Dear Family,

Still shocked by the effects of my third epiphany, I see how events continue to develop in a very different way than I had initially anticipated, but in a complementary way.

Before starting the New Blog, I determined that it was important to give testimonies of how, when and why I have perceived the interventions of an invisible hand to guide me throughout My Journey. 

These are not necessarily dramatic events such as a crash, a death or a rescue. They can be intimate, simple experiences, but with transcendental effects. Let’s see, for example, what I had pre-written for my second or third installment:

I think I should return now to the coincidences I have detected that have been determining the evolution of my current earthly life.

 (The use of bold is a simple device that allows me to help verify the chronology and highlight the lesson learned.)

Considering the second stage , besides being raised by my maternal grandmother, without any interference from parents or blood siblings, there is another one that I will tell later, that of Choachí. Which is one of my testimonies today. And other important ones that happened after my mother’s death. My stepfather also decided to remarry and my then teenage brothers were eventually left adrift. I then felt the responsibility of an older brother in a family of orphans.

The third stage that came to resolve the loneliness that the absence of brothers of my age implied, occurred with another coincidence: The invisible hand arranged that my initial ‘contact’ with my second family would have been a few punches with the eldest son, a classmate, whom I also arrogantly called ‘son of a shoemaker’. A false offense, not to mention insulting (his father owned shoe stores on an important commercial street in Bogotá). The reason for the fight? Something so trivial that I don’t even remember, I only know that we were about eleven years old and that a few years later, a friendship grew with his second brother, a classmate and athletics partner (and don’t suspect homosexuality, quite the opposite) that in a very short time turned me into another brother, another son of the shoemaker and his unforgettable wife. As I can attest, the hand not only gives gifts but teaches humility in a very effective way and without punishing.

The 4th stage and 5th stages are not free from coincidences, but given the considerable distance in time, I must first address several intermediate interventions by my beloved hand. There are several that have to do with “money” but that apparently are still in the period of ‘experimentation’ (in the sense of feeling them firsthand, not of testing) and it is advisable to postpone their testimony and analysis in order to have a coherent global vision.

But I do think I should tell you now the first one I remember, because of the importance of its lesson. It happened when I was about 17 years old.

I was a Boy Scout all my time in school. In my last year (or second to last? My memory is failing me, but it doesn’t matter) the troop planned an excursion to a place near the town of Choachí (altitude 1900 m), located on the other side of the same hill in the Colombian Andes where Bogotá is located (altitude 2640 m). The distance by road, although short, about 40 km, takes time, an hour and a half or more, by car, because it is a zigzag route that goes up to the paramo (Cruz Verde, more than 3300 m) and comes  down again. In a straight line (well, up and down) leaving the school, it was only about twenty km.

It just so happens that on the morning of the scheduled day, the “grown-ups” had a mandatory activity, so it was scheduled that the troop would go by bus to Choachí and from there to the chosen site, about fifteen minutes by bus, they would do it on foot. The grown-ups would make the entire journey on foot (horse trail) once the activity be over.

The unavoidable coincidences:

1 Given the circumstances of my father’s sudden death and my mother’s subsequent marriage, my relations with my paternal family were practically limited to receiving a monthly cash allowance for my education. I had received the allowance the day before.

2. The activity at school was prolonged so that we started walking two or three hours later than expected.

3. It seems that I had a lot of energy that day and I got ahead of the group during the ascent to the paramo. I arrived alone at Choachí. I waited a long time for the group until it became clear that I was not going to arrive that night. But it didn’t matter, I was ‘rich’

The reality. Choachí is a small agricultural town. At that time I don’t think it had more than five thousand inhabitants. When it got dark, all activity stopped. There were no more public buses (fleets). Hotels, one or two, and they had no room, much less for a stranger. Restaurants, only during the day. Fortunately, I managed to get a loaf of bread and a slice of ‘salchichon; (a type of salami)  in the only store that kept open late.

 Result: I had to try to sleep outside, under an eaves, near a church that I was able to enter at dawn and wait to take the first bus that would take me to my destination. Frankly, I didn’t feel like walking any further. I arrived at the camp at about eight in the morning, feeling proud of having overcome my odyssey.

 The group arrived on foot at around eleven. When it got dark in the middle of the mountains, they decided to ask permission from a small peasant home to put up a tent. They ate from the “foodpack” they had brought with them and had breakfast courtesy of the family that allowed them to stay. The trop received them with affection and admiration. They had made the journey on foot from school, and not by bus like that asshole (me).

If I understand the lesson correctly, the hand showed me that the money had only served to cause me a certain fear of loosing it and to pay for the transport that negated the very purpose of the excursion. An uncomfortable and frightened night is certainly not the happiness that we think money brings.

No, I don’t have a phobia of money or of those who hoard it. I just think that it should not be confused with happiness and much less make it the ‘goal’ of life. And that is what this experience prepared me for.. Of course I didn’t pay attention to it and, same as I insisted on putting my finger in the flame to ‘know’ that it burns, I decided to go in search of it and now I know that it burns. But for a coherent global vision, as I said before, I still have to wait a bit.

Following the chronology, there are two other interventions by the hand, which have left their mark and which I am only now, during this review, understanding and appreciating. Both are unprecedented, in the sense that for the first time they come out of the place where they were stored after experiencing them; perhaps because only now can I interpret them at their true value.?

The first, when I started my third year at university, at 21 years old . The Faculty offered two degrees: Chemistry (4 years) or Chemical Engineering (5 years) and the first two years were common. I started as a student of Chemical Engineering but when I enrolled for the third year I decided to change to only Chemistry. The reason was that I had already decided that when I finished I should go abroad to specialize and in this way I would save a year and instead specialize in Engineering.

By ‘coincidence’ there was another student who made the same decision, but his motivation was economic. He was the son of a chemist and former German university professor, forced to emigrate because of the persecution of the Nazi regime. Our university had a powerful incentive: the best student of the year, in each course, automatically had tuition exemption and also received a monthly scholarship. I had been fortunate to have qualified for this distinction in both years. My classmate, also a good student, thought that by changing, he could access this award, which was obviously nullified by my decision.

I was still receiving monthly financial support from my paternal family, so my scholarship was not really essential to me. Something or someone, without any request or suggestion, prompted me to share (50%) of my monthly scholarship with this classmate, for the next two years of our career. 

Our paths never crossed again, not even to say thank you. If I interpret this experience correctly, it taught me that giving is the true way of receiving. The happiness of receiving the scholarship was certainly increased by sharing it selflessly. It also showed me the proper way to use money: where it is needed.

The paths that did cross ‘coincidentally’ were with the classmate who finished Chemical Engineering in my place (who deserved the scholarships then) and with whom we traveled together to the United States, (The year I saved I ‘spent’, or rather invested, in my first professional job. And I don’t regret it, this also influenced my destiny). We shared a summer learning English at the University of Michigan, and an apartment in Boston, where we lived the first year as students at MIT. Eventually, this classmate came to hold very important positions, nationally, in Colombia. Both his scholarships and his professional successes contribute to increasing my happiness. Thank you, invisible hand!

The second has to do with my graduation as a Chemist at the age of 24. After completing my four years of studies, I accepted a paid internship at a multinational company, while it was time to travel to specialize. Shortly thereafter, I think two months, I received an offer for a permanent position. The temptation of an attractive salary proved irresistible, increased by the pride of being called ‘doctor’. (In Colombia, every university graduate is called that. In fact, every client of the illustrious guild of shoe-shiners, almost extinct due to the disappearance of the use of leather shoes, receives the title of doctor/a). I decided to accept and without noticing it, a full year had passed. I then realized that I had to formalize my trip, for which it was necessary to speed up my graduation and I registered on the first possible date, without thinking about invitations or special celebrations.

I remember that early on the day of the ceremony I received an urgent call telling me that in order to graduate I had to immediately bring the receipt for payment of the degree fees. I informed them that according to the regulations and my academic average I should be exempt from them. After a quick review they told me that it was okay and that I could attend the ceremony to receive my degree.

The ceremony was a massive event, with thousands of graduates and many thousands more of relatives and friends. As fate would have it, when my turn came, I was the first that day to be announced as an Honorary Graduate. The crowd simply burst into applause and cheers. When I received the congratulations along with my certificate from the hands of the Minister of Education, I realized that since I had not told anyone, I had no one to share it with. The happiness of the moment turned into a certain sadness.

For a long time I attributed this episode to my eagerness to graduate so I could travel to continue my studies. In fact, this was my explanation to my father from the second family when he rightly complained about my silence. He found out from some of his friends who were at the ceremony accompanying a relative and knew me.

Now, on this review (and the years) I see a new perception: it was not about eagerness but about selfishness. I felt omnipotent and it was ME with MY effort that was graduating and I did not have to share it with anyone. I was ungrateful to many: My maternal grandmother (she provided shelter and love), My paternal grandfather (she provided the economic support), My mother, stepfather and brothers, with whom I was living the last few years, My second family (they provided the joy of living), And with friends and coworkers I was, at the very least, rude. I can and must recognize it now and apologize to everyone, But I can also recognize my mistake and forgive myself so I can calm down and accept peace. Thank you God and Holy Spirit for guiding me in this review with your invisible hand.

The lesson is simple but profound: there is no happiness if I cannot share it with others. If the ego were to ‘succeed’ it would be an empty triumph without happiness, like when I Graduated with Honors.

I see now, too, that the very change of career was an intervention of the hand. At MIT, the Department of Chemical Engineering is part of the School of Engineering, while the Department of Chemistry is within the School of Science. The consequence was that upon entering, based on my degree in chemistry, I fell under the tutelage of Charles D. Coryell, Professor of Radiochemistry (Nuclear Chemistry) who had also been one of the scientists of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. 

With Dr. Coryell as my advisor, and although I took some chemical engineering courses, I changed ( at age 26 ) my emphasis from engineering (applied science) to research (pure science). But the whole truth is that he, Dr. Coryell, became much, much more than my academic advisor. Actually, the title of father falls short of him. But as it is clear, this is not a biography, so the details justifying this claim are omitted.

When meditating on good and evil, and knowing that everything in the universe is energy, it is necessary to conclude that energy itself is neither good nor bad. What can be good or bad must be the use that is given to it. Several years ago, observing the ‘bad reputation’ of nuclear energy in the world and comparing it with the ‘good reputation’ of electric energy, I did ask myself what would have happened, on a global level,  if the electric chair had been the first use of electric current? My perception has been that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the holocausts that forced Japan to surrender and thus end World War II, should never have happened. And now, reading the biography of my more than father, I find:

“Coryell was one of the Manhattan Project scientists who in 1945 signed Szilárd’s petition urging President Harry S. Truman not to use the first atomic bomb “without restriction,” urging him instead to “describe and demonstrate” its power and give Japan “an opportunity to consider the consequences of a subsequent refusal to surrender.”

 (Vil copy. You can google it at Charles Dubois Coryell. Wikipedia)

My time at MIT coincided with the beginning of the so-called Cold War (although not so cold, the Vietnam War was also in its infancy) and topics like the Manhattan Project were not a matter of discussion. Therefore I never heard the Professor mention anything about it. The “coincidence” that years later I came to exactly the same thought is nothing more than a confirmation of the interventions of the hand in my spiritual evolution. Thank you Dr Coryell (and MIT) for helping me learn how to think.

Having written the above, I am assailed by the question: why did Truman not accept the recommendation?

(I had gotten to this point before my third epiphany. Believe me, I honestly don’t know how I would have answered the question, but I am absolutely certain that it would not be as I am going to do now.)

Here comes again my ‘discovery’ of the information revealed in my most recent blog on UFOs. Going through the paragraphs omitted in the book of the Law but appearing on the recording tape of Session 8, I find this:

8.6 Questioner How did the United States learn of the technology to build these land [inaudible]?

 Ra I am Ra. There was a mind/body/spirit complex known to your people by the vibratory sound complex, Nikola. This entity departed the illusion, and the papers containing the necessary understandings were taken by mind/body/spirit complexes serving your security of national divisional complex. Thus your people became privy to the basic technology. 

In the case of those mind/body/spirit complexes you call Russians, the technology was given ffrom one of the members of the Confederation in an attempt, approximately twenty-seven of your years ago, to share information and bring about peace among your peoples. The entities giving this information were in error, but we did many things at the end of this cycle in  attempts to aid your harvest from which we learned the folly of certain types of  aid. That is a contributing factor to our more cautious approach at this date, even as the need is power-upon-power greater, and your people’s call is greater and greater.

 I have copied the entire paragraph so that you can become familiar with Ra’s way of expressing himself and, above all, so that you can draw your own conclusions.

” Truman, a farmer born in 1884 in Lamar Missouri,  is the only president since William McKinley (elected 1896) who did not earn a college degree.  He was raised in Independence, Missouri, and during World War I fought in France as a captain in the field artillery. Returning home, he opened a haberdashery in Kansas City, Missouri, and was elected as a Jackson County judge in 1922. Truman was elected to the United States Senate from Missouri in 1934. Between 1940 and 1944, he gained national prominence as chairman of the Truman Committee, which was aimed to reduce waste and inefficiency in wartime contracts.

Truman was elected vice president in the 1944 presidential election and became president upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Only then was he told about the ongoing Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. Truman authorized the first and only use of nuclear weapons in war against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What I perceive is that in these “cold and calm decisions” love for one’s neighbor is conspicuous by its absence. And that is why,

I love you all,

Alberto