Before proceeding with the dramas surrounding INIT, I need to share some other, more personal lessons I’ve learned (and am still learning) from ITC. This is one of the most important ones:

You on Earth often wonder, “What can I do when I keep falling back into familiar old patterns, making the same mistakes over and over again?” The answer is the same for everyone: Don’t follow your emotions freely; control them. Of course, this is an art, and it takes practice. If you really want to become a good person, but you simply live in a carefree way without reflecting on your actions, then you will never become the person of good will whom you wish to be. On the other hand, if every morning you propose to yourself, with all your soul, not to offend anybody, to be good to everybody, then you have to bear these good intentions always in mind. At first it’s not easy to do, for you quickly forget your intent as you go about the day, falling back into the old patterns. But if you stick with it, you will succeed. Retrospection is a basic condition we all have to fulfill to be complete. With time will come the strength and the cognition for mastering yourself, and then you will have something beneficial to offer many people.

In mid-December 1986, Maggy Fischbach received this communication from the late Konstantin Raudive through the “EurosignalBridge,” a configuration of equipment that her spirit friends helped her develop to let them convey long, clear voice messages through her radio sounds.

At the time that message came through in Luxembourg, my wife Regina and I, living here in Colorado, had a two-month-old baby boy. When Regina came home from her middle-school counseling job, and I from my technical writing job, we spent most of our spare time taking care of our son. If someone had told me then that a woman across the Atlantic had just received that message from across the veil, I’d have shrugged my shoulders… and probably rolled my eyes. The concept didn’t fit into my agnostic worldview. I didn’t know then that the wisdom being gathered through ITC would soon change my life.

Today I harbor more good will than ill will toward those around me… although two situations still test me: driving and politics. On George Carlin’s driver scale, I lean a little toward the “maniac” side by nature—impatient, passing slow drivers, and honking at people ahead of me when they’re stopped at a green light. Regina thinks I may have been a New York taxi driver in a past life.

Hey, but she’s not perfect either. She leans toward the “idiot” side of the Carlin scale. She’s one of those people who starts rummaging for something in her purse three seconds before the light turns green. When we’re together in the car—doesn’t matter which of us is driving—there’s always a lot of advice (not always polite advice) coming from the passenger seat. I’m often amazed how incompatible we are in the car… we make such a great team otherwise.

Anyway, this week I hope to watch my driving angst recede in the rearview mirror, thanks to ITC messages like the one above. I adopted a new driving attitude of patience, acknowledging that we’re all doing the best we can. I taped this note to the dashboard of my car:

Patience
Best we can…

I took a casual hour-long drive around town, enjoying the brisk autumn air, driving calmly, staying out of people’s way, and immersing myself in good will toward all the traffic around me. What a great experience! Breaking the pattern of impatience in the car will take some work, I’m sure, but the benefits are going to be great… such as removing a big source of marital strife.

My political angst seems to run a little deeper and will probably be harder to break. It can be triggered by a political headline or picture, or by an opinion overheard in a crowd. Right-wing politics in America is my plutonium trigger. It started after the controversial election of the Bush-Cheney administration in 2001 and the soon-to-follow heartless bombing of Baghdad. I don’t recall ever being as furious with anyone as I was with that little clique of men and women running the country.

I remember a dream I had at the time. Bush and Cheney and another guy—either Karl Rove or Donald Rumsfeld–were strutting down the street like they owned the place, oblivious to the mayhem they were creating. I confronted them, and an altercation broke out.

The dream was far too vivid and detailed to be a mere creation of my subconscious mind. I’m sure I was visiting a scenario in the astral worlds of spirit (which is a sort of energy template of this physical world). And I now believe it was my intense feelings about these guys that pulled me into some kind of karmic collision with them, acting out conflicts on the other side.

It’s what I call the law of resonance. When you think of something with passion—and it doesn’t matter if the passion is love, trust, and good will, or contempt, fear, and malice—that thing is pulled toward your sphere of being… or you are pulled toward that sphere. In any case, when your consciousness resonates with another consciousness, the two of you drift together. That, I believe, is how I drifted into a karmic connection with the people I didn’t like.

So, today I also plan to turn over a new political leaf. Somehow I need to disarm my intense feelings about politics, so that I’m not triggered by random comments and headlines. I’ve tried it before, with just moderate success… but I have to defuse this thing. It’s not an easy world and, again, we’re all doing the best we can.

Here on Earth it’s easy to take these conflicts for granted—these troubled feelings that come up day to day and seem like a normal part of our lives. It seems natural, here on Earth, with our egos and hormones, to experience a roller coaster ride of emotions… feeling warm and friendly with someone at one moment, and feeling hostility toward someone else a moment later.

It may be a natural way of life on Earth, but it can make for a difficult transition to the next life… where thoughts and consciousness are the complete reality. As Konstantin implied earlier, retrospection and emotional self-control are key to a happy afterlife.

Maggy once asked the superhuman spirit Technician about people who let their emotions run wild. How do they adjust to the next life? His reply:

Many of them do not find their way once they arrive in the worlds of spirit because they never learned to work with the powers of thought. Some of them are unsuitable for our world, and we have to send them back to Earth. This is especially true of those who have grown accustomed to using their thoughts for negative power only (spreading fear and malice). Other, more kindly people here work with their hands (if their minds are not proficient), much as people do on your side. There are workers in the mountains, on farms—even real dairy farms of the Middle Ages.

The age-old lesson: Take the time and effort to foster love, trust, and good will for your fellow inhabitants of this wild planet, and master your emotions. That’s the definition of spiritual growth… and the key to a happy afterlife.

What I Learned from ITC, the series:

1 Being sensitive in a harsh world
2 Controlling emotions
3 Leaving the family of man
4 How spirits navigate time and space
5 Hardships heighten the human experience
6 To establish a bridge
7 The illusion of time
8 Life on the mid-astral plane, or third level