Preparing to Channel

The question of this hour is, why channel?

I had that question at the beginning of my own experience with this group and chose not to. For 12 years, from ’62 to ’74, I chose not to channel. I thought there was plenty of inspirational material out there and why add? And yet at the same time, although the information on the universal level is always and ever the same—you see it in all religions and spiritual practices—every single voice has a resonance in it; a bias, if you will, that is unlike any other.

Each of you is unique. There has never been another one like you and there never will be another one like you. You are unique, like a snowflake, in all the world, in all the universe; for ever and ever, Amen.

The Confederation says they really appreciate the differences in people, because they can find different ways to tell the same story. They can find ever-new ways to offer the information. I have come to think that it truly is a service that is very much worth doing, and I will continue to do it until nobody comes to the meetings. When we don’t have three people to do a meeting, then I’ll know that it’s time for me to quit. I don’t really have an attachment to doing it. But I no longer question doing it as a service because I know from experience it has been a service that has helped many people.

We don’t offer this service at L/L Research trying to change anybody’s mind. We are gathering information concerning the spiritual evolution of humankind that may be helpful, and we share it. I would strongly suggest, for collecting the best information of a universal nature, that you keep that attitude going. I think a lot of harm has been done to perfectly good messages, such as the one of Jesus the Christ, by people that were trying to push it on people that weren’t asking for it.

It’s wonderful to develop the information and to make a web site for it. If you found your own group and start developing your own information, make it available globally. We can do that with the Internet now so easily. At the same time, don’t worry if people don’t get it. Don’t worry if people don’t understand what you’re doing.

A very nice thing that happened to me when I reread A Channeling Handbook. I read it, after it was published, once, just after I wrote it. Jim and I read it together at Morning Offering. Since then I hadn’t looked at it. So it’s been at least ten years and probably more since I read it.

When I read it, I found that the one thing that I had completely forgotten about was the work that I had done in realizing that part of shaping the way you tune and the way you challenge is to analyze how you think.

Are you a person who is completely faith oriented? Do you lead from the heart? Do you move on your intuition more than you do on your intellect or your logic?

Or are you the opposite? Are you a logical, rational person that is reluctant to trust hunches and the feelings of intuition?

It doesn’t matter what your make-up is. You just have to know what it is in order to figure out what your best path is going to be to prepare yourself to channel. That is why the question, “Who Am I?” is so important.

The “Who Am I?” essays that we have shared were wonderfully inspiriting. It really did my heart good to listen to each and every one of them. As G said, there were so many things said around the circle! In the general run of casual, social converse and communication, you don’t run into people that are so completely focused on the spiritual and it’s a wonderful thing to realize that you’re in the company of people who are all very, very oriented towards the spiritual.

One thing that the Law of One has done for Jim and me is that we are always able to converse with lots and lots of people about spiritual matters, because the work has attracted those people to us. So we don’t have that feeling of isolation and that loneliness. We have a constant influx of people that want to talk about spiritual things. It’s a real blessing.

If you are mostly in your head, then you are going to have to find a way to challenge spirits that makes sense to you. It’s going to be difficult for you to, say, challenge in the name of Jesus the Christ, even if you call it Christ-consciousness or unconditional love. If you are rational to the point where those words are just words to you, you have to find the path of resonance in your own make-up. You need to find the deepest part of yourself, that part of yourself that wants to serve others, and then analyze what that is. Then you can move into the question, “What am I living for? What would I die for?” I don’t know how that will come out for each of you; it’s something that we will be working with as the intensive goes on and as we start practicing.

If you’re a person of faith like I am, it’s very easy to figure out how to challenge. I happen to be a Mystical Christian. I have been since the cradle. Nobody told me about Jesus Christ. Jesus was part of my magic kingdom when I was a little girl.

I didn’t nap easily. I was very active and clung to consciousness tenaciously. My mother would put me down for my nap, and I would take my little glasses—I wore glasses from the age of 14 months—and I would put them on a slat of the old-fashioned Venetian blinds. At a particular angle they would focus the light. I would look into the light and I would slip out on that light. I don’t know how to explain it, and I can’t do it anymore. I stopped being able to do it when I told my parents about it and they told me I was imagining it. That did it—I could no longer go there. That was when I was about five.

But from the about the age of two to five I had a magic kingdom. I could talk to the trees. I could talk to the animals. I could see the fairies. I could see the devas and the nature spirits and the elementals. And Jesus was there. He was short and scruffy. He wore a robe and had dirty feet. He would sit there. Jesus never said a word. I would sit beside him and look into his eyes, and he would look into mine, and I would know what love is. That was my Jesus. Mother swore that she never told me about Jesus. I told her I knew Jesus.

Needless to say, my path of challenging has always been to challenge in the name of Jesus the Christ and make the spirits say that Jesus is Lord.

That has worked for more people that you would think, for the simple reason that Jesus isn’t a Christian. Jesus is a universal figure, as far as I can tell. I’ve had many people tell me that when they were involved in opening up their channel, they had an experience of Jesus. And it wasn’t, “I am the Christ and you must believe me.” It was, “Oh well, I went to the highest and that’s where Jesus was.”

So I challenge in the name of Jesus because that is the highest principle I know.

But a lot of people that I have taught settle on challenging in the name of unconditional love. One of us was saying, “I don’t want to sound like a Harlequin novel.” And that expresses the problem with using the word, love. We don’t have several words for different sorts of love as the Greeks did. We have one poor, overused shop-worn word, “love.” Still, it is usable. So if you challenge in the name of “unconditional love,” or “Christ consciousness,” those two phrases remove the Christian tinge from Christhood and put it back into more of a universal aspect.

But if you are fishing around for a way to challenge, I do recommend investigating whether you can challenge in the name of Jesus the Christ or Christ-Consciousness, because of the fact that so many people have told me that they have experiences of Jesus when they are opening their channel. When they ask for the highest and best; that is the energy that comes.

But I have had a lawyer, for instance, that challenged in the name of justice. It worked fine for him. He would die for it. He lived for it. He sincerely desired in a service-to-others sense that justice be made available to all people. And he was keenly interested in questions of ethics, because justice is not a simple thing sometimes. So it worked for him.

You can work with this, and I will help you. We’ll see if we can find a way for you to get to your heart of hearts, and challenge.

The reason that this is so important is that, metaphysically speaking, you’re nobody until you know who you are; until you can say what you would die for, what you are living for, who you are and why you are here.

As I said in the book, you never meet a spirit that says, “Well I don’t know what I really stand for.” They are perfectly sure. And if you’re not sure, then you don’t have anything to which they can connect. You need to find that peacefulness which comes when you’ve gotten accepting of who you are; you’ve gotten happy being yourself. Then you are ready to stand on your own two feet, metaphysically, from the very center of your being—not the being of your teacher or somebody you admire; not something somebody told you, but something that you have come to through a real process of your own.

I have been told by various people, starting with my mother, who was a clinical psychologist, that I’m an unusual person. Most people are either heavily weighted towards the intuitive and the insightful, or they are heavily weighted towards the rational and the analytical. I seem to be balanced right in between them. This is probably because I have a strong intellect and at the same time I have a strong gift for mystical awareness. Actually my personality is far more mystical than it is intellectual. I don’t consider myself an intellectual. I think of my mind as this big engine and I almost hate to get it in gear. But I can do that. I can use my intellect very strongly and at the same time my personality is that of a mystic.

But most of you are biased more than that, one way or the other. It is really good to work on this as you get to know yourself better. Ask yourself this question, “How does my mind work? Am I the kind of person who has a hunch and goes with it?” Or am I the kind of person who has a hunch and then says, “No, that’s silly! I’m not going to act on that, I’m going to think about it. I’m going to figure it out!”

Figure out enough about yourself to see which way you’re weighted, and then develop the other side. If you are a person that really floats on faith, start looking at questions with an analytical mind. Start setting down logic. Practice using the other side of your brain. You will channel better if the two sides of your brain are comfortable working together. So emphasize in your work with yourself whatever you feel is missing in your use of your mind.

If you’re a right-brained person and very artistic, start spending a little bit more time in analytical work. If you’re a scientist and think quantitatively and have tended in your life to dismiss the mystical of the unseen, the mysterious and the paradoxical, encourage yourself to begin to “clap for Tinkerbell.” Begin to believe. You can exercise that muscle. It’s a muscle like any other. We all have it. It is a matter of repetition; of affirming to yourself, enough times that it starts to stick, that it’s okay to be this other side of the brain as well. It’s not going to diminish your personality. It’s going to increase its flexibility.

Discrimination is something that we all have. It is part of our package. We come with a very good inner discrimination faculty. We need to use it. We need to start trusting ourselves. When people ask me, “What do you think about this channel?” or “What do you think about that channeled work?” or “What do you think about this book or movie that has influenced me heavily,” what they want is for me to evaluate it for them. And, really, I can’t. I can tell you how it struck me but I can’t tell you whether it’s going to be useful to you.

Here is an example. Somebody had given me the first book of Ramtha, that first white book with “Ramtha” across it. J. Z. Knight wasn’t really famous yet. I was sitting on the plane reading it, going someplace. I’d been reading for, I don’t know, half an hour. I was getting more and more disgusted because to me, this was inner-planes marshmallow fluff. I wasn’t getting anything out of it. You know, “love, love, allowance.” It was beautiful but it was nothing you could really sink your teeth into. There was no structure to it.

So I just about dismissed it. I closed the book and the lady sitting next to me looked and saw what I’d been reading. She said, “Ah, Ramtha, that’s the most wonderful book! It’s just opened up everything for me. It’s just started me on the path and I’m so excited about that book!” She was over the moon about this book that I had just dismissed in my snippy way. I’m a born critic, so watch out if you ask my opinion, because I’ll tell you!

I realized at that moment, and it was a really strong realization for me, that I can’t evaluate for anybody else. I can’t be the expert here. I don’t know what that person’s path of resonance is. I have no idea what’s going to turn you on; what’s going to light you up; what’s going to excite you; what’s going to make you passionate.

As you move into a role of being a channel, then, your discrimination becomes very important. You’re going to be discriminating between spirits. You’re going to be discriminating in your own development, making choices as to how you want to develop your gift and how you want to challenge. All of these things are intimately personal to you. I can’t simply give you one way to do it.

I’ll give you the outline. You can ask any number of questions of the channels themselves and they will answer you. But as far as there being one way to do anything in this work, no. It’s not a science. It’s an art, or perhaps an art and a craft because there is craft involved, in that you’re using words.

And so the more you read, the more ideas you come across, the more different things that you know, the more riches you have. As G said, in your mind, the more furniture you can move around up there, the more they’ll be able to use you and the better instrument that you’ll be; the more potential you’ll have to offer helpful material.

You have to trust your own discrimination. You can’t trust your teachers. You can’t trust an outside authority. You’re going to have to learn to trust your own feeling for resonance. I call it the path of resonance. I’m not sure if that’s a phrase that you’ve seen around somewhere else, but there is path of resonance. You go through your day. This and this and that and all the details of life go past. And then, bam! At 10:31 in the morning, you hit something that resonates to you. You think, “Oh, that’s so beautiful! Oh, that’s true!” Something happens that brings you to a deeper place that centers you and focuses you. Make note of those things, and follow them. Follow that path.

Jim and I do a Morning Offering each day. I’ve been doing these Morning Offering since I was 12. It’s just part of my path. When I was 12 years old I vowed that I would never again have a day pass without reading the Bible and that’s how it started. Jim joined me in 1987 and he has been doing it with me ever since, so he and I have been doing it for 20 years together.

But one of the reasons for doing a daily offering with readings is that if we take some thoughts each morning—and they’re random, since we just go through the Bible, we go through The Law of One books, and we read through other material that looks inspiring—we get a little set of thoughts for the day. We don’t get very much from any one source but we get a little here and a little there. It adds up to seed thoughts that can come back to you during the day.

A lot of times, a couple or three of the sources will hit on one theme. It’s very synchronistic and it gives you some seeds to develop, to let sprout throughout your day.

And each time that you hit a resonant moment, pay attention to it. Follow it and let yourself wake up more and more, because things are happening in each present moment. This universe is just chock-full of information.

Every person with whom you come into contact has information for you, mirroring to you parts of yourself, good or bad. There may be a visit from your totem, such as our hawk. Even the street signs talk to you, if you’re ready to take the information in.

Start to notice what animal comes to you in moments of crisis; what bird that you see or what little squirrel, or maybe a certain type of tree. There are all different kinds of signals to you that are being given to you from the world of nature.

And then, of course, there are the thoughts that come to you over the tube or in the newspaper or whatever. Some of them will resonate to you. So, pay attention and the present moment will open up to you more and more as being full of information.

I am a fan of meditation and, at the same time, I am the least of all meditators. I have seldom in my life had a meditation by myself in which my mind was completely silent for more than five or ten seconds. I have a very active, infamously active, mind. Things are always coming up in my mind. The best I’ve been able to do at meditation is not to follow them. I just let them arise, let them fall away and observe them. They keep arising and falling away.

And yet, at the same time, I feel that I am a totally different creature now than I was when I was nineteen, and started the practice of silent meditation with the local group. There is a cumulative effect to meditation.

When you begin meditating, the body has a great deal of resistance to meditating. It doesn’t want just to sit there. If you’re sitting and watching something on the television, or if you are playing a video game or reading something, then your body doesn’t mind being still because your mind is active. Your body may be still but your mind is active. But if you ask your body to be still and your mind to be still, it can actually make you sick at first.

I don’t know how many of you have had the experience, when you started meditating, of getting sick in your stomach. I did, I actually got sick in my stomach. I mean I was used to sitting and contemplating nature or just hanging out with my own thoughts. I would endlessly sit and be silent, thinking, to the point where my mother would drive me from the room, saying, “Carla, do something or leave the room!” She just couldn’t take it. I would sit in a chair with my mind furiously going on three different tracks, thinking about all kinds of things and just amusing myself like crazy. I’ve always had a lot of fun in my own head. My thoughts are really good company. But to ask my thoughts to stop was too much. To ask myself to stop thinking—how to do that? I’m not a person who has been a skilled meditator.

Yet at the same time, I swear to you, it works. You have to accept the fact that you will have an imperfect practice at meditation. It may not be satisfying to you emotionally at the time. Yet please, set yourself a daily practice of it and keep to it.

If you’re having trouble being daily about it, I would advise you to start very small. Ask yourself to meditate for five minutes, or a minute, if five minutes is too long, if it’s an agony. And don’t move faster than you feel comfortable moving. Don’t think, “I’ve got to meditate for twenty minutes, twice a day, like TM does or I’m not meditating.” It’s not so. Actually 30 seconds of dedicating and making an intention to have silence come into your mind, to invite the still small voice, will do wonders for you.

And company helps. In a group, I definitely can go deeper and quieter. The group energy helps me tremendously and buffers some of that activity

Now when you’re getting silent, you’re not getting silent so that there is nothing going on. You’re getting silent because you want to initiate a conversation with the one infinite Creator in a direct manner. The Creator and the forces of creation speak in silence. They don’t speak when you’re talking. They don’t speak in words, for the most part. They speak silently. They speak to your subconscious mind, so you don’t know that it is happening.

So you set your intention to listen to what the Creator has to tell you that day and then you simply listen. Set yourself to listen. Or if that makes you strain, like you want to hear something, then you can just simply set yourself to following your breath, or sinking into the silence.

I have had a lot of luck in my time with following my breath. When I’ve had trouble settling down, I have visualized myself breathing in the white light of the infinite Creator. Then as I breathe out, I visualize breathing out all the things that are tired and used up, just cleaning out my mind and my emotions, breathing out everything that is tired and weary and old and used up. Then I breathe in the new again. Breathing all that white light in, you’re doing a visualization along with your breathing.

G tells me that he actually counts his breaths sometimes. That is a good way of meditating for him. When you do something like that, it is counter-intellectual. It will stop the process of intellectual thought if you are visualizing or if you are counting. You’re not thinking, you’re just there. You’re just being there. You’re trying to get to Peter Sellers’ point in that wonderful movie Being There, where you’re just there.

It’s actually an enormous jolt of excitement sometimes to get the sense of yourself, to become filled suddenly with what L said, “I’m me! I kept saying it over and over to myself because I realized that I’m really me! I’m really me! I’m here! I’m real! I’m me!” It’s a wonderful feeling to become aware of your person-hood, your soul-hood, and your beingness.

Go slowly with it, but be faithful with it. If you’ve decided that you really don’t have the time for a long spiritual practice, still you can set aside five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night and be silent for that long. Set that intention. That “still, small voice” can say a whole lot in five minutes. Just assume that’s enough. That’s enough for you. And if you need more, you’re going to hunger for more.

A lot of times, who you’re with makes a difference in how much you want to meditate. If you happen to be part of a group that likes to sit in vipassana meditation for instance, they will carry you on their shoulders because of the group energy. I have sat with a group of vipassana meditators for as long as an hour and had a wonderful meditation the whole time. But if I try to do that by myself, just sitting there and looking at a candle, I’m going to be off making lists in my mind and having conversations. I’m not going to be able to carry that silence alone.

Really, you need to create a practice. That’s what it comes down to. The things that we get done in life are the things that we make room for. If you meditate when everything else is done, you’ll very seldom meditate.

So I counter that by doing it the first thing in the morning and the Gaia Meditation is close to the last sensible thing that I do during the day before I’m going down towards sleep. It really helps to have those time set. That way, it’s a part of your day and your expecting it.

It’s very helpful to set a place for your meditations and to make that place special. Because of the fact that our home doesn’t render enough rooms, we do our meditating in here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we have an altar—and some of the things from the Ra contact are on the altar, by the way—right here in the living room. Our sacred space is created. This is where we do our meditation. We have a habit and that means that we are going to do it every day.

This really does help support any kind of spiritual work, whether it’s channeling, teaching, healing or just attempting to become a lighthouse that the light can shine through. Radiance of being is a very strong service which accesses the gateway to intelligent infinity.

And that reminds me; I really ought to talk about my fingernails here and the gateway. I had the nail tech paint my fingernails with an iridescent color that, depending on how the light hits it, is blue, indigo or violet. Then I had her put some green sparkles over the top of that. The green affects the iridescent nail polish, so you really can’t see the indigo or the violet. You just see the blue. But I figured it would be a good visual cue to myself to remember that we were working with the gateway to intelligent infinity, which uses the blue, indigo and violet chakras.

Now when we were studying the energy body, you remember that you access the gateway, spring-boarding from the green ray, moving through the open blue ray through the indigo ray and into the violet ray, which is where the gateway is, in between the violet ray and the eighth chakra, the white ray. And so you’re moving through that gateway, and you are bringing down through that gateway specific types of information from above.

That’s differentiated from the information that you bring in when you open your heart, in the following way: when you’re opening your heart, you are receiving the unconditional love vibration. And in that unconditional love vibration is everything you will ever need to know to graduate from third density. So it is not important to access the gateway to intelligent infinity in terms of graduating into fourth density.

The reason you want to access the gateway to intelligent infinity is to bring down inspiration and information of a specific kind, whether it is channeling, healing, teaching or just radiance of being. Those are the big things that you bring down through the gateway.

The Ra describes the kundalini as being the place where the energy that comes in from the root chakra on upwards meets the inspiration and information that is coming through the gateway downwards. Where that meets is where your kundalini is. For channels it will meet in blue ray, the communication ray. For healers, it is going to meet in green ray. For those who are working with radiance of being, it will meet in the indigo ray. And there are combinations of those, depending on your personality and the kind of work that you do.

Honing your intention is tremendously important. Setting your will is the primary thing that you have as a servant of the light. Your will is totally strong. Free will is the first distortion of the Law of One.

Before the first great original Thought, there was free will. It is preeminent. It is absolutely number one. So when you realize the power of your ability to set your own intention, you have begun to access your magical self.

You want to be very careful about setting your intention. When you set your intention for something, that activates it. That opens the gateway. Your will, your desire, your passion, needs to be honed and focused to the point where, bam! You have set it, and so it is. You can even do visual or auditory cues to yourself, like setting it and clapping your hands or setting it and crossing yourself, or whatever.

The other kind of meditation that the Confederation recommends tremendously is one that I have found very, very helpful. Actually I do this more than once a day. I do this quite often. But they suggest doing this at the end of the day, each day, every day.

By the time you get to the evening hours, you have moved off your default setting many different ways. You’ve been irritated. You’ve been gladdened. You’ve been pleased. You’ve been inspired, etc, etc.

Each of those things that takes you away from a totally peaceful, unconditional love setting with the open heart needs to be looked at in order to balance your being further. The example that the Ra group gave was patience/impatience. I like that because everybody has patience and impatience. I don’t want to say, “When you were angry today,” because maybe not everybody is angry every day, but almost everybody gets impatient, especially if they drive a car.

[Laughter]

There are so many lessons for learning out there on the road!

One of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my life—I think I told you all this last summer at Homecoming—was Don’s Uncle Marion, who sort of adopted me. I was riding in his car. He was just plodding along in the slow lane and some guy came running up on the ramp. Of course Marion could have accelerated and gotten past, but Marion was an old-style guy. He hated the expressway. And so this guy is going to run into him if Marion doesn’t stand on the brake, right? “This is my road.” Anybody else would be going, “Arrrgggh!“Marion just stands on the brake saying, “Okay buddy, there’s room for you too!” Patience! That’s patience! I got a strained wrist out of the deal.

If you have a reaction to somebody doing that to you on the expressway, that’s something that you can balance. The way the exercise works is, you re-visit that moment. You allow yourself to become very impatient or angry or whatever you felt. You emphasize it, just glory in it, go to the extreme of it. Then you invoke its opposite. You ask, “Let me feel its opposite,” and that impatience naturally begins to turn into patience.

And when you start feeling that energy of patience, then you emphasize that and go into it until you are in love with the whole world. Then you release both of those things because now you are balanced. You are a patient/impatient person. You have experienced both of them, and you can go on with your life without holding on either to the patience or the impatience. You are back at your default setting of the open heart.

You do that with each of the things that you have done during the day. Sometimes you have to go through a conversation to figure out where you got caught. “What really pulled me out of the open heart there? Where did that happen? How did that happen? We were having a good conversation and all of a sudden I was just ticked off. What triggered me to leave the open heart?” Sometimes you have to analyze.

Sometimes you really dwell on it for awhile and then you basically end up finding, “Okay, here’s where I went off the rails.” And then, whatever that is, you go through that exercise of increasing it, glorying in it. You don’t say, “Oh I shouldn’t feel that way, I’m a spiritual person.” You encourage yourself to be a human being and feel it. Then allow it to be balanced so that you don’t get off and stay off. You can keep your heart open and not get caught. We do get caught if we don’t watch it!

The last thing about meditation is: even if you’ve never channeled, if you begin meditating, because of the fact that you are putting aside the time and dedicating it and making your intention to seek the truth of the one Creator, as the truth comes to you, it will inevitably accelerate the place of your evolution.

Now you can’t help changing—we are naturally an evolving people. Our entire world is evolving. Nothing stays the same. That’s a cliché but it’s also true. So when you are meditating you are increasing the pace of your spiritual development. As you do that, even if it’s just five minutes twice a day, or once a day, or at all—once you set an intention like that, you have accelerated your pace. Therefore, you are going to begin to change.

If you are of two minds about wanting to change, you’re going to create a lot of strife in your life. So watch out for that moment when you find it highly inconvenient to feel the way you do, because that is likely to be resistance to change. It’s likely to be the old self not wanting to give up the self, because, “If I give up this part of myself, will I still be myself?”

Not that that’s a conscious process. It is an unconscious process. But it has held more people back than I can tell you, including myself from time to time. I’ll get into a bind like that and I’ll realize, “Oh, it looks like I’m going to have to let that go.”

Then you let it go, and you discover how very easy it is and how it just falls away. But if you’re going to do this work, you’re going to deal with a constant shifting of your awareness. So be prepared for that and be willing to do the work of seeing the change in yourself, accommodating the change in yourself and honoring the changes in yourself.

This next point is old news for you all, I know, but I want to go through this. This is just a reminder from the “Who Am I?” workshop of Homecoming 2007. A good channel is a peaceful channel. A good channel has no axe to grind, or any particular attachment to what is going to happen. A good channel has only the desire to serve and the willingness to be an instrument and to tune oneself to the highest and best, and then to offer the self in service.

The things that will reliably keep you from having an open and peaceful heart are blockages in your first three chakras. If you have an issue with sexuality, you need to work it out. It’s not necessary to be sexually active in order to be balanced. It’s not at all necessary. There have been years and years of my life where I was dealing with a celibate mate. Don wished to be celibate. He didn’t have to be celibate. He wasn’t gay or indifferent. He just thought sex was tacky. After we bonded, he just didn’t want to do it and I respected that. I understood where he was coming from. So unless I found a lover that I thought was truly a person to whom I could open my heart, that loved me dearly and was a worthy partner, I was celibate also.

I was celibate for six or seven years out of the sixteen years I was with Don. When I did take a lover, we talked about it first. Don was out of town half the time usually, being a pilot, so it wasn’t a problem of bothering him with my other relationship. I would also tell him when that was over. That only happened three times. I was with one guy whom I had known in college. He did love me dearly. There was one fellow I helped after his wife died for a while. And then there was Jim. So it wasn’t as though I was with a lot of guys. But Elkins always knew. We were always very clear in our energies with each other.

At first, my reaction was, even though we were not married, to choose that if he doesn’t want to make love, then I just won’t make love. I was 25 years old when I got together with Elkins. That’s pretty young to give up one’s sex life. My passion had opened very naturally and I really, really missed it.

Eventually I realized that I did not have to be celibate. But during the whole process that I went through, at all times I was in favor of sex. It wasn’t that I was denying it. I think Don closed down because he just wanted to stay in those upper energies so badly. He didn’t want to go down into the red-ray chakra.

Sexuality is not the only red-ray thing that causes blockages. I think, these days, it’s pretty common for everybody to have a sex life now. It’s not totally, narrowly channeled into marriage. The other underlying red-ray blockage for people is their love of life or their lack of love of life.

It is very easy to become disenchanted with this world. It is very easy to believe the headlines and not realize that life happens under the radar of the headlines and the media and the news and the buzz. It happens person-to-person and completely unpublicized, and 99% of all life goes on in that arena. So you don’t have to buy the cynicism. You don’t have to buy the depression of our culture. You can stay below the radar; stay close to the ground, chop wood and carry water, as the phrase goes from that wonderful book. You can do your thing and let your life be illuminated in the very humblest of things.

If you accept the fact that all of life is equally sacred, you can live a sacred life under any conditions. I’ve had a gewgob of health problems in my life, and the Ra said that I set that up that way so that I would be constantly forced to do inner work and be still, because my natural tendency is to go, go, go and volunteer, volunteer, volunteer. I just love to be active. So I’m always pulled back, pulled back, pulled back. However, I adore life!

Most people do not have that pattern of being pulled back by physical limitations. What pulls most people back is emotions. They see so much sadness and so much suffering in the world. And it just gets to them. They begin to get blocked, to the point where they are not sure they even want to be alive. They’re not sure “what it’s all about, Alfie.” It’s just very difficult.

There’s a lot of suffering in this world; a lot of suffering that nobody knows about that happens in people’s minds and hearts. You sit there in the reaches of the night and you’re suffering and you’re hurting and you’re isolated and you begin to get blocked in your red ray. “Why do I have to suffer like this?” It’s just as important to lift yourself into a love of life as it is to lift yourself into an embracing of your having a physical body and the sexual implications of that. It may be more important, actually.

I think that it’s pervasive in this part of the world, where we’re so over-civilized and over-saturated with the media and the hype and all of the falsehood and the buzz and the spin. We wonder whom we can trust any more. And, of course, we look at politics and go, “Arghhh!”

You need not to let that affect your love of life. You need constantly to be seeking for that place in yourself where the energy is running sweet and clear. For a lot of people, the way to do that is to go to nature rather than meditation. As a friend of mine once said to me, “People will disappoint you, but nature never disappoints you.” I thought that was one of the truest phrases I’d ever heard. It’s true. Nature won’t disappoint you. Get out there; get your hands in the dirt. Get your feet on the soil. Whether it’s gardening or walking in nature or hiking or just looking at the sunset, being in touch with nature is so heartening. It brings you back to a love of life. Because you can see the beauty of the Creator and the glory of the creation, just by looking out the window.

The next chakra is the orange chakra and that has to do with personal relationships. A lot of times, our personal relationships are very difficult. I have a friend who just went through a horrendous time with her mentally ill mother for months and months. It was everything she could do to stay alive.

I sent her the Banishing Ritual and I sent her the prayer that Dion Fortune gives in Psychic Self-Defense. She used both of those every day and she pulled through, barely. But it wasn’t until she physically moved away from her mother and lived in a different city, and was out of the range of the sort of devouring energy that her mother had, that she was able to be herself again. She was just a shell of herself until she drew the boundary; not just in her mind but also by physically moving away.

It’s an extreme. Most people can draw a limit and make a boundary between the self and a toxic relationship without having to move physically. But if you can’t do it without having to move physically, then you might think about physically making a move.

This isn’t just your mate—this isn’t just your parents. This is every relationship that you have that’s a personal relationship. Friends and even acquaintances sometimes can really throw you off because of the caustic nature of the interaction between you. So when you come to the evening, come back to that and work with it in your evening balancing. Forgive the other person. Forgive yourself and get back to balance. It’s not your fault or their fault that you’re not compatible. So without judging the other person or yourself, forgive, let go and release.

In the yellow-ray chakra, surely the relationship with one’s mate takes centre stage in many of our lives. If the relationship with the mate is not going well, it can really close down your energy body. Again, forgiveness is everything. If you can forgive yourself and forgive the other person, then that gives you a perspective that allows you to see through these energies that are toxic and to stop the toxicity at its source. If you forgive the other person, you begin to have compassion. If you forgive yourself then you begin to have compassion.

If you can only work on part of it at any one time, work on yourself. Work to forgive yourself and let the other person hang for a while, because the key to having compassion for others is to start having compassion for yourself.

We are all harder on ourselves then we realize, I think. Some of us never get rid of that nagging voice from within us that criticizes every single thing we do. We need to make our peace with that voice. Maybe that voice isn’t even our voice. Maybe we have internalized our parents’ voices or some teacher’s voice or somebody that didn’t have such a good opinion of us.

It is really important to forgive yourself. Forgive, forgive, forgive! Forgive yourself completely for being yourself and have compassion for this child that you are, this child of God that just wants to make his way in the world, that’s all. Just have compassion on all this suffering that you are going through. See yourself as that child hearing those parental voices. Cradle that child. Love that child.

At one point I actually got a doll, and I loved on that doll so that I could bring myself back into loving my inner child. I hadn’t had much of a childhood. I had two alcoholics for parents and they were performers to boot. The performance lifestyle is crazy, so I ended up keeping the home fires burning. I was really my parents’ parent. So I really didn’t have a proper childhood as far as being carefree and playing and stuff. I was taking care of my little brother from the age of seven. I was cooking from the age of ten. A lot of people have this kind of thing if they have alcoholics in the family. You cope. You do what you have to.

But somewhere along the way there was this deep hole where my childhood was supposed to be and it just wasn’t there, as far as being loved, being caressed, being held, being pampered. That didn’t happen to me. So I did it for myself. I became my own Mom. I had this little Raggedy Ann doll, and for a while I carried it with me everywhere I went. It looked pretty funny too, but it was necessary for me to do that. Now, Annsie is up by my bed and I speak with her and sometimes I put her on my lap and we watch TV together. I always take her on my trips. But she can stay in my bedroom.

I love myself now. I have fallen in love with myself, I really have. I love myself dearly and that makes me compassionate with myself. I can forgive myself when I screw up. I really don’t take it to heart. We all screw up. And that is the key to having compassion on other people: forgiving yourself.

That’s pretty much what I want to leave you with: forgive yourself, forgive as you go, continue to forgive and forgive again. Never stop forgiving. Forgive, forgive, forgive; release, release, release. And that sets you up for being a channel.

Questions?

You said something about the energy coming down through the gateway to intelligent infinity and meeting the upcoming love/light energy. What did you say happened when it met an indigo ray?

The indigo ray is the center of faith and radiance of being. I think there are many people at this time, wanderers especially, who came in for the purpose of being passive radiators of light. But in order to be a passive radiator of light, you need to have accessed the gateway to intelligent infinity and have asked for the inspiration to activate the indigo ray. So it’s the center used in matters of faith—the faith-filled person, not the person who is talking about faith, but the person that is just glowing.

You said that a lot of people who begin to channel are visited by Jesus Christ. That happened with me; He was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt, which was just classic for me!

[Laughter]

But you know, I found it colorful and wonderful, and it opened my heart center, the way it needed to be. But, what do you think that means—if that happens to people who aren’t channeling on a pretty regular basis?

I think that Jesus wasn’t a Christian. Jesus was an Essene who studied in the Jewish lore. Jesus is a universal figure. He didn’t intend to start a church, not at all. He thought that it was a community thing. He was more of a communist where, you know, would live and hold things in common and then nobody would be without. That was his expression of living in the world in total love.

But I think that he, more than any human being that has ever lived, and I do think he lived, has successfully embodied or taken on a cloak of unconditional love or Christhood. So he has become the symbol, or the face—the icon, say, if you click on something on the desktop—for unconditional love. You want unconditional love—you click on Jesus. That’s why it works for people who aren’t Christian or religious.

It’s because he’s not Christian or religious. He’s a human being that lived and expressed and manifested unconditional love to the degree that nobody else has managed to do—to a perfect degree really, although he would have said that he was wildly imperfect. In comparison to what anybody else has managed to do with his life, I think he was really approaching perfection. So that is why I think he is accessible.

And I think when it happens to people it’s because they have achieved a certain vibration. In that vibration is the vibration of unconditional love, and because of the fact of the way our minds work, we can’t just live in that mystery, we have to have a name for it. Well we get a name for it because we are just of a nature to want that. So we get a personification of it and that personification is Jesus Christ.

I didn’t think I would want to challenge in the name of Jesus. I thought that might be limiting. Actually, to hear you say it on a universal scale, it being an icon for unconditional love, that makes a lot of sense. But, you also say you really are no one metaphysically unless you know who you are, and if your identity truly is that of the Creator, aren’t you no one and everyone at the same time? Can you challenge in the name of the Creator?

Exactly—can you? You have to figure out if that’s where your feet come down. What do you live and die for? What moves you? What makes you passionate? What brings your allegiance to the fore? What’s the center of your light? These are the kinds of questions you have to ask yourself. You really have to be creative because of the fact that we are not encouraged to develop this kind of sense of ourselves. We’re encouraged by our culture to be far more shallow than that.

I think for most people that are service-to-others oriented, the answer lies somewhere in the service-to-others polarity of unconditional love, the open heart and seeking. G was very strongly talking in his, “I am one who seeks the One; I seek the One.”

He also told me something else that I thought was really worth sharing, which was that he had developed a practice recently of saying, “One infinite Creator, one Infinite Creator,”—just to keep his mind on the one infinite Creator. He wakes up sometimes thinking, “One infinite Creator.” He’s in the process of training and honing his hunger and his passion to the point where it’s more at the center of his being and he’s not as scattered. If he doesn’t want to challenge in the name of unconditional love, he could consider challenging in the name of seeking the One. He’ll have to work it out.

Another interesting facet is that it gives more variety to this topic. I happened to read Dion Fortune’s book, the one that you mentioned in A Channeling Handbook. She had said that what she believed to be the highest aspect of challenge is asking yourself if you would be willing to be crucified in the name of Jesus the Christ. His crucifixion was the highest point of being in service to humanity in this third density, and in her opinion, being able to sacrifice yourself in such a symbolic way would be the highest aspect of serving others. I thought that was interesting as well, that if you look at it from a symbolic approach as well, not just an internal feeling, it could be a focus.

It could. And there are lots of other ways you can envision. It sounds almost grandiose or surrealistic to talk about what you would die for. But what if you jumped in front of another person to save him, when you saw that that person was going to be shot? Then you have loved another enough that you gave yourself for him.

It’s not something that happens to us too many times, unless we’re missionaries in an unfriendly country where we’re going to get boiled for dinner because we’re Christian missionaries. On the other hand, expressing unconditional love for another may indeed get us killed one day. And if we did get killed in that way, what a wonderful way to go! Not that you’d seek that out, but it would be a dandy finishing-up of a good, well-lived life if it happened that way.

There have been times, in the depths of the Ra contact, when I was actually getting a psychic greeting from an entity, where I looked at that. Because I was getting extreme things. For instance, I was being told to step out into traffic when there was a car coming. I’d look and I’d see no car coming. This happened several times. Fortunately, I wasn’t by myself, and the person who was with me pulled me back. But I would not see the oncoming car. The attempt was to take me out. For some reason I wasn’t scared through that.

I remember one time I was completely unable to breathe. And I thought, “Oh, this is interesting! I may well die and, okay, but I’m not going to worry about it.” I was well aware of the gravity of the situation. It passed in about thirty seconds, When Don asked Ra about the situation, Ra said, “Because she was fearless it didn’t have any effect on her. If she had had tightened up and had fought it, she might well have died. It might well have worked.” So maintaining a lack of fear in a challenging situation is a very helpful way of moving through it with the most positivity and love.

The day that you know you’re going to be doing a channeling, or the hours leading up to it, or maybe even the week leading up to it, do you find a need for a specific diet to increase your vibrations? Or is that not necessary for you?

For me personally, I find it necessary to eat very badly, in terms of most people’s belief of what a spiritual person eats. My favorite food groups are vodka and steak.

It doesn’t affect the channel?

Well, I am as I am. I’m sure it does affect it. But my physical body needs it. I’ve always been very fragile. I was born with a lot of birth defects. I was expected to die when I was born because I had brain damage. My eye was turned into my amygdale and was pushing against it. The doctors figured I couldn’t survive it. They moved the eye out of the way but not before they saw there was tremendous damage done.

At the age of two I had rheumatic fever so badly I was expected to die. It affected every organ in my body. The doctors said, “Well she’ll never see grade school. She’ll die before she’s five, probably.”

Then my kidneys failed twice when I was a teenager. I wasn’t expected to live either time. So I came in with a very fragile, very delicate body that sort of walks the razor’s edge and I can get very sick, very fast.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to balance it. One of the things I’ve experimented with is diet. I used the Edgar Cayce diet for about a year and a half; that did nothing.

I tried macrobiotics—that tore me down, that was very bad for me. I happen not to be able to digest rice, so that didn’t work at all.

I did try an ayurvedic diet for a while but it was a pain in the neck and it didn’t do me any good. I didn’t keep that up but about six months. I was tired of figuring out what nine different foods I was going to eat at every meal.

That’s what I’ve been doing, and my naturopath says, “What’s going on? That should be gone by now.”

I know. It works for some people; it doesn’t work for others. It did not work for me.

Do you take grain from alcoholic beverages within a certain time frame before you channel?

Well, not the day of the session. I’ve been all over the place with alcohol. Early in my life I didn’t drink at all because, of course, having alcoholics for parents, you see the worst of it and you just don’t want anything to do with the substance.

Then at the age of twenty-five, I mated with a drinker. I mated with Don Elkins who grew up rough in the country. He was in the Army. He was a pilot. He liked to drink scotch when he hung out with his friends, at private clubs where pilots went. And what they did was, they drank.

And so I learned to drink beer and scotch. They were the first things I tried. I didn’t like the taste of either of them, but I gradually learned to nurse them along. I just got used to them.

Much later in my life, after Don, I discovered that vodka actually tasted really good. So did white wine or spirits. I like different fortified wines; brandy and stuff.

So I got into the liqueurs. I was cooking a lot with wine and spirits. And of course, if you have a lot of chronic pain, one way to remove yourself from the awareness of it is to become merry with wine or with vodka. I would drink to the point where I would begin not to feel the discomfort so much.

And then in the last six months, I noticed that my health problems were accumulating. Not only had I gotten interstitial cystitis, but I was starting to get this problem with my ears. I talked to Holly one morning and asked her what was going on with that. She said, “Well dear, what do you think about the possibility that you might be somewhat allergic to some of these substances and that they might not be doing you much good?”

I asked myself that and I thought, “I’m going to pipe down on the alcohol and on the colas, and on the caffeine and on the sweets, because those are the usual suspects. So those four things I’ve cut down on quite a bit here recently. But not the meat and not the comfort food in terms of having potatoes. A lot of people say that if you have arthritis you absolutely should never eat potatoes.

However, I have O-negative type blood. It’s the oldest type. You need to eat somewhat high off of the energy chain if you’re going to be comfortable within your own body with that type of blood, according to that book, Eat Right for your Type. I have found that basically to be true.

So I think it’s extremely individual. Some people are so sensitive to what they put into their bodies that they really, really need to eat carefully. If a person like that drinks, he suffers the next day. He feels so bad; and he doesn’t just feel badly physically, he feels grungy mentally and emotionally. Whereas I’ve never had a hangover in my life. I mean, honestly, I never have. I don’t know what that is. Of course, I don’t drink to the point where I put myself out or become unable to speak, but still, a lot of people do just habitually get a hangover if they drink. But I never have.

So I think that you really have to investigate diet for yourself. There’s a lot to diet, especially if you think about the symbolic aspects of eating. We all eat more than we need to eat in this society. If we really ate only what we needed to eat, we’d eat a whole lot less. We’d eat a whole lot more sparingly. We probably wouldn’t even eat as often.

Fasting, I think, has a really strong place in a person’s spiritual life. If a person wants to dedicate himself to facilitating a change in himself, for instance, he can fast for it and bring that into his physical sphere instead of it being mental and intellectual. When he feels that, “This is what I need to do, and this is what feels right,” then if he fasts for it, every hunger pain that you have can make him think, “Okay, this is grounding my intention to make this change. I will fast as a symbol of the thing I want to drop.”

I think a lot of people have had very good luck with fasting and I recommend it. Don’t fast for thirty or forty days. But take a juice fast for several days or even ten days. If you really want to have a cleansing fast, there are ways that you can segue into it and fast completely for a few days with just water, and then segue back to the juices and then slowly back into solid food.