It has been a while since our last update and so as usual I have a lot of information to share.
Here is a list of topics I’ve covered (clicking on each title will jump you to that section within the post):
Thank you
Assistance Groups
Recent Divine Truth Training Programme
Volunteer Induction Programme
Other Divine Truth Projects
God’s Way
Changes to Production Team
Personal Work
Of special note for those wishing to attend any of our future assistance groups are the changes to scheduling for these groups (see below for details).
The Big Year
2016 was a big year for both Jesus and I.
Running three assistance groups in one year was an incredible feat that was largely created, managed, directed, presented, produced and output by Jesus alone. He had some help along the way but the lions share of what was done was done by him. I personally want to thank and congratulate him on the immense gift he has given in sharing this content. For the early part of the year I made it my daily business to study what was presented in the first two groups and it assisted me greatly.
2016 for me was all about making my own developing my number one priority and through that process I encountered and learned quite a lot about valuing my emotions (no matter what they are) and developing compassion for my injured self. These things assisted me to become more self responsible (something you can learn lots about in the “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” Assistance Group material) and enhanced my personal happiness. This was all essential work that I needed to do and I am immensely grateful to Jesus for doing all the extra things that needed to be done in my absence.
For Jesus this has been a tiring year which is why we have made some changes to our schedule for Assistance Groups, which you can read about below. 2017 is a year for him to take a rest from what has been an intense work schedule the past 16 months and to focus on his progression again. We are both aware of how important our personal progression is in furthering the understanding of Divine Truth on earth.
Thank You
Thank you to everyone who has made an individual donation to us over the past few months and to those who continue in their regular monthly and weekly donations. Even though you haven’t seen much in terms of new content via the internet these past three months, as you will read below, we have been quite busy. We are using your contributions to not only create Divine Truth material but also to implement ways and better systems to assist in the delivery of truth with the world.
As I often say, I feel we are only stewards of the monies that you donate. These funds are in our hands for a short time and we are placed in charge of making the best use of what you give us so that it can be best used to serve others in the world who want to grow in love toward their Heavenly Father and Mother.
Assistance Groups
“Understanding God’s Loving Laws”
The “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” assistance group is now on the website and YouTube.
This group was great fun to be a part of. In total 130 people participated. Our venue and the weather were lovely and Lena and Igor offered their own personal gift of a group BBQ on one of the Rest & Reflection days during the programme.
I believe that the material covered speaks for itself in terms of its importance and significance for people individually and for the world collectively. I hope that you find it as exceptional and inspiring as I do.
Arrivals
Lena & Igor do BBQ
In this group, we implemented some new procedures for how we run the groups and manage participation. This included a new system for asking questions which turned out to be very effective. Participants preparing questions prior to each session meant that we covered some excellent topics in every Q&A session that was recorded and little time was wasted in addictive exchanges from the audience. We will further enhance these methods for questions in future groups to streamline the process even more.
Questions
We made some decisions about tolerance of unloving attitudes in those who register and attend our groups and decided to act (rather than continue to speak) regarding these issues. We have raised these issues many times before, but most people keep on ignoring what we are saying to them, and this is why we will in future be enforcing love and truth through our actions rather than by just speaking about the issues.
These decisions made before the second November 2016 group meant that we began to remove some participants from the second group. This was due to long standing resistance in each of these participants to specific injuries they have either towards Jesus and I as presenters or towards other members of the group.
Each person who was removed had been previously made aware of their harmful attitudes and emotions on many occasions by Jesus or I but was continuing to resist and justify their unloving condition. This meant that they were having a damaging effect on the group and so were asked to leave. Jesus and I both feel that these actions on our part were a positive step towards ensuring a higher level of love is maintained at our events.
Only one person who was removed demonstrated an immediate attitude change and some repentance for their behaviour, and they we allowed immediately back to the group as a result.
There were also a number of people who made very late cancellations of their bookings for this group without providing any reason. As late cancellations prevent the possibility for other people to have attended (and because we had previously advised registrants of the issue of love involved) we have banned these people from attendance at any of the future Assistance Groups in the “Education in Love” series. These people have demonstrated that they cannot be relied upon to be responsible about their booking and we have no desire to see their behaviour repeated.
There were one or two people who did have genuine issues that prevented their attendance (not just a lack of regard for their responsibility in holding a ticket) and these people were not prevented from attending future groups. We have enforced this new principle only for people who have displayed a lack of consideration for how their late bookings affect others and have chosen to be irresponsible with how they manage their planning and booking for our events.
We feel that often, because our events are free, people do not demonstrate even the smallest amount of regard for our own time and effort in preparation, or regard for other people who wish to attend the groups. Many people are ignoring our request to fully prepare by completing the pre-requisites for the events, and if they wish to cancel their seat at the event, they do not do so in the manner we have requested.
This demonstrates that these people are not interested in practicing what we are teaching, which includes demonstrating love for others. If a person cannot demonstrate love to another person who is giving their time for free, then it is highly unlikely they have a sincere desire to grow in love.
In future if we believe an attendee has any unloving attitudes regarding these matters, we will be preventing those attendees from either attending our events, or will remove them from our events if they have arrived at an event.
Our Thanks
Jesus and I would like to thank to our helper team during the group. These people were; Lena, Igor, Kelly, Cornelius, and Eloisa.
Set-up Begins
Thank you guys. Your efforts helped to ensure that things ran smoothly and we know that you gave a lot of your personal time to the event.
Thanks also to Bruce who transported some of our equipment to and from the venue.
Set-up and Testing
We’d also like to give a special thank-you to Lena. Lena has worked incredibly hard this year, at times while when she was also dealing with stressful personal, emotional issues. She has always been diligent, thorough, helpful and pleasant to work with. Thank you Lena, we really appreciate you. We know that when we put something in your hands you will do it to the best of your ability, while also considering those who will come along after you and have jobs that are dependent upon you.
Set-up takes work
Eloisa & Kelly
Cornelius on Cam
Details about the Material Now Available
The “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” video, audio, outlines and PowerPoint are available via our website. For anyone wishing to have an offline copy of this data, please follow the directions on the download or gifts pages of the website.
We are happy to receive hard disks and copy the new material for people. Please make sure you supply us with the correct information and large enough disk. These specifications can be found on the gifts page.
This new material is a gift from Jesus, Mary and Lena Shakhanov.
There are 66 new extended videos. Low resolution audio is available for download from our website. Video and high resolution audio is now available from the Divine Truth master synchronization server. All of the videos are also on YouTube.
There have been some new features added to the shared material that will assist you to access the information:
Outlines Package
The “Outlines” package for any group is a single PDF download file which contains all of the outlines for the group indicated in a single PDF file. All of the outlines have been edited by Jesus post production. They include the actual questions answered during each presentation with the timing and person asking the question listed.
Audio Package
The “Audio” package for any group is a single zipped download file which contains all of the audios for the group indicated in a single zip file. The single zip file contains many mp3 audio files which must be unzipped in order to be played.
Document Package
The “Document” package for any group is a single zipped download file which contains all of the individual outlines and presentations (Powerpoint 2016) for the group indicated in a single zip file. The single zip file contains many pdf and pptx files which must be unzipped in order to be accessed.
Many people will find it easier to download these packages rather than downloading the individual files from our website. These download packages are available from the Assistant Group Event Downloads page, or can be selected from a list on the What’s New page of the website for any new group that is added. The packages are a gift from Jesus.
Video
As with the videos in the “Developing My Loving Self” assistance group, these new videos all include chapter markers which can be used to navigate each video when it is viewed in QuickTime.
With the “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” videos we have also added the chapter markers into the description field while playing the video in YouTube. This enables the YouTube viewer to use these chapter timings to easily skip to particular sections in each of the presentations.
New Scheduling for “Education in Love” Assistance Groups
Because of the large work load involved in preparing, presenting, editing, producing and uploading our Assistance Groups, Jesus and I have decided to place plans for future groups on hold until Jesus has had a chance to rest.
It normally takes Jesus around 500 hours to prepare all of the documents, outlines, presentations and technology for a one month group course (2 groups at a time). Also, when he comes home from a group, he also spends another 400 hours immediately after each group finalizing the editing of the presentations, outlines, audio, chapter tags, video production, video compression, video upload to YouTube, website editing, and website upload, as well as maintaining backup copies of all of the data produced. Obviously the group presentations also take an additional one month of his time per group.
This has meant that he has spent over 2700 hours in preparation and post production on 2016 assistance groups in addition to the 3 months delivering almost all of the material. If you calculate this time, you can see that this means he has spent over 330 8 hour days since October 2015 until January 2017 preparing, delivering and post producing the assistance groups. Obviously this is in addition to all of his other regular jobs. He has had to work extremely long hours each day for the 16 month period to obtain the results.
All this work means that he needs a rest!
Those of you who have watched the previous Assistance Group presentations will know that we had already moved the groups initially scheduled for 2017 to 2018. We have now gone one step further and decided to only schedule the next group in the series until 6 months after the material for that group has been prepared.
This removes the “deadline” from our lives (in particular from Jesus’ life) and will mean that we can take our time to prepare material that we feel will be most beneficial to the world. Having the 6 month buffer between completion of the material preparation and the actual presentation has additional benefits including; allowing people wishing to attend the groups time to make plans, arrange their work life, make bookings and complete the group pre-requisites sufficiently. It also means that Jesus and I can be well rested before we deliver the material.
Jesus teaches by the pool on his day off
What this means for people wishing to attend our assistance groups:
All dates for assistance groups in the “Education in Love” series are now to be advised.
The dates listed on the EventBrite pages are tentative and used as a guideline only.
We now anticipate holding the “Understanding Sin & It’s Causes” group in November 2018 at the earliest. We may follow this with “Removing Sin & It’s Causes” in February and March of 2019 since we are writing the material for both groups at the same time.
Your current bookings
If you are currently registered for any of our future groups, these bookings will remain valid. You will have the chance to cancel the booking once we schedule the actual date if the new dates no longer suit you. We will confirm dates 6 months prior to commencing the group.
We are now maintaining waiting lists for each of the groups in the “‘Education in Love” series. This means that if we have a large amount of cancellations these spots can easily go to others who would like the opportunity to attend. However late cancellations (within a month prior to a confirmed event) will all still mean that these people will be banned from future events in the series for the obvious reason that if you are cancelling less than a month before the group begins, you obviously had little real intention to attend the group anyway, and are just taking a seat on the group because it is a free event.
Jesus and I feel that a person who wishes to be responsible for their lives and actions knows prior to one month before a week long event if they are realistically going to be able to attend. There are many logistical issues that a participant would need to arrange prior to one month before a week long event. Obviously if there are extreme circumstances that prevent attendance quite soon before the event, we understand this and would not take the same actions towards these people.
Recent Divine Truth Training Programme
In December and January, in addition to all of the normal production work required after the assistance groups in November 2016, Jesus and I coordinated a training programme for a group of people who have demonstrated over time that they have a sincere desire to assist in the work of sharing Divine Truth with the world.
This meant two exceptionally busy months for us after the November groups. Jesus and Lena in particular have managed and juggled a lot. Both were completing the extensive post production work necessary for “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” while simultaneously providing training post production training, and other training, to groups of people during the period.
This busy time has meant that Jesus has been working 7 day a week, mostly 12 hours a day for two months. (He usually begins work at 5am, and finishes normally around 5pm).
Participants in this training programme gained a lot of knowledge of how Jesus and Lena perform their jobs, what kind of knowledge and quality control is required, along with learning about other aspects involved in sharing Divine Truth.
The programme focussed on four main areas:
- Attitude Required to Share Divine Truth in Harmony with God’s Laws
It is really impossible to share Divine Truth unless Truth is presented by a person wishing to be humble and to share a gift in harmony with God’s Laws, and the person desires to be loving while they share God’s Truth.
So our training in this area involved presentations and one on one feedback discussing attitudes and emotions involved in giving gifts. We focussed on the various ways our injured emotional condition can interfere with serving others and creating material.
- Production of Divine Truth Materials
Lena and Jesus coordinated this training and were able teach a lot about various aspects of our current production process along with many of the technical and spiritual principles involved in the processes we use.
Participants learned about the equipment we currently use and had the opportunity to take part in practical exercises relating to video recording, editing and production, sound recording, editing and production, marker editing and production, equipment setup, pack-up and storage, and backup of data.
Some of our training group
- Environment Regeneration
Jesus gave presentations about the impact that our unloving behaviours and attitudes have upon the environment and some of the principles involved in land regeneration.
This was followed by practical days in which participants need to work hard physically and had the chance to complete some physical aspects of land regeneration. They also were able to see some of the projects and experiments in progress on our property. We did this to prepare people for what knowledge and effort would be required for participation in a God’s Way Learning Centre.
- Introduction to Public Speaking
Jesus gave presentations about public speaking, and outlined to the participants the many aspects of good public speaking.
Participants then had the opportunity to prepare and present a short presentation, and to receive personal feedback on the aspects of presenting that they could improve upon. Learning about public speaking from Jesus is truly valuable. I also gave a short presentation of ways that addictions and unloving emotions can interfere with presenting material.
Courtney before her presentation
Programme Participants
Joining the programme were three international guests; Courtney from the USA, Nicky from England and David from Barbados. It was a pleasure to have them with us. In addition, we selected some people locally who have a passion for teaching and sharing Divine Truth in a loving and truthful manner. Each of these persons had previously demonstrated to us by their attitude that we could spend this time with them.
The triple treat from OS
David, Courtney, Nicky
We plan to continue to offer training to people who wish to volunteer to assist in the delivery of Divine Truth. In future we will be offering a volunteer induction programme for these people, with the details about these programmes being listed below.
New Volunteer Induction Programme
Jesus and I are currently designing a volunteer induction programme. It is now mandatory for any person wishing to volunteer their time for Divine Truth or God’s Way to complete this programme prior to joining any of the teams in either organisation. Very few people will complete the induction successfully on their first attempt.
Eloisa Lytton-Hitchins and I will implement the programme.
This programme will not focus participants on developing specialized practical skills required for each team. Rather it will offer participants the opportunity to participate in a number of different activities, receive personal feedback about emotional issues relating to love and service, and allow them the chance to work on these issues in their own time.
This is not a programme that will involve a lot of presenting of Divine Truth material in the “teaching” style you are used to at our public events. Rather the programme will focus on giving each participant the opportunity to act, take initiative, follow instructions and complete practical tasks.
This structure allows those involved in giving further instruction from either Divine Truth or God’s Way to see if each person who is volunteering;
- truly has a sincere desire to serve
- has the correct attitudes of service
- has the correct understanding of Divine Truth principles
- has a strong desire to bring their life into harmony with God’s definition of love
- is desirous to correct any unloving behaviour and beliefs
- is able to be educated God’s Way
- is willing to perform any task, from cleaning toilets through to video production and presenting material to the public
In order to participate in this programme you must:
- have a sincere desire to assist in the work of sharing Divine Truth worldwide
- be available to attend and participate one day per week for a minimum of a three month period (in the Wilkesdale area)
- be desirous of feedback regarding your emotions and condition in love, especially in relation to your being of service to others
- be desirous and willing to work and on your emotions and condition in love in your own time throughout the duration of the programme
- be aware that you will be removed from the programme if certain conditions or requirements are not met
Final acceptance of participants into the programme will decided by Jesus and I and we may cease any person’s involvement at any time if we feel that they are not sincere in meeting these criteria. This means that while to complete the programme involves 12 days over a three month period, a person may be removed from the programme at any time regardless of whether they have travelled from another location or live locally.
If you would like to take part in this programme it is essential that you consider you desire to meet the criteria listed above. If you feel that you do then please register your interest on our Eventbrite page here. Please note that by registering your interest you are indicating your intention to uphold the criteria.
Other Divine Truth Projects
While all this has been going on, we, along with members of our current volunteer team, have been working on a number of additional projects.
E-Books & Self-Print Book Automation
Visual Basic code is currently being written to save large amounts of time during the transcription of video files into self-print documents. Once the automation of the production of e-book and self-print documents is complete, large amounts of volunteer time will be saved in the production of new material for printing, and a large number of self-print and e-book documents will be added to the current list.
Search Engine Database
An offline database is currently being designed to integrate into the static website (both the offline and online copies). This will enable key word searches of many thousands of documents on our site, along with all of the nearly 2,000 hours of videos as well. This is a very time consuming project, and we hope to have this project completed before the next assistance groups in 2018.
Transcription
The transcription team volunteers are currently working on the transcriptions for all of the 2016 assistance group material. Most of these transcriptions will be added to the website in the coming months. Jesus & Mary would like to thank their volunteers and encourage you to donate to them if you are able to help them continue with their work.
Barb McNair who runs this team has also begun training another person in her role. Not only will this provide a back up person should Barb ever be unable to continue in her role, it also offers Barb the chance to have some assistance in managing quite a large team and the long list of talks that she currently does. It also creates the potential of possible expansion of this team into new areas and projects.
Fundamental Truths
Jesus and I are in the process of designing a “Fundamental Truths” series of videos which will provide a summary of God’s Fundamental Truths in a concise and easy to understand form. We hope to start recording some of these videos in the latter half of 2017. This information will be designed to provide all people listening, reading or watching Divine Truth material with clear, concise explanations of the fundamental truths that underpin God’s Way.
Assistance Group Q&A
Jesus and I will begin recording some studio sessions to answer questions related to the assistance group material that was presented in the three groups in 2016.
Due to our new system of collecting and answering questions during this last assistance group, we already have a long list questions to answer that relate to God’s Laws. However further questions about any of the three assistance groups already presented are always welcome. Please send questions to faq@divinetruth.com and label each email with the group and individual presentation that the questions relate to.
Spirit Discussions
Jesus and I still regularly communicate with people who used to live on earth, but who have now passed. Not all of these sessions are recorded, but those that are will be added to the website. Now that the post production work for the assistance groups and our short term Divine Truth training programme are both complete we hope to find some quiet time in the coming months to speak with spirits again. Please check the Spirit Discussions or the 2017 Downloads pages on our website for this new material.
Vimeo Videos
We’ve have decided to expand the avenues available for people to view Divine Truth video. So sometime in the future we will add all of our video material to Vimeo. This means that videos will then be available online both from Vimeo (add-free) and from YouTube. This is quite a process to undertake as it means loading over 1800 videos to a new account. I will let people know via the blog and our What’s New website page when this is finished.
God’s Way
Recently a group of people incorporated a new company “God’s Way”. This company has a very similar constitution to the previous God’s Way of Love organisation, and aims to work in the development, implementation and sharing of projects that demonstrate the potentials of God’s Way on earth. The directors of the company are Tristan Miller, Eloisa Lytton-Hitchins and Catherine Spence.
God’s Way Directors
Jesus and I were made founding members of this company and while we won’t be involved in day to day operations of God’s Way or hold any directorial positions we will be advisors and mentors for the directors. We also hold the power to veto decisions if we can see that the directors and/or direction of the company is in disharmony with God’s Way.
Changes to the Production Team
We have made some recent changes to our production team. Lena has been formally appointed as the leader of the production team (though she has effectively been in this role for some time now).
Igor has been removed from the team completely to give him time to deal with some long standing issues that have been effecting how he works with the team.
This means our production team now only consists of Jesus and Lena. They are both managing and undertaking an enormous amount of tasks. We are always open to new people joining the team, but these people must meet our pre requisites for consideration which include the successful completion of the volunteer induction programme.
Personal Work
Mary
I usually take the time at the end of each update to share a little of my personal progression and reflections since my last post. I’m feeling lately however that it is difficult to quantify or adequately describe my emotions and changes in words.
However, in summary I would say that 2016 was well spent by me personally. I really turned a lot of my definitions of what was “selfish” on their head – e.g. spending time solely on my own emotions – and found that valuing my emotions and giving myself enough the time and compassion I needed in order to experience myself created changes that turned out to exponentially change my ability to share myself, give to others and generally be a nicer person. Being “selfish” (by my old definition) made more giving. So it was absolutely worth it and I continue to view the time I have to spend on strengthening my desire to experience all of me, not only as a gift, but also time that benefits others as well as myself.
At the start of 2016 I had some courage to face more truth about where I was really at at that time. My desire to deal with long standing issues that were causing me pain was really called into question. I’m pleased to say that after many years of simply trying to “punish” myself out of that place and into action, or to punish Jesus instead of myself; I actually started to do some things differently. And the results were good.
Sometime during the year I scrawled something in my journal by a psychologist named David Schnarch. He said:
I think trite dictums like “People always do the best they can at the time” trivializes goodness by taking it for granted, minimizing how hard it is to do the best you can, and blinding us to the ugliness of those who frequently don’t.
At the time, these words seemed to capture exactly what I was reflecting upon and looking at within myself. When considering this update, I remembered the quote and leafed back through my journals to find it. I thought it was worth a share.
God knows that each of us can cope with being overwhelmed, with encountering and embracing immense change in a short period of time, and also that we are capable of more than we currently think. This past year I asked myself many times, and continue to ask myself, “how much am I limiting my experience by saying I can’t cope“?, or as Schnarch would put it, telling myself “I’m doing the best I can” when really there is much more that could be done by me.
And when I notice people really “doing their best” and not making excuses for their injured state or justifying a lack of loving action, I feel the immense gift they offer me and the world. Jesus inspires me in this way every single day. But sometimes there are others I see acting and experimenting and using all that they have to do good and I feel gratitude for them as well. I don’t take it for granted.
Truly doing our best takes courage and to me it deserves to be honoured. Making excuses and calling that “our best” on the other hand is selfish. It harms others and as well as ourselves.
Jesus
Jesus simply needs time. In 2016 he has had no time to relax, take stock or feel anything deeply. Today he has completed the mammoth task of preparing, managing, delivering, producing, outputting and making public material and videos for three assistance groups in one year. I was just explaining to him my new policy that, instead of celebrating birthdays or other nominal and often meaningless holidays and season, I plan to implement new celebration times into our life.
For example when a person achieves a spiritual accomplishment, takes a new and significant action in harmony with love, or gives a gift of great value and importance (such as he just has). So this afternoon will involve a massage for him and perhaps a special pizza for dinner.
Until next time, with love,
Mary
