From January 15, 1981, through March 15, 1984, three dedicated seekers of truth received the spoken communication in this book. The messages, as you will discover, came from a civilization of extraterrestrial beings who identified themselves as Ra. The Ra Contact: Teaching the Law of One contains the whole, rectified, and now unified record of this three-year period of contact with Ra.
This introduction does not intend to thoroughly explain the contact or its philosophy. The purpose of this section is simply to offer the reader a little context regarding how this contact happened, some background about the source with whom Don Elkins, Carla Rueckert, and Jim McCarty were communicating, and a thumbnail sketch of what this source says about metaphysical reality. This introduction is not essential to reading and understanding this book; it is offered as a means of orientation and preparation for the journey to come.
¶About Ra
In Earth’s ancient history, Ra is known as the Egyptian god of the sun. They state, however, that when they visited the Egyptians they came as brothers and sisters, not as gods. They came because that civilization had developed a culture and a belief system that prepared them to comprehend the concepts of the Law of One. This readiness for the Law of One drew those of Ra to them to serve as teachers of these principles.
Ra reports that their efforts to aid that particular culture were misunderstood and distorted. The Egyptians, particularly the royal elite who reserved the message only for themselves, robbed the message of its inherent compassion, distorting the philosophy of the oneness of all things. Ra consequently removed themselves from the Egyptian experience, but they continued from then until now to observe Earth’s development from a distance. It was Ra’s longstanding desire to correct the distortions introduced to the Law of One during that time period that led them to make contact with our group.
But that was not their only reason. Ra also made contact with our group because Earth is nearing the end of a 75,000 year master cycle of evolution, and many of its population are ready to graduate to the next evolutionary stage, what Ra calls the fourth density, the density of love and understanding. They wished to be of aid in this time of transition and thus responded to the call for service issuing forth from this planet.
Ra said that they are from the sixth density and they are, in their words, a “social memory complex.” This is what a planetary population becomes in the densities of evolution beyond our own. In this arrangement, the thoughts, memories, and experiences of every individual are known and available to the whole group. The entire social body, then, consists of many unique individuals who also have access to a shared group repository of memory and identity.
According to Ra, the population of Earth will birth its own social memory complex after its graduation to the fourth density is complete. Just as individuals evolve over time, the social memory complex likewise evolves, transforming and becoming more unified as the lessons of each higher density of evolution are successfully grasped. To Ra, as a social memory complex, there is no distinction between an individual and the whole group. Thus when we communicated with those of Ra we spoke to one individualized entity of the social memory complex. Since everyone in this group accesses a shared mind, it was as if we were communicating with all 6.5 million entities of the Ra social memory complex.
Ra is also part of a larger group called the Confederation of Planets in the Service of the One Infinite Creator that consists of many other social memory complexes from other planets in our local portion of the Milky Way Galaxy. According to Ra, members of the Confederation have been offering their services through channeling and other means to various individuals and groups around the world for some time, their interaction with this planet stretching back into our deep pre-historical past. Our group has been in contact with assorted members of this Confederation since we began in 1962.
The Confederation’s primary message has always been that we live in a universe of unity, that the world as we perceive it is an illusion, that we are here to learn how to give and receive love, and that meditation is one of the principal means of discovering the Creator that exists in all of us.
In the course of this conversation, Ra certainly took responsibility for their perspective but renounced any authority, indicating that what they had to share was their perspective only—what they described as a “somewhat different slant upon the information which is always and ever the same.” They wished not to be identified as the source of this information. Instead, they asked specifically that they be described as “humble messengers of the Law of One.” In this statement they acknowledge their limitations and honor their relationship to the one truth which transcends (but includes) every seeming portion of identity throughout the universe:
[We encourage the seeker not to remove] the focus from the One Infinite Source of love and light, of which we are all messengers, humble and knowing that we, of ourselves, are but the tiniest portion of the Creator, a small part of a magnificent entirety of infinite intelligence.
¶The Law of One and its Cosmology
This is how Ra described the Law of One:
In truth there is no right or wrong. There is no polarity, for all will be, as you would say, reconciled at some point in your dance through the mind/body/spirit complex which you amuse yourself by distorting in various ways at this time. This distortion is not in any case necessary. It is chosen by each of you as an alternative to understanding the complete unity of thought which binds all things. You are not speaking of similar or somewhat like entities or things. You are every thing, every being, every emotion, every event, every situation. You are unity. You are infinity. You are love/light, light/love. You are. This is the Law of One.
In this book, Ra brings us face to face with the same basic truth that has been reported by mystics from all quarters of the world throughout the ages: the astounding realization that the One Infinite Creator is within us and is within everything, everywhere. In fact, the Law of One asserts there is nothing that is not the Creator; there is nothing that is outside of this underlying unity. Ra reports that the Creator has made the infinite creation out of Itself for the purpose of knowing and experiencing Itself. This “intelligent infinity,” as Ra calls it, generates out of its own being the galaxies, stars, planets, entities such as ourselves, darkness and light, love and fear, every shade of meaning and experience, every mode of thought and activity, and everything else real and imagined on every plane of existence. And It has endowed each and every seeming portion of this creation with a foundation of free will: the capacity to learn, to grow, to intend, to adapt, to make evolutionary choices, to chart a return path of experience to the Creator.
As we travel on our spiritual journeys we exercise free will, choosing to gradually know ourselves more clearly, and sooner or later we grow into unity with the One Creator. As all of the infinity of entities in the infinite creation travel this path, the One Creator comes to know Itself in ways that are unimaginable and endless through every free will choice that is ever made by each portion of the creation.
The journey that each soul takes, according to Ra, moves through an infinite system of “octaves,” each octave divided into seven ascending densities (or concentrations) of light. In the first density of our current octave, fire and wind teach earth and water to be formed in such a way as to produce the foundation for subsequent biological life.
The second density is the level of consciousness inhabited by bacteria and single-celled organisms in the lower stages to plants and animals in the higher stages. This density’s lessons involve transforming from the random change of first density to a more coherent awareness that facilitates growth and directed movement. As entities progress through the second density, they begin to strive toward the next density of self-consciousness; and as the spirit complex becomes awakened, graduation to the third density becomes possible.
Earth and its human population are currently approaching the end of the third-density cycle, according to the Confederation. In this third density, the density of choice, we have a more highly developed self-awareness that includes the mind, the body, and, for the first time, a fully activated spirit. The function of this density is to polarize our consciousness and to choose our form of love, our form of service. On one end of the spectrum of polarization is service to self: an exclusive love of self which rejects universal love and seeks to control, manipulate, exploit, and even enslave others for the benefit of the self. On the other end of the spectrum is service to others: a love of not only the self, but of all other-selves. Service to others seeks and embraces universal, unconditional love, sees the Creator in all things, and supports the free will of all. Our lived lives are not so black and white, however, as we strive toward either end of the spectrum of polarity in consciousness.
In congruency with various wisdom traditions of Earth, Ra communicates that we are moving toward a “new age,” or what Ra would call a harvest to the fourth density of love and understanding. This is where the social memory complex is born, where thoughts become things, love becomes visible, and the positive and negative polarities separate from each other to inhabit environments more suited to their respective and divergent courses of evolution.
The fifth density is the density of light, wherein wisdom becomes the focus and criterion for graduation to the next density. The sixth density balances and unifies the love learned in fourth density with the light (wisdom) learned in fifth density and produces a power to serve others that is more effective than that of love or wisdom alone. The seventh density reaches a realm of experience even more difficult to describe. According to Ra it is the density of “foreverness,” and here we begin to move into total harmony with the One Creator. The eighth density represents the complete coalescence of all of the creation with the One Creator and can be viewed as the first density of a new octave, similar in arrangement to the notes on a musical scale. The fruits of this octave will eventually give birth to another octave of densities, whose fruits will give birth to another octave of densities, and so on, infinitely.
¶How the Ra Contact Came to Be
Don Elkins started asking the big questions about life when he was in junior high school. Amidst the everyday reading, writing, and arithmetic he was thinking to himself: What is the meaning of life? How big is the universe, and how does it work? What don’t we know? That desire to understand and put the puzzle pieces together would persist unabated throughout his incarnation. In his professional life Elkins would go on to become a professor of both Mechanical Engineering and Physics, and in his personal life a determined investigator of UFOs, reincarnation, and other areas of inquiry that might be cobbled together under the heading of the paranormal. He realized that modern science fell short of revealing the fundamental workings and purpose of the universe, so he turned to these fields for answers that science could not provide.
Carla L. Rueckert was a person gifted since childhood with a soaring intellect and a profoundly deep and personal faith. On the latter point she called herself a “cradle Episcopalian” and, eventually, a mystical Christian. On the former, Carla was a precocious child who excelled in school, mastering any test offered her. And most centrally, despite tough circumstances growing up, Carla vibrated with a love of life. She lived to dance, to sing, to interact with nature, and to embody a life of devotion and service. She was so committed to the loving viewpoint that people often took her as innocent or naïve, compelling from some a desire to protect and guard Carla against a world they felt was less pure than she was.
In late 1961 Don was given a small, brown volume, creatively titled The Brown Notebook, which had been compiled by Walt Rogers of Detroit, Michigan, a fellow who previously experienced a face-to-face encounter with a UFO entity. After the encounter, Mr. Rogers displayed “lingering telepathic contact” with this entity, a phenomenon that frequently was reported in similar encounters from the 1950s. Rogers’s compiled brown notebook contained information about the metaphysical nature of reality from alleged extraterrestrial sources. It also described how a group of people who meditated together on a frequent basis could receive this sort of information via telepathic contact with extraterrestrial entities. Elkins was so thoroughly impressed with the correlations between the channeled material in the notebook and his own work that, based on this information, he decided to try an experiment with a dozen of his physics students in Louisville, Kentucky.
News of that reached the ears of a girlfriend of one of those students. She had recently developed a driving interest in silence and love of meditation, so she asked to attend. Her name was Carla L. Rueckert.
Don didn’t tell the group what might happen, only that something interesting could possibly occur if they meditated together. He was actually attempting to conduct a scientific experiment to see if the students would receive extraterrestrial telepathic contact without prompting. After some time had elapsed, and no definitive results were produced, Walt Rogers visited the group and channeled from his source, Hatonn, the entity with whom he had experienced the face-to-face encounter. Hatonn said that they had been trying to channel through some of Don’s group, but the students were not aware that the impressions they had been receiving—but not verbalizing—were from extraterrestrials. Elkins felt that this event nullified the scientific validity of the experiment, but it did begin producing results. After this visit everyone in the group, except Carla, learned how to channel; she preferred silent meditation.
Carla’s and Don’s respective courses after this meeting took them on different paths for some time, but they would eventually reunite and officially join together upon a shared mission of research and seeking in 1968. Two years later they would form the L/L Company, changing its name to L/L Research in 1976. And it was in 1974—twelve years after Carla attended Don’s first channeling experiment—that Don asked Carla to take up the channeling service herself. Not coincidentally this was the same year that Elkins began to actually preserve (not throw away or recycle) the cassette recordings of the channelings. The messages took a qualitative leap forward thanks to Carla’s aptitude in channeling coupled with the refinements she made to Don’s rudimentary channeling protocols. Among these refinements, Carla developed the crucial procedures of tuning the instrument and challenging the contact that became hallmarks of L/L Research’s style of channeling.
In 1978, Jim McCarty was living off the grid in a log cabin that he built on his 132 acres of land in the woods of central Kentucky. One evening, while he was listening on his battery-powered radio to station WKQQ broadcasting from Lexington, Kentucky, he heard an interview with Don Elkins and Carla L. Rueckert on the topic of UFOs. Fascinated, Jim hoped to meet them one day. A year later, his wish came true when he was introduced to Don and Carla by fellow homesteaders who knew them. After driving to Louisville each Sunday night for a year to attend their channeling meditations, Don and Carla invited Jim to join them to help with their research. Jim moved in with them on December 23, 1980.
Twenty-three days later, on January 15, 1981, while Carla was teaching a student how to channel, a voice spoke through Carla and said, “I am Ra.” Prior to this session all of Carla’s channeling had been done consciously, but when serving as an instrument to channel Ra, she went completely unconscious. In a way that was never fully understood by Don, Carla, or Jim, she left her body for the Ra contact. Ra was then able to remotely and mechanically operate Carla’s vocal chords to produce replies to Don’s questions. For every subsequent of the 105 sessions following the first one, Carla would slip into unconsciousness, completely unaware of what was coming through her. It wasn’t until session 23 that Don began showing her the transcripts of Ra’s words. He had previously kept them from her to preserve the scientific viability of the contact.
The Ra contact was such a quantum leap forward in depth of insight and breadth of vision that Don, Carla, and Jim devoted themselves completely to this contact for the next three years and two months.
¶The Conversation with Ra
Ra’s style of contact was question-and-answer only. They felt that this format was the best to ensure that the free will of each person in the group was not abridged. Ra described their contact as “narrow band,” which meant a few things: one, that considerable focus and discipline were required to maintain their contact; two, that the quality of the information was of much greater precision and depth than was available through conscious channeling; and three, that they wished to focus principally upon philosophy and timeless spiritual principles, which meant avoiding transient information that had no lasting value.
Ra chose Don, Carla, and Jim to communicate with because, of course, Don and Carla had been practicing and refining the process of channeling for years. But more fundamentally they chose these three seekers because, as a group, they enjoyed significant, sustained, almost effortless harmony. Of equal importance was Carla’s absolute purity of desire and total dedication to be of service to the One Infinite Creator, especially through communication, and more especially through channeling. These factors supported the Ra contact in a stable manner that would eventually produce 106 sessions exploring the Law of One.
The preparations for contact with Ra began the night before each session was to be held. Don, Carla, and Jim would meditate together and then go over the previous session, fashioning new questions to pose to Ra. It was discovered that sexual energy transfers lengthened the Ra sessions by increasing Carla’s vital energies, so Carla and Jim, having already developed an intimate relationship, would dedicate this transfer to the One Creator and to the Ra contact. On the morning of the session, Don, Carla, and Jim would have a light breakfast, and then Jim would give Carla a back massage to stave off the arthritic pain that would eventually come from her lying motionless for about an hour.
Between breakfast and the session, they would meditate together in the living room, and during this meditation Don would often receive another question or two to ask Ra. They would then retire to the Ra room and situate Carla on the bed in the middle of the room. Jim would set up the three tape recorders to ensure a successful recording. Don would measure what Ra called the “appurtenances”—the Bible, incense, chalice of water and candle—to be sure that they were in the optimal placement, per Ra’s instructions. (These items were chosen by Ra due to their personal significance to Carla, as she had served on her church’s altar guild and had dressed the altar with these items each Sunday. They were a great comfort to her as she left her body.)
Ra gave the group a ritual of protection called the Circle of One in which Don and Jim would walk around Carla while repeating the words that reflected their desire to be of service to others. Then Don would take his chair and review the questions for Ra, and Jim would take his chair and begin a meditation that would last for the duration of the session. He would visualize light moving through Carla’s energy centers from the top of her head through the bottoms of her feet. Within a minute or two after completing the Circle of One, Ra would begin the session.
During the three year contact with Ra, Don was able to ask over 2,600 questions of Ra. Their replies allowed him to fit together many of the puzzle pieces that he needed to finally answer his biggest, most pressing questions.
¶The Seeker Seeks the One
Ra said that each of us is a seeker of truth. As we strengthen our will to seek the truth and our faith that we shall find love in ourselves and in the world around us, we also will surely find our true nature, which is another way of saying, the One Infinite Creator. As Ra said:
The seeker seeks the One. This One is to be sought, as we have said, by the balanced and self-accepting self, aware both of its apparent distortions and its total perfection. Resting in this balanced awareness, the entity then opens the self to the universe which it is. The light energy of all things may then be attracted by this intense seeking, and wherever the inner seeking meets the attracted cosmic prana, realization of the One takes place.
During our channeling sessions, the Confederation almost always prefaces each session by advising seekers to consider the messages carefully and to then use their own discernment to determine what is helpful and true for oneself, and leave the rest behind. We echo this sentiment to readers of this book, encouraging all who read Ra’s words to approach them with an open yet discerning mind. We used the word “true” above but remind you that you are the truth that you seek; no message, philosophy, or any combination of words can ever equal or substitute for who you are.
Blessings on your journey of seeking the One Infinite Creator in yourself, in your friends and family, and in the world around you.
¶Dedication
It would have been an honor for me to work with Don and Carla even without the Ra Contact. The harmony between the three of us was so obvious and easy that it felt like old friends coming together again for another adventure in consciousness. Whatever we did felt like what we should be doing to be of service in the way that our hearts knew best. Don was like a big brother who knew the secrets of how to play the game of life that Carla and I were just learning.
After the Ra contact, and Don’s passing, Carla and I shared a life together for 28 years as husband and wife, and she became the dearest, sweetest love of my life. Now that she is also gone, I, with my present-day companions Gary Bean and Austin Bridges, carry on the work that she and Don began in 1968 as Love & Light Research.
For all of these reasons this book is dedicated to Donald T. Elkins, whose intelligence, intuition, and experience with the paranormal perfectly prepared him to carry on an astounding conversation with those of Ra, and to Carla L. Rueckert who fearlessly offered her life in service to planet Earth as she served as the instrument for the Ra contact. Don’s wisdom and Carla’s love blazed a trail through the veil of forgetting for any who would become a seeker of truth.
— Jim McCarty
¶Note to the Reader
When Don, Carla and I were having these sessions with Ra back in the early ’80s we knew that we were living the best days of our lives. We knew that this work was the primary reason that we were on this Earth. We could hardly believe our good luck to be involved with extraterrestrial entities who spoke so eloquently, so precisely, and so profoundly about the nature of creation, how we all evolve through it, the meaning of life, and how love, light, and unity are the basic building blocks of all things. Quite simply, Ra spoke the language of our hearts and our souls, and we vibrated in harmony with everything that they had to say.
Over the years we have found that there is a small community of seekers of truth who also have this powerful sympathetic vibration with Ra’s information. If you are one of these people, welcome to our family. Even if we never meet, it’s good to know that you are here. In our shared service to the One Infinite Creator we are always together, no matter what the appearance of our physical realities may seem to be. So we send our love and light to you and ask that you share your love and light with everyone that you meet in all present and future life experiences.
— Jim McCarty