04-21-2010, 10:38 AM
Hey everyone, I've been asked to share my story and I daresay it's probably about time I did. This is part metaphysical story of me, and part just plain out story of my present incarnation. I'm always amazed at how I got to where I am from such radically different circumstances, so I wrote out a fairly complete story... The downside being that it is very very long. If you'd rather cut to the chase, scroll down to the picture of the flying saucer. :-)
Here I am at three months old, sitting with my older sister
Here's the house I grew up in, in Wisconsin (nice cold wintertime..)
In 1979 I took incarnation as a baby boy in Wisconsin, to a middle income house hold. My parents were practicing non-denominational Christians and that was the world view I was given. I went to church each Sunday with little exception for the first 10 years of my life. I never had any problems with that and it made sense to me as how the world worked. Of course, I was also quite young and didn't have the mind to see where it's problems are... Fortunately this never manifested as too much of a catalyst for me, because around 1991 when I was eleven we stopped going to church. I'm not completely sure why still to this day, except that perhaps my parents own faith was gradually declining. We stopped when we moved to a town about 30 miles away, too far to drive to attend the old church. After that, a brief search for a new one in our own small town took place, but my parents never found one they liked. Consciously decided or not, we stopped going. This was confusing to me for a short while, but since I was still just a kid I wasn't so molded that I was concerned for longer than a few weeks. This was lucky for me, because the dogmatic aspects of the religion never fully took root in me, nor (too much) fear.
Up to this point in time, I had been doing quite well for myself in school. Our old city/town was a little larger and the school system, much better. Our new town was very small and a little backwards. My new school was awfully under funded, and for one reason or the other, I never gained acceptance from my peers. I made friends with one person who was, I would later learn, something of an outcast- an unpopular fellow. And after that my identity was solidified to the main body of students as someone to be picked on and fought with. This was a new and shocking experience for me, and for the first time I experienced a large degree of anxiety and fear about simply going to school. I was viewed as a low life, and I'm sure I believed it to a degree at that impressionable age. In my old town, I had a large group of close friends. What a change it was for the worse, although I'm sure valuable in a larger way...
I continued to live with this status through middle and the first few years of high school. I can't fully explain how humiliating it feels to be seen crying as a result of emotional and physical abuse in a public space at the age of 13. Typically I would suffer some sort of humiliation a few times a week and live in fear of it happening the rest of the time. Fortunately my time wasn't ALL bad- I made some close friendships and had a small support group. Some of those friends I still am in touch with, I even had a part in one of my best buddies' wedding last year. As I got in to high school I was still a certified nerd in the eyes of most students, but I was regaining confidence in myself as well as expanding my friend base. By sophomore year I was doing much better, socially. Unfortunately, my grades continued to suffer and my extracurricular school activities were zero. My response to being picked on was a withdrawal from effort in class, and since I only felt anxiety from school, why would I want to have anything more to do with it than I was required to? I passed with minimal grades. I even qualified for a "rescue" program in my high school, put on for troubled and/or trouble-making students that couldn't pass classes normally. Most people would have been embarrassed by this, but my M.O. was apathy at this point in my life. I started running around with different groups of people, and experimented with some drugs and alcohol. We'd drive around all night and find "adventures", which usually involved lightly illegal activities such as breaking in to sheds, destroying mail-boxes or yard decorations, putting bumper stickers on cop cars, pulling pranks and the like. Most of it was stupid and reckless, but for the time it was exactly the sort of expression I needed. Back at school again I would frequently skip classes. I never took SATs or other college qualifying tests, and I might not have gone to college at all, except for an elective photography course I took in my senior year. I fell in love with it in no time. And right after I graduated I enrolled at a technical college in Milwaukee, under a photography major. This would be 1998, and I was 18.
So I moved out of town and said good-bye to all of my cronies and delinquent friends. I moved in to a single studio apartment which was quite run down, for a mere $325 a month. I don't know why my parents let me live there- in fact I question many of their judgment calls to this day- but anyways. There I was in a big city by myself mostly. My college experience was not the idealistic one you typically think of, with a campus and dorms. The school was situated downtown in a crowded area, and since it was a technical college geared mostly for returning adults. There was almost nobody my own age with whom to make friends. Mostly I would just be alone in my apartment during that time, listening to my industrial music and trying to think of interesting photography projects. I'll mention, since I had found such a passion in photography, my grades for the first time shot right up to the "A" level. I was inspired, and it gave me confidence that I had more ability than I had given myself credit for all those long years before.
Not having friends, and being highly interested in photography, I would wander around the city at night and practice with long exposure shots.
Around this same time I found myself one day in an incense filled used CD shop (this was just before digital music took off). Behind the counter was a tattooed and rather rough looking woman who was a little older than myself, listening to some hard metal music that I liked. I struck up conversation with her and a friendship. I would hang out there when I had time and talk about music, or photography, or other art related things. Eventually one day our chat switched to religion. Up to this point I still considered myself a Christian, having never replaced it and lacking anything else in my life. (I honestly just never thought about it much). I told her I was so, and I'll never forget what she said next, "Oh? I'm sorry..." This blew me away- because I had never had my religious understandings challenged before in any way. I kept a cool outside appearance though, and I can't remember exactly but probably gave her some confused justifications. She then went on to tell me why she wasn't a Christian, and I listened hard. That interaction got the ball rolling for me. I made no changes but thought about that day for a long time after.
The Water St. Brewery, where I met my wife!
In '99 I started working as a waiter part time at a micro-brewery / restaurant. A few weeks later, as it would happen, the love of my life, future wife-friend-lover-life partner and mother of my children would also start working there as a waitress. A few weeks after we initially met and flirted, we started to go out. A little while after that we were "going steady". I had only had a few non-serious and short term girlfriends before in the later part of my high school career- but this was something wholly different. About a year in to our relationship, when I was 20, I can remember being in a deep late night conversation with her (a frequent thing) about religion and God. Her upbringing had been much different than mine in a religious sense. Her parents attended a Universalist church and raised all of their kids with that understanding. In addition her mother had had several meetings with deceased relatives in lucid dream / OBE states, and was/is a Reiki healer. The father, in pursuit of understanding these things had taken up a hobbiest study of the paranormal, not least of which entertained the idea of channeling, which I'll touch more on later. What's important now is that she was coming from this background... I, since meeting my record shop friend, had been thinking more and more about what my religious identity was, if it was anything. Remember, I stopped practicing any sort of faith when I was 11. I still held on to the beliefs but they were getting shaky. I remember specifically being VERY conflicted about why homosexuals had to go to hell. It didn't make sense to me that love could be extended out so conditionally, and apparently so very immaturely. It was really beginning to dislodge my Christian belief system. Regardless- I was still imprinted heavily with the fear of hell, and worried to myself at night if even thinking such things would condemn me eternally later. I had some terrible dreams about hell which made things even harder during that time. This is where I was at when I came to this conversation with my now wife. She told me exactly what I needed- that she didn't believe that hell existed one bit. Not even slightly! Yes, God exists. Yes, Jesus probably existed. Who knows, maybe even the miracles are true. But hell? That simply didn't compute to her, and I was extremely inspired by that. I had never run in to someone who displayed that level of faith while simultaneously rejecting what I now understand is a self serving, human created device for the purpose of control and manipulation. I repeat, it was exactly what I needed at that point in my life, and I see it as no accident that it happened as it did!
I became a Fight Club devotee... of sorts.
I thus turned a corner in my life and knew Christianity no longer. I still believed in God, but I didn't know how I believed. It still at this point in my life wasn't something that I concerned myself with as a top priority. I read a book about a western boy who decided to move to India to study with a Hindu guru in the 60's, eventually becoming a guru himself. (On the Road to Freedom by Swami Paramatmananda). This was enlightening but not world changing for me. Then I saw the movie 'Fight Club' and took some inspiration from it's rather extreme anti-materialism theme. I tried to emulate that to a degree, having 'woken up' to the vast degree of advertising manipulation in our western culture, and the general conspiracy among all companies to separate people from their money. I stopped short of turning renegade however. As synchronicity would have it, I would years later end up working for one of the richest men in America, Phil Knight (founder of Nike). Gotta love how the universe plays with you sometimes!
Fast forward a handful of years to 2002. My newly found decreased value of material things firmly in place, my lovely woman by my side, and being the young age of 22 years, we cooked up the idea to get the ^&@%! out of the mid-west. I day dreamed of palm trees during the 8-month Wisconsin winters. I was also freshly graduated and no longer tied down in that way. However I did not graduate in Photography. My studies of it in tech college lost some of their appeal to me after a while and I experimented with various other majors at an actual university (which I now qualified to go to). These included graphic design and computer science. Ultimately though after much dabbling, I would return to that same tech college and finish my associate degree in what I realized was a marriage of photograph, computer science and graphic design- computer graphics. My girlfriend (now wife) had also recently graduated college from a different school, and with full trust that things would turn out for the best, we moved out west.
San Diego was amazing in many ways. I bought a long skate board and made good use of the boardwalks on Mission and Pacific beaches. When I got too hot I just jumped in the ocean. Then back to cruising. These are real basic and simple pleasures life can offer- and these things I could never have done back in the mid west. We drank a lot of Pacifico beer, ate lots of Mexican food, and sometimes drove out of town to hike through the old mountainous pine forests. (Cacuma, etc.) Our stay in SD would be short lived however. My idea of finding a computer graphics or graphic design related job did not pan out and I found myself again working in restaurants for little income. My woman was also finding it hard to find "real" employment and worked as a checker at a little organic grocery store near our apartment. We loved our location, but compared to our income it was a very expensive place to live. As a result, six months after we got in we again packed our bags- but we did not go back home. My counterpart got wind of a potential job in Portland, OR. And since we knew it would be a cheaper place to live anyway, not to mention that she had done a lot of job research in that city before graduating, we decided it was a good fit.
So in the spring of 2003 we again settled in to a new city and new part of the country. My wife found some meaningful employment with her bachelor's degree, but with my somewhat unimpressive associates degree, coupled with a high un-employment rate in Oregon at that time (we found out about AFTER we moved...) I soon found myself, aged 23, working part time at a coffee shop with high school students, earning minimum wage. I was grateful to have some work, but it was a slap to my ego. I realized then that if I wanted to make any use of my knowledge of computer graphics, I would need to seek higher education. Thus I soon enrolled at an expensive art school and took out many large student loans. I dedicated myself to learning the way of 3D computer graphics (a new thing to me) and animation. The type of things we were learning there was much advanced compared to what I had learned previously. I was amazed and terrified at the huge list of skills I would have to learn to even become competent. However, thanks to some amazing instructors and a sense of good spirited competition with my peers (that I didn't know I had), my grades soon shot straight to the top of my class and my works graced the school galleries. I poured *everything* I had in to learning how to be the best I could be with 3D software.
During this time I was largely asleep spiritually. I had no free time, nor interest in learning more about my views on God or anything of that nature. But, as all such people experience from time to time, I did not go through that period without some gentle taps on the shoulder from higher dimensions. One such tap came in the form of yet another deep conversation about religion, this time with another friend and school class mate at an oriental bar. We were a few drinks in and the question was posed to me if I believed in God. "Oh yeah, of course! I mean, it just makes sense, y'know? How could there not be God?" But I was unprepared for his response, which I cannot recall exactly but was on the lines of "Well what do you mean exactly... Why couldn't there be no God? Do you have proof, if so, where?" I was speechless in response. I realized I didn't know what I was talking about. I claimed to "know", but had no intellectual explanation of this knowing. In hind sight, I feel this is perfectly acceptable, but to my 24 year old brain at the time, it was not acceptable. It was a reminder, a tap on the shoulder, that there was SO much more I could learn about God and spirituality. I declined the cosmic offer to learn at that time, but the reminder stuck with me.
Fast forward to 2005, I am 25. I am nearly graduated from college, very close to having my Bachelor's of Science under my shoulder, not to mention being at the top of my class and with glowing recommendations from all of my professors. I was working part time at a small company in town as an internship and no longer had to work in a restaurant. (Total of 10 years of restaurant work under my belt up 'til then!) Now that I was about to graduate, I would need to seriously consider where I could go. Most all of the companies I sought to work for were out of town, and I had been preparing mentally to move for about a year leading up to graduation. There was one really nice company in Portland that did the type of work I liked, but the odds of that working out were against me I figured. Well, during my last semester of school I was apart of a portfolio oriented class. The instructor happened to work at this very company... And one day he brought in as a guest speaker THE CG SUPERVISOR of this company to offer critique on the student work... (!!!) This was no small matter. He walked around the class and looked at everyone's work, rather silently, not offering overly much feedback to anyone in particular. I thought he liked my work when he saw it, but I was not sure. As the class wrapped up, I saw my opportunity and boldly walked up to this man. "Hi, I know your company may not looking for anyone right now, but I just wanted to say that if you ever nee-" His hand flipped out a little rectangle of paper, extended towards me- "Here, take this card. Call me. Call me." And out the door he went. I must have looked funny, rooted to the ground with a rather dumbfounded look on my face, a small smile growing there. A few weeks later, I was working directly under his supervision at that studio. It was a huge break that not everyone gets... And better still, I didn't have to move! I would work there for almost three years, "cutting my teeth" in the industry and leaning a lot.
"KAHN!!!"
During this general period of time I had some further interesting metaphysical taps on the shoulder. One that is particularly interesting and a little funny, involves the film Star Trek 2. My wife (we ended up getting married in 2004 by the way, woo!) was out of town visiting her parents in Oklahoma. I was left alone in the house for 4 or 5 days. Realizing the opportunity in front of me, I went out and rented a handful of 80's sci-fi movies that I know she wouldn't want to sit through. One of them was ST2. I love this movie. I even have a vintage ST2 poster up in my cubicle at work :-) Anyways- I popped in the dvd and as usual, got heavily involved in the story and superb acting. At the end of the film (read no further if you haven't seen it yet) there is this scene where Spock saves everyone on the Enterprise, but in doing so exposes himself to toxic levels of radiation. Kirk enters the scene too late and cannot help him. The scene is so emotional and powerful, it's probably the best you'll find in any sci-fi film, anywhere. I've always been a sensitive person and it brought a few tears to my eyes, despite the fact that I've seen it so many times. Then after the credits started to roll and I had dried my eyes, I had the sudden feeling that is hard to describe. This film had brought more emotional impact to me than anything else had that year. Was star trek the only thing that could do this for me? Did this mean that the star trek mythology was more important to me than any other sort of mythology, or metaphysical understanding? Wasn't there something bigger that should captivate my emotional attention so? I thought on that for a while.
The Good Book.
In 2007 we had our first baby boy. What a dramatic change that was in our lives, and continues to be so today! And what a blessing also. The arrival of our first born coincided with my sudden interest in learning more about spirituality. I cannot honestly say what sparked this interest, although I suspect unconsciously I realized that if I have serious plans to raise a human being in this world, I should finally get around to really thinking about what I believe in. There is a great little New Age book shop in Portland called 'New Renaissance' that I had poked around in a few times before. I only knew a couple of things: I wanted to buy a book about spirituality, and I knew I wasn't interested in dogma, which excluded most of the religions. I ended up buying 'Spirituality for Dummies', but Sharon Janis. http://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-Dummi...0764552988 The title is hilarious, but after paging through it I knew I had found what I needed. And indeed, it's an amazing book! It is true to it's title, going over all the major elements of faith, religion, spirituality, meditation and so on. I will wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who is somewhat sleepy or in the process of waking. In fact it sits on my bookshelf proudly to this day. :-) I remember those happy mornings I would spend in the work van car-pool, alert from my morning coffee, sun streaming down in to my lap as I hungrily devoured page after page of that book. I would always arrive at my desk with a huge smile on my face. I was an immortal being! Love is the fundamental basis of all existence! With those in mind- how can anyone have a bad day, ever? We're here to learn, we're here to love. Reading these things brought such joy to my being, my very essence. I was awake, but groggy. And I would take just another short cat nap for about 18 months before waking up with a bang...
Sydney, Australia. Yet another beautiful city.
So in early 2008 I got an amazing opportunity- I had a job offer that was too good to turn down. It was not just in another city, or state, or country.. but on another continent on the other side of the planet. A company in Sydney Australia was ramping up on a new production and needed my help. So, with our nine month old son we packed all our things in to storage, rented out our house and flew down under. What an amazing experience that was. Such a beautiful country, and very friendly people. I loved my new job. And here I was, just plain Eric from Wisconsin, living and working in Australia, and with a family no less. It felt like life was trying to keep up with us- in fact it still feels that way today.
Taken before the days of Photoshop...
Now we get in to the interesting part of my story, metaphysically speaking. Remember my father-in-law had been for many years dabbling in and researching metaphysical, paranormal and spiritual things. Part of this research led him and his wife to join the Psychic Studies Institute (PSI) in Kansas City. This group holds monthly events and presentations for members. Psychic guest speakers will perform medium-ships, paranormal researchers will lecture about UFOs, and etc. They even have a regular channel speak at every other meeting. Chris Powell who channels a native American spirit Dagendaweda. Over the last 5 or so years leading up to the present time in my story my father-in-law would bring transcripts of these channelings with him on family visits and read them after dinner. This was my first exposure to channeling, and I really didn't know what to make of it either way. I found them fascinating. He (Dagendaweda) would speaking on a large range of topics, from future events, spiritual things, Earth mysteries and so on. The sessions would be potluck Q&A. I'd hold on to these transcripts in my file cabinet to see which ones of the prophecies would come true (I eventually made a database and found his ratio to be about 50% correct, which is very good!). So, back to the present time, I was in to what I called "my spirituality", and open-minded about such things as channeling. I had heard a little bit about UFOs, and saw no reason why they couldn't be real, although I had no first hand experience.
Ok, we're nearly up to speed now. One day my father in law send us an e-mail with a transcript from a channel named Blossom Goodchild. But this was no ordinary channeling- it was a proclamation and prophecy of a MASSIVE UFO sighting that would occur on exactly October 14th, 2008. I'm wiser these days, but at the time this nearly knocked my socks off. These beings spoke about how ET and human contact was overdue, and that attempting to work through governments was not viable anymore. They would make their presence known to the world all at once with the de-cloaking of their miles long mother-ship... In just a few months time. This got a lot of people excited. I, and thousands others, started watching for the new channelings that would be posted on a weekly basis. Everything seemed set to go down, and then the predicted date finally drew near. I wasn't certain about this happening, but I didn't see any reason why it couldn't happen, and on some level, I must admit, I expected it to. I thought about all the possible ramifications of this event happening, how my life and the lives of everyone else on earth would change. Finally Oct 14th came around, and as you know, nothing happened that day. Or the day after. Or after that... it was very disappointing for me. I felt like the world became a little less magical... and, I still don't know what to make of that contact to this day (the channeling is still on-going). The "official reason" was that apparently some group of negatives threatened something terrible if it did happen, but this explanation doesn't work for me on many levels that I won't get in to here. At any rate, I was bummed, and my father in law was too. We didn't know what to make of it. But there was no doubt I was different after this experience. For weeks I had been extremely interested in a subject I hadn't been in to before- channeling. My mind and belief system had been rapidly expanded. And miraculously after such a huge no-show, my mind did not revert or shut back down in subconscious retaliation. I was hungry for more information- I wanted something that would help me put the last few months in to some sort of perspective. Well, about a week later, my father-in-law e-mailed me again with a link to a website called Divine Cosmos, run by David Wilcox. There was an article there that spoke all about the Oct 14th prediction that made a lot of sense. I'll post just the first paragraph here, and please note the last few lines:
Now I could clearly see that this prediction was not the first of it's kind- but more interestingly, what were these mysterious laws that ET's govern themselves by? What was all this about the primordial essence of the universe, or more over the One Infinite Creator? What does this have anything to do with channeling or mass UFO sightings? I was about to find out. I started to look in to all of the material Wilcox had to offer. That was fun for a while, but gradually I got back to what interested me the most about David's website to begin with, the Oct 14th article, and that mysterious Law of One idea. I downloaded one of David's "Law of One Study Guide" versions and read through the whole thing. Wow! This was some seriously deep stuff. I was intrigued to say the least.
Having burned through the study guide, my next natural step was to the L/L Research internet library. I should pause here and explain how many seekers I've spoken with on our forum have spent decades putting together the puzzle pieces of 'the bigger picture' only to have found the Law of One at the end and feeling a sense of confirmation. My experience has been pretty much the opposite so far. I've discovered the Law of One, possibly the richest collection of spiritual information on planet Earth, right at the start of my spiritual awakening. As such I never felt any large sense of remembering or confirmation that others have, but rather have found overwhelming confirmation of IT through just about every other spiritual / esoteric resource. So in this sort of backwards awakening process I have worked out my metaphysical understandings. This was all happening around the end of 2008. Right at the start of 2009 L/L Research launched this forum, which I signed up to right away. A few months after that I ordered volumes 1-4 of the Law of One books, and later on the 'Secrets of the UFO' book. Although there are parts of it that I still can't get my head completely around, I can say with deep confidence (and satisfaction) that on the whole, The Law of One is the most complete written understanding about the greater picture or purpose of life that I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
As such, I have since kept the primary concepts and ideas in my mind when investigating any other area of interest. "Hey this sounds like the Law of One!" or "Yup... that guy "gets" it" are common mental trains of thought when I find something that feels right. The nature of my work, being computer graphics, has me sitting in front of a computer and doing visual work all day. This is fantastic because it allows my right brain to do the majority of the "work" while my left brain is free to listen to audio commentary and digest it intellectually. Thus I was able to listen to hundreds of hours of channeling, lectures, speeches, and many other things without needing to dedicate extra time out of my day. In my desire to leave a trail of breadcrumbs along my spiritual journey, I have put together a compilation of interesting links that I found some resonance with. (It's in my signature- a rather large and constantly growing list!) Some of the best include but are not limited to, Alan Watts, Neale Donald Walsh, Bashar / Anka, Dean Radin (psi research), Michael Newton, Ramond Moody, Fred Alan Wolf... and the list goes on. They all speak about The Law of One in their own way, some more directly than others. (This is in addition to having read all the LOO books, read about a year of Q'uo transcripts, listening to about another two years (from BBS radio) and listening to the entire 'Sons of the Law of One' podcast library two or three times). In looking at established religions, I was able to see that the core statement of almost all is unity. And it's what all mystical experiencers, near death experiencers, gurus, sages, monks, and so on have been talking about for so many hundreds and thousands of years. It's elegant and resolves all paradoxes. And it's just the sort of confirmation you would have to be really sleeping soundly to ignore (god bless 'em all)
Last spring we returned to the USA, and to Los Angeles, where we now live and work. I am definitely not the same person as I was when we left. Back to to premise of this sub-forum. Am I a wanderer? I really have no clue. In many ways I feel like I just fell in to the right place and time, but I suppose in light of my deeper understanding of things, there are no accidents. Why I chose pre-incarnitvely to awaken in this way, at this time so near the end of third density is a bit mysterious to me. I consider myself a fairly average person. If I may be from any higher density, I would guess it would be the fourth. I say so because looking back at most of my life I have exhibited love more so than understanding or the blending of understanding and love. I've made loads of life mistakes out of my seeming ignorance, but never in malicious or hateful ways, with a few shameful exceptions. I've generally been very turned off by realistically violent films. I love little kids, animals and happy people. I still don't know what the overall purpose of my life is, except perhaps to do what Q'uo and others have said exhaustively, to live as an example of the love I see in and feel for the world. On the other hand, I may simply be a ripe 3rd density plum for the picking, and in collaboration with my higher self have been allowed to finally get 'the real deal' in terms of the bigger picture understandings. After, I assume, many countless incarnations without that sort of knowing. I've never had any past life memories (nay, or any paranormal experiences for that matter).
I guess that about wraps it up. I'm happy to be awake, happy to be here and to know all of you, and damn happy to be alive. Living life is pretty magical after all, eh?
Happy to be here,
Lavazza / Eric
Here I am at three months old, sitting with my older sister
Here's the house I grew up in, in Wisconsin (nice cold wintertime..)
In 1979 I took incarnation as a baby boy in Wisconsin, to a middle income house hold. My parents were practicing non-denominational Christians and that was the world view I was given. I went to church each Sunday with little exception for the first 10 years of my life. I never had any problems with that and it made sense to me as how the world worked. Of course, I was also quite young and didn't have the mind to see where it's problems are... Fortunately this never manifested as too much of a catalyst for me, because around 1991 when I was eleven we stopped going to church. I'm not completely sure why still to this day, except that perhaps my parents own faith was gradually declining. We stopped when we moved to a town about 30 miles away, too far to drive to attend the old church. After that, a brief search for a new one in our own small town took place, but my parents never found one they liked. Consciously decided or not, we stopped going. This was confusing to me for a short while, but since I was still just a kid I wasn't so molded that I was concerned for longer than a few weeks. This was lucky for me, because the dogmatic aspects of the religion never fully took root in me, nor (too much) fear.
Up to this point in time, I had been doing quite well for myself in school. Our old city/town was a little larger and the school system, much better. Our new town was very small and a little backwards. My new school was awfully under funded, and for one reason or the other, I never gained acceptance from my peers. I made friends with one person who was, I would later learn, something of an outcast- an unpopular fellow. And after that my identity was solidified to the main body of students as someone to be picked on and fought with. This was a new and shocking experience for me, and for the first time I experienced a large degree of anxiety and fear about simply going to school. I was viewed as a low life, and I'm sure I believed it to a degree at that impressionable age. In my old town, I had a large group of close friends. What a change it was for the worse, although I'm sure valuable in a larger way...
I continued to live with this status through middle and the first few years of high school. I can't fully explain how humiliating it feels to be seen crying as a result of emotional and physical abuse in a public space at the age of 13. Typically I would suffer some sort of humiliation a few times a week and live in fear of it happening the rest of the time. Fortunately my time wasn't ALL bad- I made some close friendships and had a small support group. Some of those friends I still am in touch with, I even had a part in one of my best buddies' wedding last year. As I got in to high school I was still a certified nerd in the eyes of most students, but I was regaining confidence in myself as well as expanding my friend base. By sophomore year I was doing much better, socially. Unfortunately, my grades continued to suffer and my extracurricular school activities were zero. My response to being picked on was a withdrawal from effort in class, and since I only felt anxiety from school, why would I want to have anything more to do with it than I was required to? I passed with minimal grades. I even qualified for a "rescue" program in my high school, put on for troubled and/or trouble-making students that couldn't pass classes normally. Most people would have been embarrassed by this, but my M.O. was apathy at this point in my life. I started running around with different groups of people, and experimented with some drugs and alcohol. We'd drive around all night and find "adventures", which usually involved lightly illegal activities such as breaking in to sheds, destroying mail-boxes or yard decorations, putting bumper stickers on cop cars, pulling pranks and the like. Most of it was stupid and reckless, but for the time it was exactly the sort of expression I needed. Back at school again I would frequently skip classes. I never took SATs or other college qualifying tests, and I might not have gone to college at all, except for an elective photography course I took in my senior year. I fell in love with it in no time. And right after I graduated I enrolled at a technical college in Milwaukee, under a photography major. This would be 1998, and I was 18.
So I moved out of town and said good-bye to all of my cronies and delinquent friends. I moved in to a single studio apartment which was quite run down, for a mere $325 a month. I don't know why my parents let me live there- in fact I question many of their judgment calls to this day- but anyways. There I was in a big city by myself mostly. My college experience was not the idealistic one you typically think of, with a campus and dorms. The school was situated downtown in a crowded area, and since it was a technical college geared mostly for returning adults. There was almost nobody my own age with whom to make friends. Mostly I would just be alone in my apartment during that time, listening to my industrial music and trying to think of interesting photography projects. I'll mention, since I had found such a passion in photography, my grades for the first time shot right up to the "A" level. I was inspired, and it gave me confidence that I had more ability than I had given myself credit for all those long years before.
Not having friends, and being highly interested in photography, I would wander around the city at night and practice with long exposure shots.
Around this same time I found myself one day in an incense filled used CD shop (this was just before digital music took off). Behind the counter was a tattooed and rather rough looking woman who was a little older than myself, listening to some hard metal music that I liked. I struck up conversation with her and a friendship. I would hang out there when I had time and talk about music, or photography, or other art related things. Eventually one day our chat switched to religion. Up to this point I still considered myself a Christian, having never replaced it and lacking anything else in my life. (I honestly just never thought about it much). I told her I was so, and I'll never forget what she said next, "Oh? I'm sorry..." This blew me away- because I had never had my religious understandings challenged before in any way. I kept a cool outside appearance though, and I can't remember exactly but probably gave her some confused justifications. She then went on to tell me why she wasn't a Christian, and I listened hard. That interaction got the ball rolling for me. I made no changes but thought about that day for a long time after.
The Water St. Brewery, where I met my wife!
In '99 I started working as a waiter part time at a micro-brewery / restaurant. A few weeks later, as it would happen, the love of my life, future wife-friend-lover-life partner and mother of my children would also start working there as a waitress. A few weeks after we initially met and flirted, we started to go out. A little while after that we were "going steady". I had only had a few non-serious and short term girlfriends before in the later part of my high school career- but this was something wholly different. About a year in to our relationship, when I was 20, I can remember being in a deep late night conversation with her (a frequent thing) about religion and God. Her upbringing had been much different than mine in a religious sense. Her parents attended a Universalist church and raised all of their kids with that understanding. In addition her mother had had several meetings with deceased relatives in lucid dream / OBE states, and was/is a Reiki healer. The father, in pursuit of understanding these things had taken up a hobbiest study of the paranormal, not least of which entertained the idea of channeling, which I'll touch more on later. What's important now is that she was coming from this background... I, since meeting my record shop friend, had been thinking more and more about what my religious identity was, if it was anything. Remember, I stopped practicing any sort of faith when I was 11. I still held on to the beliefs but they were getting shaky. I remember specifically being VERY conflicted about why homosexuals had to go to hell. It didn't make sense to me that love could be extended out so conditionally, and apparently so very immaturely. It was really beginning to dislodge my Christian belief system. Regardless- I was still imprinted heavily with the fear of hell, and worried to myself at night if even thinking such things would condemn me eternally later. I had some terrible dreams about hell which made things even harder during that time. This is where I was at when I came to this conversation with my now wife. She told me exactly what I needed- that she didn't believe that hell existed one bit. Not even slightly! Yes, God exists. Yes, Jesus probably existed. Who knows, maybe even the miracles are true. But hell? That simply didn't compute to her, and I was extremely inspired by that. I had never run in to someone who displayed that level of faith while simultaneously rejecting what I now understand is a self serving, human created device for the purpose of control and manipulation. I repeat, it was exactly what I needed at that point in my life, and I see it as no accident that it happened as it did!
I became a Fight Club devotee... of sorts.
I thus turned a corner in my life and knew Christianity no longer. I still believed in God, but I didn't know how I believed. It still at this point in my life wasn't something that I concerned myself with as a top priority. I read a book about a western boy who decided to move to India to study with a Hindu guru in the 60's, eventually becoming a guru himself. (On the Road to Freedom by Swami Paramatmananda). This was enlightening but not world changing for me. Then I saw the movie 'Fight Club' and took some inspiration from it's rather extreme anti-materialism theme. I tried to emulate that to a degree, having 'woken up' to the vast degree of advertising manipulation in our western culture, and the general conspiracy among all companies to separate people from their money. I stopped short of turning renegade however. As synchronicity would have it, I would years later end up working for one of the richest men in America, Phil Knight (founder of Nike). Gotta love how the universe plays with you sometimes!
Fast forward a handful of years to 2002. My newly found decreased value of material things firmly in place, my lovely woman by my side, and being the young age of 22 years, we cooked up the idea to get the ^&@%! out of the mid-west. I day dreamed of palm trees during the 8-month Wisconsin winters. I was also freshly graduated and no longer tied down in that way. However I did not graduate in Photography. My studies of it in tech college lost some of their appeal to me after a while and I experimented with various other majors at an actual university (which I now qualified to go to). These included graphic design and computer science. Ultimately though after much dabbling, I would return to that same tech college and finish my associate degree in what I realized was a marriage of photograph, computer science and graphic design- computer graphics. My girlfriend (now wife) had also recently graduated college from a different school, and with full trust that things would turn out for the best, we moved out west.
San Diego was amazing in many ways. I bought a long skate board and made good use of the boardwalks on Mission and Pacific beaches. When I got too hot I just jumped in the ocean. Then back to cruising. These are real basic and simple pleasures life can offer- and these things I could never have done back in the mid west. We drank a lot of Pacifico beer, ate lots of Mexican food, and sometimes drove out of town to hike through the old mountainous pine forests. (Cacuma, etc.) Our stay in SD would be short lived however. My idea of finding a computer graphics or graphic design related job did not pan out and I found myself again working in restaurants for little income. My woman was also finding it hard to find "real" employment and worked as a checker at a little organic grocery store near our apartment. We loved our location, but compared to our income it was a very expensive place to live. As a result, six months after we got in we again packed our bags- but we did not go back home. My counterpart got wind of a potential job in Portland, OR. And since we knew it would be a cheaper place to live anyway, not to mention that she had done a lot of job research in that city before graduating, we decided it was a good fit.
So in the spring of 2003 we again settled in to a new city and new part of the country. My wife found some meaningful employment with her bachelor's degree, but with my somewhat unimpressive associates degree, coupled with a high un-employment rate in Oregon at that time (we found out about AFTER we moved...) I soon found myself, aged 23, working part time at a coffee shop with high school students, earning minimum wage. I was grateful to have some work, but it was a slap to my ego. I realized then that if I wanted to make any use of my knowledge of computer graphics, I would need to seek higher education. Thus I soon enrolled at an expensive art school and took out many large student loans. I dedicated myself to learning the way of 3D computer graphics (a new thing to me) and animation. The type of things we were learning there was much advanced compared to what I had learned previously. I was amazed and terrified at the huge list of skills I would have to learn to even become competent. However, thanks to some amazing instructors and a sense of good spirited competition with my peers (that I didn't know I had), my grades soon shot straight to the top of my class and my works graced the school galleries. I poured *everything* I had in to learning how to be the best I could be with 3D software.
During this time I was largely asleep spiritually. I had no free time, nor interest in learning more about my views on God or anything of that nature. But, as all such people experience from time to time, I did not go through that period without some gentle taps on the shoulder from higher dimensions. One such tap came in the form of yet another deep conversation about religion, this time with another friend and school class mate at an oriental bar. We were a few drinks in and the question was posed to me if I believed in God. "Oh yeah, of course! I mean, it just makes sense, y'know? How could there not be God?" But I was unprepared for his response, which I cannot recall exactly but was on the lines of "Well what do you mean exactly... Why couldn't there be no God? Do you have proof, if so, where?" I was speechless in response. I realized I didn't know what I was talking about. I claimed to "know", but had no intellectual explanation of this knowing. In hind sight, I feel this is perfectly acceptable, but to my 24 year old brain at the time, it was not acceptable. It was a reminder, a tap on the shoulder, that there was SO much more I could learn about God and spirituality. I declined the cosmic offer to learn at that time, but the reminder stuck with me.
Fast forward to 2005, I am 25. I am nearly graduated from college, very close to having my Bachelor's of Science under my shoulder, not to mention being at the top of my class and with glowing recommendations from all of my professors. I was working part time at a small company in town as an internship and no longer had to work in a restaurant. (Total of 10 years of restaurant work under my belt up 'til then!) Now that I was about to graduate, I would need to seriously consider where I could go. Most all of the companies I sought to work for were out of town, and I had been preparing mentally to move for about a year leading up to graduation. There was one really nice company in Portland that did the type of work I liked, but the odds of that working out were against me I figured. Well, during my last semester of school I was apart of a portfolio oriented class. The instructor happened to work at this very company... And one day he brought in as a guest speaker THE CG SUPERVISOR of this company to offer critique on the student work... (!!!) This was no small matter. He walked around the class and looked at everyone's work, rather silently, not offering overly much feedback to anyone in particular. I thought he liked my work when he saw it, but I was not sure. As the class wrapped up, I saw my opportunity and boldly walked up to this man. "Hi, I know your company may not looking for anyone right now, but I just wanted to say that if you ever nee-" His hand flipped out a little rectangle of paper, extended towards me- "Here, take this card. Call me. Call me." And out the door he went. I must have looked funny, rooted to the ground with a rather dumbfounded look on my face, a small smile growing there. A few weeks later, I was working directly under his supervision at that studio. It was a huge break that not everyone gets... And better still, I didn't have to move! I would work there for almost three years, "cutting my teeth" in the industry and leaning a lot.
"KAHN!!!"
During this general period of time I had some further interesting metaphysical taps on the shoulder. One that is particularly interesting and a little funny, involves the film Star Trek 2. My wife (we ended up getting married in 2004 by the way, woo!) was out of town visiting her parents in Oklahoma. I was left alone in the house for 4 or 5 days. Realizing the opportunity in front of me, I went out and rented a handful of 80's sci-fi movies that I know she wouldn't want to sit through. One of them was ST2. I love this movie. I even have a vintage ST2 poster up in my cubicle at work :-) Anyways- I popped in the dvd and as usual, got heavily involved in the story and superb acting. At the end of the film (read no further if you haven't seen it yet) there is this scene where Spock saves everyone on the Enterprise, but in doing so exposes himself to toxic levels of radiation. Kirk enters the scene too late and cannot help him. The scene is so emotional and powerful, it's probably the best you'll find in any sci-fi film, anywhere. I've always been a sensitive person and it brought a few tears to my eyes, despite the fact that I've seen it so many times. Then after the credits started to roll and I had dried my eyes, I had the sudden feeling that is hard to describe. This film had brought more emotional impact to me than anything else had that year. Was star trek the only thing that could do this for me? Did this mean that the star trek mythology was more important to me than any other sort of mythology, or metaphysical understanding? Wasn't there something bigger that should captivate my emotional attention so? I thought on that for a while.
The Good Book.
In 2007 we had our first baby boy. What a dramatic change that was in our lives, and continues to be so today! And what a blessing also. The arrival of our first born coincided with my sudden interest in learning more about spirituality. I cannot honestly say what sparked this interest, although I suspect unconsciously I realized that if I have serious plans to raise a human being in this world, I should finally get around to really thinking about what I believe in. There is a great little New Age book shop in Portland called 'New Renaissance' that I had poked around in a few times before. I only knew a couple of things: I wanted to buy a book about spirituality, and I knew I wasn't interested in dogma, which excluded most of the religions. I ended up buying 'Spirituality for Dummies', but Sharon Janis. http://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-Dummi...0764552988 The title is hilarious, but after paging through it I knew I had found what I needed. And indeed, it's an amazing book! It is true to it's title, going over all the major elements of faith, religion, spirituality, meditation and so on. I will wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who is somewhat sleepy or in the process of waking. In fact it sits on my bookshelf proudly to this day. :-) I remember those happy mornings I would spend in the work van car-pool, alert from my morning coffee, sun streaming down in to my lap as I hungrily devoured page after page of that book. I would always arrive at my desk with a huge smile on my face. I was an immortal being! Love is the fundamental basis of all existence! With those in mind- how can anyone have a bad day, ever? We're here to learn, we're here to love. Reading these things brought such joy to my being, my very essence. I was awake, but groggy. And I would take just another short cat nap for about 18 months before waking up with a bang...
Sydney, Australia. Yet another beautiful city.
So in early 2008 I got an amazing opportunity- I had a job offer that was too good to turn down. It was not just in another city, or state, or country.. but on another continent on the other side of the planet. A company in Sydney Australia was ramping up on a new production and needed my help. So, with our nine month old son we packed all our things in to storage, rented out our house and flew down under. What an amazing experience that was. Such a beautiful country, and very friendly people. I loved my new job. And here I was, just plain Eric from Wisconsin, living and working in Australia, and with a family no less. It felt like life was trying to keep up with us- in fact it still feels that way today.
Taken before the days of Photoshop...
Now we get in to the interesting part of my story, metaphysically speaking. Remember my father-in-law had been for many years dabbling in and researching metaphysical, paranormal and spiritual things. Part of this research led him and his wife to join the Psychic Studies Institute (PSI) in Kansas City. This group holds monthly events and presentations for members. Psychic guest speakers will perform medium-ships, paranormal researchers will lecture about UFOs, and etc. They even have a regular channel speak at every other meeting. Chris Powell who channels a native American spirit Dagendaweda. Over the last 5 or so years leading up to the present time in my story my father-in-law would bring transcripts of these channelings with him on family visits and read them after dinner. This was my first exposure to channeling, and I really didn't know what to make of it either way. I found them fascinating. He (Dagendaweda) would speaking on a large range of topics, from future events, spiritual things, Earth mysteries and so on. The sessions would be potluck Q&A. I'd hold on to these transcripts in my file cabinet to see which ones of the prophecies would come true (I eventually made a database and found his ratio to be about 50% correct, which is very good!). So, back to the present time, I was in to what I called "my spirituality", and open-minded about such things as channeling. I had heard a little bit about UFOs, and saw no reason why they couldn't be real, although I had no first hand experience.
Ok, we're nearly up to speed now. One day my father in law send us an e-mail with a transcript from a channel named Blossom Goodchild. But this was no ordinary channeling- it was a proclamation and prophecy of a MASSIVE UFO sighting that would occur on exactly October 14th, 2008. I'm wiser these days, but at the time this nearly knocked my socks off. These beings spoke about how ET and human contact was overdue, and that attempting to work through governments was not viable anymore. They would make their presence known to the world all at once with the de-cloaking of their miles long mother-ship... In just a few months time. This got a lot of people excited. I, and thousands others, started watching for the new channelings that would be posted on a weekly basis. Everything seemed set to go down, and then the predicted date finally drew near. I wasn't certain about this happening, but I didn't see any reason why it couldn't happen, and on some level, I must admit, I expected it to. I thought about all the possible ramifications of this event happening, how my life and the lives of everyone else on earth would change. Finally Oct 14th came around, and as you know, nothing happened that day. Or the day after. Or after that... it was very disappointing for me. I felt like the world became a little less magical... and, I still don't know what to make of that contact to this day (the channeling is still on-going). The "official reason" was that apparently some group of negatives threatened something terrible if it did happen, but this explanation doesn't work for me on many levels that I won't get in to here. At any rate, I was bummed, and my father in law was too. We didn't know what to make of it. But there was no doubt I was different after this experience. For weeks I had been extremely interested in a subject I hadn't been in to before- channeling. My mind and belief system had been rapidly expanded. And miraculously after such a huge no-show, my mind did not revert or shut back down in subconscious retaliation. I was hungry for more information- I wanted something that would help me put the last few months in to some sort of perspective. Well, about a week later, my father-in-law e-mailed me again with a link to a website called Divine Cosmos, run by David Wilcox. There was an article there that spoke all about the Oct 14th prediction that made a lot of sense. I'll post just the first paragraph here, and please note the last few lines:
http://divinecosmos.com/index.php?option...&Itemid=70 (David Wilcox) ' Wrote:
WE ARE WRITING THIS THE NIGHT BEFORE
I started working on this post on Monday, October 13th, the day BEFORE the latest in an ongoing chain of date-specific channeled prophecies comes and goes without incident. It's now 4:44 am, ironically, as I publish it. For those who were really looking forward to this happening, I'm sorry to say that the news is not going to change today. There will be no mass UFO sighting. I've taken some time away from Part Five of my 2012 Politics series to address this particular issue, in response to all the emails I would otherwise get asking me why nothing happened. In the decade I've been online, I've probably never had as much of an issue on my hands as I've had with the October 14th emails. A typical day's load has included five to ten October 14th emails, per day, for at least the last month now.
The last time a specific date attracted this much attention was May 15, 2003, when many Internet channelers rose to support Nancy Lieder's initial prophecy that "Planet X" would swing past the Earth and cause a pole shift, destroying the majority of all life here in the process. Many people wrote me and were absolutely convinced this was going to happen, and got very upset that I did not support the prophecy and / or was not doing more to tell the world.Tonight's post is partly my celebration of the fact that once the 14th has passed, such emails will almost completely stop coming in, except for those asking me why the big event failed to materialize. If you sent me such an email, I have directed you to this link so I can give you a fuller explanation of this issue without having to repeat myself. It has been draining to answer so many letters asking me exactly the same thing, even though I've now given my opinion in at least two different audio blogs as well as Part IV of my crop circle piece. I am very relieved that this situation is finally about to end, and I am sincerely sorry for all those people who will feel let down or disappointed when nothing happens.
The October 14th prophecy upset does not in any way discredit the seriousness or the validity of the UFO phenomenon. The sad fact is that the vast majority of people studying UFOs are unaware of the laws by which the ETs govern themselves -- laws that make it impossible for such an event to occur at this stage in our planetary game.These laws are written into the primordial essence of the Universe itself, and therefore cannot be contravened. As you awaken to your true identity as the One Infinite Creator, you discover that free will is the most important principle that governs our Universe. It is a principle that the entire Universe is set up to insure will not be violated beyond the level to which it is invited.
Now I could clearly see that this prediction was not the first of it's kind- but more interestingly, what were these mysterious laws that ET's govern themselves by? What was all this about the primordial essence of the universe, or more over the One Infinite Creator? What does this have anything to do with channeling or mass UFO sightings? I was about to find out. I started to look in to all of the material Wilcox had to offer. That was fun for a while, but gradually I got back to what interested me the most about David's website to begin with, the Oct 14th article, and that mysterious Law of One idea. I downloaded one of David's "Law of One Study Guide" versions and read through the whole thing. Wow! This was some seriously deep stuff. I was intrigued to say the least.
Having burned through the study guide, my next natural step was to the L/L Research internet library. I should pause here and explain how many seekers I've spoken with on our forum have spent decades putting together the puzzle pieces of 'the bigger picture' only to have found the Law of One at the end and feeling a sense of confirmation. My experience has been pretty much the opposite so far. I've discovered the Law of One, possibly the richest collection of spiritual information on planet Earth, right at the start of my spiritual awakening. As such I never felt any large sense of remembering or confirmation that others have, but rather have found overwhelming confirmation of IT through just about every other spiritual / esoteric resource. So in this sort of backwards awakening process I have worked out my metaphysical understandings. This was all happening around the end of 2008. Right at the start of 2009 L/L Research launched this forum, which I signed up to right away. A few months after that I ordered volumes 1-4 of the Law of One books, and later on the 'Secrets of the UFO' book. Although there are parts of it that I still can't get my head completely around, I can say with deep confidence (and satisfaction) that on the whole, The Law of One is the most complete written understanding about the greater picture or purpose of life that I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
As such, I have since kept the primary concepts and ideas in my mind when investigating any other area of interest. "Hey this sounds like the Law of One!" or "Yup... that guy "gets" it" are common mental trains of thought when I find something that feels right. The nature of my work, being computer graphics, has me sitting in front of a computer and doing visual work all day. This is fantastic because it allows my right brain to do the majority of the "work" while my left brain is free to listen to audio commentary and digest it intellectually. Thus I was able to listen to hundreds of hours of channeling, lectures, speeches, and many other things without needing to dedicate extra time out of my day. In my desire to leave a trail of breadcrumbs along my spiritual journey, I have put together a compilation of interesting links that I found some resonance with. (It's in my signature- a rather large and constantly growing list!) Some of the best include but are not limited to, Alan Watts, Neale Donald Walsh, Bashar / Anka, Dean Radin (psi research), Michael Newton, Ramond Moody, Fred Alan Wolf... and the list goes on. They all speak about The Law of One in their own way, some more directly than others. (This is in addition to having read all the LOO books, read about a year of Q'uo transcripts, listening to about another two years (from BBS radio) and listening to the entire 'Sons of the Law of One' podcast library two or three times). In looking at established religions, I was able to see that the core statement of almost all is unity. And it's what all mystical experiencers, near death experiencers, gurus, sages, monks, and so on have been talking about for so many hundreds and thousands of years. It's elegant and resolves all paradoxes. And it's just the sort of confirmation you would have to be really sleeping soundly to ignore (god bless 'em all)
Last spring we returned to the USA, and to Los Angeles, where we now live and work. I am definitely not the same person as I was when we left. Back to to premise of this sub-forum. Am I a wanderer? I really have no clue. In many ways I feel like I just fell in to the right place and time, but I suppose in light of my deeper understanding of things, there are no accidents. Why I chose pre-incarnitvely to awaken in this way, at this time so near the end of third density is a bit mysterious to me. I consider myself a fairly average person. If I may be from any higher density, I would guess it would be the fourth. I say so because looking back at most of my life I have exhibited love more so than understanding or the blending of understanding and love. I've made loads of life mistakes out of my seeming ignorance, but never in malicious or hateful ways, with a few shameful exceptions. I've generally been very turned off by realistically violent films. I love little kids, animals and happy people. I still don't know what the overall purpose of my life is, except perhaps to do what Q'uo and others have said exhaustively, to live as an example of the love I see in and feel for the world. On the other hand, I may simply be a ripe 3rd density plum for the picking, and in collaboration with my higher self have been allowed to finally get 'the real deal' in terms of the bigger picture understandings. After, I assume, many countless incarnations without that sort of knowing. I've never had any past life memories (nay, or any paranormal experiences for that matter).
I guess that about wraps it up. I'm happy to be awake, happy to be here and to know all of you, and damn happy to be alive. Living life is pretty magical after all, eh?
Happy to be here,
Lavazza / Eric