Sunday 4 / 8 / 07 

[Updated 4/9, 4/11/07] 

We are very sorry about the on-again, off-again nature of this site’s accessibility this past week. Here’s what seems to have happened, along with the spiritual implications it invoked…

 

NEGATIVE GREETING HITS DIVINE COSMOS  

Do we think any physical agent or conspiracy was responsible for what happened this past week? No. Let’s get that cleared up first. The issues that caused this site to remain completely offline — as if it never even existed in the first place — for the better part of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and the first half of Sunday do NOT appear to have anything to do with hackers, human-generated attacks to the server computer, et cetera.  

That being said, it became very clear, by Wednesday, that we were getting some sort of METAPHYSICAL interference.

As I’ve written in previous entries, “negative greeting” can come in many different forms… but one key aspect of it is that the higher the vibration you try to anchor in, the more resistance you may tend to encounter. We’ve had a great deal of it already in the process of putting the CONVERGENCE film together, and it was occurring in my own life long before I understood what was happening. 

As a general rule, negative greeting cannot STOP what we are doing; it can only DELAY it. This ‘greeting’ is one for the record books, as the past five days have been the greatest amount of time we’ve been ‘offline’ in the entire nine-year history of our Internet presence… since the first version of the CONVERGENCE series went online at the Great Dreams website, in spring of 1998. 

To say it was an exercise in patience, and avoiding frustration, would be about the most pleasant face we could paint on this whole situation.  Nonetheless, we feel it could have been a LOT worse.

 

ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT CAN BE VULNERABLE

If you look at pictures from the original days of the Law of One contact, you’ll notice that three different microphones were used, connected to three independent tape recorders. The reason for this is that ‘negative greeting’ (i.e. an attempt from negatively-polarized entities to offset any work that could sufficiently enlighten people and help bring them towards the positive,) can take the form of a disruptive influence to electromagnetic equipment.

So, the reason why the original Law of One group used three tape players is that on the very first day of contact with the Ra group, the tape recorder malfunctioned and a question was lost from the permanent record… only the answer survived. Three machines was the best insurance policy they could ask for, to make it nearly impossible for a negative greeting to cause any data to be lost.

In my own work I have had many examples of bizarre, spontaneous equipment malfunction… but what we had with this server situation was truly unprecedented. 

Skeptics will say it all has a very mundane explanation, and on one level that’s true… it seems that we got set up on a dedicated computer that had either a damaged hard drive or memory chip, most likely.

The part where the Science of Peace material comes in is HOW we ended up receiving damaged computer equipment on our server in the first place… despite our hosting company being one of the most prosperous and respected in the industry, with over a quarter of a million clients. It is very unlikely they would have given us any equipment that was NOT new, at least to their knowledge.

Instead, we ‘won’ an unseen lottery for the damaged equipment… only because it was ‘rigged’ by forces outside most people’s awareness.

 

THIS WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME… 

This is not the first time such a thing has happened. In fact, most electronic equipment I order has an unusually high likelihood of being damaged in some strange way. A few cases in point will help illustrate this. 

 

TELEPHONE PROBLEMS

Telephone equipment, and telephone companies handling that equipment, seem to be notoriously subject to negative greeting. Almost every time I’ve tried to set up new phone service in an apartment, I’ve had ridiculous amounts of interference.

As one of many stories I could tell, when I first got to LA and tried to move into my own place, I signed up for Vonage. I desperately needed my own phone. For some ‘strange reason,’ I ended up getting a completely defective modem from them… so no matter how you played with it, you never got a dial tone. It was completely non-functional. I couldn’t make or receive phone calls from my own apartment. By the time a properly working modem arrived, I had already been through some very substantial hassles and heartache. 

 

EXTRAORDINARY HASSLES SETTING UP MY MUSIC SEQUENCING SYSTEM

As one of many examples of disheartening computer failure, over a year and a half ago now, Larry instructed me on what computer parts to buy so we could build a music studio to run Gigastudio on my own, for composing music.

I visited him in Austin to complete the process after I’d already purchased some of the equipment. We stopped in to the Fry’s store in Austin to get the remaining parts we needed, including a properly-sized monitor.

For some reason, the motherboard I had ordered online wouldn’t even start the booting process… it wouldn’t ‘post,’ in computer-geek terms. This caused us two days’ worth of agony and struggle before we finally eliminated all other options and figured out what had to be causing the problem, so we could actually keep working. We hadn’t even STARTED building the system up yet and we were already having terrible difficulties.

By the time we fixed it, we were already strongly running out of time, compared to what we’d originally expected. The motherboard company would NOT give me my money back… they would only send me a replacement in the mail. The replacement would not arrive until after I had to return home. This would make it impossible for us to finish the job of building the studio unless I bought yet another new motherboard. I still have the replacement motherboard I received in the mail after I got home, and still have not used it for anything. 

The extra motherboard I had to buy at Fry’s also pushed my bank account dangerously into the red, and I ended up having to borrow money from my father to make up the difference. He was gracious enough to honor my request.

 

SUDDEN COMPUTER DEATH SYNDROME

Later, once I had the computers home and everything seemed to be working fine, first one of them died — to the point that you couldn’t even turn it on — and then the other died the same way a few months later.

It just so happened that the cases I ordered — Antec Sonata II’s — were shipping with defective power supplies during the exact timeframe that I ordered mine — namely the fall of 2005. I had to go through the hassle of buying and installing NEW power supplies in each case, because I did not want to be ‘down’ for however long it took for the company to process a warranty request and send me new units in the mail. 

 

THEN THE MONITOR DIES… AND A STRUGGLE ENSUES

The monitor I bought with Larry, for the same music system, started developing several red or green lines going vertically, from top to bottom, across the entire screen — even before the power supplies went bad. This was very disruptive to the work process. I brought the monitor back to Fry’s in Manhattan Beach, California for replacement, as per the special “repair or replace” warranty I signed up for, and they gave me a ‘loaner’ in the meantime.

Finally Fry’s called and said my monitor had been replaced, and I needed to come pick it up. I went to the store and, being smart enough to cover my butt by this point, insisted that they power it up. I knew you might not see the lines unless there was a gray background, and I had made that point clear in the original write-up for the repair. I had the technician bring up a program with a gray background, and sure enough, there were the lines. They were dimmer, but they had NOT disappeared. They had NOT fixed the problem.

Of course, they made it very difficult for me to dispute this. The technician almost begged me to take it home and ‘see if it would get better,’ because it was a very hectic store and you had to wait sometimes up to an hour in line before someone would address your concerns. He told me I had ‘thirty days’ to bring it back “if it didn’t get any better”. 

I very calmly but firmly said, “It’s not going to get better. It’s only going to stay the way it is, and it will probably get worse. I asked you to fix the problem and you didn’t fix it. So I need you to send it back again, and I’ll keep the loaner until you do.”  

 

THEY HAD LEGALLY ‘REPAIRED’ THE UNIT… AND I HAD TO FILE A NEW CLAIM

Then I found out that their system assumes the repair was valid, automatically. By their legal definition they had ‘repaired’ it, even though the lines were still there! As a result, they forced me to sign off that I had “rejected” the current repair, and then I also had to enter in a NEW repair claim, as if something ELSE had gone wrong in the meantime… rather than simply re-submitting what I already had.

Based on the terms of my warranty, this little trick also nullified my ability to get ANOTHER fix if they didn’t do it right the second time. I would have to start paying for each new repair after this. 

 

I GO ON VACATION… AND THEY START TRYING TO ATTACK MY CREDIT RATING! 

Another month or so went by. Of course, they called in to tell me it was fixed directly after I went home to New York for three weeks. I could not get the monitor to a Fry’s store because the monitor was in LA, and I was in New York.

Furthermore, I was very sick in New York, and checking my messages on my phone in LA was the last thing on my mind. Everyone knew where I was. By the time I DID check my messages, I had several messages from them… and each one sounded worse than the one before it. By the last message they had been threatening legal action against me… saying they were going to report me to a credit agency and extract payment for the loaner unit out of my bank account. Obviously they would not give me the original monitor back either… or that was the implication, at least.

Then I had to make calls and placate them, and ask them not to sue me or attack my credit rating, long enough for me to get back there. I had a week of house-sitting at Billy’s place after I got back from New York, and by the time I actually fought my way down to Manhattan Beach, I had grown accustomed to having to call them and hold off the Apocalypse.  

 

IT WAS LEGALLY ‘REPAIRED’… BUT IN FACT WAS STILL TECHNICALLY DAMAGED

Certainly you would expect, after all this struggle, that the monitor would be in great shape, right? Wrong. They STILL did not fix the problem… except by a dodgy legal definition!

I didn’t see it this time until I got home… but as soon as I ran the monitor, I discovered that it had a single bad pixel. There was one dot that always stayed black, right in the middle, below the center.

Since a monitor is not technically ‘damaged’ until it has at least THREE bad pixels, it was considered a proper, legal repair!

I felt this was probably a form of ‘punishment’ for my having rejected the first repair… so they didn’t actually have to pay for a new screen, which is obviously the most expensive repair that would ever need to be done on a monitor. Someone else had sent in a screen with one bad pixel and they obviously got a brand-new one, whereas I got someone else’s blown-out unit as my reward for not accepting the first ‘repair.’

Here was the kicker: if I rejected THIS repair, then I’d have to pay for a whole new screen myself, now that the terms of ‘two repairs’ had expired.

None of it was fair or ethical, but by this point I was too weary to fight them… and they’d done it all legally. 

Thankfully, I found a way to set up my sequencing software so there is a naturally black area where the dead pixel is.  I do see it when I flip over into Gigastudio, but otherwise I’ve just had to work around it. I am far less likely to give them my business as a result of this experience. 

 

OTHER EXAMPLES… FUNKY LAPTOPS AND EVEN FUNKIER BRAKES

In another strange case, I bought my first laptop as a used model in Virginia Beach. It had a strange, intermittent problem where it could spontaneously power itself off, causing you to totally lose whatever data you had been working on.

After multiple repetitions of the same problem, it became clear that when I pushed myself too far, wrote late into the night, or became too angry while I was working, the power-down would occur. In every case, it was a signal for me that I had to stop what I was doing, step back and gain some perspective.  

Another example of bizarre mechanical failure, in this case involving a motor vehicle, was when I was driving a diesel Peugeot up to the Disclosure Project event in Washington, DC.

Right in rush-hour traffic I lost my brakes, and was left with no other option but to use the transmission to decelerate. Though it was terrifying, I still managed to get to the venue in the nick of time… but it also left us driving around in vain for hours that night, trying to find a hotel with vacancies, until 1:30 am… all the time with no brakes on the car. 

 

HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? 

By now you might be asking yourself how this happens. In some cases, the problem is probably coming from my Higher Self directly, for the purpose of ‘initiation.’ This is where you can make the greatest spiritual strides in the smallest amount of time. 

Training in ‘patience’ is one of the greatest initiations you can ever go through. When you feel you MUST have something done by a certain time, that can leave you weak and vulnerable, particularly on an emotional level, if things don’t go your way. The laptop problem, for example, taught me not to push myself past the point of exhaustion in my work… to take it easy. I didn’t always want to listen. 

In the case of things like the Vonage modem, the bad motherboard or the monitor ordeal, a negative greeting could occur if there is a spiritually ‘weak’ person involved at some key point in the chain of business. The less integrated someone is, the more likely they can be manipulated, in subtle ways, so that a unit that will become defective gets shipped or handed to me, rather than someone else.

In the Fry’s situation with the monitor, the repair people were probably not at all happy to see that their work had been rejected and sent back. It could well be that someone lost compassion for me as a result of this (even though none of it was my fault) and pulled this legal stunt where I got a monitor that was still damaged, but not enough that it was ‘legally’ damaged.

I had become a non-person, through my unwillingness to cooperate, and that’s all it took for there to be an amazing degree of negative greeting. They also knew I could not send it back again without paying, as by legal definition they had ‘repaired’ the unit… so they got the last laugh.

 

ANOTHER ‘NEGATIVE GREETING’ IN SHIPPING MY CAR FROM LOUISVILLE TO LA

Another extreme example of this kind of greeting, involving ‘weak-minded’ people at key points in a transaction, occurred when I tried to ship my car from Louisville to LA. The people from the shipping company had me park the car in the airport extended parking lot, at 9 dollars a day, so I could go directly onto my flight to LA from there.

This seemed to be less expensive than the risky proposition of parking my car in front of a house I no longer rented, for however long it took for it to be picked up, and taking a one-hour taxi ride down to the airport. “We do this all the time,” they said. “Lots of people park at the airport.”

They also told me there was ‘no problem’ with my leaving some belongings in the car, so I didn’t have to pay to ship them. “As long as it’s not above the windows, you’re fine,” they said. “The truck driver should be there in two or three days to pick it up.” 

 

TWO WEEKS LATER… 

Nearly two WEEKS later, a truck driver finally arrived. To my utter horror, he then called me and said he was refusing to take the car, because it was ‘illegal’ for him to ship it with anything inside!

The shipping company had totally lied to me!

(I found out later that drivers who haul cars will frequently pull stunts like this, trying to get people to bribe them to take the car anyway. That’s why the shipping company told me not to worry about leaving my stuff in the car… everyone does it, but it’s actually illegal — they just don’t tell you that. I did not have the money nor the inclination to mess around with such an extortion, and thus never even thought to ‘make an offer’ to the driver.) 

 

TWO AND A HALF WEEKS LATER… 

As incredible as it must sound, two and a half MORE weeks went by before the shipping company could get another driver out there. The entire time, the car was racking up 9 dollars a day in parking fees. This driver called me with similar complaints, but thankfully in this case he was willing to do the shipment anyway.

It could be that it took the shipping company that long to find a driver who was ethically slippery enough, or broke enough, to take the work without trying to extort cash in the process. I was very nice to the guy on the phone so he would connect with me as a real human being, rather than as another non-person he could screw with. 

In the meantime, my father was absolutely convinced I was the victim of a massive fraud… how did I even know the car was still there? After all, they had ordered me to leave my keys behind one of the tires. If someone were savvy enough, they might have figured out what was going on, grabbed the keys and simply driven off with the car, and all the booty it contained.

Talk of massive lawsuits was floating up… and in the meantime I was paying through the nose for a rental car, with nothing else to drive. I also managed to dent the bumper on the rental car in a parking garage, and some guy stood there and watched me do it without ever trying to warn me of what was about to happen. 

 

NOW THE RULES CHANGE… AND I PAY THROUGH THE NOSE

It took a lot longer for the car to arrive than the shipping company had promised me. By the time it finally was in town, the rules had changed yet again. First of all, I had to pay for over a month’s worth of airport parking fees, at 9 dollars a day, out of my own pocket. The shipping company was totally free and clear of responsibility.

I never read the fine print on the contract… that part where the shipping company is NOT held liable for any parking fees, regardless of HOW long they let my car sit in the lot!

Of COURSE they didn’t have a problem with keeping people in an airport parking lot for weeks at a time… they didn’t have to pay the tab! 

Then the carrier inexplicably INCREASED the fee I would have to pay to get my car back… by almost 300 dollars!

They only told me this on the phone AFTER the car was almost home. They knew I had no choice, as I had a variety of valuable items in the car and needed to get it all back.

Once again, there were loopholes in the contract that made this all legal. In order to get my car back, I had to sign off on a form that made it impossible for me to go after anyone in the whole chain, for any amount of money, for any reason, no matter how awful it might be. 

Once I finally got the car back, it had been kept on the very top of the car carrier the whole trip. It was literally covered in a thick black layer of diesel exhaust grease. It was absolutely filthy. Thankfully, nothing was taken from inside.

So, the moral of the story is that when you’re dealing with people who might be heavy drinkers, or running a semi-corrupt business with all sorts of legal mechanisms they can exploit, you can run into serious trouble. In situations like these the ‘negative greeting’ can flourish far more than it ever would if I were dealing with more ethical, stable businesses.

 

WEBSITE WOES… A DELIGHTFUL FEAST OF NEGATIVE GREETING

Now if you’re still with me in this trail of tears, you’ve just gotten your Bachelor’s degree in negative greeting. Now let’s move back to the present situation with this website, so you can go for a full-on Ph.D. — a Doctor of Phrustration. 

The original idea behind moving this website to a new server was the fact that the old server was costing us 350 dollars a month. We had ordered a server with “unlimited” bandwidth, so that no matter HOW popular our store became, we could handle it… but we never used any more than a very small percentage of what we’d paid for. Sales from the online store almost never made enough money to do more than break even each month. We had a great idea, but it seemed to have become a wash.

I was glad people had access to MP3 files they could download — something that is harder to do than you might think — but it did nothing to fund our operations. Justifiably, I didn’t feel very inspired to update the store with new products… it was a sad situation.

 

DNS MESS

Once we had the time and money to pay for the switch, we got to work. Our first move was to go to a very cheap ‘shared’ server.

There were obvious problems that caused down-time as we shifted our site from one server to another. Every website has a server, and every server is assigned a DNS number… a collection of four numbers, in the format of 000.000.000.000. This is also known as an IP address.

In some cases, one or more of the numbers in your IP address might only have two digits instead of three. You can type in the DNS number for a website in your browser and it will take you to that website, just like the normal dot-com address would… in the form of http://000.000.000.000. (Obviously the zeroes won’t work… every number is different.)

When you register a new domain name, like myfirstandlastname.com, you have to find a ‘host,’ who keeps your website on their server. The ‘host’ assigns you a DNS number, and then releases a message to all the key computers on the Internet, telling them this number is now assigned to myfirstandlastname.com.

Every person who accesses the Internet has an ISP, or Internet Service Provider, and every ISP has its own servers. Your ISP’s servers have to know every website address on the entire Internet, as well as the DNS number to go along with it. The myfirstandlastname.com address alone won’t get you anywhere… it only works because every ISP on the Internet has been TOLD what number it points to. 

Many ISPs only upgrade this list of website URLs, and their corresponding DNS numbers, once every 24 hours, on average. That means that until they upgrade, no one on that server will be able to find your website. 

Furthermore, if myfirstandlastname.com is linked to an OLD number, like 000.000.000.000, and then you switch it to 000.000.000.001, it takes 24 hours for all the servers to point to the new number. In the meantime, anyone trying to hit your site on those servers gets an error message.  

 

MORE WEBSITE NIGHTMARES

Every time we made a switch, we were ‘down’ for 24 hours, thanks to the DNS problem I just outlined.

The idea of going over to a ‘shared’ server seemed terrific at first. We were down for 24 hours, but when we came back up, it seemed to work very well. It was very cheap and very fast… faster than the server we’d had before at 350 dollars a month! We were pulling in downloads at 500K per second, or more, and it was less than 150 bucks for an entire YEAR.

However, the joy would soon wear off, as it seemed that we were the first of about 800 people to share the same server!

As new clients piled in, what started out as a dream soon became bogged down into a true nightmare. It was so slow at certain times of the day that people couldn’t even submit their orders — it would time out before they got in.

Once again, it was time to try something else. Go to Plan B.

 

PLAN B DIDN’T WORK EITHER… 

Plan B, in terms of expense and hassle, was to go to a ‘virtual private server,’ the next step up in the chain. This meant that we shared a server with a small group of other websites who were paying more to not be on a huge shared server with 800 people bogging it down. Once again, we had to copy everything over, re-install the whole site from scratch, and wait for the DNS nubmers to change.

It took longer to copy and re-install the site than 24 hours, so in the meantime we had a message up on the screen that had my picture, the words “Divine Cosmos” and then the message “We are working on our servers. Please check back again later.” 

For some crazy reason which we never did figure out, it was simply not possible to install all the software we needed on that virtual private server and get it to work. This was agonizing. At least we had not shut down the shared server — that was still operational. Nonetheless, we had to change the DNS number back to the old, slow site, which gave us another 24 hours of down-time.

 

THE SHARED SERVER WAS NO FUN AT ALL… 

Any time I tried to post to this website on the shared server, I had to wait and wait. Each time I clicked on something in the ‘back end’, as it’s called, the whole thing would hang on you, since it was so slow… and it was a torture. I simply could NOT get working at a comfortable speed… and the more edits I made, and graphics I put in, the more patient I had to become.

 

PLAN C: DEDICATED SERVER, EVEN MORE OBSTACLES TO CONFRONT

Finally we decided to go with a dedicated server, one of the more expensive options. Again we had down-time as we made the shift, changed DNS numbers and then disabled the new site with our ‘Working On Our Servers” message while all the software was uploaded, installed and tested. 

In this case, we had problems with getting the online store going. For some reason it was telling the viewer that the SSL certificate was not valid, which made the whole browser title bar turn an ominous red color when you hit the online store. It was a total technical glitch that forced us to keep the site down even more. Again we had to shift back to the shared server while we sorted out the problem, and again this left us with 24 hours of down-time as the DNS numbers switched all over the world.

By this point we had the very top techs from the server company involved in making sure we could get everything to work on the dedicated server — and to their credit, with some patience and time put in, they got it working. Everything seemed OK. We did another 24 hours of down-time to get our DNS numbers changed back to the new site, and then we were rolling! My access to the ‘back end’ was much faster, and things seemed good to go!

Feeling confident, we finally launched the Science of Peace series. Right away, we discovered that about 40 percent of our customers were unable to complete their orders, ( ! ) and they were emailing us wondering what was going on. We really did not know how to solve the problem — it had something to do with PayPal.

 

TROUBLES WITH THE GATEWAY

Now we realized we had to get our own secure online payment gateway, separate from PayPal. It would certainly involve some hassle, but should only take us a few days. We were very eager to get a fully-functioning online store going, now that we finally had a server that was working properly.

I called Authorize.net on a Friday, telling them we had an ’emergency’ and needed this problem solved ASAP, as we’d just launched a popular new product and were instantly losing 40 percent of our sales revenues a day. The way these things usually work is that you get a great spike of interest in the beginning, but then it quiets down to almost a standstill, usually within a few weeks, not more than a month. Therefore, even by a conservative estimate we were losing at least 200 dollars of business a day… or more… when we MOST needed the site to be running. 

Authorize.net said they’d put a ‘rush’ on the order but we should be able to get it within two business days at the most, which was their normal time frame. If we were lucky, we might get it that same day (Friday) or one business day later (Monday).

Even within the two-business-days plan, we were actually going to be ‘down’ for Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday… which could amount to an 800-dollar loss, or more. We had to grit our teeth and put up with it, as we had no choice.  

 

THE OTHER 60 PERCENT DROPPED OFF… 

In the meantime, we put up a notice on the site that we were having order problems, and as soon as we did, everyone seemed to freak out a bit. They were worried that they might be the one to get hit with some kind of problem, even though in the worst-case scenario you were still totally safe… all that might happen is you’d get stuck in a loop where you couldn’t get to the order screen.

Of course, this distrust of the system caused the volume of our orders to substantitally decrease. Now we were not only losing the 40 percent, we were losing most of the remaining 60 percent as well!  In fact, it appeared that NO ONE was ordering the new Science of Peace series WHATSOEVER. We were lucky to pull in 20 bucks a day. This went on, and on, and on, one day after another. Nonetheless, I refused to ‘cover up’ the fact that we were having problems. People had a right to know that they might not be able to complete an order. 

 

THREE MORE DAYS IN LIMBO

This was right about when my hands just went nuts with poison ivy. They were itching, burning and blistering, and I would type and write articles just to keep my mind off the madness. The four days went by, and I tried not to freak out as the phone never rang all day Monday. I called, checked email, but no one answered the phone and no reply came.

I could almost feel the losses as a physical feeling of sinking into the chair. Most of your orders happen when you first launch a new product, after all… once everyone’s seen it, the orders drop off. We were handcuffed in our single most important moment, and there was nothing we could do about it. Nothing. 

Then the same impasse happened on Tuesday. No one answered the phone, or even an email. The poison ivy went nuts. I was very, very upset by this point. My hands were driving me crazy.

 

CHARGE TODAY… OR MAYBE A COUPLE WEEKS FROM TODAY

Finally, on Wednesday, Authorize.net got back in touch, and told us they had found a ‘processor’ for our payments… a company named ChargeToday.

Only once I spoke to ChargeToday on the phone (and I have the highest respect for Laurie and Diane, along with many great conversations) did I realize that I now had to file brand-new applications and paperwork with them… and basically start over again from scratch!  Authorize.net was only a gateway, and it was the processor who actually ran the transactions.

The processor, of course, was only a middle-man as well… they had to liaise with a bank who was actually the under-writer of all the transactions.

In the bank’s worst nightmare situation, they could have a huge number of people want their money back. So, the reasoning went that if we got a big spike of orders and then everyone decides they never got what they paid for (despite the fact that it’s almost entirely online downloads with instant fulfillment), we could be attacked… and if we couldn’t pay it back, the charges could ultimately fall back into the hands of the bank.

This meant they were heavily inclined not to trust us, and felt they had to be almost hyper-paranoid in making sure we were good material.

 

FRAUD? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME… 

My hands were a mess… and then Wednesday became Thursday, and I heard nothing. Thursday became Friday, and I had to get up early and fly to San Francisco to meet with an investor for the CONVERGENCE film. While I was in this investor meeting, I got a call from Diane at ChargeToday, telling me in so many words that I was being investigated for ‘fraud’, and would need to file all this additional information and paperwork. 

“I’m in an investor meeting in San Francisco,” I answered. “There’s no way I can get you this material you’re asking for today. Are you open tomorrow?” I asked, hopeful.

“No, you’ll have to call us back on Monday morning,” she answered. Oh my God… another entire WEEKEND of down-time, with the orders having dried out to almost absolute zero.  

Now wait a minute. Fraud? Why fraud, you ask? That was my question too… and I had a vague idea of what it was from what she told me on the phone, but I wouldn’t get the whole scoop until that Monday.

The story went like this. I had moved into my new residence as of mid-January, but I hadn’t changed over my driver’s license, so it wasn’t yet my legal address. Furthermore, I did not have a land line here in my name… only a cell phone. As a result, I looked like a drifter, trying to fake an identity with no real proof of who I was, or where I would be staying. 

Why no land line? I was trying to work with the owner’s sons and daughter, who were managing the house I started renting, to get a phone installed. It appeared, at first, that Verizon would not let me fill an order myself, because I was not the account holder, nor was I related to the account holder.

I had been politely asking ever since I moved in to have this phone issue addressed, but nothing had happened. It had been an irritation, but now it was causing me to be accused of fraud!

In the meantime I had been forced to use the original phone line, which was littered with telemarketing calls and had no call waiting ID… so if it beeped while I was in a call, I had no idea if it was a legitimate call or another scam. Any time I called someone, it was not my name that appeared on ther caller ID… so some people didn’t answer me. 

 

MONDAY COMES… AND BAD GOES TO WORSE

Finally I called ChargeToday back on Monday, and gave them what they thought they wanted. Two more days went by and I heard nothing. Then I finally got through on Thursday, only to find out that they were offering me a severely limited payment gateway… complete with a rigid ‘cap’ that meant if I hit even a minimum number of sales per month, the gateway would SHUT DOWN and everyone would get error messages. In three weeks, despite these horrific problems, we’d already managed to chase right near the top of the ‘cap’ in our PayPal transactions. 

By the time all was said and done, I’d sent ChargeToday more paperwork, which I scanned and put together in an email, than any other agency I’ve ever dealt with… period. Bank statements, credit reports, PayPal statements, financial records, full documentation of the identity theft I suffered three years ago… it was crazy. I called it “Turn Your Head and Cough.” 

I did get some nice compliments, though… they told me I had the ‘best paperwork package’ they had ‘ever seen’ from any applicant. “Some people would need months to assemble something a third as thorough as what you just sent us in the last 2 days,” they told me. I found that very impressive… and it comes from all my years of scientific research. In the midst of all this, I was still managing to post to the website almost every weekday… and the poison ivy was a constant source of irritation.  

 

FINALLY… THE GATEWAY WORKS! 

Let’s now take a step back and review this sorry tale, before we go on. Oh, you thought that was the end of the story? Wrong again, my friend.

We’re losing 40 percent of all our transactions, and contact Authorize.net on a Friday with our “emergency”. They tell us they might get back to us that same day, or Monday at the latest. We finally heard from them on Wednesday and got put in touch with ChargeToday.

Then I discover we have a major problem on Friday, and submitted my initial reply that following Monday. Then we didn’t hear anything back until Wednesday. Then I sent them all the NEW paperwork by Friday. Then another weekend goes by, and we finally heard back from them at the end of the day on Monday. We got the codes and started testing the gateway on Tuesday, and were able to get it functioning and integrated with the website by Wednesday.

So, it took us nearly three weeks… and an incredible amount of hassle and heartache and paperwork… to set up a simple gateway that originally sounded like we might land in one business day. Dear God.

There was a reprieve when I realized that my email notifications for all the Science of Peace orders had gotten shut down, so we actually had made a modest but acceptable number of sales during the whole time we had this problem.  We hadn’t been COMPLETELY screwed… we were still getting one or two orders coming in a day.

Also, in the process of feeling completely helpless at the hands of these bureaucracies, we went back in and SOLVED the original PayPal problem, so that now people could order through PayPal via any system, with any browser, and never get stuck in a loop. We did have to pop them into a separate window… that was the whole trick to it. The feel wasn’t quite as nice, perhaps, but it totally solved the problem.  

However, there were storm clouds on the horizon. The same day that we started heavily testing the new gateway, that Tuesday, the handful of our other websites on the server, BESIDES Divine Cosmos, all… mysteriously… DIED. 

 

UNFAIRLY SINGLED OUT BY A COMPANY ERROR

Now the Hall of Mirrors had immediately started all over again… and everything looked like medieval torture devices. We went through utter hell in trying to understand what had happened, but no one would give us a straight answer on the phone. “Oh, you need to call billing.” Call billing. “Oh, you need to call tech support.” Call tech support. “Oh, you need to contact the FRAUD department.” Fraud AGAIN? Good Lord!

Ok, well what’s their phone number? “Sorry, they don’t have a phone number. You have to email them at &@+_$#!+.com.”

Now get this… we email &@+_$#!+.com… and the emails BOUNCED!!! It was a bogus address! 

They shut our sites down, never told us why, we go round and round in circles, someone finally tells us where to go, and then the email’s not even operational! Can you imagine what we felt like by this point? 

Thankfully, we’d had so many problems by this point, jumping from plan to plan, that we went back to the original customer service associate who worked with us and explained the whole situation. This finally was our ace in the deck, and got things moving. We got back to tech support, but now they were actually talking, rather than trying to get us to email a non-existent address for the fraud department.  

Only now did the problem unravel. We had done NOTHING wrong! It was a stupid mistake from within their own staff! [Read “Negative Greeting!”]

The how and why goes like this. A series of DNS numbers had been assigned to us, one for each of the websites we hosted on our server. One of these numbers was keyed in wrongly by the technician, leaving it as a two-digit number instead of the three-digit number it was supposed to be. Instead of 000.000.000.000, we came out with 000.000.000.00. It doesn’t look like much, but it makes ALL the difference. 

When we had these DNS numbers assigned to us, we saw there was a sequence break from one to the next, but assumed they knew what they were doing. We used the numbers they gave us, and got all our websites up and running. 

Then, when a fraud technician was scanning the networks, he saw our seemingly out-of-place DNS number… which was NOT the one that we had been assigned on the books. Rather than call us, they simply shut everything down — thinking that some horrible hacker attack had been thwarted in the process. Furthermore, no one even wanted to talk to us on the phone… they insisted we send an email, and as I said, the email address they gave us bounced. 

 

DIVINE COSMOS DIES AND IS REBORN… REPEATEDLY

Once we finally got through to someone who discovered the problem, and that it was their mistake, they were severely apologetic. To bolster the strength of the apology, they gave us a two-month extension on our existing account.

For whatever reason, Divine Cosmos hadn’t been hit, the problem had been solved, and everything seemed to be fine. We’d backed up all of our data and were good to go. The payment gateway had just gone up and now we could process any type of transaction someone wanted to throw at us… PayPal, Discover, AmEx, Visa/MC, gold, sheep, pork bellies, you name it. 

However, the very next day after we resolved the “fraud” problem, all our sites went offline… AGAIN… and this time Divine Cosmos went down with the rest of the ship! This was Wednesday… THE SAME DAY WE GOT THE GATEWAY WORKING!!! 

When we had the ‘fraud’ problem on Tuesday, we could still access the server from the back end… but now it was as if the whole server computer was … totally… DEAD!

What in the WORLD was going on here? Negative greeting, of course. Heap it on. Still haven’t had enough? Good, then here’s some more.  

 

SOLVING ALL THE ISSUES, ONE STEP AT A TIME

In the meantime I was going through a variety of other stressors, each of which involved personal relationships that I am not at liberty to discuss publicly. Suffice it to say that in each of three cases, I had allowed myself to get too busy or too overwhelmed with everything going on in my own sphere, (and you can see how crazy THAT was,) and I ended up getting others upset with me. I couldn’t believe how everything seemed to hit all at the same time… it was ‘synchronicity’ of a type you don’t WANT to have, ever. 

Nonetheless, I dove in, did the work and managed to resolve each issue, all throughout the course of last week. At the same time, the poison ivy on my hands seemed to miraculously improve after each hurdle was crossed.

I called Larry on Wednesday after one of the issues remained painfully unresolved, and he told me the site was back online. That was a major relief. That same night I resolved the personal issue in question, so when I found out the site was down again on Thursday, by this point I was feeling positive enough about everything else that it didn’t bother me as much.

In the meantime, I called Verizon and found out I could get a phone installed at the house WITHOUT having to work through the existing homeowner’s family. Even better, they’d have someone stop by Friday morning… the very next day!

Getting back to the website issue, the server people didn’t know what was wrong, but they put in a ‘reboot request’ and we were up again Thursday night. We got through enough of Friday that I wrote and posted the 2012 article, regarding USA TODAY’s story about the 2012 buzz, and then just as inexplicably everything died… AGAIN.

Strangely enough, by this point I’d almost become desensitized to it. I knew we’d get the problem solved, and I knew there had to be some kind of initiation going on here. The key was to stay calm and NOT get emotional, NOT let the stress damage my relationships with other people as I’d done earlier. Return to the center… return to Peace.  

 

THE TELEPHONE PROBLEM: “I’M AN IDIOT!”

I had a brief ‘tension-resolution cycle’ after the phone got set up, apparently successfully. I let the guy walk, thinking everything was fine, but then as soon as he left, everything was NOT fine. Oh man, we’ve been down THIS road before. How could I have been so stupid! This ALWAYS happens, and I didn’t keep him here long enough to really test it! 

Here’s what happened. I tried to plug my two-line telephone into the wall jack, but only one line would run at a time. If you tried to take the other line off the hook at the same time, you’d just get dead air. Something was SERIOUSLY the matter, and it didn’t matter what jack you used throughout the house… the installation was damaged, and we had some bizarre ‘crossover’ problem going on.

Hopefully they could solve it on their end, but the solution might well have involved a long, arduous and expensive process of redoing all the inside wiring in the house. I had no idea if it had been done properly, and it appeared that it had not been. 

I called back, expecting another ordeal of unknown duration. “Make sure the phone you’re using now is a different phone than the 2-line phone.”

“It is,” I answered, unconvinced.

“OK. Unplug the cable from the two-line phone that is going into your wall jack for a minute,” he said.

“Done,” I answered. 

Then he asked me “How many tiny little gold contacts do you see in the clear plastic plug on the end of the cable you’re using?”

Two. Not four.  

“Oh my God, I’m an idiot,” I replied. “There’s only two wires in this cable and there has to be four, or else only one line will work on my phone at a time. That’s IT!”

WHEW! Other than proving my own stupidity, that was a great reprieve. For once in my life, a telephone installation had actually worked properly the FIRST time! It hadn’t even occurred to me that some telephone cables only had two wires inside them, rather than the typical four! 

OK, got THAT done. What’s next?  

 

DEAD AGAIN

I had cranked out the 2012 article while in the midst of the waiting and hand-wringing about the phone. Divine Cosmos had come back online, again, and I managed to publish the article before hearing back from the phone company, as promised, just before 5PM. The technician who did the install called me himself, and that was when I was enlightened to the real problem. 

I was feeling fantastic. Now my site was running and after over three months, I finally had my own phone. I went back to the computer, took it out of suspend mode, and hit the Internet…

Divine Cosmos was dead. Email was dead. Everything was dead. AGAIN. 

I called Larry and got the scoop. Of course, he already knew about it.

The head tech of the whole company was now personally on the case. He had to leave for the evening, but was going to come back tomorrow if they couldn’t solve it that night by rebooting the machine. It was already clear, more or less, that these re-boots only bought us a few hours of online time, 12 at the most.

It was now very likely that we had faulty equipment in the computer they had given us to host our site… either a memory chip or hard drive inconsistency, based on the problem. We now had the head technician of this entire, huge company going out of his way to come in, on a day he normally didn’t even work, and during a holiday weekend, no less, to replace whatever needed replacing in the machine, so we’d be back online.

We acknowledged that the reboot, scheduled for later that evening, probably wouldn’t buy us much time at all… and that was true. 

We sputtered to life again for a few hours that evening, but were hanging cold and dead before midnight. We would stay dead all the way until Sunday. This was not a death with a screen saying “We are moving our servers. Please check back again later” — this was complete nothingness. You entered www.divinecosmos.com into your browser and all you got was a void. Emptiness. Divine Cosmos has left the building. 

 

ARCHETYPAL OVERLAYS WITH GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTER SUNDAY 

It never even occurred to me at the time that this final ‘death’ was on Good Friday… the day celebrated as when Jesus died on the cross. Were we in some kind of weird archetypal experience? After all, this was the longest block of time we had ever been offline in the entire history of our activity on the Internet. 

Saturday came and went… all day long… with no progress. The head tech DID say he would come in that day, even though he didn’t normally work Saturdays, just to fix our problem… but nothing had changed.

By this point I totally ‘got’ that I was in the midst of a hardcore initiation experience. The whole key was to stay calm and not get all wrapped up in the drama of it. Something was clearly going on… I could see that now. If I passed the test, then we’d get the site back… but there was a message I needed to get first. Perhaps it was simply to stay calm in the midst of great adversity.

So, rather than write about it in my journal and obsessively check throughout the day, I didn’t even go into my bedroom. I hung out in the living room and read books that had material that might inspire me in the 2012 book I’d been planning to write, but had largely forgotten about in the midst of all this flurry of activity with the website.

I completely released my frustration and went back into Trust. Forget about losses, or whether people are upset that they can’t get into the site… just let it go, and trust the process. Somehow. 

Then today, Sunday, we were still entombed in black death. Not a damn thing happened when you clicked on any of our website links. Nothing was online. Nothing.

OK, no problem, I thought to myself. The initiation isn’t complete yet.

So, I again went back to reading books with material intended to inspire my writing. I did not let the problem make me angry.

I meditated on Easter and the concept of the Resurrection, and wondered if this was somehow going to be an archetype playing itself out with this site as well. Sure enough, directly after I finished my book, circa 2PM Pacific time, I went and checked, and we were BACK ONLINE… hard to believe, but true!

I do believe it will ‘stick’ this time, as on my side I believe I passed the initiation… no one could read, access or order anything, and after over a month of this kind of thing happening, on and off, I lost all the emotional charge. “Let it be,” I reasoned in myself, shamelessly plagiarizing a Beatles song in the process. “There will be an answer. Let it be.” 

 

SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE

Sure enough, we were back online as soon as I’d finished reading my book. Sunday afternoon. I seemed to have passed the test.

It then dawned on me that the longest single block of  ‘dead air’, for my nine years of online presence, happened between Good Friday and Easter Sunday in 2007, while I was sitting and reading books, and contemplating three different personal issues that had exploded during the week, requiring my full attention!

All the titanic struggles to resolve the website issues had charged my personal issues with even more emotional energy than they normally would have had… but I didn’t break. By that Friday morning, I had an incredible Ascension dream, one of the most stunning, amazing and fulfilling dreams I’ve had in my entire life. That dream had been part of what carried me through the whole weekend, including the telephone installation and all the down-time on my site. The dream was obviously a big ‘thank you’ for all the work I’d done to smooth out conflicts with others. 

In this dream, not only could I plunge my hand or my entire body through walls, by simply flying, I could also pull solid objects through walls, or bring other people through walls. This was obviously not just a lucid dream — it was a symbol, showing me that the ‘walls’ I had seen all around me — my inability to access the site — were not barriers. What seemed like insurmountable problems in my personal life were, in fact, very manageable, once I returned to my center and went back into Trust. 

More and more, thoughts are becoming things. I certainly am not trying to cop a Messiah complex here… but I do find it interesting that while most of the world’s Christian population was meditating on these archetypes of death and resurrection, thus creating a very real thoughtform in the mass mind, we experienced a very literal death and rebirth of our online presence.

It was even more interesting to find the site “resurrected” on Easter Sunday, rather than on Monday as we expected. That made it fit even more cleanly with the archetype. So far I’m not levitating my physical body yet, but maybe next time…    🙂

Many of us seem to be going through archetypal experiences like this as we get closer and closer to 2012. By no means am I singling myself out as someone special. It was just a very interesting twist of fate that this amazing, long ordeal to get the site properly functioning would reach its ultimate ‘death and resurrection’ point in direct alignment with a time when a large percentage of the world’s population is meditating on death and resurrection, on those very same days.

(Or it could just be that everyone was home for the holidays, so customer service was deplorably slow to react, and I am just making something out of nothing… I certainly won’t try to fight for it one way or the other!)  

 

IT ALL TIES BACK TO THE SCIENCE OF PEACE

Again, the average ‘skeptic’ is going to think I’m stark-raving mad for making these connections. Such ‘hate language’ as ‘crackpot,’ ‘delusional,’ ‘freak,’ et cetera can be thrown around quite easily. 

The part I want to make increasingly clear is that this is a science… The Science of Peace.  Much of why we totally overhauled this site in the first place, and went through such dreadful initiations, was to support the release of this audio series — and give the site a whole new level of quality, appearance and functionality.

In fact, the folks at ChargeToday said our website was in the “top one percent” most professional-looking sites they see come across their desk. That was gratifying. We wanted to improve the site as substantially as The Science of Peace was an improvement over any other work I’ve ever released.

 

PROOF THAT WE ARE ALL INTERCONNECTED

Anyway, getting back to the science itself. In time, I feel it will be ‘common knowledge’ that we are all part of a shared databank of consciousness. The Internet is actually a great metaphor of what is already occurring, and HAS BEEN already occurring on a consciousness level, for quite some time.

Much of the functioning of ‘karma,’ both good AND bad, seems to be the result of a collective subconscious agreement throughout all of humanity that when you invade on free will, you will be ‘balanced’ back to your original purity by the actions of others, even if they don’t consciously realize that they have done something to bring you into balance. Any harm you measure out to others is measured back to you in due kind.

One exciting theory for this is that ‘karma’ is part of a mass, collective subconscious agreement within humanity. There are forces outside our conscious control that steer these events along. Ultimately, this all ties back in to the fact that we have a Higher Self that is overseeing our life, plotting a course for our evolution, and working with others to insure that we meet the experiences that will best help us grow.  

 

ATTRACTING ‘INITIATION’ EXPERIENCES

Similarly, if you are really trying for the highest level of spiritual attainment you can reach, it is NOT a cakewalk. You end up attracting ‘initiation’ experiences to yourself, like what I’m describing here. You might have a physical body ailment (like my poison ivy) at the same time that you get a seemingly endless amount of hassle to work through in some other area, which may also cause you to lose a great deal of money. 

In The Science of Peace we give the scientific PROOF that humanity has a shared consciousness — that the thoughts in your own mind are not just inspired by your own free will, but are rather a function of your environment. If you read the previous blog entries you will see a discussion about synchronicity as it pertains to the Science of Peace, but ‘bad karma’ is equally as much a function of the same process. 

Initiation is NOT necessarily ‘bad karma’. You can run a really clean game and still have trials and tribulations to work through, in the interest of purifying you and making you stronger. So, when your initiations come, don’t fear them… embrace the experience, strive to learn from it and stay as balanced as you can. That’s the secret to making it work for you, rather than working against you.  

  

I MADE MANY GROWTH STRIDES AS A RESULT

On a physical level, I feel we were protected against this website problem having been far more serious. Some of the personal issues I went through were very pivotal turning-points in opening myself to love and not walling out others because I am too busy, and ONLY focusing on the greater good I can serve through this website.

For that same reason, it might not always be possible for me to write large new bodies of text each weekday. That promise was made in a lack of wisdom, and could unncessarily chain me to the computer and restrict other avenues that need to flourish. Once the film really gets rolling I may be getting up for meetings at 6AM some days, and not getting back home until late into the evening. 

 

2012 BOOK: “GIT ‘ER DUN…”

Another thing I have learned from this down-time is that I must finish the 2012 book. By breaking the cycle of being able to post to my website this week, I re-invigorated my thirst for this new material, and my desire to put it in print.

So, in order to finish the 2012 book, and write larger articles like what I’m preparing to release with Hoagland, there will have to be some days where I just write a few sentences, if that. Even though today is a Sunday, I also am going to take off most weekends, so you can either catch up on articles you may have missed during the week or check out the discussion rooms. Moving from Yahoo to an on-site forum system was another MAJOR victory that came out of this whole ordeal, and the feedback has been incredibly positive. 

The discussion rooms have exploded in popularity, well beyond anything we ever had in the Yahoo group… and it is always available to be read without requiring a subscription. It’s not a bunch of “me too” posts, either… there are many genuinely interesting and intriguing things you will read there.

Now you know you can come to this site every day and find something new, even if I didn’t write it… we are building a true community and you can be a part of it simply by registering and participating. By not having to be consistently posting new material on a daily basis, it frees me to do things I could not do otherwise.

Ah — and as I write that, the sunlight has just broken through the cloudy gloom for the first time in literally three days. That synchronicity definitely adds weight to the point I’m making here. I’m having to learn as I go along… having more direct access to my Higher Self than most people certainly doesn’t mean I see everything… in fact I constantly have to work to figure out what is the best decision at any given time. 

Here’s another thought. Every time this site went down, there was NOTHING you could read, EVER… not any article I ever wrote, going all the way back to 1999. Once it came back up, I realized how much was really there for you to explore.

So, just because I don’t write something each day, that certainly doesn’t mean there isn’t a wealth of material. I highly doubt most visitors have explored everything we have to offer… particularly now that we have seven years’ worth of discussion-group archives posted. Before I go beating myself up, saying I’m “not doing enough” for the site, I should remember how much is already there each day, waiting to be discovered. 

 

WE WERE PROTECTED FROM A MUCH LARGER DISASTER… 

I was guided internally NOT to pitch a show to Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory yet, nor to finish my part of an interplanetary climate change article I’m about to co-author with Richard C. Hoagland. These have been things I’ve been intending to do throughout this entire ordeal, but I kept holding off, feeling that we didn’t want to move forward until we KNEW we were okay. 

It’s obvious that with 20 million people listening to Coast, and Hoagland being their longest-running, most-frequent guest, getting publicity with either source will lead to a substantial spike in the traffic we get on this website. Now think about the problem we just went through this week.

In the ideal ‘negative greeting,’ this site would have its catastrophic failure right in the middle of when the highest number of people wanted to view our site and download products! It would appear that we never even existed, and potentially millions of people would miss out on the perspective we provide. Rather than losing, say, a hundred dollars a day (or whatever), the potential losses could have been vastly greater. Now we will make sure everything is perfect before we make the next step. 

 

THE POINT IS TO STAY AT PEACE, DON’T LET IT RUFFLE YOUR FEATHERS

Thanks for reading this rant… I hope you gained something, other than a headache. The ultimate point is that these ‘greetings’ will happen, but if you get angry and furious you have totally missed the point, and they will only intensify. When they happen in your own life, stay in your peace, stay in your center, no matter how crazy it seems to be or how much you want to indulge in anger. This tells your Higher Self that you get the point, and therefore do not need to have these experiences keep repeating.

Despite my hands being a mess, and having to tend to some personal issues, I honestly did not freak out, go crazy or yell during this period of time… especially in this past week, I stayed cool as a cucumber. I KNEW this was a negative greeting, as it was just FAR too weird to be an event without some type of higher meaning, in my opinion. 

Even if you REFUSE to believe it has higher meaning, it STILL becomes a test to see how centered and grounded you are… and if you freak out, letting it make you furious, swearing and fretting and indulging in feeling the victim, you GUARANTEE it will all need to happen AGAIN in the future.

 

“…UNTIL IT IS NO LONGER USEFUL…”

Then, you will AGAIN be tested as to whether you can go through the initiation WITHOUT indulging in negative emotions. This is the hidden meaning of the all-important Law of One quote, “Catalyst will repeat until it is no longer USEFUL.”

If an experience (catalyst) makes you angry, frustrated or emotional in any way, then it is still USEFUL to you, by definition. Once something like this can happen and you are NOT moved by it… meaning that you can stay in your center and not be ruffled… then it is no longer USEFUL to you — and it will quickly fall by the wayside. 

Let’s say you’re in a severely dysfunctional relationship. Let’s say you’ve tried everything, made huge growth strides in yourself, but the other person hardly changes at all… they remain stuck in the same patterns. You may not realize that you have complete control over whether you stay in that relationship or not.

 

YOU ARE NEVER TRULY TRAPPED… YOU’VE SIMPLY MADE A CHOICE

You may take some hard hits, including financial losses, blasts of anger in your face or just the sad feeling that you hurt someone, but you are NEVER stuck or trapped in any situation. You may THINK you are, but that is still a CHOICE you are making. The most insidious dysfunctional relationships will also be set up so you feel you CANNOT leave, no matter what, but if you really dig deep inside yourself, you will find there are options.

 

 

This also is given in the Tarot archetypes — the blueprints of our evolution from the mind of the Galaxy. The Devil card has two people chained to the altar of the Devil, who represents pure indulgence in the material world — but if you look at the chains around their necks, you realize that they could be easily slipped off. They are CHOOSING to remain in bondage, but they could actually get up and leave at any time.

This is precisely where YOU are, at ANY time, in your own life… if you feel you are in bondage. You are NEVER truly stuck… you only CHOOSE to be that way.  

If you were to have called me with a problem, back when I still did client readings, one of my biggest gifts to you would be to show you that the walls you find yourself surrounded with aren’t really barriers… you can travel right through them. When you rise to the ‘sixth-density’ level, where love and wisdom are unified, “There are no paradoxes.”  

 

EVERYTHING IS A CHOICE

If you’ve been financially dependent on the abuser, for example, you are CHOOSING not to earn your own money, but that doesn’t mean you CAN’T. When you look deep inside, a part of you may be lazy or unmotivated. And thus, you are willing to trade off one form of enslavement (an unsatisfying relationship) for the ‘freedom’ you gain from another apparent enslavement (having to work a job). 

I think you’ll find that a job is NOT slavery. Even if your job is “not spiritual”, in the sense that you’re not out there selling incense, candles and New Age paperbacks, or leading people through bizarre yoga postures and meditation retreats, you are STILL gaining exactly what you need for your own Ascension process. If you were NOT getting the single most important spiritual learning curve you could have in your work, then you wouldn’t be there… plain and simple. You would have taken action and made a CHOICE to do something else.

If you have NOT chosen to leave, it is because you are gaining everything you need from where you are now. In many cases, making a decision to walk away IS the lesson. 

I love the phrase “I’d rather lose you than lose myself.” You may have SO convinced yourself you don’t want to do something (like getting a job, or getting out of the job you already have) that you really, truly believe you are “stuck”, but that is ONLY a choice you’re making.

 

GET OUT THERE AND MAKE IT HAPPEN! 

Esoteric initiation does NOT make you a bench-warmer — it makes you a winner, a go-getter, a risk-taker, a fearless and intrepid explorer, willing to TRUST in your Higher Power and know that when you jump out into the wide unknown, your parachute will open as it is intended to. Make that move! Do the impossible! Surprise yourself!

We now have the PROOF that we are all interconnected in consciousness. That is the Science of Peace. It is no longer a speculation. This consciousness field of humanity is not just something that passively sits there. The ‘Secret’ film is awakening people to the fact that you CAN use your intent and create a positive manifestation. Once you know HOW to call in the manifestation — namely to make your first question “How may I serve the Universe” rather than “How may the Universe serve me,” the rest will follow.

 

 Image

 

Ask yourself if what you’re doing now serves the greatest good. Are the greatest number of people being served by you staying in that diseased, unhealthy situation you find yourself in? If another person is involved, are they really even happy to be there with you, or do they simply wallow in their own misery and despair, and persecute you for why THEY are not any happier? Think about it.

This is your life. Don’t get all hung up in my life. I can’t come save you. This is your responsibility. You have to make the change. You have to trust. You have to get in there and get your hands dirty. It’s not going to happen while you sit at this computer. You can’t do it in writing. You’re going to have to take action, get in there and make the change. 

 

EPILOGUE

So, I hope the sorrows we’ve endured here can be some consolation. Don’t forget that in the midst of all this other stuff, I was also going through crippling poison ivy on my hands. I still itch a bit, though it’s largely over with. Once I faced the irritation I was going through, and got to a point where I stopped fuming about the financial losses, stopped obsessing on the problems I could not directly change, and taking solid action to change the ones I did have control over, my body no longer needed to manifest irritation.. my irritation… on my hands.

The poison ivy was no longer USEFUL to me, and it faded away.

Nonetheless, I went out and bought every damn thing you could ever fight poison ivy with, just in case… Rhus Tox 30X, Poison Ivy homeopathic tablets, jewel-weed poison ivy spray, homeopathic ivy gel, you name it… I don’t have any desire to repeat this again any time soon. 

We apologize for the lack of access you may have had to the discussion group or otherwise. It does appear that we’re just about out of the woods now, and I have a feeling that we will be quite stable for a long, long time to come once we get this defective equipment repaired. This was a test to see if we can really live by the principles we teach… and all indications are that we passed!

 

UPDATE MONDAY MORNING, 4/9/07

I had a dream this morning that showed me I really got the point here. Apparently the website woes, my hand trouble, all of it was trying to send me a clear message. I had promised the 2012 book on a high-rush delivery, and then got so captivated in writing music, launching a new product and transforming this website with day-by-day content that I totally strayed away from my original promises. Such negligence has real consequences when it involves planetary service.

This dream is saying that the information I’m going to put into the 2012 book is so powerful that even if I never did a film, the book would still have the same impact that I’ve been told the film will have. I was quite surprised to see how blatantly the message came across in the dream… in direct response to a stray thought I’d had the night before. I do not feel I’m having delusions of grandeur, and no, it had nothing to do with Christ symbolism or anything like that… but it did show that the book is going to have a far wider impact than I’d ever imagined.

We therefore DID win a “Divine” lottery for a bad server computer. It was not orchestrated by negative entities… it was a carefully guided sequence of events whose purpose was to remind me that the simple EXISTENCE of this site, as a community resource, is more important than whether I write a lengthy post to it every day. I will continue to make updates, but now I have been given a crystal-clear directive to finish the book… ASAP.

I’m also going to make this book more like the sequel to the CONVERGENCE series, rather than using the content I’d originally developed about my own personal history. We’ll save that material — which I feel is quite good — for Book II.

Again, when you post to the discussion group we have moderators who read it and approve it before it goes up, so don’t fret if it doesn’t happen right away. Troublemakers can be assured that this is not a place to have fun and heckle budding students of metaphysics… it is a safe zone for enlightened conversation and discussion.  

 

UPDATE WEDNESDAY MORNING, 4/11/07

I wanted to share some mail that was triggered from this post, so it doesn’t just get buried in the sands of time for those who keep coming back later.

First of all, under the tongue-in-cheek heading “Negative Entities Massing for Attack on City of Angels,” Robert Riedel (a guest on two different sacred tours I’ve held — one in Egypt and one in the Caribbean) shared a first in my lore of synchronicity — a combination digital clock / digital thermometer hit:


Hey David! Hello Group!

Thanks for yet another wonderful blog; your Easter Message: “Divine Cosmos Site under attack” has caused me to “burst into print,” as Eddy would say. When I finished reading it, I walked into the back TV room, and the atomic clock read 11:11PM, and the outside temperature was 33.3 degrees- so, I went upstairs to have a nap, and nurse a headache.

So glad that your site is back up and running again. I check out various forums semi-daily to get a well-rounded feel for what’s up, and yours would truely be missed. After a few days, I began to wonder if California had finally got the Big One, but I fought the urge to turn on the telly, or buy a newspaper; has anyone ever conducted a scientific investigation into whether these occurances happen more frequently in Southern California, compared to other places? I know that Julia, who last lived in Fullerton, had to finally leave the area to get relief from similar anomolies, which she can much better explain than I.

Also, syncronystically speaking, The “Cosmic Internet” is perhaps finally beginning to work a little better these days- just Sat., we were talking about when 2012ists first began to appear, and you answered that magnificently with your 4-6 blog posting, which of course I couldn’t access until Sun. night!

 

Secondly, this post from Jax in the same thread emphasized to me how much we’ve grown, to be able to have handled this initiation like we did: 

TalkingAttack!


I bet if I had been David and Co and had my server go down at such a critical time, I doubt I could have been cool about it like he was. I would be bald from pulling my hair out!

However, it was incredibly funny to read the post telling of his 3 day ordeal after I had been wondering if he had been taken in the “Rapture” or something for 3 days the site was down. I was LOL in the middle of the night at the computer while reading that post (probably waking my family up to wonder if I was losing my mind.)

I’m so glad I found David and Co because after reading several of the “Ra – Law of One” chapters and so many of the free articles on the Divine Cosmos Site, I’m sure I’ve finally found my place in this world where I can learn and understand who I am, why I’m here, and how to cope with being a Wanderer with courage, patience, and a sense of humor.

 

This post from Charran, still in the same thread, echoed the sentiments of the others:

 Come out of the darkness and into the light


I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read about the “attack of the negs”. I could so totally relate. Its like when Murphy’s Law hits it really hits and you are at the mercy of the gods. But it is a cycle…as all things are. Isn’t that what we have learned from astrology?

I believe it was a Stephen King book that made into a TV show that I saw where in the one final scene as darkness has fallen on this village… the mummy like creatures are going for the voluptuous heroine… and she is climbing to the highest rooftop to get the first rays of light as dawn approaches…

 
Just when you think the mummies will destroy her, the light peaks out over the rooftop and you hear someone say, “Get out of the darkness and into the light!”
 
And at that moment, the mummies fall by the wayside, and the voluptious heroine is saved.

Way to go David and Larry! That was some story. You saw it through, now reap the rewards…

Charran

 

I did have a conversation with someone who suggested that I may come across with too much ‘victim consciousness’ in this post. That was not my intention, of course. The objective is to show how you will also endure similar things at certain times in your life, and to provide a model for how you might choose to handle yourself without breaking under the pressure. From the looks of these emails, it was a good idea for me to tell the story! 

I’ve taken the guidance from the Source that was triggered by all these website woes and have started immersing myself in the creative process of the 2012 book. There is a great deal of data that needs to come together, and one of the biggest ‘problems,’ if you will, is how to arrange that data. Much of the writing happens BEFORE you ever put words on paper. The dreams have been incredibly supportive of this process!