Carla
The software scrambled in some unknown way and erased the first hour of my previous talk, in which I was explaining the principles behind doing the tuning and then explaining my tuning process. I can’t really recapture the stuff about why I do the tuning in this way, but I can recapture the actual words of the tuning process. In between sessions I typed out the words to my tuning process. Hopefully that will take the place, to a certain extent, of having my talk available, because it is not going to be available. It has been wiped.
So we are going on now to discuss the topic of challenging spirits. I will not go through the challenging process live, as it were. Maybe if I had it to do again, I’d sweep the whole tuning and challenging process into one longer session so that I could demonstrate the whole thing. But I don’t think it is really necessary.
At any rate, the sticky wicket on challenging a spirit is that you need to challenge according to what you believe in for sure. And if you don’t believe anything for sure, you are not going to be able to challenge. I liked certain things about the essay on Who Am I?“ from L. She wrote, “I am me.” What a wonderful thing. What an amazing thing! I realize that it has changed my life. I am me!“ That awareness, in itself, is enough for her to be able to talk to a spirit face-to-face and on an equal basis. Just that simple, sure knowledge that you are you. You are unique. You are no one else. You are yourself.
I think that we are not encouraged in this society to delve into who we are. I remember talking about that very thing to a friend of mine, Jane W, years ago. She said that she had never, ever delved into who she was because she was quite certain that after she peeled away the various onionskin layers of masks and roles, etc., she would find out that there was simply nothing there whatsoever. She was sure she was just nobody and that all she was, was the various masks and the various roles that she played.
And I believe that she was serious. I don’t believe that her life had given her the opportunity to experience herself at that time in a profound and unquestioned manner. I believe since that time, because of creative writing and the deep woes that she has had in her personal life, that she has came through, eventually, with much suffering and with much dignity that she now would not say that. But I can’t say for sure.
I think a lot of people share her basic feeling. There is a fear there of going too deeply into oneself because one is either afraid that one really isn’t anybody in particular or one is afraid of what one will find, if one is afraid of one’s shadow side. That is why all of the preparation, all of the living of a spiritual life, a spiritually intentional life, is the only thing that can back up a channeling life.
If you want to be a channel, I really think it is important, and perhaps imperative, that you form a rule of life and keep to it. It doesn’t have to be ascetic and monk-like, so that you go without sex or food or the things that you value in your life. What you are fasting from is not food or sex, but from the debased and unthoughtout energies of food and sex and other things.
If you conceive of food as sacred; if you conceive of sex as sacred; if you conceive of washing out the toilet and changing the baby’s diapers and raking the yard and driving to work and all of the things that you do as sacred, then there is nothing in your life that is unacceptable. There is nothing in your life that has to be left out of a devotional life.
What you are aiming for is living a life that approaches channeling. This reinvents the experience of living as something that is constantly sacred. That is a lot easier than it sounds on the surface of it because of the fact that it carries the ring of truth. Changing the baby’s diapers is sacred. Raking the yard is sacred. Driving to work is sacred. Every breath you take is sacred. There is nothing that is left out of the human experience when it comes to sacred things.
They can, of course, be debased. There is a system of white magic that is basically focused on making all things sacred in life and acknowledging and affirming the sacredness of various aspects of life. There is also the negative aspect, the satanic aspect, that has had so much press. While there are some satanic, magical orders and they practice, their rituals are entirely derivative. There is not an original bone in the body of their rituals. All they do is take the Christian rituals and turn them around. They take the cross—say the cross is upright, with the cross piece up close to the top and the long piece down below—and they turn it upside down.
If they want to take the “Hail Mary” or “Our Father” or any of the well-known prayers and make it into a satanic prayer, they pray the opposite thing. There is no originality. There is no charm. There is no nothing. All they are doing is negating the power of the positive. That is why it is called “the path of that which it is not.”
The negative path, the service-to-self path, does lead to graduation, but it by-passes the heart. And because it by-passes the heart, everything is a lie. The only way that they can use other people and bend them to their will is by not acknowledging that they and others are one; that all things are one. That is what they don’t acknowledge. It is a failed path from the very beginning and it has never had any attraction to me at all, at any rate.
When you come to the point of challenging, you have a life that backs that up. That is the supposition. If it doesn’t appeal to you to live an intentional life, then you need to rethink your desire to be a channel.
The positive thing about living an intentional life and channeling is that as you attempt to live what you channel, then you are constantly making room for new information. You are constantly enlarging your channel. The negative there is just the opposite. If you are channeling basically just to experience it and don’t want to change your life; if you don’t have an amendment of life in mind, then you will channel at the level at which you are living. Then you will repeat. You will just keep repeating the same thing over and over. You’ll soon lose interest. It is not even worth doing. This is all my opinion.
There is a certain heaviness, I would say, a certain responsibility, a certain honor/duty aspect to channeling or to any gift, and that is to use your power rightly.
When you are working on channeling, you are opening channels of power within yourself. And the ethical question then becomes, “How do I use this power rightly? What is the right use of this power?” I can’t say strongly enough that it is important to attempt to live the life about which your source is speaking about. Ra said about teaching is good unless you are not teaching what you are learning, in which case you were doing no good.
The background to challenging is to live a life that allows you to stand on your own two feet and know who you are. I pray every day to remember who I am and why I am here. And I think those two questions are vital. If you can answer, “Who am I?” by saying, “I am one who seeks the One,” or “I am that I am,” or “I am me,” or “I am here to be a servant of Jesus Christ,” then you are a metaphysical entity.
The thing about time/space as opposed to space/time is that in space/time, in consensus reality, my thoughts do not count. Say I want to put some of L’s flower remedy in my water. To consensus reality, water is just a thing. My thoughts about the water or the powers that the flower remedy may have don’t count.
In the metaphysical universe, all is energy which has been bound into a series of fields. I can’t hold onto it. It is a series of energy fields. But, I can put L’s flower essence into this water and also my own love before I drink it. And to the metaphysical self, that is quite real and evident and the state of mind that I have is quite evident. Thoughts are things in the metaphysical universe and all of these physical constructs are not there. It is a world of light.
When you are trying to challenge, you are repositioning yourself. You are moving your consciousness, toggling up from space/time to time/space; from the physical universe of things to the metaphysical universe of thoughts. Each of you is a thought. Each of you is a vibration or a series of vibrational characteristics, which taken together is sort of a spectrograph that defines you.
And in actuality, each of you has a very distinctive spectrograph that is visible on the inner planes. And that is your identity in the metaphysical or spirit world. But that doesn’t mean that you can just rest on that because of the intention that you are placing; because of the use of your will, etc. You are making an energetic action into the metaphysical universe by saying that you wish to channel and by saying under what circumstances you will accept a channeling source or spirit.
I’ve talked around this several times before and I can just repeat it again. If you are pretty rational, scientific and technical in nature and really don’t have a big belief system going, you may have trouble challenging in the name of unconditional love, or Jesus the Christ, or whatever. Until you have had some kind of personal experience that makes this word “Christ” or “unconditional love” real to you, it is going to be too vague for you to be able to get hold of, to challenge and say, “This is who I am, one who believes in unconditional love or who wants to follow unconditional love,” or whatever.
I once taught a lawyer. He absolutely could not go in the way of faith, but he did believe, paradoxically, in absolute justice. So he was able to say, “I am a person who is a servant of absolute justice.” He was able successfully to channel and he did a good job.
You don’t have to compromise. You don’t have to do it my way. You don’t have to do that at all. What you have to do is find out what your way is and feel that. Feel that so firmly that you can say, with excitement and passion, “Yes! This is who I am! This is why I am here. This is why I come to this moment and ask to be of service in this way.”
I do feel that the challenging is absolutely important. When you think about it. If you don’t challenge it is like picking up the phone and being willing to talk to anyone on the other end of the phone without bothering to check their bona fides. You don’t know to whom you are talking. You don’t know if you are talking to a legitimate person or someone who wants to do identify theft on your credit card. You don’t know.
In channeling it is the same deal. You are basically connecting a metaphysical telephone call and you are offering to be a channel through which this entity’s thoughts may come. You don’t want to hook up to just anybody. It is a waste of your time to hook up to doubtful sources. You simply want to organize the work that you are doing.
And it is work. It is hard work to get yourself tuned up and to submit yourself to the catch-playing that you are doing when you channel. It is very concentrated work. I am always glad when it is over. I have always been a reluctant channel. Oddly enough Don thought that I was a better channel for being reluctant to do it. His feeling about most channels was that they were doing it for egotistical reasons. I wasn’t. I never liked to do it and was only doing it to help out the experiment, because I loved Don and I wanted to help him out.
And I believed in the experiment. He thought that he got better results because of my not having a bias. I had no attachment to an outcome. Whether I got a contact or whether I didn’t, I was just offering myself for the experiment.
I recommend that lack of attachment to an outcome to all of you. If somebody asks a question when you are channeling and you are not coming up with anything in the channel, that is all right. You aren’t responsible for coming up with an answer to every question.
How many times have you just not known something? I don’t think it is so much when you are channeling, that the channeling source doesn’t know something as that they do not feel it appropriate to share the information. But whether it is a matter of ignorance or whether it is a matter of choice, many a time is that you won’t get any information to offer and that has to be okay, or else you will start going down that slippery slope where you are so eager to get an answer that you begin to detune. Because negative sources are always glad to give specific information.
I have talked about this before: removing self-doubt; removing unworthiness. How do you remove self-doubt? You really have to move through this process of getting to know yourself better and better until you finally have this feeling that you have an integrated awareness of your shadow-side; the rapist, the murderer, the thief—all of those aspects of human nature that you don’t want to look at.
When you see it on the news, you have every opportunity to look at. Politicians are good for that in this administration anyway: lying and manipulating people. It is important to find that manipulator, that liar, that power-hungry person in yourself. Because all of these are part of an acceptable perfect, integrated 360-degrees self.
What makes us special is that we choose what we shall manifest from all of these characteristics. But our choosing to manifest some of them and place others of them carefully in our heart doesn’t mean that we can remove them from our selves. We continue to be part of everything that possibly can be felt by the human heart.
The removal of self-doubt is essentially a process wherein you become so well acquainted with the spectrum of selfhood that you have, that you are comfortable in your own choices. You are comfortable in your humanhood, your imperfections and your shadow-side. And you are comfortable in the choices that you have made as to what part of that 360 degrees that you want to manifest.
A couple of times in my life I have actually experienced that feeling of almost being taken over by negative aspects of myself. When I was having to work through the death of Don Elkins, it was very, very difficult for me. And I have had that experience of facing almost literally a wolf that wants to tear your heart out. I knew that the magically appropriate thing to do was to open my arms and embrace that ravaging beast and bring it into my arms and tell it that I love it, that I accept it, that I ask it to work for me. I ask it to be my grit and determination and my perseverance and that I love it and honor it and respect it. That is very hard, but it also is a very unifying and integrating thing to do.
However it happens to you, and I think everybody’s process is different, there is this long period when you are more and more getting in touch with the various parts of your shadow side. I think as we move toward the very, very end of third density and on into fourth, it is easier and easier to access the shining truth about ourselves as we see harsher and harsher mirrors of negativity. We have more and more vivid opportunities to take those wolves into ourselves, into our hearts, honor them, respect them and ask them to work for us.
You don’t remove self-doubt by becoming cocky. You remove self-doubt by realizing that you know nothing and yet you are perfect. You become humble. You let all pride and pretense go. That is how you finally find total self-respect. You acknowledge precisely who you are and then you stand there. And you say, “Yes, I am human. Yes, I am very imperfect. Yet I can set my intention to love the Lord, my God with all my heart, and all my mind and all my soul and all my strength, and my neighbor as myself.”
So you come back to the naked intention, along with totally empty hands. You never say, “Well I know this,” and, “I know that.” You say, “I am a servant. Help me to serve.” Then you are filled up with the new life and new growth. It isn’t a process where you become competent and then you are there. Every day we die and then we are born again. If we can encourage that in our self more and more, than I think we can become better and better at being clear and transparent instruments through which the one Creator can shine.
Removing unworthiness from the self is just as hard as removing self-doubt because, of course, there is no end to one ‘s self seeing one’s unworthiness. There may have been times in my life where I have done something and thought, “I could never have done that better if I did it a hundred times over. That was my best. That was my best shot right there.” I have had it happen to me just a few times, but for the most part, I asymptotically approach my best shot and I have to be satisfied with that.
Walt Whitman is a perfect example of a guy who just kept trying to do his best, to be absolutely perfect. He wrote one book his whole life, Leaves of Grass. He kept adding to it and adding to it and changing it. There is a whole line of scholarship involved just in keeping up with what was in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass book in 1854, 1862 and in 1870. If you follow Whitman’s example you will keep doing the same thing over and over until you are absolutely certain that it is your absolute best, and then you do one thing your whole life. And maybe that is a good thing.
The other option is to admit that your creative child, or the child of your intellect, or whatever it is that you have been working on, has grown up and it is time for it to leave home. So you say, “Bye-bye” to it and you let it go as it is, imperfect as it is. I have never yet published a book where I was satisfied totally that I had done my absolute best. I always felt that if I read it through one more time, I could make it better. But there comes a time when you just really need to realize that it is worthy. It may be imperfect, but it is worthy and you need to move on. There are other things in your life that deserve your attention as well.
Again, removing your feelings of unworthiness is not becoming worthy. It is becoming totally aware of the human situation, which is that to be human is to err. It is impossible not to err. I believe that to be true. You start out each day with a perfectly white piece of paper on which you write the hopes and the dreams and the actions of your life. By the end of the day, you’ve got it all blotted and crossed out. You have done some good things. And there are some things that you didn’t feel you did well. Maybe you botched a telephone call. Maybe you got mad at somebody. Maybe you burned something and damaged the pan. I don’t know what happens in a day, but in my day, I certainly have a lot of times where I think, “Well, I blew that one, didn’t I?”
I think banishing unworthiness is a matter of becoming able to laugh at it and to know that you were doing your best the whole time, and that your best is all you can do. If you use that excuse and then don’t do your best, and just mumble, “Well that was the best I could do,” that is pretty weak. You do need to do your best. But when you do your best and then you perceive that you are still imperfect, then you need to laugh and say, “Well, guess what—I am a human being. I am in third density. This is where I chose to be. I am supposed to be imperfect. I am supposed to have warts and all. I am supposed to be a mess. God bless this mess.” And that is how you move from unworthiness.
You need to remove those things from your personality as you begin to channel for the simple reason that they don’t work in the world of the metaphysical. All of these self-doubts and feelings of unworthiness will simply cramp you and close you so that you are not getting the energy through that you need in order to pull down these channeling inspirational messages through the gateway. You need to simplify and relax and let everything go and focus down into your most essential true self, that part of you that says, “I am me. I am. I am that I am.” And feel that. Feel the power of that self that the Creator has given you.
It is not just in the Ra material or in the Confederation material or Christian material, but in every mystical tradition of the world that you can read, where there is this knowledge that we are sparks of the living Creator and that we exist before any Earth was created or anything was created. We are part of the Godhead principle. Here we are filtered into a spark of God in manifestation, but the enormous weight of our entire personality or our entire selfhood is behind the veil.
We have a little suitcase of selfhood that we have packed to come into this incarnation. We packed some skills, some gifts, some limitations and some important relationships. We left 99.9% of everything behind. We came into an illusion in order to add to the experience of the Infinite Creator and in order to add to our experience of ourselves. We can’t by searching our human personality come into full knowledge of who we are by any linear or logical thing. We have to sense into it. It comes down to, where is the very bottom of our heart? Where does the rubber hit the road for us? What gets it done for us in terms of moving us and making us feel the most profoundly good? Because we are not trying to get away from emotions. We are trying to purify our emotions. We are not trying to be indifferent as much as we are attempting to purify our passion.
The journey that you take to knowing yourself is not a completely isolated one because the universe is waiting to help you. As you go, as you are attempting to come to the deepest possible understanding of who you are metaphysically, listen to everything that is going on around you. Listen for that path or resonance in everything that you hear. Because when you are really seeking, when you are really putting out for help, the universe is very, very helpful.
Look for synchronicities. Look for like Jim’s and my hawks. Look for street signs, words that you hear more than once in a day or concepts that you hear more than once in a day. You have all kinds of hints. It is sort of a game that you play to go through the maze of daily life and come up with the fruits that you have found, all of the synchronicities and all of the things that lead you out of the maze into a more clarified understanding of yourself.
There are some things that you have to watch for in channeling. I have talked before how ego is not a desirable thing to have in a good channel. Of course, there is bound to be ego around. We are human. We have various part of our personality, one of which is loosely called the ego. But if we are channeling so that people will think well of us, or so that people will pat us on the back, we will never get anywhere with our channeling. Because it is a self-defeating thing to try to please people. You have to try to please yourself, or please the Creator, however you want to say that. You can’t hold onto the ability to channel. You really have to let the ego know you are seeking to move beyond the bounds of your human personality in doing this type of channeling. Doing things for egoistic reasons is going to scotch your effort. It is not going to help you at all.
There are control issues that people have. S was saying, “What if I want specific, topical information. Can I ask for topical information?” You have to watch for control issues. Do you honestly think that you know the best way to be of service? Are you sure about that going in?
I think the essence of the channeling process is that you don’t know what is going to come through. You are just offering yourself, then and there. As I said before, there is this desire to help people. And, say, they want to know about a certain source. They are going to ask your source to judge another source. That source is not going to give you an opinion. But you have an opinion. And you think, “Well, really, what is the damage if I pretend that I am still channeling, but I actually just say my opinion?”
I don’t do this. A lot of channels do this. They get mixed up in their polarity. I’ll tell you what the damage is. The polarity of the channeling becomes mixed. And people begin sensing that they can’t trust your source because your source is mixed. Some of your source is coming from an outer source and some is just sheer human opinion.
You need to avoid the urge to be helpful. If you are channeling and you get a question and the source does not want to answer it, and yet you feel that you have got helpful information to give. Do not go ahead and “channel” it. Let the source not be helpful. Later, you can approach the person and you can say, “You know, I do have an opinion on that,” and then give your opinion, but make a difference between your opinion and the channeling.
It is interesting to watch a group grow. There was a time when it was just Don Elkins and I. We were just doing this goofy experiment. Nobody gave us any credibility whatsoever. Nobody knew about it. Then we started writing. Through the years various compilations came to various people’s attention. We became a corporation. In the eyes of the IRS, we are incorporated as non-profit. In the eyes of the world we became substantial, more so than we had been by a long shot. I began, for the first time in my life, to want to solicit donations so that I could get up in the upstairs office and do my creative writing and have Gary at the helm and Pam doing the books, and not have to do the front office work. I became aware of how subtle and insidious ego is when you say, “It is not for me. It is for L/L Research.” That is ego, still, if you are saying, “No, no. I am important. I am so creative. I need to get up there and do that writing. Everybody has got to see that.” That is ego, folks, no matter how pure my desire is to be of service. If I am not just as happy down here doing the books and batting out emails to people who write in from Australia, etc., then I don’t deserve this job. And that is the truth.
So I try to keep that uppermost in my mind and realize that I am strictly staff and that is all it is. I want to have staff, but in terms of whether L/L needs for there to be staff, whether it needs to get bigger, I am sorry. If spirit wants us to get bigger, it will inspire people to send us money and then we will use the money and we will get bigger. And if we are supposed to be small again and I am supposed not to be doing creative work and just keeping the books and writing people e-mails, then that is what is supposed to happen.
It is very, very tempting, as you begin to have some success with your work, to shuffle off all of this thing about ego. “No, I have no ego. I am just a servant of L/L Research.” But at the same time, if you have just become L/L Research—if you go out and conglomerate it unto yourself and now you are L/L Research—that is the danger. So hopefully I am not doing that either. I am trying very hard to stay pure and to stay unattached to the outcome and continue strictly to want to be of service.
All of these things need to be cleared out of the way so that you can do your challenging. And this is where I think the most creative work lies as you prepare to channel. You will need to determine for yourself precisely how you want to challenge.
What are you looking for?
What principle is uppermost in your value system?
What, if pressed to the wall, would you die for?
And since that is such an abstract, say when you jump on top of a grenade you know you are dying so another may live. But what is the principle involved here? Because you are not dying for the other guy as much as you are dying for the principle of loving another person more than yourself. You value that other person at the expense of yourself.
I don’t believe I can go any further than that in logical talk. But I can certainly entertain questions. Let’s have questions as long as anybody wants to ask them.
Questioner
Just exactly how do you challenge? What do you say?
Carla
I can only tell you my own experience. When I challenge in the name of Jesus the Christ, I say, “Who comes in the name of Jesus the Christ.”
And then Q’uo says, “I am Q’uo.”
I say, “Thank you, Q’uo. This is the first time of asking. I challenge you in the name of Jesus the Christ. Can you say that Jesus is Lord?”
Then Q’uo says, “Yes, my child. Jesus is Lord.”
And I say, “Thank you, Q’uo. This is the second time of asking. Who comes in the name of Jesus the Christ to speak to this group today?”
[Side one of tape ends.]
And I don’t hear audibly, I just sense, “This is Q’uo.”
And I say, “Thank you, Q’uo. I challenge you in the name of Jesus the Christ. Can you say that Jesus is Lord?”
Q’uo says, “Yes, my child. Jesus is Lord.”
Then I say, “This is the third time of asking.” And I go through the process again.
By the way I challenge three times just because I might not be totally focused the first couple of times. I want to make absolutely sure. So I repeat. “This is the third time of asking. Who comes in the name of Jesus the Christ?”
And I hear, “We are those of Q’uo.”
And I say, “Q’uo, I challenge you in the name of Jesus, the Jesus that I follow, the Jesus that I live for and who I would die for, the Jesus that I consider to be unconditional love. Can you say that this Jesus, that this unconditional love, is Lord?”
And Q’uo will give me an expanded answer. They will say, “Yes, my child, love, unconditional love is the source of all things. It is the Lord of all things. We are all made of unconditional love. We are all creatures of unconditional love and I wholeheartedly come in the name of unconditional love.
And I’ll say, “Good. Good to go. Will you hold this contact while I go downstairs and come back into the channeling circle?”
And they say, “Yes, my child, we will be with you.” I do receive a response, a very ready response.
T
Are you just thinking this?
Carla
Well you know, I am verbal by nature so generally I do it out loud.
T
How do you know that this process is working?
Carla
I rely on the integrity of the response. I have the experience of challenging many entities who go away when I challenge them. A good challenge is as good as a brick wall. If entities out there cannot meet your requirement, it is just like they are hitting a brick wall. They can’t go any further. They are stuck.
Questioner
In your opinion, is the source of the answer your imagination or is it an external source? Is the response susceptible to that same challenge?
Carla
Oh yes. This whole thing is susceptible to doubt. When we do the first practice, you are all going to feel that you are playing a game. That is the way I felt when I began. The problem is that we are not tuned and perceptive in our physical bodies to the point where we can sense differences between our thoughts and the thoughts that come through us.
You have had the experience many a time of starting to give an opinion and realizing halfway through that you are basically giving the opinion you heard on the TV and you haven’t processed it yet. You are not really being authentic. You just happened to have that answer handy. We don’t have any way of telling the difference between something that comes from us and something that comes through us.
The only thing that saves us is repetition. You have to repeat and repeat and repeat this process, until you begin to get some confidence that you are doing the catch, throw, catch, throw. You begin to get a sense of how it feels as you do it. You can’t do it beforehand. It is like all matters that have to do with faith.
We are using the upper chakras here. We are going through the gateway to intelligent infinity and bringing down the truths from specific types of tuning. In this blue-ray channeling that we are doing, after awhile you can begin to have fairly good confidence in the fact that you are doing the catch, throw, catch, throw concept communication.
But in the beginning of every single channeling session, you get exactly the same information. They identify who they are. They say they come in love and light. They express their desire not to infringe on free will. You know all these things or have heard them or read them a hundred times. You could repeat them without ever doing the channeling. You could just sit there and pretend to channel and repeat that stuff.
So it takes a while to get the experience of it. What they usually do is, they will start a story and send the story around the circle. And how the story comes out, of course, nobody knows. Your intellectual mind is tripped up and you have to go into the channeling process. This is how they generally teach beginners—they tell a story and it goes from channel to channel to channel. By the time the story is finished, it has been transformed somehow and you go, “Wow, I could never have created that story.” You begin to get confidence, but only after you start doing it.
Faith is always gained after you decide to have faith and launch yourself into mid-air with nothing below you but abyss. You really have to hang your ass over the line and just go for it, and that’s the truth.
Questioner
Do you hear words?
Carla
I do experience words, but I think, my mind is expecting words so I get words.
Questioner
I mean, how do you hear them?
Carla
I don’t hear them. I think that the hardest thing that you ever do get is a new name. It is hard to get new names. There is no prior shape or quality to that new name. And I think, for instance, when Q’uo chose his name, obviously he didn’t have a prior shape or quality to that name. They chose a name that would trip up my interest, which is my knowledge of the Latin word “quo.” They wanted me to ask who it was, right? The names are the hardest thing to get, but I do basically get words when it comes to the answer to a challenge.
Questioner
How can you be sure you have sensed it rightly?
Carla
Repetition is the only way really. That is why I didn’t want to teach channeling to individuals. I wanted to have a channeling circle that would have a series of attempts to learn, so that we could work together as a group and begin to work through these things together.
Questioner
What do I do if I cannot hear the name?
Carla
You just need to press on. See, you are trying to control things and you can’t control things.
Questioner
What if I get nothing but white light when I challenge?
Carla
As long as that white light is of an absolute value quantitatively and it has the same value to you as words, it might be OK. But I think most of us are more comfortable with words. If you worked only with vibrations, you would be trusting yourself to be able to use concepts instead of words in order to discern spirits. If you are used to doing that anyway, then I see no reason why that wouldn’t work.
Questioner
What if I just start hearing an entity?
Carla
You mean, what if it happens without you trying to channel? You wouldn’t connect with the entity until they pass the challenge. You wouldn’t start. You wouldn’t accept the contact until they identify themselves. You need to identify who it is that you’ve got before you accept the contact.
Questioner
But I talk to an energy a lot already.
Carla
I think you are probably working within your guidance system. What you have to realize is that if you are just working with a source for your own edification, you don’t need the challenging. You don’t need all of the paraphernalia of a formal contact. You stay within your guidance. You ask questions. You get answers, and everything is fine.
If you are going to show this stuff to other people; if you are going to make it material that you offer to other people and allow them to evaluate your material for themselves -and maybe it will be helpful and maybe it won’t—that ratchets it up to a different level where you need to be more careful that your process is very clean and pure.
I remember when I started channeling in ’74, I went to the guy who had confirmed me when I was thirteen and who was still the bishop, Bishop Marmion. I showed him this channeling. He read it through, he said, “Uh huh, uh huh, it looks good. This is very good material. I like it a lot.” He took his time with it. He took about a half hour. He got with me in church and read through some of the transcript. He was a big guy with big hairy fists.
He shook his hairy finger at me and said, “Don’t you ever forget that if you put this out for people to see it, you are Christ to them.”
If you don’t want to stand there in this spotlight and let yourself be Christ to them; if you don’t want to stand and say, ‘Yes, I channeled this, and I believe it is positive material,’ don’t do it. Christ already channeled some good stuff. It is in the Bible. There is other good stuff that is out there from other channels. There is plenty of stuff out there. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t do it.
This is real. This is real stuff. It is a very delicate thing to offer positively oriented information to people. And you can say that you have nothing to do with whether people pick it up or not. But you do, don’t you? You are responsible for what you have put out. And you need to be a person that people can rely on. You need to be as close as possible to an utterly reliable positive person that people can totally depend on as you can be. I think it is really serious business.
Questioner
Can I let the source challenge itself?
Carla
You beg the question if you are asking the contact that you got by challenging it in that manner. Of course, they are going to say it is okay. I think that it is more subtle than that, S. The challenging needs to stay within your own ego. You need to determine within yourself who you are and how you want to challenge. And then you need to be satisfied that is good. And then you need to go with that.
You need to have faith in yourself. Certainly, experience always gives us refinements to the first thing that we started out with, but one thing that you brought up by saying, “Well, what if I am very visual and I want to challenge visually?” It is the same thing as G said, “What if I want to challenge in a different way than just with words?” I say, “Yes, do that your way. Make it your own. Don’t just follow what somebody else has done.
I’m not a highly visual person. I’ve never been able, for instance, to visualize a map in my head. I could never do solid geometry or mechanics, or where you have to get into the inside of a shape and figure out how it looks from the inside out. I can’t do that. I have a block against doing that, and I know it sounds stupid, but it is just a hole in my abilities.
There is no sense, if you are totally visual person, in doing it my way. You need to make it your own. But you need to make it your own in that very particular and careful and committed way of serving so that it doesn’t become a game or anything less than your absolute heart. Basically, you are trying to find your heart-passion, where you truly, truly live, not just now but for all eternity. You are trying to transcend the human and become the soul that you are. You become much more fleshed out and more colorful to yourself as a metaphysical being after you start this process of being a magical personality and acting in a magical way.
That is really what we are doing. The definition of a magician is one who creates changes of consciousness at will. And that is what we are trying to do. We are trying to alter our consciousness so that we are able to process information that comes to us from inspirational sources. We are attempting to do magic as channels.
Questioner
It seems to me that people should want to support channels.
Carla
I certainly feel that way too sometimes. But what if I start feeling like people should support me because I am doing such a good thing; I deserve to be supported because I would like to spend talking about unconditional love for the rest of my life. That just doesn’t hold water. We work for spirit, not for the world.
Questioner
Why do you challenge three times in a row?
Carla
My reasoning for challenging three times is that I might not have my act together by the first time or even the second time, but by the third time I have gone through it and I am really focused. My feeling is that it is better to repeat and be sure than to be a little bit sloppy and let a disruptive influence through.
I can remember times in the early group where various of the guys would get communication that was just all over the map. One of the entities that was channeled wanted to take over the group and was extremely negative. It was really obviously negative. But other ones were just silly. There was one contact that this one guy would get where he would just start hollering out numbers. “99, 4, 16, l58.” What is that? It really does help to narrow down.
I have gotten perfectly charming inner guides that love to tell stories. And then there was Yada. Remember Yada? R loves reading Yada. Yada was an absolutely great, hilarious, wonderful, charming, profound guy, but he was not somebody that I wanted to channel on a regular basis. It wasn’t the highest and best.
My thing is that I hunger for the highest and best. I hunger always to be more absolute, more pure, more service-oriented, more polarized, more full of love. I am never satisfied. I am always driven further into the light. I just hunger for it. I yearn for it. Jesus has to fill me up every day. I can’t get enough. It is just a personality trait of mine. I think it is a good one for channeling. It happens to work well for that.
Questioner
Can I channel someone from this side, someone still alive on Earth?
Carla
There is a thought. I don’t say that it is impossible. Was Brother Philip incarnate or was Brother Philip on the other side? He wasn’t on the other side? Okay, well then let’s go with that because Brother Phillip is a wonderful channel.
George Hunt Williamson’s real name was Michel D’Obrenovic. He was a prince of a Balkan state. He changed his name when he came over to America and called himself George Hunt Williamson. He wrote a lot of interesting books that another person made a lot of money off of by repeating the research and calling it Chariots of the Gods. Erich Von Daniken totally ripped off all of George Hunt Williamson’s stuff.
George Hunt Williamson channeled. The first channeling that George Hunt Williamson did was by using radio telegraphy. He picked up channeling from the Confederation on a radio by tuning some way. We have a little book that speaks of radio telegraphy communication. Later he began getting communications from an entity called Brother Philip who said that he was a member of the Elder Race and that there were about 150 of them. They were in a magic valley in the Andes somewhere and they wanted to help mankind. It was beautiful channeling. We have a recording of it on our disk of Voices of the UFOs. He is the last channel on there. It is beautiful. It’s about a twenty-minute channeling, highly oriented towards the New Testament and very inspiring.
Questioner
Then do I need to challenge them is they are still alive?
Carla
You are challenging to find out who you’ve got. So whether it is an incarnate entity or a discarnate entity, they all have names or they will give you a name, or an identity.
Questioner
What if it is all just me?
Carla
I mean who knows? There is always that doubt when you are beginning. I could create an intellectual superstructure that would hold water, I think, by saying that in the channeling process you are moving into a deeper part of your extended personality and you are never going out of yourself at all.
Obviously it is a construct designed to place you in the properly altered state of mind in order to access the information that you have got somewhere in your left rear pocket. I have never been able to satisfy anybody’s desire for proof as to whether or not channeling is actually happening. All I can say is that if you look at the 1500-plus messages lasting on the average of an hour, 1500 hours of channeling, you just know, no matter how smart I am, that I had to have run out before that.
Questioner
How can I find enough faith to challenge?
Carla
It has to be in that atmosphere. If you are dealing with faith, you are dealing with the gateway to Intelligent Infinity.
Questioner
But what if it turns out to be just you and no outer source?
Carla
Maybe that is a model that is going to be proven. Maybe that’s the solution. But if so, whatever it is that we are doing by the tuning and challenging, we are maneuvering ourselves into a configuration that yields useful information.
S
How about teaching channeling to a child?
Carla
Only if the child is totally into it. He would have to have an intellectual understanding of it.
This channeling circle is going to be happening probably for at least a couple or three years. It is going to take a while for each person to evaluate how he feels about it once he gets to doing it. It is not for everybody.
We are going to have these circles. We are gradually going to spend more time channeling than talking about channeling. I felt that it was really important to front-load you with a state of satiation, where all of the questions that you had up to this point were answered, or at least where you found that I couldn’t answer them.
You will also have plenty of chances to ask the Confederation entities questions. As a senior channel, I will do a lot of channeling of that kind. But before we even get there, I think you all need to come to a point in your own intellectual minds where you are ready to go, where you are psyched about it and you have got the feeling, “Yeah, I want to do this thing,” and everything that keeps you from it has been taken away, all of the stumbling blocks have been removed. And by stumbling blocks, I don’t mean anything negative, but we all come to the practice of channeling with a million questions.
You really have to sort of slog through all of these intellectual questions, this “and/or/but” thing, and get to the point where you are ready, in the inelegant phrase that I have used ever since I began, because that is exactly the way it feels to me. It has never felt any different. Put your ass way over the line and let it go.
Questioner
But I have specific questions.
Carla
The only thing that you can do when you have a specific question about which you want information is to say, “I have a specific situation here. Can you give me some spiritual principles with which I can think about this?” They talk about spiritual principles and help you think about it. That is about as close as they will come. And they are very generous. If you will ask for spiritual principles, they will always take a stab.
I have gotten to the point where, when somebody says they want a private channeling session, I tell them, “Well I am going to have to see your questions. I may need to tweak them with that spiritual principles thing.” Gary has caught onto that and usually I don’t have to do that anymore because Gary has already told the person that when they are writing up the questions, that is what they need to focus on.
Questioner
But you’ve gotten lots of specific information.
Carla
That happened a lot in the Ra contacts. They gave us a lot of specific information because of the fact that we already knew it.
Questioner
Were you ever surprised?
Carla
No. Ra was so clever. We knew that we were all wanderers and Ra said you are fifth and sixth density wanderers, but they didn’t say which of us was which.
Questioner
But I got specific information in my session.
Carla
Wasn’t your whole question about spiritual principles though? So what they offered you, in terms of what they gave you, was in response to a question about principles.
Questioner
One question I asked was, “What was my experience like on Earth? I didn’t recall that effect on my life. And they gave me what information about my experiences.
Carla
That is interesting. There you are, see. There is an exception to every rule.
Questioner
But I want to know how to judge that.
Carla
I think we are pushing the question beyond our ability to answer. In general, we can say that if what you want to know is something specific like where you should move or what kind of career you should seek or whether you are going to have a mate, something of that nature, they are just going to say no. The only way you can get information when you want to know something like that is to ask what spiritual principles would be helpful for me to use in thinking about this concern. I have been surprised sometimes at what people will get when they phrase a question that way. It seems like it sort of steps a little beyond. There must be some celestial balance that is beyond my intellectual understanding.
I hereby declare this bridge open. The session is over.