In this interview, Carla Rueckert discusses her journey into spiritual research, her experiences with channeling the Ra Material, and her insights on the soul’s growth, spiritual cycles, and the importance of choosing a path of service to others.

Lee Horstman – Interviewer

On Thursday, June 27, 1985, I’m Lee Horstman and am walking through the outskirts of Louisville, KY, with Carla Rueckert, and would like to invite her to make some introductory remarks of her own choosing.

Hello. I haven’t met you, 1 but I’m glad to long distance. Mr. Horstman said that you might like to know a little bit about our organization, so I’ll begin at the beginning and work forward.

We started out as a UFO contactee group—a physics teacher and 13 students—in 1962. We soon discovered that, although the messages that we got were purportedly from UFOs, the philosophy that we were receiving was infinitely more interesting than the various questions concerning the objective reality of UFO contact. Consequently, our research turned to a refinement of the philosophy of the UFOs. We found a great deal in common between the “cosmic sermonettes” of UFOs, as Brad Steiger called them, and the cosmic sermonettes of many inner plane teachers, and came to the conclusion that there was one basic spiritual message, and that we were receiving it in as many forms as possible on this planet because people really wanted to hear it. Some people can hear it through the church, some people can’t; and the people that can’t hear it through Orthodox Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism need to turn to less orthodox, and sometimes more direct, methods of revelation.

We’re still researching; we’re still looking; we don’t know what’s ahead. We do have some information that we’ve collected now that’s available, and some few conclusions that we’ve drawn. Lee?

Thank you, Carla. As a point of detail, I would just like to ask you to give the address of your organization in case anyone would like to write for more information, or to obtain copies of the material you do have presently published.

What we have is available from P.O. Box 5195, Louisville, KY, 40205. The name of our organization is L/L Research (that’s our publishing arm). The name of our nonprofit organization, as a whole, is the Rock Creek Research and Development Laboratories. 2 We have two kinds of things to offer. One is the written account of quite a few years of research into UFOs, and what came, we found out, to be related subjects, such as: ghosts, reincarnation, etc., the end of the world (that’s a book called Secrets of the UFO… terrible title, good book).

The other things that we have to offer are strictly channeling. Probably the most impressive body of research that we have is a four-volume compilation of sessions that we had with an entity calling itself Ra. The entity described itself as a social memory complex, and the language is extremely pithy and precise. The format is question and answer, and the spiritual subjects are covered in a very unique way.

We also put out conscious channeling, as opposed to the trance channeling of the Ra contact. We do that quarterly in a little newsletter we have called Light/Lines, and all those are available, as I said, from L/L Research, P.O. Box 5195, Louisville, KY, 40255… and if you get the zip right (Forget it if you spell Louisville wrong!) 3

Thank you again. One question that does come up pretty regularly, it would seem, is the interest in whether or not you ever make trips to different parts of the country to talk to groups, or meet with people, and I’d just like to ask that.

I do it, but not often. When Don Elkins was alive (the third member of our research group), he did much more of that because he was a pilot. Consequently, he was able to go just about anywhere Eastern went, for free! However, I—being a mere mortal and bound to

terra firma—need to be able to get there and back. With no monetary resources of my own, I have had to restrict my trips to those where people can pay me, not for what I’m doing, but just enough to get me there and back.

Thank you, Carla. I, at this point, would just like to interject my own opinion for the benefit of whoever might be listening: that in the six years of my active study of spiritualist topics (new age topics), I have found the four books titled, The Law of One, that were transmitted through Carla from Ra, to be of exceptional quality and of truly profound thought, and would recommend them to anyone who is seriously studying in the area of spiritual growth and self-growth of the soul.

Perhaps a question of a metaphysical nature, at this point, would be appropriate. I have personally been studying different books that talk about the cycles of growth, of the individual soul that we each have, and I would just like to ask you at this point, Carla, what your own feelings or views on that issue would be: the idea that the soul does go through cycles of growth and gradual flowering, really, like a flower.

As near as my human opinion has been able to pin it down (and this is, of course, extremely fallible), it seems that humans fall into two basic categories; and I know you’ve heard that before, but the rest of what I have to say isn’t what you’ve heard before. The two categories are those who have [and have not] yet decided that they want to pursue something, which is often called the truth (usually spelled with a “v,” “t-r-v-t-h,” “TRVTH”). 4

[Those who have not yet made the choice and] are bounced from pillar to post in life, reacting to everything, and learning slowly from their reactions, gaining biases, discovering things about themselves, but not consciously. The spiritual process works perfectly well even if you don’t try to make it work.

[For the rest], it is of extreme interest to those who do want to speed up that process that one apparently can by making a choice—a very profound choice in that once you make the choice, you can’t go back and unmake it. Once you’re on the journey of the spirit who seeks truth, you will never be away from that journey, no matter how many steps are taken at right angles to it (or 180 degrees away from it). There is no path that does not lead, for the conscious seeker, to a very rapid assimilation of truth, or to at least an accelerated intensification of the nature of experience.

When one has become conscious of seeking, and has decided to speed up the process, one does indeed go through many sub-incarnations (I suppose you’d call them), where you’re working with a lesson. The lesson is always a lesson of love. However, love includes absolutely every part of your experience, and consequently, the bad experiences, are just as full of love and just as full of learning as the good ones.

Often the difficult experiences are the most important. This is a doggone shame for those of us who like to have fun, but it seems to be true. One works and works, and chews and chews on the experience and the catalyst, and finally at some point one surrenders to the process. At that point there is some kind of a transformation. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and it all starts over because there is no ending to the learning as far as I can tell. So you are now at a different level, but you are still learning, still on the path, and still subject to the most intransigent of difficulties, which are designed to give you the opportunity to learn even more. Another lesson of love is being offered to you.

So that is, to me, what looks like the cycles that happen to us during our incarnation. It’s just a constant refining and enlarging of our perspective on what love is and what truth is.

Thank you, Carla. I’d like to bring up just an observation about spiritual growth that came up in a discussion with a friend of mine in Montpelier, Vermont, about six days ago. And it is something I’ve thought about quite a bit in the past year or so, based on different things I’ve been reading and studying and reflecting on. It would seem to me that you could sort of say that there are two ways of realization of the divine nature of things. One of them seems to be a sort of sidewards, immediate cognition that everything is awareness, that everything is blissful and eternal, and there is a sort of instant liberation that is possible by this means of realization. It can occur in a dream state, in a waking state, in a state of meditation, or even in a state of pronounced physical activity.

There’s another sort of realization that does seem to occur, and this really involves an evolution of form. And many of the more esoteric spiritual texts discuss our emergence into a new form, when our awareness has evolved through the cycles of earth reincarnation. We finally leave the school-room Earth, and activate our awareness in other worlds in forms that might be very incomprehensible to us today—and that these more elaborate forms give us a much deeper perspective into the fullness of the transcendental nature of the divine.

What I’m trying to say is that there might be a form of realization that requires evolution into a form beyond what we know here on earth, and there seems to be another kind of realization that is quite immediate and available, not just to any person, but to all beings who choose to look towards it. And as a philosophic question, this has interested me that there are these two kinds of realization, and I wonder if you might make any remark on this thought.

Well, my immediate thought may not be to your point. My immediate thought is that there are birthrights that we all have as we enter into incarnation on planet Earth. The “third density,“ which is the term Ra uses for this particular density of experience, is just as full of the love and light of the Infinite Creator as any other portion of the creation. However, much is veiled from us in our conscious mind and stored quite accessible, but stored at various levels, some very deep, in our subconscious or unconscious mind]. The Creator is all around us. As I’m walking down the street, I see the beautiful blue sky, and the green leaves of summer, and the soft birdsong that you can probably hear on this tape. It’s quite beautiful.

And at any moment, the actual nature of our beings may respond to the Creator that’s all around us and within us. These spontaneous things can happen. I think that was probably one of the most exciting things about the psychedelic era. Although highly illegal, it enabled many people to reach a place which usually is only reached spontaneously, and that’s the experience of instantaneous joy. I don’t recommend the use of any kind of drugs for trying to achieve that state due to the fact that, if you aren’t achieving it on your own, you may well not be ready (the mind, body, spirit, emotions—the whole thing) to carry the responsibility for that realization; and therefore, you could be confusing yourself more than you’re giving yourself help. It feels good at the time—the ramifications are not so good.

When one has, through meditation or whatever works for each person, reached a place in the mind and in the spirit where this spontaneous realization of joy comes from time to time, then you know that you’re on the right track. The realizations that you work for are, of course, entirely different in that you are conscious of the process. However, they are also through what I would call grace, open to the excitement of the instantaneous breakthrough.

So even if you’re consciously plodding along and you’re in the dark night of the soul, even if you’ve been in the desert forever it seems and nothing is ever going to come to you, maybe especially when you’re in that particular situation, it’s time to buck up and carry on even more than you would be doing if you were with no conscious problems on your mind, or a desire to solve any particular difficulty—because the dark night of the soul is probably the most productive, although definitely the most painful, state to be in. And the more you outlast that dark night, the closer comes the dawn of instantaneous realization.

Thank you very much Carla, and I’m kind of glad that you made those last remarks, because it leads well into the next question I really wanted to bring up. And it’s a question that would, I hope, be one I could ask on behalf of many who, like myself, have experienced (or are experiencing) that dark night of the soul, and may really feel very alienated from any form of belief at all, and may feel trapped in a universe that is seemingly without rhyme or reason, or without joy, and are very very confused, and despairing and miserable in many different ways. Certainly most of us have experienced this to some extent, and I would just like to ask on behalf of, I guess my prior self and anyone who-might be listening, who does feel terribly bitter and unhappy about life. What would you suggest as the first steps to try to bring about a happier experience of reality within/without oneself?

Probably the first step is a backwards one. That is to take it easy; do whatever makes you feel good, that doesn’t harm somebody else, of course. Go have a pizza. Stretch out with a good book. Go to sleep. Get your mind off of the terrible immediacy of whatever it is that has begun to haunt you, because there is no joy in the intense concentration on what is difficult or negative.

After you have given yourself a rest, which has its own kind of healing, you’re then in a position to do some conscious work, not before. I think it’s really important to be good to yourself, and affirm to yourself that you’re worth being good to by just letting yourself knock it off for a little while. Then you come back, and you consciously begin to attempt to stretch that situation: stretch the way you look at it, pull yourself back as if you were a zoom lens on a camera that was zoomed in far too close and the director was yelling, “Pull back! Pull back!” And you pull back until you begin to see that we are living on a ball rotating in space at the very edge of a rather insignificant galaxy near the outer rim of the Milky Way, and begin to see the grandeur and the majesty of the part of all of us that is ancient, and wonderful, and majestic, and, without question, other than mundane. For all of it is too elegant in design, too fastidious in pattern, to be some kind of cosmic happening. It was planned; we know that. The question is, “What was the truth about the planning?”

When you’ve gotten your mind at this place, you’re now no longer huddled over your little problem trying to make it grow. Almost by your protection of it, you’ve exposed it to the cosmos. You’ve exposed it to the greatest that you can think or feel or imagine. Ra said that the greater the wideness of the viewpoint, the less the distortion. 5 So when one goes through the dark night of the soul, which everyone who seeks eventually does, and then does again, it’s part of the process. The thing to do is first protect yourself from cracking up by giving yourself permission to just have some good time in your own way, and then perhaps a meditation would be the best. Imagine yourself pulling back and back and back, seeing the planet Earth, seeing the color of it as we’ve seen from the photographs taken from space, seeing this beautiful blue planet with clouds around it, and then pulling back and back and back until you can no longer see that planet, and then back and back until you can no longer quite make out the galaxy. And yet, you know that you are upheld and in the creation. There is nowhere else to go, and in that context is the greater healing that can be done if you open yourself to it. But, it will be done not on your time, not on your terms. It will be done according to what plans you may have made before incarnation in conjunction with what I would call your Higher Self, or angelic presences. Since I’m a mystical Christian, I consider those two terms interchangeable, although I don’t try to force that concept on other people.

Thank you, Carla. My next question I would like to preface with a paraphrase of a note that I wrote to Carla and her research associate, Jim McCarty, about six months ago where I said that the four books that I had found most helpful were the four books of The Law of One, and The Bhagavad-Gita, Yogananda, and the writings of the philosopher Dr. Franklin Merrell-Wolff. I feel that there’s been a real valuable contribution to my understanding from each of those sources.

Certainly Yogananda’s writing speaks eloquently of the simple usefulness of trying to love God.

And Dr. Wolff’s writings discuss the equally simple idea that all we behold and all that we are is basically one substance: consciousness, and a consciousness that cannot be defined in any other terms that is primordial and eternal.

And certainly the scripture known as The B’gagavad-Gita discusses how we can obtain a greater unification with that primordial awareness of which we are a part.

And finally, The Ra Material helped me to realize that perhaps the most profound lesson that we face in this planet experience as humans is to realize that there really is a distinction we need to work through in order to progress onward in our growth and unification. And that is this issue of service towards others or service to self—basically a nature that might be generous and positive, and a nature that might be selfish and somewhat negative. And this, to me, was really the most exciting aspect of The Ra Material for me, as far as filling in an area of further understanding, and I would just like to ask Carla to amplify on this issue from her unique vantage point of understanding, having of course channeled The Ra Material, and to just amplify on this issue of the choice we need to look at of service to self versus service to others.

I guess, in the first place, what I need to do is say that I don’t have any unique qualifications for discussing this. What I did, in channeling The Ra Material, was go to sleep. I don’t feel that gives me a unique vantage point, actually; it’s sort of like saying to the pipe, “That is good water that you’re running there; I’m really proud of you.” But with that disclaimer made—

And also with apologies for walking past our local country club with a beer truck, a person making new driveways or something with a jackhammer, and a fellow with a golf cart, sans golf clubs, they came loose , we shall move right along, [this is an] appropriate juncture for the question!

Yes, the world is full of seeming divisions, but I don’t think that people who are seeking to move forward on the spiritual path need to worry about polarizing negatively, as opposed to polarizing positively. And by that I mean, if you had a positive pole to a magnet, and a negative pole to a magnet, you don’t have to worry about pulling yourself down to the negative end of it. What you have to worry about, if you’re seeking, is keeping yourself from going towards the positive by rocking in a well of neutrality that is in the middle. It’s very difficult to get out of that. Every thought that you have, every action that you take moment by moment—not day by day— reflects not only how you see the situation (whether you see love in whatever situation you’re momentarily facing) but also how you act in regards to what you’re seeing (whether your action reflects the love that you have seen in the situation).

Many people who are sincere seekers bounce themselves from one ideology, theology or dogma to another, one weekend workshop to another, one seminar to another. And it all feels very good and friendly, and there are lots of wonderful people, and it’s a wonderful experience, and it gives you the energy of everyone else that’s at a weekend or seminar or whatever, and makes you feel that you’ve had a true mountaintop experience. However, once you leave that carefully cloistered and structured atmosphere, in which freedom reigns and love is the answer to all questions, you are standing on what may be a mountaintop, what may be a very deep valley, what may be a plain, and you’re saying to yourself, “Now, how do I get back up there?” Well, you don’t want to get back up there. What you want to do is get that “up there” within yourself and carry it with you. It’s already in there; the point is to find it. And I again recommend meditation.

Because the process of polarization is constant and ongoing, and is often very, very conscious, it sometimes seems very tedious, because of having to keep paying attention to what you’re saying, what you’re doing, what the situation is, trying to find the love in everything. But the polarization principle works like that moment to moment. So, what you need to avoid is not negativity, unless you’re fighting every day with someone, or thinking rotten thoughts every day of someone. You don’t need to worry about the negativity; what you need to worry about is reacting to situations instead of acting creatively in situations. Reaction in a conscious person is the second best thing to do. Creation of an action that is designed to reflect the love of the moment, and validate the love within any person that is with you, is that which will polarize. And that takes a certain amount of work—spiritual work—which is what we’re here to do.

Thank you again. And I notice that we’re nearing the end of this side of this tape, and in the tradition of Elizabeth Gipps, who always concludes her interviews with a very nice question (and I hope that perhaps this interview will be of use to Elizabeth’s program), I’d like to ask the question she always asks, or almost always, at the end of an interview: Are there any concluding remarks, of any kind at all, that you would like to add to what’s been talked about, and could you just make those remarks in whatever way you think is best for you?

I really have nothing to say beyond my desire that anyone who listens to these words hears what he needs to hear. I wish you all love and an infinite supply of the light with which you will build your spiritual life. Blessings to all of you, and the work that you’re doing… and have a ball!

  1. Carla is presumably speaking to Lee Horstman’s audience. ↩

  2. L/L Research is the dba name of Rock Creek Research and Development Laboratories. The organization is, for all intents and purposes, L/L Research. ↩

  3. Approximately 10 years after this interview, and after the advent of the internet, www.llresearch.org was launched, which now makes available all of L/L Research’s work for free to the interested seeker. ↩

  4. A reference to the B.C. comic strip that featured a pedestal with the word “TRUTH” inscribed on its front where the “U” appeared as a “V.” ↩

  5. Ra: “As in all distortions, the source is the limit of the viewpoint.” #99.5 ↩