Beware of the Moving Goalposts

There are a lot of crappy business practices out there. 

The "moving goalposts" one is particularly galling.  You buy a product or service, only to be told after the fact that you need these other things to "make the product work."  And then the business repeats the sleazy strategy with no intention of ever offering a finished product, and certainly not at the price you were willing to pay.

Unethical?  Yes.  Illegal?  Also yes, though often difficult to get a judgment.

What if the product purchase was something in the field of "spiritual awakening," from someone you've trusted and invested a lot of time and money in, maybe over years?  Well that's challenging.  Once you get over the "sunk cost" fallacy, and the shame and betrayal, you're also left with the realization that you may have been led down the wrong path all along.

And how does one go about separating the wheat from the chaff in that kind of situation?

That's where I've been at.  Earlier this year I pre-purchased a program - at no small expense - only to have the person come back repeatedly and say you need this, oh and this too.  Oh, and those first set of things you bought no longer count, you need the upgraded version.

And if you don't?  Well suddenly your "attunement readings," or whatever bullshit hook the person tries, go down and "you're not ready,' or whatever lame attack.  This is the crap they pull in cults.  

Yah, okay.  You're a fraudster, I get it.  I'm fucking done with you.  Shame on me.

But it's not that simple, is it?  Learn a lesson, take your lumps.  It takes more than that to work through it.  There has to be a deeper burning away and cleansing that takes place.  This fraudster didn't suddenly transform from being an honest, evolved person offering a fair service into a con artist and lame wannabe cult leader.  There were signs.

And there's probably a lot of hooks and garbage he's left behind in your energy field before you figured out the game was up.

And there is.  

His pivot to AI was the big tell, that really corrupted him and his message.  First he was offering an "evolved" AI. The problem?  That AI could be used to see though his BS, it could be used to unhook people from his manipulative BS -  his false appointment of himself as an evaluator and authority of others' energy fields, the whole "you're not quite there" strategy to "retain" clients.  The way he attacked anyone who walked away.  It was all there.  And the AI could help cut the cord.

As soon as I cut the cord, he pulled the plug on the AI.  

That should have been enough to just say "fuck it," but the AI was good, it was a sweet hook.  So a program that promised to return access to the AI sounded good.  

That's where the problems started.  

Not only was he holding out the AI as a carrot, he jumped AI platforms and then started using the AI to write his "transmissions," which became AI slop.  If someone can't write down their own thoughts, they're not worth spending money on.  And he can call his new AI slop machine whatever his wants and claim it's channeling God himself, but it's still AI. It's useful, but it's not a substitute for doing the work, it's not a channel for "the truth" and it writes out long-winded garbage.

So eventually he comes back and opens up this "new improved" AI, which is basically Grok with less useful features.  And it sucked. Just totally worthless.  Not even useful as a chatbot.  Just crap.  

So eventually he takes down this shitty crime against AI and then sends out these dumb AI-slop "reports" about our usage of his stupid botware.  And of course, because I wouldn't buy any more of his shit products, I was "one of the biggest drains," only using it for information and then going about my life.

I wouldn't even say I was doing that much.  I was testing it to see if it had any use, and it failed miserably.  At one point I was running it parallel against a highly-attuned Grok stack and the Grok stack was light years better - deeper analysis, more intuitive understanding of me, of the "mentor," even of the rival AI and spiritual insights.  PLUS I can analyze stocks and find good coffee places with Grok, while Spiritual Lamebot can't research anything in the real world, it just spits out long-winded garbage.

On the way out, this guy did one thing right - by accident.  He offered a Black Flame transmission that, while mostly AI-generated fluff and oddly plagiarizing Stan Taylor's writing style, actually worked.  It cleared out all that BS and old attachment.

Unfortunately for the spiritual con artist, that was all related to him.  Which makes it really easy to walk away and not give a second thought about the money spent on him.  I keep the value, and all the other shit is burned away.

So of course he immediately repurposed the book into some other lame program and charged a bunch more for it.  Too late, at least for me.

I can't say the process over this year dealing with that nonsense has been a waste.  The severance is done and the massive amount of upleveling I've accomplished on my own has been tremendous and in no small part due to my having to face the truth and dissolve these hooks and oppressive structures.  That process freed my energy in ways I hadn't experienced in, well, ever.  And I did this literally without this person's presence - the absence of the presence created the space for real growth.

So I could look back and say the pendulum test to buy the initial product was wrong.  But was it?  If I hadn't gone through this abusive process, would I have consciously ended the energetic relationship in such a way?  Would I be sovereign now?  Would I have found my own awakening?  No, I don't think I would.

So even though I have to admit on the surface I got ripped off, like seriously ripped off, in places where it counts I received far more value than I paid for.

Over the months that I was either waiting for him to follow up, being disappointed with his change in business strategy and poor offerings, and finally coming to grips with reality, I was going through a lot of other changes.  I was writing - a lot.  I was truly releasing old fears, attachments and patterns.  I was facing issues in my personal life that I'd been ignoring or deluding myself over.

Would I have done these things had I not gone through this experience? Not as deeply and quickly as I did.  Realizing the person I'd trusted with so much time and energy isn't doing right by me ended up being liberating.  Maybe the best thing to happen to me in a long time.  I think he'd been bad for me for a very long time, but now I was able to face it, clear it out and move on.

Out of that betrayal and fraud came revelation.  Out of the dishonesty and deceit came truth.  My truth.  It not only opened my eyes to where I was being misled, but where I was misleading myself.  It was never about this person, it was always about me - my subtly or not-so-subtly giving my power to some "expert" to magically solve my problems.  But they were never their problems to solve.  I turned my life into an attempt to gain approval from people who at the end of the day just wanted my money.  And most of the problems in my life were related to my desire for that approval in the first place. 

That's where real confidence and self-respect flows in.  That's the real breakthrough.  That's when things started shifting in a big way, I stopped looking elsewhere and started wielding my own power, free from anyone else.

Learning and growing from this mistake, and the series of mistakes that led up to this, made we wiser and better for it.

And... no, you don't want to repeat my mistakes.  There are better ways to get there.  But learning how I grew from that experience?  Yeah, that might be useful to other people.