekend venue for usually up to 40 people, for whom we provide five homecooked meals and transportation assistance from/to airport and hotels. It is a long L/L tradition to help assist people flying into the event that is important, not only to help reduce the cost for attendees, but to help them to feel welcomed and at home from the moment they exit the airport.

The L/L office, where Carla, Jim, Austin, and I have spent much much time working

From receiving the tent and setting up the circle, reengineering and cleaning the house, preparing the meal arrangements, making big Costco/Kroger runs, coordinating with attendees, and so forth, it went surprisingly smoothly and was less stressful than it’s been in years past. We have a really good team. And we were aided by Anthony, an alumni attendee who is an intensive reader of the L/L library with seemingly infinite personal energy (at least I have not sensed a limit to it), who arrived early to help out.

Thanks to his loving tending from late winter onward, Jim’s gardens were a bounty of beauty and color. And minus some pain in his hip for which he would get a replacement surgery in late October, Jim was in great form and ready to receive the coming invasion with open arms and a corresponding heart.

The morning of Daniel and Joanna meeting Jim for the first time in person.
Jim and Joanna in the backyard of his home
Jim lunching down while Daniel shows him things on the website

Nothing ever goes completely according to plan, though. Jim’s basement had flooded at some point during the pandemic. This destroyed the boxes of meditation cushions (for the seated backjacks) stored down there, along with the burlap curtains we purchased and cut to string around the perimeter of the 40x40ft tent to block sun and add an aesthetic comfort to the large canopy. We discovered this the day before Homecoming and had to improvise.

The tent pre-people

Homecoming Commences

The hours leading up to the start of the event are among my highlights. I love seeing people who haven’t seen each other hug and shared updates and smiles, along with those who are new to each other embrace in open spirit. The exuberance felt particularly high this time around. Primarily, I think, because there was a three-year gap since our previous Homecoming. Many of our friends have been coming for years. It had an air of a family reunion, along with several new faces in the mix.

We join Morris and Linda in meeting Jonathan for the first time in person

Except for some baked chicken, Trisha prepared an entirely gluten-free vegan dinner that included: the aforementioned seasoned chicken, tofu, stir-fry vegetables, homemade stir-fry sauces, rice noodles, rice, garlic green beans, and sesame cabbage salad. And when stomachs were full from that, she brought out vegan/GF chocolate cake and vegan/GF pineapple-passionfruit cake.

She began work on this a month or so in advance, freezing what she made knowing that we’d be at Coming Home the weekend prior. It is an incredible amount of work that she has volunteered of her own initiative for nine Homecomings now, beginning before she was a staff member, and now undertaken in addition to her staff responsibilities. She is a sight to behold. Though tending to all that during the weekend in a kitchen not designed for 30–40 people causes her to miss much of the event, so this year she is finally showing signs of relenting and considering alternative options for future events. Fingers crossed.

The Schedule

As mentioned, this all takes place in a suburban home. We rent a canopy and pay the company to set it up in the backyard behind the garage. Because we got started with Homecoming later in the year than usual, every tent company was booked up for September. On a hail mary, we found a company who would make the 1.5hr drive from Cincinnati… at a premium.

The canopy goes in the one semi-open space that Jim hasn’t occupied with stone structures built by hand over the decades, mostly using limestone that he hauled from the Avalon property he and Carla used to own. (Avalon was nestled away in a small valley next near the Ohio River about an hour away. No electricity or running water, just an ancient shack with a foundation of stacked stone, it was a lovely place.)

Due to the lack of space for breakout areas, we cannot create a true Open Space Technology format with the circle pitching their ideas each morning. Instead, we build the schedule in advance from attendee submissions. We received 18 total that we were able to split between the tent and the living room. You can read the curriculum here, if interested. Everyone contributed great material, whether it was a lecture, a discussion, a practice, or a slideshow.

Homecoming tends to be a little bit more left-brained and a less embodied practice. It is, however, a great complement to Coming Home. As always, it is a socially boisterous event, balanced by moments of silence and meditation.

Tiffani led the authentic relating games

It carried that same spirit of gratitude for connection, with several of the attendees describing that feeling of absence making the heart grow fonder. It was a boon to our spirits that made a wonderful consummation of our journey of three major events and one minor in the span of five weeks. This was enhanced by the sense of being in our home space with family members.

These obviously higher-quality photos are courtesy of Ken (in bright blue).
He has a really nice Google Pixel phone camera.
That captures how haggard I look

At the Prague event, I mentioned that Austin, Trish, and I had the opportunity to cross a barrier and channel in front of others for the first time. The Homecoming also presented a similar opportunity. Unfortunately, I was too pooped to get energized and clear enough to channel, so I reluctantly bowed out. However, Kathy, one of our channeling circle members and a dear friend with an angelic gentleness about her, made her first go at it(!), alongside Jim, Trish, and Austin. Trish was particularly impressive considering that she’d gone through everything I had—including two weeks of people hosting + rotating driving duties with me to/from Asheville—and spent a lot of the weekend busting hump for the food production. The channeling circle did wonderfully together! I was filled with gratitude and a sense of home watching them channel Q’uo.

Synthesis

Throughout this writing I’ve referenced the energies and orientations of those sisters and brothers who joined us in these sacred spaces. I’ve spoken in highly positive terms because that reflects what I saw and experienced. But the joy and the meaning experienced by each arises in a context of suffering in the journey of service which unfolds in a hard, sometimes cruel-seeming illusion. Buddhas do not attend—except in the sense that, in truth, we are all buddhas—but people with wounds and scars, loss and limitation, confusion and episodes of privation, despair, and anguish.

What each shares in common is what they seek to do with that pain. There is a whole menu of options available in our third-density plane, from playing victim, to becoming embittered, to waging war, to seeking answers through material gain, to distracting the self, to… nothing. The spiritual seeker, instead, seeks healing, learning, and growth. In other words, they seek to use their catalyst—that wonderful word the Confederation uses to describe all life experience, the pleasant and the unpleasant. This is true of any embarked consciously upon the path of seeking the Creator, whether or not they read L/L’s work. The Law of One just offers a particular frame and platform for that seeking, and creates a common vocabulary for those who come together in its study.

And that is probably what most impressed me about everyone. There is an aspiration for the light. There is a desire to learn the ways of love. There is a need for healing the self. There is a quest to use the hard experiences for positive growth. There is a current of service.

I loved the personal stories I heard. I do have one representative example to share that doesn’t come from the events, actually. Because it was emailed, I can more accurately represent it in the person’s own words. This is a seeker with whom we’ve had some correspondence from India. They wrote:

Also wanted to inform the team that last Sunday (6th and 7th Sept) I had a heart attack, a symptom that was being built up for about 60 days with symptoms of fatigue, frequent headaches, blocked nose and gastric. On 8th I went for a healing treatment and on the same evening before I could begin, I had a massive attack, almost deadly. I somehow managed to breathe enough to get to emergency and surgical procedure was done on same night. So I survived 😅. Perhaps isn’t ripe enough for harvest 

They put a stent on one of my arteries (LAD) which had 95% block. Whilst the experience was scary, due to the Ra Material I learned how to harness the love of one eternal creator to embrace, love and internalize this catalyst. I continue to pray for effective learning from the catalyst which I believe with the love energy of the creator I will learn it. I was peaceful throughout the experience, except for extreme painful situations where the mind was disturbed, but otherwise settled down with complete acceptance. 

It’s not so much the Ra Material’s role in supporting this seeker that I wish to highlight here, though that too is of note, but rather, this being’s consciously intended and cultivated acceptance of their catalyst. This attitude, however variously and imperfectly embodied, is representative of what we witness at gatherings. And it humbles the self to be in its presence.

The Team

It is so good working on a team, together seeking the Law of One in shared mission. Austin, Trish, Jim, and I all loved meeting Joanna and Daniel in person, and reuniting with Tiffani. I will not do any justice to the fullness and complexity of the three new team members, but maybe I can offer an infinitesimal window into their depths.

Daniel

Meeting Daniel in the physical was a seamless continuation of the work we’ve done together for a few years over messaging apps and video. He is gentle and preternaturally calm. His voice has a meditative quality to it. With me driving and him riding shotgun, I learned pretty quickly that it was easy to be silent in his company, which is something I greatly appreciate as I am not a natural extrovert in social situations (I typically have to turn it on).

Though possessed of a gifted intellect, particularly, obviously, in the realm of web development (if you could see the magic he’s worked), there is an uncomplicated spiritual simplicity to Daniel that is easy to feel affinity with. The positively connoted simplicity that the spiritual seeker strives toward.

We have become great collaborators on the website, but it’s not just us leading ideas forward. He is constantly staying on top of the workflow, initiating new projects, and innovating new design strategies to meet and exceed the potentials of what’s possible. (There are great things in the pipeline.)

This was his first trip to the States, and his first two Law of One-centered events. In his opening introductions for both events, he mentioned that one of the primary values for him was getting to interface with some of the actual readership instead of the programs, numbers, and abstraction of web design. I think that it really inspired him to see the living impact of L/L’s material and of his work on the website.

I mentioned his meditative-like energy. At the Homecoming Gathering in the living room, he led a guided meditation that he created. Those gathered were very surprised that this was his first time. He took the group to a place of serenity and focus. One male attendee was even in tears at the end, feeling his heart very open. Daniel has plans on designing a meditation app that will integrate with the website and allow us to finally be able to support meditation practice and interactive shared meditation events.

Joanna

I’ve learned some of the snippets of Joanna’s own life journey in this incarnation, so I was greatly looking forward to deepening my understanding of her unique path. That, fortunately, was fulfilled. To a degree at least, as learning about an other-self is never-ending. Born in the Philippines, she spent the first portion of her life growing up in the slums of Manila. After her family was able to relocate to the States, and long before she knew what wanderers were in the Law of One-sense, she had distinct experiences of being different. In fact, her first US ID card listed her as “alien,” seeding or maybe intensifying an awareness that she was other-than that set up a condition of learning in the years to come.

There is a strong conscious drive in Joanna. A desire to examine herself and to confront those areas of where growth is needed. Combined with a desire to advance her understanding, in surrender to the inability to fully understand, of that which is beyond the boundaries.

What I think is one of the keys to her integration into the L/L team is that quality of the heart that exercises those spiritual disciplines Carla liked to speak about: praise, prayer, and thanksgiving; seeing the beauty of the human experience; finding creative ways to bring out the interconnectedness of all things; and bringing alive the magic. I think that this core attitude helps to develop the magical personality through the challenges that arise.

She’s also a great pun master, which makes sense as she earned her degree to become an English teacher. And she has been such an appreciated addition on multiple levels, including leading up the prison ministry and her support of the seeker ministry. She puts a good deal of effort in to meet seekers as best as possible.

We had the opportunity to be with Joanna and Daniel for two solid weeks through two gatherings, with both staying at Trisha’s and my home. A couple of my most cherished moments from that period came from just relaxing with a glass of wine and conversation at our place with these two between and after the events.

Tiffani

As I’ve talked about in a podcast that Tiffani joined us for (oh, that dusty podcast… someday soon we shall return to you), Tiffani and I met the same weekend we both first met Carla and Jim. It was April 2002, in Louisville. We were different people then, but we were both alive in the relative newness of Law of One study and the spiritual path itself, but where she was self-confident, I was not. Tiffani has had a long journey of friendship starting with Carla, Jim, and me that has grown to include Trish, Austin, and others at L/L.

As described in the BW report when we announced the new team, Tiffani was the only applicant who had any experience at L/L Research events. Almost 20 years in her case. So after proper vetting, we, in consensus with Jim, designed the new role of Event Manager. Holding space for spiritual seekers at in-person events is an important priority for L/L, but it is intensive and more than our existing workloads can accommodate.

We have various divisions of duties and specialties at L/L Research. Since Carla threw me into the ring in 2006 and asked me to produce an event with no experience, I’ve been leading up their production, learning how to improve every year. So this year I put in a lot of time and showed Tiffani the ropes of event management through three unique events–one international, two stateside. Coming Home was where she had the most opportunity to shine, and shine she did. She was like a multi-armed Hindu deity, holding together the various logistics of the event while playing hotel manager while liaising with the venue staff. She was able to take a lot off my/our shoulders. We’ll see next year she’s ready to more independently lead up production of gatherings.

We’ve explored in the podcast and I’ve written previously about her strength of will in the direction, as she describes it, of surrender in recovery from alcoholism. What I also admire about her is her social fearlessness. She doesn’t have my social hang-ups, awkwardness, or frequent avoidance of social situations. An extrovert by nature, she can talk to anyone. Unlike the quieter Daniel, when Tiff is in on-mode she externalizes her thoughts in a steady stream of consciousness. She did great speaking to the group, blending warmth, humor, and information.

What strikes me most when I consider her spirit is the strength of her will and faith. To pull through what she’s pulled through, and to come out with a cleansed and forgiven heart that takes responsibility for her creation, the shadow included, and sees always the best in others. Tiffani, like the others, is strong in the ways of the heart.

Categories: Uncategorized

Prague & Berlin Law of One Gatherings 2022

LL_Central

PRAGUE

We didn’t realize how much we missed this, how much we needed this. To be with spiritual seekers again. To blend the energies in service to others. To share not only a love for this philosophy but – more importantly – to share each other. My eyes welled with gratitude at multiple points during the weekend. Magic is everywhere in a universe made of and by the Law of One, but it really becomes evident and inspiring when like-hearts connect in a space focused upon collaborative work and sharing. Three weeks later I can see everyone’s face, hear everyone’s voice, and bring to life in my heart everyone’s particular energetic signature.

What I am pointing to is L/L Research’s first in-person event since before the pandemic: the recently completed August, 2022 Prague Law of One Gathering. Our last event was, funny enough, the October, 2019 Prague LOO Gathering. Almost three years! A drought that was so gradual we didn’t quite realize how parched our throats were, though our cracking skin was a growing sign.

27 people registered from nine different countries. It began Friday evening with introductions and what we call authentic relating games, which are just mechanisms designed to break the proverbial ice and begin the process of blending the individual into a harmonious whole.

Having been over three years during which the world became…different, we didn’t know what to expect; but from the first moment forward, each seemed to merge in the open heart the way it always happens at these gatherings. We do various check-ins over the course of the event, from beginning with questions about expectations/hopes/desires to sharing reflections at the end. Invariably there are reports of feeling at home, feeling an inexplicable familiarity and kinship, being where one is supposed to be (along with some accompanying sadness at times to return to the routine life and its attendant challenges); this due not to any special powers of L/L Research, but to the way the Creator makes Itself more known when humble seekers come together in shared seeking and service.

Breaking into smaller groups for Friday’s authentic relating games

Three dinners, two lunches, all vegan, including this pizza

Open Space

We utilized the Open Space format that has proven so successful in the past. In this format, each attendee has an opportunity to pitch their presentation to the circle during the morning Marketplace portions. With feedback from the group, they then determine in which venue and time slot to situate the presentation. Offerings can run the spectrum of brain hemispheric activity, from the left-brained intellectual lectures and discussions to the right-brained artistic and emotional explorations, to body exercises, group activities, and everything in between.

Jochen introducing his open space offering

Each attendee has a different experience, as no two attend the same exact offerings throughout the weekend. I loved every presentation I attended. To highlight a few:

  • Bara, a member of the Czech translation, held a discussion about forgiveness where she courageously shared a tale of traumatic events in her past, her own struggles with forgiveness, and the very recent moment when it suddenly shifted and she moved into that sweet eternal river of light. The discussion that followed highlighted some of the difficulties (which I too grapple with) regarding the lived practice of forgiveness in a world such as ours.
  • Jochen, the German translator and L/L’s partner in publishing German and French translations, shared his deep and extensive background with the spiritual discipline of using chanting as a means of communion and purification. (He spent some years of his 20s in an ashram.) He is drawn toward sacred words such as “Adonai Vasu.” We participated in a chant set to a rhythm of those two words. I wish we had had more time, because as we chanted, I could feel an emotional knot of pain begin to open and the tears begin their journey to the eyes as my voice faltered during the chanting. But it was only a hint of a beginning.
  • Narek, a multinational friend with whom we’ve shared time at past Louisville and Prague events, led a breathwork session that was very much like the breathwork I did at a Stanislav Grof/Jack Kornfield workshop at the Omega Institute many years ago. Following Jochen’s session, the access to that buried crystallized emotional knot of pain began to re-open. Laying on my back on the ground breathing rhythmically and intensively to music playing in the room, the tears began to flow and the body began to convulse. But again I felt I was not reaching what needs to be processed and released. Outside of my sister Noelle’s sudden passing almost two years ago, which hardly let me stand upright at times, I haven’t had a deep soul cry in so very long. And I really need to cry.
  • Radim, another member of the Czech team, spent a whole session examining the Lord’s Prayer, line by line, a prayer that he had integrated into his own practice upon learning how important it was to Carla and integral it is to L/L’s channeling service. It was incredible how much insight and richness of meaning there was in each turn of phrase.
  • Sarah, a return attendee from the UK, held what I and others felt was a much needed service: a woman’s circle. Naturally I was not present, but each who did, including Trish, was quite grateful. Trish in fact decided to forgo offering her heartshare in favor of giving space to this woman’s circle.

And many others! This is just a small taste of the great variety of offerings at these events.

Discussing The Lord’s Prayer

A breathwork session

We were able to travel with Jim to the 2019 event, but this year Jim had cat commitments (the literal four-legged feline entities). Travel was not in the cards for this home-rooted Taurus. Fortunately, the group connected with Jim via Zoom for some Q&A. And we kept him with us in our hearts.

Channeling

Also in highlight, Trish, Austin, and I did the unthinkable. Prior to the event, we were invited to channel. We conveyed to Vojta not to build a channeling into the schedule. In our years of practice, and thanks in large part to the pandemic which put public meditations on hiatus, we had yet to channel in front of other people. We had taken plenty of live questions, just not with other people join us in the room. (Exception: Morris did once several years ago.) We were expecting to break that barrier when public meditations resumed this fall, but at an event on another continent with almost 30 other people? Unlikely.

But, we kept our minds and hearts open. Austin performed the Banishing Ritual every day in the space we might use just in case, and, come the day before, Trish, Austin, and I combined hearts and decided… yes, we would try it. We gave appropriate disclaimers to the circle and set a time for the next day.

Come Sunday evening, one of the attendees, Miroslav, played sacred sounds for the circle while we three human instruments performed our individual tuning/challenging process in the space to be used for the working. (Miroslav is one of those entities who anchors a grounded and expansive presence that gifts the circle tremendous light. He spent much of the weekend in meditation.)

We finished our processes a minute or two before the group began solemnly streaming into the space, Trish had tears flowing. In what I think may be a first, she reported seeing Carla “clear as day.” Trisha said that Carla was present and aglow with pride for her proteges, and also some light admonishment for taking ourselves too seriously. Trish received the message that we should essentially loosen up and enjoy ourselves—we were supported and would serve great. We were quite nervous.

It was an ordinary channeling like any other non-Carla (read: extra-ordinary) channeling. It was positively oriented information, but ultimately just a perspective inherent with its own incompleteness and biases. But special for us because we did what we thought we wouldn’t be able to do. In the moment after the session, my eyes were water-filled as I looked over to my companions. Austin transcended the role of colleague/friend and Trish transcended the role of colleague/wife, and I saw each as something… larger… a brother and a sister, each an equal peer and teacher to me, the three of us with arms linked taking another step on a long road of fulfilling the incarnational mission of service. It was a moment I and we will cherish for years to come.

By the end of the day with eyes I could barely keep open (dinner was very…celebratory), I excitedly report the event to Jim by email to receive a very heartfelt and supportive reply in return.

The gathered circle was so supportive in their beingness and attitude. What seemed a daunting prospect was made possible because of the generosity of their hearts. It actually turned out to be a highly conducive space to take this leap! Now, so long as we never have to do it again, because there are still apprehension-causing hurdles to cross, we can rest easy and put up our feet… : )

A Few People

Readers of L/L Research may recall the name Romi (or Roman) mentioned over the years by us or by Carla and Jim. A Czech transplant to Louisville in the early 90s, having defected when it was under the Iron Curtain, he was a very faithful friend to Carla and Jim, and then us, over the years. In 2013 he gave up his life in the States to return to his native country to care for his mother. He and we were eager for a reunion at this event, and then just days before it was scheduled to begin… he contracted covid. It was quite sad to be unable to see our old friend.

I wish I could speak about each person and shine a light on just some facet of the beauty I see in each, but that’s not possible. There are a few other highlights I wish to make.

Vojta, the lead of the Czech translation team and our dear friend, really came into his own. This was his second effort to lead the production on the ground in Prague following the 2019 event. It is always a lot of work, and it always presents new challenges, but there is a certain quality of copy + paste when you establish your precedents, so we were able to carry over the good work of 2019 and improve upon it. Thanks in large part to his efforts, the event ran without a hitch! Including filling our bellies with delicious vegan food for dinners and lunches.

Vojtech (nickname: Vojta) is someone with an irrepressible quality of energy and zest for life. A tall entity, he speaks loudly and seems often incapable of modulating to lower decibels (I joked that I imagine he is permanently banned from libraries throughout the Czech Republic), and he fills up whatever room he occupies. He is always laughing, whether at other people’s jokes or his own, sometimes halfway through what he is saying; and oh, he is ever on the lookout for a new English idiom. Vojta welcomes all into his heart and is very much himself with little pretense, an authenticity that he’s learned to embrace over the years.

And while I’m at it, a shout-out to Prague in August! Weather was a bit on the hot side but amazing nonetheless. It was great walking to the local small vegan restaurants for dinner.

It was also a first partial run for L/L’s first-ever dedicated Event Manager, Tiffani. (Since 2005 when Carla threw me into the ring and asked me to produce an event without training or preparation, I have been leading the production of L/L events.) Tiffani had helped to produce the event, processed all the registrations and various attendee-related questions and needs leading up to the event, but this wouldn’t yet be the platform for her to put her skill set to use—that is still upcoming. She was able to lend support and did a fantastic job designing and leading Friday’s authentic relating games and keeping the European attendees flowing from one session to the next.

Left to right: Emilly and Tiffani greet people at the door at the start of the event

And Sheyla! A member of the Serbian translation team for the TRC. We previously had correspondence and “met” through Jonathan Tong’s live zoom Q&As, but this was a first in-person meet-up. Among that which I personally needed was her humor. A barrel of laughs, that one; and fluent in the sarcastic arts, but not in the condescending or cynical way that many are. She threads that very fine needle of imbuing each quip with the green ray so there is always a sense of embrace and safety, even as mutual barbs are being exchanged. A delight to share energies with.

Left to right: Trisha, Gary, Jochen, Emilly, Vojta, Austin, Sheyla

And in the way that Ra describes the exponential possibilities of the mated relationship, Vojta’s life mate, Emilly, also passionate about the Law of One—and oh what a story of synchronicity, their coming together—supported the production and synthesized so effortlessly with Vojta and the rest of us in keeping the event not only logistically viable, but energetically clean and vibrant. While grounded, greatly intelligent, and pragmatic, she has the energy and the light of a flower. She just shines.

Vojta and Emilly meditating on a noodle

Emilly and Trisha

Emilly and Vojta distributing food during Saturday’s dinner.

Holding physical space for seekers of the Law of One has been part of the lifeblood of L/L Research. The absence of that space was beginning to become acutely felt. Being in a live circle of seeking again, giving and receiving service, was so reenergizing, uplifting, and heart-restoring. And hearing the same from others… I wish I could hug each one once more. I never want to again go three years without this

BRUSSELS

Among the translators that have remained dedicated to their service over the years is one entity forever rooted in our hearts: Misha Deschreider. A professional translator by trade, she has gifted L/L Research 13 different books in the French language. As she said recently, “Translating L/L Research books is always a great joy for me since it gives me a feeling to be closer to you all, and it is also the best way for me to learn fascinating things. How fortunate I am in this respect!” But it’s not her service alone that she has gifted; it is her energy, conversation, culture, and charm. Misha has been a friend since we crossed paths in September, 2007.

In the rooftop garden of Misha’s apartment complex

Sadly, she had to cancel her registration for the Prague LOO gathering. At almost 80 years old, her knees wouldn’t allow her the journey she made for the 2019 Prague LoO gathering, so we knew what we had to do: go see her. In between Prague and Berlin, Austin, Trish, and I made a stop for a couple of days in Brussels to spend with Misha.

Living in a well-maintained and comfortable senior living center, one of her neighbors brought over a paella dish for us to share together on day one. And we were joined by one of Misha’s LOO study group members, Mia, a transplant from Finland, for a blend of spiritual and personal discussion. The next day, Misha guided us through the public transit system to make our way to Brussels, the Grand Plac in particular, where with great care and meditational speed, we were able to walk, visit shops, and share a lively meal together. Though operating an aging body, she has such vitality of spirit, wit, good humor, questions, and stories to share.

It was sad to say goodbye. We all agree that the time was too short, though next year there is scheduled to be a sleeper train up and running that will allow her to travel to Prague.

This visit also intensified the repeating clock digit phenomenon. They arrive in clusters, and our first day with Misha I experienced five of them. They’ve continued, but less intensely.

BERLIN

And for our final stop, we were met by Vojta and Emilly (the latter of whom organized much of our weekend) in Berlin, the home city of Jochen Blumenthal who is the head of Das Gesetz des Einen Verlag. For the few who follow this Blogworthy, you’ll have seen Jochen’s name repeated over the years. In 2014, with Carla and Jim’s blessing and joy, Jochen officially pioneered something new for L/L Research: a satellite operation authorized to translate and publish L/L’s work in German. (Later Misha would join the arrangement to bring in French.) And since then he has been a faithful and much valued partner in the mission of L/L Research.

In conjunction with Daniel, a German student of the Law of One who we met the weekend prior in Prague, Jochen hosted a small public gathering that Saturday. We met at Daniel’s workplace for an event live-streamed via Zoom. As with the channeling effort the weekend prior, we were a bit nervous because being in front of a camera recording and streaming us, that’s still pretty new after all these years. But it went so well. As with Prague, the atmosphere itself was just beautiful—seekers gathered together in shared focus and positive spirit.

It was the first event we’ve participated in that was bilingual: every question that Jochen asked or relayed, along with every reply, Jochen translated into German. And extra exciting: Trisha finally joined Austin and me for our three-person panel. Uncharacteristic for her, she was nervous but spread her wings and, in our opinion, soared. It was strengthening for us three to be upon this adventure as a group, from the channeling the weekend prior to this live Q&A. We three have gone through a lot together, and thanks to catalyst both wonderful and not-so-wonderful, we’ve grown closer into a tight-knit, well-oiled operational unit, each of us dedicated to the mission and each other.

I had never seen Jochen in this role before. He was great and much more at ease than us. Jochen is a good speaker with a melodic voice. He is a great (albeit often meandering) storyteller who’s lived like an ascetic much of his life, including some years in an ashram, and has undergone a good deal of hard experience.

Being with him in his home environment gave me a deeper window into soul. He loves the streets. He loves the people. Smoking his rolled cigarettes and observing the world around him, he interacts with all walks of life, talking compassionately with whoever he encounters—from drug addicts, to the homeless, to religious sectarians, to business people, to young, old, and all manner of mind/body/spirit complexes.

Jochen radiant

Jochen showing Austin some aspects of his operation

We enjoyed meeting some new seekers at the Berlin event, re-seeing some faces that had been in Prague the weekend prior including Lin and Maximillian, and seeing some old ones like Matthias Galke who had helped us to produce the series of YouTube videos in 2019. Matthias led the Berling event in a couple short yoga sessions and spoke about his own Law of One-based tour de force: Intelligente Unendlichkeit . (Kids in the 80s may remember Johnny 5 from the movie Short Circuit. Matthias’s reading habits remind me of Johnny 5. He has consumed thousands of non-fiction books in years of research and study, the fruit of which he synthesizes into that book.)

I could also add a personal note about the fascinating and…painful history of Berlin. I am forever passionate about history, one of my great loves after metaphysics, and Berlin was a particularly rich place to be in that regard. Among the historical places we visited while in Berlin on our time was a walk along a preserved section of the Berlin Wall, which now features a variety of painted murals. (I didn’t quite realize that West Berlin was totally encircled by the wall, though being an enclave in then East Germany, that would make sense.)

But in the way of positive transmutation, we also walked by the site of the future House of One. From their website:

“Berlin is soon to become home to something truly unique. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are planning to build a house of worship here – one that brings a synagogue, a church, and a mosque together under one roof. The three separate sections will be linked by a communal room in the center of the building. This will serve as a meeting place, where worshippers and members of the public can come together and learn more about the religions and each other.”

Berlin is a hotbed of clashing and cross-pollinating cultures. Jochen called it a microcosm of the world.

HOME

Returning home, we were faced with a backlog of accumulated work that converged with the need to kick the engines into gear to ready ourselves for TWO more in-person gatherings coming in mid-September! (The first of which is this coming weekend.) This was not the universe’s brightest scheduling idea.

Time moves soo fast. It’s difficult to soak in and savor any one of experience. I blinked and Prague was over. And I am back in this fast-flowing river of duty and commitment in the service of this organization. But the aftertaste of the two events in Europe grow sweeter.

On the organizational level, to return to form after a three-year hiatus, to feel oneself of service, to see impact, to actively support other seekers in their journey, and to play a part in holding a container of connection, healing, and transformation—it was well worth all the effort. Also, the opportunity to work more closely with Jochen (who may one day head up a European publishing center for a variety of foreign languages) and Vojta (who is growing into leadership for European event production) was in good support of L/L’s mission.

On a personal level, Trish and I are somewhat isolated in our day-to-day lives (which was especially intense during the first year of the pandemic given that Trish is an immunocompromised person). But generally, much of our human interaction comes mitigated by technology. Outside of a week here and there spent with birth families, I can’t recall the last time we both spent such a span of time with loved ones/peers/fellow adventurers on a path of service on this strange planetary outpost. It felt so good.

My mom has six siblings. My dad seven. I had cousins galore growing up, combined with friends in school. Living with my grandmother from grades 7 – 12, my parents loved to host. We always had family members and friends over, whether something my parents organized, or our school friends visiting my brother and/or me, and all the dumb things that kids get into. When adulthood and the spiritual path commenced, I drifted and detached from all of that, losing a universe of relationships, along with the identity that was part of that world. While I’ve welcomed many beautiful people into my heart thanks to the Law of One, it’s been over 24 years since I had that sense of local community. It took some years to make peace with its loss, but I still feel its ache; perhaps an echo of that faint subconscious memory of being one with a planetary society of loved ones…

The above accounts of our journeys of service are not to be read as being experienced by perfect beacons of love and light. We are dumb, imperfect, ordinary mortals. I struggled with low energy at various points. One afternoon in Berlin I became somewhat withdrawn. After abstaining in the lead up to the Prague channeling, I keep my system clear for channeling, I succumbed to the inner seduction of nicotine and vaped on an off. But, save for a private moment of tension between Trish and me unrelated to the event, the venture was conducted in harmony. I love people. I love their stories, their aspirations, their talents, and their humor, especially. I love their individually unique light. I will miss everyone encountered during our European journey. The sights now are upon our upcoming events!

Prague, here and below, is an exceedingly beautiful city

An overlook of Prague near the event venue

Addendum

After the event, Radim reached out to a few of us regarding his presentation on the Lord’s Prayer at the Prague event. With his permission to publish here, he wrote:

I wanted to describe you what I imagine during the prayer but we were running out of time. So let me do it now. I altered this after digestion of the words and inspiration/thinking that came to me after our session.

I imagine space, infinite space and try to feel love and gratitude

– Our Father who are in Heaven, I imagine how this space forms Sun, logos, as a concentration of love, as a facet of the One

– hallowed be Thy name. Sun, its surface starts to move in a dynamic endless process

– Thy kingdom come, Sun starts to glow more into outer space being its Will to be received on Earth

– Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Moving to Earth where all people have what they need in 3rd density, no thirst, no starving.

– Give us this day our daily bread I imagine people smiling, then hugging, all nations doing that

– and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. I imagine a person(s), balanced, knowing his/her incarnation purpose

– And lead us not into temptation I imagine people in great armor of light – but deliver us from evil.

I pause here for a while, trying to feel what comes back, no words

– (For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever.) Amen.

Categories: Uncategorized

2022-07-15

LL_Central

5/27 – 7/15

Team expansion: You who follow our ongoings may remember that this past February we put out a call for a new hired position with L/L Research, what (for lack of better term) we titled an Operations Specialist who would work alongside Austin, Gary, and Trish in the daily operation of L/L Research. As we described in past blogworthy reports, we received over 35 applications from around the country!

It was a first for us, and it was a difficult selection process as many of the applicants had gifts to offer the organization and the readership. After a substantial collaborative process of engaging both the analytical and intuitive gears, we narrowed down the field to a handful with whom we conducted interviews. And then Jim, Trish, Gary, and Austin in consensus landed on two with whom we held final interviews.

The one to fill the Operations Specialist role was an unknown to us, this being our first contact with her, but she had a resume and portfolio that not only checked nearly every box, her bright heart and authenticity of spiritual seeking and service were also glowingly evident in her beingness. She has been a joy to work with, catching onto everything quickly, intelligent and witty, master of puns, a great organizer and communicator, and, thanks to a life of various hardships, deeply empathetic to the suffering of others. Now that she has completed her 3-month probationary period and has settled in with us for the long haul, we are happy to introduce to you the amazing Joanna Burns! Please welcome her onto the team!

The role was originally designed to include managing L/L Research events. But among the 35 applicants was a particular soul who has been attending L/L Research events for 20 years and who thus understood the spirit and practicalities of our events. Consequently, from the Operations Specialist we split off an Event Manager role for that and other reasons. A guest on our podcast in 2020, she rose and resurrected from the dark trenches of life and substance abuse into a self-forgiven person who is single-pointedly dedicated to growth and service, including through volunteer work to help other women struggling with substance abuse. She also has one of the most forgiving hearts we’ve ever encountered. Strong in the ways of will and faith, and a longtime dear friend of ours and the organization, and a past volunteer, we are happy to introduce to you the incredible Tiffani Mauldin! Please welcome her onto the team!

Whereas Joanna devotes her time to L/L Research as a regular staff member, Tiffani works on an as-needed basis for helping with the production of events as Gary guides her in taking up the reins, which has been quite a lot lately as we are conducting three of them in August and September.

And then last but not least, if you’ve been following L/L Research at all, you’ve heard of the name Daniel spoken in tones of reverence. He is the entity who fulfilled and exceeded our vision of a new library site at LLResearch.org by gifting the organization his web development skills and blending in his own vision. As mentioned in news bulletin for the launch of the new website last year, Daniel volunteered for two years working intensively before we got him to accept some compensation for his service. Since the launch of the site, his efforts have not decreased. Every week he is working with us and working on the website, bringing his own initiative and leadership to constant improvement and innovation. Our collaboration for over three years now has been seamless and, surprisingly, because we’re all humans, frictionless.

The most unifying thread for these three people, along with the rest of L/L Research’s staff and volunteers, is a sincere love for the Law of One and Confederation philosophy.

You can now meet the expanded team on the updated About page! We are honored and grateful to be working with these other-selves.  

Channeling Circles: The channeling circle continues gathering in Jim’s living room semi-monthly to receive messages from the Confederation. It is always a volunteer service, happening outside of our regular work hours. We were only able to meet once in May this time, and the sessions from June are still in the transcription pipeline and being tended to by our amazing volunteer transcribers. Thanks to Daniel P. for transcribing this one!

Ra Contact YouTube: Trish, with some input and support from Austin, continued on with the steady task of creating the audio/text videos for the Ra Contact Youtube project, bringing us up to session 95.

A Book of Days Narration: Jim recorded another inspirational message from A Book of Days to share on Youtube, bringing Carla’s unique Christian mysticism to interested seekers:

Discussions with Jonathan Tong: Jim met again with Jonathan Tong and the Seattle Law of One Study Group (based online) in a live Q&A style discussion. If you haven’t sensed the pattern, this will be a regular occurrence (along with sessions with Gary and Austin):

Spiritcomplex.com – Gary: In March, 2022, I fulfilled a long-held dream of undergoing a 10-day silent meditation retreat. It was life-changing, and it inspired me to type up and share my notes, which inspired me to finally launch a journal. If interested, you can find The Light of Polaris at the nascent www.spiritcomplex.com. Over time, I hope to share my heart. At the simple beating center of its myriad layers and complexities is the spiritual impulse, the striving toward oneness. I hope to focus on the mystical aspect of my journey, that which is most interior and true to me; that which, even when serving in a spiritually oriented organization among those similarly seeking, goes often unarticulated.

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

  • Working with Translators:
    • Korean –Memory refresher: a family who asked to remain anonymous appeared on the scene and gifted L/L a complete Korean translation of the Ra sessions. However, it needed updated to TRC standards. Enter Sienna, who was recently begun her own work to produce a Korean TRC. After some coordination, she in great spirits took up the task of updating the text and translating the accompanying material of TRC. In this period, she sent in her completed work up to Session 50. We could be quite close to seeing a Korean Volume 1 of The Ra Contact. Thank you, Sienna!
    • Arabic – In addition to replying to some questions about the meaning of things, we received from B. sessions 41 – 56. Like the Korean version, bringing us very close to an Arabic TRC, and the first Arabic of anything for the website. Thank you, B.! He works full time while raising a family and finds time around the edges to this passion project.
    • Farsi (Persian) – Received from Meysam the first ever transcript in Persian for the website. Thank you, Meysam, for the translation, and Pupak for the editing! Also discussed the effort to produce a Persian Ra Contact as their efforts continued and we found a way to be of support to Meysam & the team. (Thanks again to Zachary for the expert help!)
    • Hebrew – And to continue in the region… Ra has had a challenging road entering Hebrew, which is interesting in light of what Ra says about the nature and origin of the Hebrew language. Over the course of several years now, the project has passed hands three times, and the third translator has been stalled for a while. Enter a new volunteer, Alina, who generously reached out and went through the onboarding process with us. Contacted the third translator, O., who was grateful to hear that another translator was willing to take up the work. He made himself available to her and we facilitated the transfer. Then connected Alina with another Hebrew-language friend of the organization, Erez, who would also like to lend his support to the project. Thank you, Alina, O., and Erez! Fingers crossed.
    • Chinese 1 – Lots of work in Chinese of late. Held an in-depth discussion with Wen, Sean, and Terry on the pros/cons of using machine translation to help Wen produce a new (and additional) Traditional Chinese translation of TRC. There are various schools of thought about the potential utility of services like DeepL and Google Translate. Obviously on its own, it will produce an inferior translation to a human. But if carefully and thoroughly reviewed and edited, it may be of some support. Wen will experiment further. Thank you Wen, Sean, and Terry!
    • Chinese 2 – Worked with Li-Yun on various content-based and formatting-related questions for the Traditional Chinese translation of A Concept Guide. ACG. Thank you for your continued work!
    • Chinese 3 – Received an offer to help contribute Simplified and Traditional Chinese translations of the Transcript Library from a new volunteer who we onboarded. We look forward to working with you, Iris! But this precipitated another round of discussions with Sean and Terry who helped us to navigate the question of the literally hundreds of backlogged Chinese transcripts, some awaiting publication to LLResearch.org once some problems about Chinese text are solved, and many more awaiting editing from their team. Coordinated with them and with the new volunteer. Should you be reading this, Sean and Terry, thank you for your indefatigable efforts, especially the skillful, speedy, and thorough replies that Sean unhesitatingly gives every time we reach for help.
    • Serbian – Collaborated with Dejan and Sheyla on the project to produce a Serbian TRC. A bit complicated, as Dejan has more or less produced most of the material, but it needs edited and updated. But the work continues! Thank you, Dejan and Sheyla!
    • Spanish – Receiving from the ever-forward moving Henry some Spanish-language transcripts. Thank you, Henry!
    • Russian – And another new volunteer effort arrived, this one from Vladimir (no, definitely not that one), who would like to contribute Russian-language transcripts to the Transcript Library. He was successfully onboarding, agreeing to our basic terms and sharing something of his journey. We look forward to working with you, Vladimir!
    • German/French – Received from our partner, Jochen, a Q1 report of his and Misha’s German/French publishing operation, along with some other points of collaboration as he gets resettled in Berlin. Thank you, Jochen!
  • Upgrading the website for translations: At the start of 2022, we met with Daniel for a year-planning meeting to set objectives for the new library site for the year. At the top of that list was the development and launch of the search engine, which happened in May. While there is still lots of evolution yet for the search engine, Daniel has taken the lead to move onto the next big objective: integrating translations into the site better, and making the site a more multi-lingual site altogether. That includes:
    • Translated Ra Contacts: We will seek to create translated mirrors of the English Ra Contact page. For the protype, Daniel is beginning with French. And toward that end, among the huge variety of back-end work ongoing, Misha provided a spreadsheet’s worth of French translations for the page. Thank you, Misha!
    • Translations for the search engine: A big and complicated process. Like the one above, in addition to the back-end work, we received spreadsheets of translations of English words that appear around the site in various languages. Thank you Kirlina (Bulgarian), Sean (Simplified), Terry (Traditional), Vojta (Czech), Erik (Dutch), Misha (French), Jochen (German), Ori (Hebrew), Laszlo (Hungarian), Mauro (Italian), Edgard and Pedro (Portuguese), Horia (Romanian), Catherine (Russian).
    • Translations, general: We have a pending meeting on the challenging question of how to make the site multi-lingual, and just what that will look like. Discussion has begun in a  a dozen cards spread out over a Trello board.
  • Publication training: Daniel, ever the above-and-beyonder, produced two series of training videos, one to use our content management system for publishing and managing content on the library site, the other for using the Markdown formatting language for properly formatting all the material published to the site. These were more than just technical how-tos, but also helped to synthesize with our existing publishing standards to set new standards of excellence for the website to keep everything consistent and professional. The Markdown videos were 2.5 hours in sum! Watched those, took notes, put together a reference guide/cheat sheet for all the rules, and got Trish and Joanna watching the same in order to train them to publish to the website as well.

    Trish adds a personal note: A note to Daniel: Thank you for all of the work you put into creating these videos! I sometimes feel behind the curve when it comes to technology, but your tutorials helped me learn so much, and I finally feel comfortable publishing material to the new website.
  • Events: Each of the three upcoming events is unique in construction and setting, making it difficult to create a one-size-fits-all template. The objective for the new role of Event Manager (as reported above) is to take over leadership of the production of the events from Gary who has been filling that particular role since 2005. Tiffani has been stellar in taking up the work, but is still in something of a training phase as there is a lot of unique knowledge that can only be given through experience. In addition to all the attendee registration, inquiries, and arrangements, there has also been:
    • Prague: Worked with Vojta (lead of the Czech translation team and our counterpart on the ground there) to finalize the curriculum and issue a general communication to attendees. Sadly had to accept the cancellation of Misha who had been looking forward to return to Prague for the past three years but whose age mitigates against the rigors of travel. Fortunately, we will get to spend some time with Misha in her home are following the event.
    • Coming Home: Nearing being full for this event, we continued working with the venue (including on the delicious-looking catered menu) and our friends in TOTOH on developing the event, planning for a meeting in a couple of weeks.
    • Homecoming: Filled up the final registrations for this event, finalized the curriculum, communicated with attendees, booked restaurants and an extra outdoor toilet, among other points of logistical planning. Took stock of in-house items we commonly use when hosting events (mostly household items like cleaning products, kitchen utensils, and other essentials) to ready L/L  for future in-person events.
    • Jochen event: Made plans with Jochen for another small event following Prague for Law of One readers. Stay tuned!
  • Online course: Met with our friend and LOO scholar, Aaron Maret, for some very early chalkboard discussions about the prospect of developing an online course in collaboration with his leadership and service. Looking forward to the potential journey to come.
  • Seeker Ministry: The inbox continues to brim with the shining light that is messages from seekers all over the world. Our goal, as has always been the case, is to respond to every email that we receive (except for spam, of course, though spammers deserve our love and acceptance too). The whole team takes part in this significant task, which can range from answering questions, offering guidance, offering prayers or condolences, relating to unique stories, laughing at jokes, accepting appreciation with gratitude, and all around doing our best to offer our highest and best to the seekers who reach out to us.
  • Typo Project: As previously reported, we’ve been embroiled in an intensive project thrust onto us from the LOO publisher. Thankfully, that project is almost wrapped up, after some significant hours were put into untangling a mess of typos introduced when the publisher created the boxed set anniversary editions of the books. To give some extra background, before the boxed set was first published, we had reviewed what we were led to believe were the final proofs of the text to be printed, with many of these newfound errors corrected. By some process that we still do not understand, those final proofs were further changed, reverting many of the corrections and undoing a significant copyedit to the text, along with introducing new, baffling edits that escaped our detection until the initial typos sent in from a seeker.
  • Morris Interview: Completed review of the transcript from the long interview conducted with Morris last November about the early history of L/L Research. After receiving his review in turn, put it on deck for a final once-over and publication to the site.
  • Light/Lines Newsletter: The summer edition of Light/Lines was compiled and sent out to the mailing list (both of the electronic and snailular kind). This chosen session discusses the dynamic between surrender and responsibility. You can check it out in the Light/Lines archive.
  • TAW Videos: This project has been one of the most slow-burning, being now a few years in the (slow) works. But, it is in the works. Received from Ken five finalized videos of the Tilting at Windmills videos, with 16 more to go. Thank you, Ken!  
  • Photographer: In the past 20+ years, the only professional photography we’ve done was for some shots of Carla for her publication of Living the Law of One 101. Now that the team is growing, we need some pics that weren’t snapped on our phones for the website. : ) Researched and contacted local photographers and booked a photo session.
  • Audiobook: As previously reported, trying to create audiobooks in house, while greatly successful for The Ra Contact, proved way to time-and-labor intensive. An attempt to commission a volunteer got us two-thirds of the way through AWH, but that took a year. So finally turned to a third-party professional a couple months ago. Received word back from our new audiobook editor with suggestions on areas for re-recording and final processing questions. Secrets of the UFO should be done super soon!
  • Living the Law of One 102: So many disruptions have kept the important project of editing this important project so close to Jim’s heart, but no longer! We developed a rough plan to keep the ball rolling and are getting back to work on 102.
  • Prison Ministry: One of the responsibilities given to Joanna was to resurrect with prison ministry, which hit dormancy during the pandemic when prisons restricted mail intake. With some guidance from Austin, Joanna assembled a team of volunteers and we’re officially back in business. Over this period, our prison ministry received a number of letters, mailed out 10 responses, and sent 6 books to incarcerated seekers. We expect those numbers to continue to grow as the program gets back in its groove.
  • Yellow-ray Fun: The unfortunate reality of being a non-profit who employs people and sells products (books) is that there the mundane organizational needs of these aspects require time and attention. On that front, our payment processor required a regular (but significant) security compliance audit for us to complete, which did necessitate some investigation and slight changes to protocol to ensure our practices are up to the latest standards. And then with a new employee comes an entirely new state’s worth of employer laws and compliances, and various forms related to insurance, workers comp, benefits, etc. needing to be filled and filed properly.
  • Online store updates and maintenance: Investigated a pesky spam issue around the contact form in our online store and found the most reasonable way to implement a captcha filter to hopefully stop the pesky bots. Also investigated another ongoing issue that causes some orders to be misfiled (and sometimes missed) in the backend of the store, and found a few possible explanations, but so far not good solutions.
  • 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.
    • Completed another five sessions worth of 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.
    • Joanna has continued working on editing podcast transcripts, and we have a total of 15 edited podcast transcripts ready to upload online once she completes her website publishing training.
  • Nuts & Bolts:
    • Worked with the LOO publisher on concerns other than the typo-related ones reported above in a spirit of mutual goodwill.
    • Received word from our old friend Mimi about a troublesome spam issue from our newsletter mailing service. Looked into it and found a temporary solution, along with a path for further investigation. Thank you Mimi for sending along the tip!
    • Reached the conclusion of a long project on a question of copyright with our skillful and helpful attorney. And began a new project to explore book publishing contracts. Ah, the yellow-ray world.
    • Completed, let’s see, five weeks since the last blogworthy report so five weeks worth of bookkeeping.
    • Played around in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to see if potential new banner images/icons could be created for the online store.
    • Regular PO box and bank visits, as usual.
  • Smatterings Held several internal meetings to talk about all of the above and then some. | Received some volunteer offers for the upcoming massive indexing project. (Mentioned at the end of the news announcement for the launch of the search engine. | Found a slight edit to 95.24 in the course of producing the Ra Contact YouTube videos. | Facilitated Jim’s processing of the final student of the Basic Principles of the Law of One course. Thank you, Harrison! | Worked with Matthias on his effort to find an English translator for his German book, Intelligente Unendlichkeit | Performed a quarterly update of the Volunteer list | After proactively inviting Sherri upon learning of the publication of her new book, added a page to the Friends Of section for Why You Were Born and What Happens When You Die: Short Answers for the Soul-on-the-Go. | Edited errors discovered in past transcripts (thank you Jan for the help!).
  • Intermediate Circles: Met 6/8, 6/23, and 7/7 at Jim’s for our channeling circles. The first was a group question about the will, the second a series of smaller questions, and on the third, Jim was grieving the recent lost of his feline companions, Dan D. and Chloe, lost five days apart, and the rest of the circle had strong catalyst in their lives, so we opted for group discussion instead.
  • C/C Circles: The C/C channeling circles were put on hold because…well, one of the members got shot (see previous entry), which happens to introduce a large burden of doctor appointments, physical therapy, surgery, and other very fun time-sinks. As healing continues and the appointments lessen, we hope to again make time for these exploratory channeling circles.

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

Personal Sharings

Austin: Thank you to everyone who reached out with kind words of support after reading my account of getting shot. It is truly healing to receive such kindness and love, and those healing vibes have been crucial. Some good news on that front: the bullet that was lodged in my leg moved closer to the surface as my physical activity increased, to the point where the surgeon felt okay to go ahead and remove it. The surgery went well and I am now bullet free! As they had to cut into a meaningful amount of muscle to remove the bullet (and other subcutaneous tissue), it did prolong the physical recovery a decent amount. While my physical therapy is going well, the lack of full function is even more obvious to me than before the surgery, and pain has returned in the muscles that have to pick up the slack from the damaged muscles. But I am still ever-grateful for having medical care available to me in this situation. I have also started therapy to help with the processing of the traumatic situation, which continues to have recurring effects on my mind and emotions. Thankfully it is not debilitating, but it is present. I still expect a full recovery, both physically and mentally, but the journey continues.

Gary: Sometime around 2006(?), Carla and Jim returned home (I was living with them at the time) with Chloe and Dan D. Lion. Dan D. was energetic, playful, and adventurous, longing for the outdoors (which he eventually won), and Chloe was more reserved, lazy, and not the most people-centric cat, but both were wonderful family members of the household. Both Jim and Carla were devoted to their cats (as was Don, evidenced by the amount of questions about Gandalf in the final sessions of the Ra contact). After Carla passed, the two kitties were Jim’s last living animal link to Carla. And, I believe, they offered him an outlet to fulfill one of his core incarnational missions: to serve as a caretaker for a portion of the Creator in need. And toward that end he gave himself completely to their care, as if they were his own human children. So it was an emotional blow to Jim to lose them five days apart from one another. His grief is quite strong, and our hearts open to him in love and support, and saying goodbye to those furry creatures who were our friends too.

Chloe
Dan D. Lion

Anniversary: Gary: The summer solstice marked 19 years since I moved to Louisville following Carla and Jim’s inivitation, 16.5 of which have been serving in a formal position.

DGDEV French & German
Our partner, Jochen, produces quarterly activity reports in his efforts to share the Confederation philosophy in German and French (with other languages on the way). He and Misha are powerhouses. Thank you, Jochen, Misha, Ivy, and team! Here is his 1st quarter report.

  • On January 11 the “Guide des Concepts” was finally published as a softcover book (https://www.amazon.fr/dp/3945871484) , and a little later as a PDF in L/L Research’s library: https://www.llresearch.org/fr/library/le-contact-ra-serie-ressources.
  • Misha continued translating A Channeling Handbook.
  • Misha and Jochen had, as always, beautiful video calls every now and then. Misha also enjoyed her regular calls and meetings with her Polaris study group and Law of One friends around the globe.  
  • Horia, Gary, Austin and Jochen concretized several pre-publishing issues of Horia’s Romanian translations, and then Jochen started the work of creating the Romanian Ra Contact publishing documents. One of the accompanying outcomes is that the blog https://legealuiunu.wordpress.com/ became more alive.
  • Matthias Galke and Jochen finalized the second volume “Chaos Logos Kosmos” of the series “The Law of One and the evolution of consciousness” which was published then in various formats.
Categories: Uncategorized

spiritcomplex.com

LL_Central

In March, 2022, I fulfilled a long-held dream of undergoing a 10-day silent meditation retreat. It was life-changing, and it inspired me to type up and share my notes, which inspired me to finally launch a journal. If interested, you can find The Light of Polaris at the nascent www.spiritcomplex.com/.

With everlasting love/light,
Gary L. Bean, temporarily

Categories: Uncategorized

The Bullet

LL_Central

(To anyone looking for the most recent Blogworthy Report, a new one has been published below at the same time as this story.)

A Personal Sharing from Austin:

To my memory, I’ve never used the opportunity of the Blogworthy to offer a personal sharing into my life. I experienced something pretty extreme recently that seems like as good a reason as any to break that trend. It’s something that I think some readers might care about, and more may at least find it at least interesting.

I’ll start with the preface: I’m okay, and should make a full recovery from this event (physically and mentally).

The short story is that I got shot. There was a shootout in front of my partner Kat’s house and I was a hit in the crossfire. It was in the leg, left calf, no bone or major arteries were hit.

The longer story has a bit more drama and speaks to the psychological experience of it – what I’ve been defining as trauma. I’ll offer a semi-detailed account with some personal reflections at the end. Warning, it’s a detailed account of a scary violent incident.

—

It was a beautiful afternoon. Kat was scheduled to move into her new home the next day and we spent all day getting her stuff organized for the move. We were in high spirits and very excited about the move. At around 5:30pm, I went outside to get my car from the street in front of the house to pull it around to the alley out back so we could load some stuff into it.

Kat’s yard is long and narrow, and her house is set back far from the road.

When I made it to the gate, about to open it to step out onto the sidewalk, I heard what I now know were gunshots coming from the nearby street corner. I then saw an SUV screeching out of control around the corner, turning in my direction. It jumped the curb, hitting the neighbor’s car and crashing fully onto the sidewalk. It was coming straight towards me very fast, so I turned and ran about halfway back down Kat’s yard as fast as I could.

The SUV continued crashing through all of the fencing and tree guards before it stopped directly in front of Kat’s house, taking out her fence and gate right where I was standing moments before.

(While Kat’s house is set back from the road, her neighbors’ houses are right up on the sidewalk. Her next-door neighbors have three young children who are frequently on the sidewalk in front of their house, directly in the path of the SUV. Thankfully they were not home.)

Kat heard the noise, rushed to her front door (in her bedroom – a typical shotgun-style house layout) and opened it. She saw everything that unfolded from here.

I turned and began moving towards the car to see if they were okay. I have a vague flash of memory of another car pulling up alongside it, and then another round of gunshots started directly in front of her yard. I began running towards Kat’s house again, and then fell down.

It felt like I had maybe just tripped, but in the moment I knew it was likely that I got shot. I could feel something wrong with my left leg. I looked at it and saw a bump on the inside of my left calf, but I didn’t see an entry wound (it was in the outer-rear, out of my sight), so in the moment I wondered if I got hit by something else.

I was on my hands and knees for a few moments (Kat says I looked frozen) before I glanced back and saw a man get out of the crashed car, jump Kat’s fence, and begin running towards me.

I did not know what was happening or why he was running towards me. There was a quick logic going on in my mind that it didn’t quite make sense that I was a target in any of this, but the look on his face and the way he was running made me think that he was coming for me, possibly to try to kill me. Before that moment, I knew my life was in danger; at that moment, the danger became much more immediate and frightening. Gunshots continued. (The police apparently recovered 30 shell casings afterwards.)

The next minute or two are the blurriest in both mine and Kat’s memories. Without knowing if I even could, I got up and ran literally for my life without looking back again. I remember distinctly thinking, “Thank God I’m able to run right now.” I wasn’t sure how badly my leg was hurt at that point. Kat later mentioned how shockingly fast I ran.

As I ran, I was shouting for Kat to close and lock the door, thinking that the man was chasing me and might come inside the house. I ran to the side door near the back of the house and made it inside and locked it without looking back to see what the man was doing.

Kat was at the front of the house in the bedroom with the dogs, and I went in there continuing to tell her to lock the door. She said she did, and then I told her, “Call 911, I think I’ve been shot.”

In my memory, I can recall even in this moment recognizing how utterly surreal this was, with such a violent, sudden departure from the reality of our happy afternoon together not a minute earlier.

It’s also worth pointing out the events from Kat’s perspective at this point. She heard a horrible crash, ran to the front door, saw me running as gunshots were being fired, and saw me fall to the ground. Then a man jumped her fence and began running towards me. It seemed as though I had either been shot dead, or was going to be killed by this man (who would then possibly proceed kill her and the dogs). I got up and ran, telling her to lock the door, and came in the side door, and into the bedroom telling her I think I’d been shot.

At this point I was aware that there was some blood on my leg but I still wasn’t sure exactly what happened. She got her phone out and I began to sit down on the ground, but became cognizant that I did not want to bleed on the carpet, so I told her I was going to the kitchen, and went in there and sat down on the ground.

My memory gets clearer at this point. I still did not feel anything specifically wrong with my leg, but I saw now that my shoe was filled with blood (my white sock was completely soaked red) and there was a significant amount of blood pooled on the floor. I didn’t know exactly where on my leg it was coming from, but Kat grabbed some paper towels and put pressure on the general area.

Kat was on the phone with a 911 operator, and eventually I took the phone to answer some of their questions. The woman just said to keep pressure on the wound with a clean cloth, and then continued asking me questions about what happened. I did my best to answer. She sounded very uncaring and unalarmed, but I don’t blame her for that. She never indicated that there was someone on the way to help, so I eventually said, “Is someone on their way? I’m bleeding pretty badly.” She said that someone was on the way.

Around this time, Kat looked outside and saw that the man who we thought was chasing me was in the alley behind her house. The operator then told me to tell Kat to go look for the responders outside.

Kat went to the front door and apparently saw a lot of firefighters kind of mulling around the crash, so she opened the door and shouted to them for help. She led them around the side of her house to the kitchen door, where apparently the man who had been running in her yard popped up from the alley and said, “I’m here, I’m okay.” I’m not sure what happened with him directly after that.

(To the best we can gather, he was the target of the shooting. One of the EMTs told me that the other car circled the block looking for him. We believe he thought it would be better to surrender to the police than risk running and getting killed. He was arrested for felony possession of a handgun, which he had tried to ditch in the neighbor’s yard, where young children play.)

The kitchen door was locked, so I reached up to unlock and open it, saw a flood of firefighters and police, and part of me relaxed knowing that the craziest part was over.

The firefighters came inside and immediately began tending to my wound. Police also came inside, and I was surrounded by men asking me rapid-fire questions about me and the situation. At a certain point, after my wound was fully bandaged and they let me sit up, there was a calmer moment and Kat (who had been watching from the doorway into the kitchen) asked if she could come sit by me and hold my hand. Through the shock I felt some relief knowing the situation would play out somewhat as expected at that point, so I told Kat a few times that we’re okay, and that I’m okay.

During these moments, the firefighters were talking calmly and with humor about the situation. Their station is barely a block away on the street the cars were on, so they apparently even saw the cars racing down the street shooting at each other. A young firefighter told me that as he saw the shootout from in front of their station, he thought they were shooting at him so he ducked. I sarcastically thought, yeah, well they got me.

The EMTs showed up soon after and began taking a closer look at my wound, asking me questions, and getting some more vital readings. They had a stretcher in the alley, so the firefighters helped me to my feet and helped me hop out of Kat’s door, down the stairs, and onto the stretcher. I remember thinking about how comfortable the stretcher was. I then saw the man who ran into her yard sitting behind Kat’s house in handcuffs, surrounded by police.

After a bit longer, I was loaded into the ambulance and taken to the ER.

To spare the details of the hospital, I was ultimately very lucky (given the circumstances). I was in and out of the ER in four hours, with the entry wound cleaned and the bullet still in my leg. (That is apparently standard care for bullets. If they are not actively doing damage, the conventional medical wisdom is that any surgery to remove them is more harmful than leaving them in. The body can heal completely around a bullet. I was shocked at this, as are most people I share this with, but it is apparently true.) Five hours after I got shot in her front yard, I sat on Kat’s couch eating a cookie, unsure if I was still in reality or not.

—

The above details were mostly written in the couple of days following the incident. As I write this now, it’s been more than three weeks since the incident. I am recovering well, though the frequent medical care appointments are getting tiring. I had to walk with a cane for a couple of weeks, but can now mostly move around mostly normally (though with impairment). I’ve been making frequent trips to my PCP. I’ve had a couple visits with a surgeon, to treat a massive hematoma where the bullet settled, and to see if the bullet might be able to come out (it’s still inconclusive). I officially began physical therapy this past week and will be going twice a week for a little while, to hopefully regain (mostly) full function of my leg. I have been looking for a therapist to help process the after-effects of the event, but I am not experiencing any severe symptoms of PTSD. I do have some lingering effects to my mood, attitude, and cognitive abilities, but nothing keeping me from returning to a normal, peaceful life. Thankfully, Kat successfully moved the following day, so we have not had to be at the site of the shooting at all.

I have also had ongoing contact with the police, but they are not very forthcoming with information about the investigation. The person/people who shot me have not been arrested yet. I have oddly thought very little about them. I do not feel any sense of anger or desire for retribution towards them, but it does concern me that these people armed with guns and with no care for human life walk society freely. For that reason, I’m hoping the police can find them and I will do what I can to help.

Soon after it all happened, as I was pondering the spiritual implications of the catalyst, I got a clear message from my inner guidance that healing was fully possible, and that the primary effect of this catalyst would be in an opening of the heart. I did not quite see how that would happen at the time, but since then I have felt it strongly settling into my heart and doing work there.

I am feeling an almost overwhelming sense of gratitude – for the fact that it wasn’t worse than it was (it could have been so much worse), for Kat, for all that I have in my life, for the first responders, for the ER doctors, for my PCP, for the hospital staff, for everyone who has offered support, for L/L Research, for the Law of One, for Gary and Trish (who have not only been incredibly supportive of my healing process, but helped Kat move the following day, which was a healing gift that can’t really be described), for you who is reading this. Really, thinking about almost any angle of my life surrounding this event, I just feel strong gratitude.

I can also feel that gratitude carrying a heavy weight. When I think about how grateful I am for these things, I also think about the people who don’t have the kind of support I have had, or who have gone through worse experiences and haven’t been able to find peace and healing. Whether it’s trauma or anything else, this experience has highlighted to me how important support is, and what kind of healing and transformation is possible when support is available. I’ve been amazed at the kind of support society has to offer someone like me (not to mention the direct support from friends and family). I want everyone to feel as supported as I have in anything they have to go through. I am so lucky. It’s feeling like a call to service, but I’m not quite sure what form that might take right now. I would like to find a way to pay that support forward, and work towards a society where others have the same opportunities I do. I’m going to continue letting it do its work on my heart as I heal and see what comes as I walk that path.

If you are still reading, thank you for witnessing and for caring. Sincerely from the bottom of my heart, I love you all.

Categories: Uncategorized

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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