In my 20’s and 30’s I thought it was the greatest calamity in the world that I couldn’t live with J-R in Mandeville Canyon; it was the second greatest calamity that I couldn’t live at Prana; and the third greatest calamity was that I couldn’t work on staff (tried it twice and both times got so sick that I was back in the little country town I had been living in within about a week). Then in my 40’s I was finally strong enough, or screwed up enough, or weighed down enough, so that I could live in LA and work on staff.

Only recently have I gotten wise enough to see how my physical distance from J-R made me stronger and more self-reliant, and this came at a time when I was finally with him physically more often, which meant that I was finally having my physical-level desires fulfilled, which in turn meant that I had to invent some new calamity as evidence that I was a victim and that my feelings of distance from God were all His/Her/Its fault. Next on my list of anticipated horrors was J-R’s death, and the thought of having to live without him for as much as another 40 or 50 years. And now, after having lived through all these years of imaginary calamities that have turned out to be the greatest blessings, I come to the point of this one and mostly I feel relief, the opposite of the disaster I was bracing myself for.

All that happened is that he went inside of me, and it’s as though all the energy that was going into the outer manifestation called John-Roger is no longer distracting from, and pulling power from, the inner reality called John-Roger. As the outer repository of spirit goes inside, that energy is becoming available to charge the inner.

For the first few days it was discombobulating, because the part of me that had become lazy and accustomed to looking outside wasn’t finding J-R, or his energy field, and I would get upset or depressed. And then I would go back inside and find him, and I’d be elated. Now I’m not looking outside so much and I feel more directly connected. I do have to be more vigilant though. If I start wandering outside, even just a little bit, now that one of the desert’s major oases is gone, I die. And there’s a mirage, called my ego, that tells me that there’s water just over the next horizon. It’s a liar and it responds to the father of lies.

The bottom line is that I’m going to have to do more SE’s to stay as balanced as I did when J-R was here physically, to keep my attention from wandering back out into the desert. I hope that the only thing that has died here is my laziness.

As long as I’m staying focused, I’m relieved that I don’t have to endure the tiring and confusing process of going in and back out again. I also feel like I’ve been relieved of a sense of obligation that I had to the cumbersome and dense physical world because I was working here to harbor a fugitive whom I promised to assist. He finally escaped and there’s a kind of elation that goes with that, as though our ordeal is over. (I can celebrate for a while, although I’m still in a body so I probably have more ordeal to come. I just hope I won’t start imagining the next one, but given my track record I’m not too sure.)

I felt the same kind of elation at the Harvesting Spiritual Blessings workshop. The Traveler didn’t go anywhere. It was a bit like the old days. Prana was packed with people, the air was electrified, the Traveler consciousness was there, and we seemed less distracted by the outer world because of our shared experience. (There are no atheists in the trenches, as the old saying goes.) We’ve all been unburdened along with J-R. John was smiling a lot more. (I know this for sure because a lot of my job as photographer at seminars is sitting holding a camera waiting for him to smile.) So even my job in the physical world has gotten easier.

And now J-R is no longer old, which means we’re no longer old, and Prana seems to have been restored to a youthful liveliness. It’s as though J-R, having been released from his slavery to time, released the rest of us from that slavery as well. Suddenly there are lots of young people living at Prana, and even a bunch of black people, who, like the Jews who used to be more numerous there, were slaves once and aren’t going to let it happen again.

What happened at the workshop?

John held the Light and talked about God, as usual. I remember the energy but not the words. It was dazzlingly bright, joyful, and, above all, alive. John talked about what Leigh Taylor-Young mentioned on the day of J-R’s passing–that J-R said he’d be more available to us after his “death” than he ever was before. That was demonstrated at a point in the seminar where J-R came in and opened a door in spirit for a bit (someone down here in a body, either John or Michael or both, was narrating the process as it happened), and it was just like the first day that I saw J-R doing a seminar in the same room 33 years ago, but without all the physical cues, prompts, and distractions that were needed at that time, without the dreamy haze of the astral/emotional/mental pollution that was in the ethers back then, and without the pull of all the imaginary calamities in my 24-year-old brain–past, present, and yet to come.

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