Money is the ultimate symbol of worldly things in this noble-savage world.  The more money you have, the more you can affect the world around you.

• On one hand, then, fueled by love, knowledge, and ingenuity, money can materialize our noblest dreams.
• On the other hand, it can stir up our savage sentiments—envy, desire, suspicion, judgment, insecurity, and resentment—to send human affairs spiraling into conflict and chaos.

For INIT, money did both… (INIT being the International Network for Instrumental Transcommunication).

I was the guy who managed the funding for INIT and decided how it should be spent, usually according to advice from our Luxembourg members Maggy Fischbach and Jules Harsch, who were in closest touch with our spirit group.

At first, things unfolded beautifully for INIT. Generous donations flowed into the bank account I’d set up for my nonprofit corporation, INIT-US, and I’d use it to make all the travel arrangements for all of our dozen or so international members as we met in a different country each year, starting in 1995 (England, USA, Germany…).

In 1997, though, personality conflicts developed, and things started to unravel with horrific consequences, centered largely around money. One member began to express increasing doubts about some of our better contacts. He pressured INIT to set up a joint project with a frontier science institute, and he made a small donation to INIT-US for that purpose. The project would subject our results to scientific scrutiny, with the ultimate goal of providing proof of afterlife… or not.

For more than a century there’s been a vocal community of skeptical, psychical-minded individuals and groups whose mission includes getting scientific proof of the afterlife. That was not an interest of INIT, since we were collaborating with spirits as certainly as we were collaborating with each other. We had nothing to prove. We knew that we were in touch with the good spirits of Timestream and The Seven ethereals. Involvement in skeptical research in which we deny or doubt that intimate, other-worldly relationship could have corrupted the contact field and pulled us away from our purpose, which was to foster exceptional ITC (instrumental transcommunication) contacts with the other side. Our spirit friends were delivering pictures and letters to our computers, talking to us on the phone and over radio, and showing themselves on our TV sets. We had no desire to compromise those miracles with doubt and skepticism.

That member (a retired prosecutor) was ultimately asked to leave the INIT group, but as a parting shot he…

• demanded that I have the INIT-US bank account audited by a certified public accountant,
• suggested that I was perpetrating a fraud by publishing a newsletter containing contacts that he considered suspect… (contacts that the rest of us considered superb), and
• insinuated, “Certain INIT members are in it for the money.”

It felt like I’d been served with a Letter of Demand (LOD) and an indictment, but without the official overtones.

(Before researching for this article, I’d never heard of an LOD, and I had only a vague idea of what an indictment was… but now a clearer picture is coming together of how things fell apart at that critical time for INIT. So writing this article is a cathartic experience for me.)

Anyway, I had the audit done, and it showed no irregularities (as I knew would be the case), but as American Law has shown time and time again, false accusations and innuendos can tarnish reputations, ruin lives, and destroy groups.

Around that time, with INIT still in turmoil, Regina and I took a trip to New Jersey to visit her relatives, and one evening we had dinner with some INIT supporters who’d become friends of mine. Over dessert, one fellow asked me why I’d mismanaged INIT donations. Assuming he was joking in bad taste about the recent accusations and other related troubles, I rolled my eyes, shook my head, and moved on to other subjects.

Regina told me later that she felt the opposite, that the guy was really questioning my honesty, and that was almost too much for her to take. For several years, Regina had been supporting the family while I had quit work to devote full time to ITC research, especially working with INIT and publishing our results in newsletters and books. It wasn’t an easy decision for either of us, to rely on Regina’s salary as a school counselor and to dip into savings while I did my research, but we both viewed ITC as a noble cause. Regina understood the higher purpose of INIT and came to terms with the fact that I received no compensation for my work in ITC and was not contributing to the family.

Then, to have my honesty called into question left Regina troubled and exasperated.

To this day I’m not sure exactly what messages were being communicated at dinner that evening… but I am fairly sure that there were negative spirits working behind the scenes, stirring things up, prodding various people associated with INIT to behave rather strangely… myself included.

Even though I managed the INIT-US bank account carefully and properly for INIT-related purposes, I do recall several things I did or said during that time (having to do with India, roses, and stupid comments I made about money) that I can’t imagine doing “in my right mind.” I strongly believe now that negative spirits were a factor, stirring things up behind the scenes… which doesn’t excuse bad choices (by me or by others), but certainly helps me understand why bad things transpired among friends and how things unraveled as a result.

It was around that time that INIT donations from generous sponsors came to an end.

Funding and Support

Like religion and other spiritual pursuits, ITC groups often find themselves in a quandary over money.

Material reality and spirit reality are very different in their principles and “natural laws.” ITC is an effort to reconcile those differences. As an ITC bridge forms, the spirits become more like us carnal humans in their thinking, and we become more like them… in an effort to reach that point at which we can resonate with each other. That resonance allows the bridge to stabilize and the contact field to become clear.

For our spirit friends to resonate with us is often an unpleasant experience because of the many dramas in human affairs, so in the future, the more we carnal humans can live by spiritual principles and overcome the dramas, the easier it will be to sustain ITC bridges.

Fostering a conscious connection to the finer spirit within us and around us invariably involves some detachment from the illusions and trappings of the material world, including money, in order to resonate more intimately with the spiritual truths that vibrate throughout the finer dimensions of spirit.

So how do we factor that into our need for funding?

Well, money is not a part of spiritual reality, but it is all important today in our material reality… and it’s something we definitely have to take into account while building ITC bridges.

So the real question is…

How to use money without drama to build ITC bridges?

Here are some guidelines I’ve come up with while reflecting on the INIT experience.

• Use only money that has no strings attached. Whether the money is provided by donations from charitable sponsors, or whether it comes from a wealthy member of an ITC group, be sure that there’s no personal agenda in how to use the money, other than what’s deemed right by the ITC group.
• Follow spiritual principles above worldly principles as much as possible to minimize drama. Encourage members to…
  • Understand and accept spiritual reality as the greater truth.
  • Address and overcome their own difficult character issues, in order to minimize envy, doubt, fear, and the other debilitating forces that boil within us all, and
  • Help each other.
• Employ modern technologies that can minimize the need for money.
  • Supplement in-room meetings with videoconferences,
  • Take advantage of the Internet to exchange information through emails, chats, and websites,
  • Set up a private website or a virtual private network to keep the team together while buffering the group from the raw emotions of the public.

.

I’m currently working with researchers in other countries to develop a private website, like the one mentioned in the preceding paragraph, that will take those factors into account. Michael in New Zealand opened the site, which he and I are now developing together with advice from other colleagues, especially Nicola in England. Michael is setting up a public front page that will show visitors what the group is about and will let members log in to the private site that operates behind the scenes, He’s set a tentative milestone of four months to complete the job, so we have our work cut out for us.

My main goal for this project is not to create a new ITC group (my heart still belongs to INIT 🙂 ), but to create a template for a new kind of online network that will help any group of ITC researchers to improve (maybe maximize) their chances of establishing and sustaining a stable bridge with a clear contact field.

Researchers will be able to explore the new site to see what would be required of them at the various  membership levels. For example, one section of the site will be dedicated to sustaining harmony, where members will work to shed ego-driven goals while surrendering to the “highest and best” spiritual aspect of themselves, so that decisions and actions within the group are directed by higher spirit. New members who complete the groundwork in that section would advance to the next level within the group… but members at all levels would continue to work in that section of the site.

I’ll write more articles here on macyafterlife about the new site as it evolves….

.

Meanwhile, this is the last article in the What ITC Groups Can Learn From Other Groups series, and if there’s one lesson that needs to rise to top, it’s this: In all areas of ITC research, including funding…

Minimize interpersonal dramas in order to sustain a clear, stable contact field as fertile ground for miracles.

.