CAVEAT: Warning! These letters have not been edited by Carla. Expect errors.
Dear M,
I am sitting here in my little nest, M, and got your revised letter to T this morning and found that our letters had crossed in the mail. You haven’t gotten my tape yet and when you listen to my tape, you will probably be able to go back and see a lot of things in the letter that you might want to think about. At least I hope so because the letter as it stood would hurt T tremendously and this was in no way your intention.
Because of the fact that the second letter was even more radically slugged than the first, and I don’t mind you for this. You’ve worked very, very hard for where you have gotten. It is just a mistake to take credit for doing anything but hanging in there. The fruits of a spiritually directed life come through one and bless others more than the structure of things being dead. You, yourself, are completely self-sufficient and serve the self. In actuality, we are all self-sufficient and we do serve ourselves necessarily in that we must be in good shape in our consciousness in order to be of service-to-other people.
But just to briefly recapitulate the points that I made about T that I think are important and would cause you perhaps to change the letter would be simply a change, a shift in the point of view. Those of us on a spiritual path must be on a spiritual path. We have had no choice. We are made up differently than some. I mean, everyone is different, but there is a certain kind of person that is so utterly fascinated with the mystery that nothing on earth could keep him from seeking. This has been the case for me all of my life. I have not had a choice about it in terms of my preference. I certainly have had a choice in an absolute sense, but my preferences have always been away from worldly things, even when I was offered marriage by millionaires, which I have been a couple of times. I just did not take advantage of it because my spiritual ground was not seen.
I was thought of as sweet and dear, but basically a fluff head who needed to be protected from the real world and in my own opinion, they were trying to protect me from an illusion, which, because I saw the world in a perhaps unreal way, I would not have to be protected from, and I have always chaffed at over-protection.
Unfortunately, this is one of my big lessons in this life because as independent as I am, I now need physically to be dependent on Jim or someone for so many things if they are going to get done. I mean, I could cut my hair off, for instance, and then I could probably wash it, but I can’t even get a comb through it. My hands aren’t that strong any more.
What I am trying to say is that T is an earth-normal person. You and I and Jim and Roger and Ken, and many others you have not met who are known to me, and to you, are not earth-normal people. There is nothing good or bad about one or the other. T, and you and I probably all had the same basic upbringing, probably fairly bourgeois. Mother described our family—she is a psychologist and studies this kind of statistical grouping as hanging onto upper-middle class by our toes and fingers.
I think that simply meant that although we did not have the appropriate money situation for upper-middle class people, our values being strongly towards the arts. We all sang and I danced for twelve years, and piano playing was done in the family, although I flunked that one because I wouldn’t practice. Anyway it was that kind of upbringing and I learned many, many things, some of which I have continued to hold dear, and they are deeply conventional and probably very much like T.
I love Christmas. I love to get and give presents. I love to go to church. I really enjoy having the house clean. I enjoy the marriage state more than the unmarried state. I desperately hoped for children in this incarnation. I tried hard. I could never get the situation to be appropriate and I sacrificed greatly. However, I did not sacrifice because I wanted to because I wanted to change. I sacrificed because I had to and I think you have to realize, or I feel (it is just my opinion, just forget anything I am saying that does not make sense to you. You know that.) But I have no money in whether or not you take any piece of advice I give you. I just want to help you if I can. So I am running these things past you myself.
In my sixteen-year relationship with Don. Now you ask why didn’t I have kids when I was wanting them. I did get pregnant and lost the baby when I was engaged to be married at the age of (I think I had the miscarriage at the age of 19). I had been engaged since I was 17 and it was pretty soon before the wedding day and it seemed like an okay thing to do, and then he just couldn’t face marriage and sailed away, literally, in a boat that he had made, down the Mississippi River. He was going to sail around up the Atlantic coast back to Cape Cod—that was what he did instead of get married.
I definitely did not want to get married for quite some time after that and did not and when I was 21, I ended up marrying a fellow that I loved dearly, but was not in love with, but I thought that we had work to do together. We were folk singers and made a little money singing in coffee houses. I am sure you can’t remember back that far, but in the sixties there were lots of coffee house type places where there were folk singers singing real folk songs and songs that they had made up, which are folk songs. I had made up many and Jim DeWitt had made up the tunes to them and I ended up marrying him because we had the green light to go on tour as the opening act for Peter, Paul and Mary. Jim didn’t want to go on a trip with me with our being unmarried. He didn’t feel it was right. It did not bother me, but it bothered him and eventually he talked me into getting married. It was really a stupid idea because as soon as we married, his desire to serve the Creator went out the window and he was in a world of hurt. He couldn’t even get out of bed for two days after he got married; he had such a terrible reaction to it. And he never could hold a job.
So I would say, “Please, just hold a job for six months and I will get pregnant.” He very much wanted to have kids too and, this was because DeWitt was a real intellectual and he believed that nothing was known, nothing could be known and the only contribution to life he could make was to put our genes into the gene pool because we were both intelligent. He figured if I didn’t figure it out and he didn’t figure it out, which was extremely unlikely, that is the truth of everything, that maybe one of our descendants would mate with somebody else who was bright and just the perfect way to complement everything else in that person, perhaps would solve the mystery. And so he saw that as being the one service that he could actually do on earth since everything else was a sham. Jim was a trip to be around. DeWitt, that is.
He was a lot of fun. We laughed through seven times that he left me. He absolutely hated marriage. He never, ever stopped loving me, but then along came Don, of course, after Jim left me for the last time. Ironically Jim did get his first full-time job about two weeks after he left me and filed for divorce and has never stopped working full-time since except when he has moved and to get it together in a new place.
The biological clock does run. Three different times between the ages of 28 and 33, I can’t remember the exact times, I’m sorry, but that is the age, I either packed and physically tried to leave the apartment or I tried to get my mind in gear to make plans of what I was going to do next, where I was going to go because I had had offers of marriage. Well twice because I had had offers of marriage from someone who was capable of giving me as many babies as I wanted and had the money to raise as many babies as I wanted. This was a very important combination to me. They cost an awful lot of money and so, I was looking not only for somebody that I really liked and could love, but also somebody that was able to support a family without dying. Because the providing bit, it is not fair that it has to happen to men, but I wanted to stay home very much and be a home.
I don’t think you make a home. You are a home. The house is just a bunch of clutter. The home is the safe place, is the woman of the house or the person of the house. A man can make a home too, but usually he doesn’t have enough of that stuff in him that somehow makes a safe place for people.
And I couldn’t, I couldn’t walk out on this man. I absolutely could not walk out on him. So my upbringing didn’t work. My upbringing has never worked. You are looking at an unconventional person. Or you are listening to an unconventional person. Unless you have my picture, you are not looking at me.
What I am saying about this is that it is not something you can talk anybody into. It is not something you want to talk anybody into. You do not work with relationships by saying, “After you change, I will love you and everything will be fine.” If you can’t take a person exactly as the person is, then what you need to do after expressing that in a compassionate way, is to move on.
I will tell you a dream I had a long time ago. It was when Don was first courting me and he did a pretty good job of it, you know, taking me different places on vacations and was very nice about it. Very old-fashioned and very much a gentleman. Of course, I never had babies with him because the man was a monk, not that he was incapable at all. He was a dandy, but he just felt that there was spiritual value in being chaste, whereas I would prefer being chased, and Jim feels the same way as I do. And neither of us could grasp Don’s willingness to yield up a clearly positive source of experience between two people. A good bonding mechanism, a good way to have just fun, just have a ball. Something that you can count on to be simple, you know, in a world full of very difficult communications. Believe me, any relationship that you take on living a spiritual life, is going to be an ordeal and you are going to have to be behind it 100% or you won’t make it.
So you are not behind T 100% in her perfectly acceptable to most of the rest of the world-self. You would only be satisfied if she could grasp the ideas that move you so and be moved by them equally. This is not going to happen. I can almost say that for sure since you have had seven years and in seven years if you can’t inspire someone by your life, and your example, and your consciousness, and the way you smile and the way you radiate, etc., either you haven’t been a persuasive advocate or she is just an earth-normal person. Don used to call them civilians.
This was my dream: I was in a very large, about three stories with a captain’s walk and cupola and various things like that, an old Victorian farm house kind of a place at the edge of a canal. I never have seen a canal, but I imagine it was like the inland waterway or the Erie Canal or something like that. It was a made river, and I was up on the top floor of the house and the house began burning around me and I didn’t know what to do because there was smoke on the stairs. Don had a boat and it was also three levels, but it was small like a tugboat or a houseboat. It was a big thing. He came charging through the smoke and fire with a captain’s hat on his head, (the ship captain, the black kind of sort of Greek sailing hat) and picked me up and effortlessly carried me. Which he could do, he was 6’ 5“ and I’m a little thing, down the stairs, and got me out of the house just as it really went up like a torch and walked me down to his ship and put me on it. And I looked back at the house and it was being consumed to the ground.
He put me up in a kind of a crow’s nest place up on highest level of his ship. It also started burning. He put that fire out, took me down on the deck, and I stood at the rail with him looking at the passing scene, which you know my house was receding into the distance, a pile of charred ashes. And ahead was all strange country and he said in the dream to me, looking me straight in the eye, “Are you sure that you want to go with me because you will never touch dry land again?”
And in the dream, I said, “Yes, I’m quite sure. Whatever comes, I want to go with you.”
Now I have thought a lot about that dream. I felt that it had a lot to do with my sexuality and the fact that it really needed to be disciplined. I was never a promiscuous person. I was always a serial monogamous person, but you could measure my life in terms of my relationships and I think one reason for that was that I simply did not date until I was engaged and then there followed several different guys, all of whom for one reason or another were either treating me badly or specifically asked me to go ahead and have affairs with somebody else rather than bother him. So I always sort of had a backlog of people. If Mackenzie, my first true love jilted me the week before the wedding, there were eleven different people that asked me to marry them the weekend that that happened as they heard about it in our little, I guess about 20, 24 group of people. Most of them were guys and all of them were unmarried at the time since we were still in college and I was working with the meditation group and all that at that time.
In-between that and the people that had gone to my classes and everything, there was just a backlog of people that really liked me and really thought that I was a good kid and had gotten to know me in very non-threatening circumstances where I was somebody else’s gal and I was safe. Once you get to know somebody, a lot of the fears of being possessed and all of that kind are laid to rest because you observe that this particular woman did not treat her guy that way. So I just never had been without a guy and I really never had reckoned with the fact that I did pretty much move my life around to suit whatever guy that I was with. Because making love meant so very much to me, more so I think than most women.
I think most women take it like they like the touching part and they like the reassurance. I like all of that too, but I am an unusual woman in that I feel about sex like a guy does and I would very much like to get laid as often as possible, so I went through a lot of discipline, a lot of thinking. I was about two years celibate with Don before I decided that I would go ahead and take a lover. And those two years was serious discipline for me in which I reckoned with the fact that an animal had sort of given itself up to my consciousness. This bi-pedal, relatively hairless being, this animal that has instincts and everything, I was asking this animal to bend itself way out of its own natural shape and its own natural rhythms for the sake of my spiritual seeking.
You are not going to find a lot of women capable of doing this. You are usually tested on your strongest temptation and the strongest temptation for me always has been motherhood, wifehood, homehood. I just never had any worldly ambition. It has been the despair of many, many teachers. I am one of those people, I mean R can probably tell you the same kind of story. There are a lot of intelligent people in this world. I just happen to be one of them.
But you know, my creative writing teacher said, “You are a major writer.” Another English teacher that I had many, many classes with and whom I absolutely adored said, “We need your voice and American criticism.” I didn’t want to be an American critic, a literary critic.
And then you go to the ballet teacher who cried when I quit and the guy who taught me piano for a year, and showed, and played back a recording of a concert that I had given and he said, “How many mistakes did you make?”
And I said, “Three.”
And I was bracing myself for his criticism because he was mad as a hornet and he said, “Do you realize that you have the instinct of a performer? You never stopped playing. You never lost the beat. I put a metronome on you and you may have done three mistakes, but they went by so quickly that nobody but you and I heard them. That kind of a person is a performer. Other people simply become good piano players,” and he said, very bitterly and angrily, “you will not practice and I am not going to have any part of this frustration any more.” And I went through that with three different teachers.
The problem was I wanted to compose and they wanted me to do hand and exercises and I just didn’t have the discipline. I never have. The only disciplines I have really are those that I must have because of my desire to seek the Creator. This is abnormal, M. It is not wrong, but it is not right. It is different. You and I are a different breed of cat. And we cannot get our noses stuck up in the air about that because we are walking around in bozo animal bodies, just like anybody else, and our biological clocks tick. We just do different things with that catalyst than a person who has bought the basic program.
Now Don called people like T civilians. I always thought that was a separating, distancing kind of a thing, but that is what Don did with everybody, himself included. But it is probably a term that you would recognize and be able to resonate with, that she more or less is a civilian in a spiritual sense, and we are soldiers or warriors in a spiritual sense. That is, we live our lives with a certain daily discipline and we are going to be doing that until the day we die. We are also going to be going through accelerated periods of change and growth that will look like one step forward and two steps back sometimes. We need a special kind of encouragement from our friends. I don’t believe that T is capable of nurturing you or that you are capable of nurturing T for these reasons.
There are extreme benefits to a match between two spiritually motivated people. There are also extreme difficulties. I can give you only two examples because I have only been with two men who I felt satisfactorily fulfilled their disciplines of spiritual growth, and that is Don and Jim. They are both incredible people. But with Don, I had to accept a relationship that was bent very, very much out of shape. It was not entirely benign actually because Don liked to make me more humble and make me think more slowly, etc. And he liked being a teacher, but not a student, so we were constantly coming up against his attitude of, “I will teach you and you will learn, but I will not learn from you.” I simply had to accept the fact that he did not think that he had anything to learn from me. That he did not think that I was a particularly valuable human being.
He just happened to be besotted with me. That was basically the relationship. I think he thought that for a person, I was a good person. But he didn’t think well of anybody, even himself.
His basic attitude, when I would say that something was troubling me was, “What is it going to matter in ten thousand years?” He really, really tried to keep a long distance between himself and any immediate problem, and during the sixteen years I was with him, I did his business to the point that I would go down and appear in court for his traffic tickets or something like that. It was just insane. I had his Power of Attorney. I did every bit of his business. I mean, thank God, because when he got mentally ill, everything was in place for me to take care of him, to the best of my ability. And as you can see, I had very disastrous failures in that one. He somehow got a gun and shot himself.
I don’t think he did it. I think that it was psychic greeting, but still, one does feel one’s failures, but at any rate, life with Don, although very joyful, was demanding and life with Jim also, as sweet and wonderful as he is, is demanding to me because Jim is practically my antithesis in times of physical energy as opposed to mental/emotional/spiritual energy.
Jim’s forte is physical energy. His spiritual energy is tremendous, but very, very stable, and steady, and kind of bedrock and he has done enough work that I don’t think he has got much more to do because he is pretty clear, and at the same time, he has to deal with the fact that I am still a very, very imperfect person. He has to deal with my complaints because I hurt. He has to deal with my irritability when I don’t want to be helped, but I have to be helped, and he is the poor bozo who is trying to help me and I am mad at the whole situation. He has to put up with at least one PMS fit a month. The only thing I can do is say, “I’m really sorry, Jim, I can tell that the fit is coming on now. I don’t know what it is about,” and he knows me now.
He trusts me and he is able to say, “Okay, let’s have the fit now,” and he’ll let me get everything in the world out and then I can cry. He doesn’t feel threatened because he knows it is not really the truth. I am just having a hormonal fit, and it is physiologically, completely understandable.
Now you just don’t want to have this kind of thing in a spiritually, accelerated growth pattern, but if you hook up with a woman, darling, you are going to have it. So there is a lot of work to do with any woman and I am figuring that you think that I am probably one of the better examples of a spiritually motivated woman as opposed to earth-normal. Well, no matter how spiritually motivated you are, you are still dealing with the animal inside and you have to make your peace with that animal in all sorts of ways. I think perhaps the worse that Jim has had to deal with is the low self-esteem that I gathered as the child of an alcoholic. I was overly responsible and nothing I did ever pleased my parents. They were perfectionists and they would look at anything that I did, and if it was not absolutely perfect, they would criticize it. This was in order to make it even better because they assumed that I was going to be good. I was somewhat of a child prodigy and it really worked against me as a child. It was a very lonely, sad kind of a childhood. And I’ll bet that your childhood was a little bit off also and I’ll bet that you have some eccentricities that are basically earth-normal eccentricities.
My worse eccentricity has to do with my low self-esteem and that is that I can’t take a joke. I try to take them, but I usually don’t see that they are jokes. They sound to me, because of the fact that I’m too sensitive, like the truth with a twist on it so that the person is supposed to laugh instead of say, “Ouch.” To me, that is what most joking around is—venting veiled hostilities in an acceptable way and than the person isn’t a good sport or isn’t a jock or whatever if he doesn’t just laugh it off.
It doesn’t make any sense to me and I have always fallen down heavily in that department of taking a joke or taking criticism, either one, because I always try my hardest and if I don’t see the joke, it is not funny. I’ve got a terrific sense of humor, but man, you try to joke around with me about something that I’m sensitive about and I’m pitiful. I am a wommit, earth-normal all the way, low self-esteem. I am working on it, but I haven’t gotten too far with it yet. I am also working on other aspects of low self-esteem and that is the addiction of buying clothes.
Now I will say that I do not go to the most expensive shops and knock off a $325 dress every week, but I will say that I have too many clothes and I’d like to have more. It is sort of like, if I am depressed about something, I can go and get a new dress or a new something or other, a new outfit, a new pair of shoes or something, and I feel better. Lingerie is especially, I love the stuff, especially if it is cotton and pretty. I can feel a whole lot better if I can find something really pretty and that is so pretty, etc. And I know it, and I am working on it.
And Jim has a few earth-normal things that he is working on. His is almost the same, but he’s got a few little rough edges and we help each other with that. We forgive each other for that. We encourage each other when we are a little bit depressed over our earth-normal tendencies. With Jim it is nothing more than getting angry at his typewriter every once in a while. Getting frustrated and really wanting to break something. I do not feel that this is nearly as twisted and deformed as my problems with low self-esteem. Nevertheless, I find that I can help Jim tremendously by accepting him as he is, sitting with him through the temper tantrum, having total faith that he will not hurt me, and not caring what else he might hurt like my furniture or make a dent in the wall. These things he has done from time to time, but it is not important.
What is important is that he is suffering and it is time for me, without any judgment whatsoever, to be there for him.
I think you need to have a lot of things in common on a real basic level before you can do that for somebody else. You have to be motivated to do that for somebody else. You have to be wanting that relationship very hard in order to keep clear from day to day and not let the bricks start being laid between you, one by one, until they become an insurmountable wall. I am not trying to talk you out of marriage in general. I am trying to help you to see that for a spiritually motivated person, it is an ordeal.
A hero and a heroine set upon ordeal, a journey, a search for the grail because they are holding hands and give each other strength in ways that men and women can and in ways that any spiritual companion can. They are better able to learn. Each of them has the mirror of the other person being transparently honest and spontaneous so that they are able to see how they are playing. They have an audience and Jim and I are marvelous audiences for each other and sometimes the things that we see in the mirror are very unpleasant and things that we have to work on, but thank God that I have a mirror. Let me tell you, I have said no to so many proposals of marriage for one simple reason and that is, that they would not be a good mirror for me. Everything that I did, they would say, “That is wonderful.” Not Jim. Not Don. Not anybody whom I have ever hooked up with over the long haul. I simply cannot live in that kind of atmosphere because I am not being taught.
I guess I was too much criticized as I grew up and I feel that there is no way that everything I am doing is right.
We are uplifted, but we are different and it would be unkind, indeed, to T to ask her to change, to expect her to change, to want her to change. It is time to let go of this woman, in my opinion. Just ignore me if this doesn’t sound right. But I think you need to realize that you will suffer, and be prepared and accept gratefully the process of grieving. It is a fairly long drawn-out process. This woman has been gentle and sweet and kind with you. She has opened herself to you intimately. You have suckled the milk of human kindness from her breasts. This is a woman you love. It didn’t work out. And it is very, very sad when things don’t work out. She is not wrong and you are not right. It just didn’t work out. There is an incompatibility of desire, which makes the prediction of future difficulties leading to a break almost sure. Since T is not capable even, apparently of supporting you in what you do, to the extent that M’s K does, and I have to give her full marks for that.
She buckled down and she supports M so much. She doesn’t understand everything that he does. She is an earth-normal, but her intelligence is such, and her love of M is the over-riding thing. She is just totally besotted with him and she wanted his babies and she wanted to live with him and she is willing to settle for what she can get.
I don’t think T would be willing and humble enough to settle for what you could give her. Just my opinion.
Now I need to talk to you about spiritual pride. I can’t think of anything more deadly for a seeker. It is difficult not to feel spiritual pride because the spiritual path is so rewarding and uplifting and when you make companions on that path that are compatible with you as you have with R, and I know that that companionship is meaning a tremendous amount to both of you. You almost sound manic. I mean you are just so happy right now and so relieved, I feel from your letters. Sort of a feeling of relief and, of course, you have been working for Eastern all of these years and stuff and then you go out to California and the sun is shining and you are doing work with somebody you really enjoy and you might even enjoy the work. R does to a certain extent. It is a test of creativity involved as well as nice big muscle work, which I think is good for anybody.
I used to enjoy putting the books back on the shelf just to get a chance in the library to get up and do something, instead of fiddling around with my small muscles.
To feel separate from other people is to take part in an illusion and in spiritual pride. What you are basically saying is, “I’m here and you are over there. And I am right and you are wrong.” And this is a kind of hubris or spiritual pride that inevitably brings its nemesis or its result and that is that you will be the recipient of earth-normal catalyst in such a way that you will find yourself strongly motivated towards humility.
We don’t have to be prideful. We can instead try to figure out what our situation actually is. Our situation actually is that we are in training to be better and better servants. Not leaders of men, but servants of men. In the serving is the leading, but we must remember that we are slaves. We are children. We are living in a world of positioning masters, that is, anyone that deals with negative ways of behavior towards people is constantly positioning himself and trying to protect himself and manipulating other people so that he is in a good position. What you are trying to do is eliminate those feelings of separation from other people, and learn to serve any person, no matter what the outer view of that person, as you would serve Christ. That is the basic idea. Or God incarnate.
I don’t want to use any vocabulary that wipes you out so each person is the Creator and that is what we attempt to hollow ourselves out to the point where that which comes through us can see that, can treat people that way, but it is a different kind of way and I believe I would call it the freedom of humility. That is the way that I would encourage.
We think we have free will when we are doing what we want to do on an outer earthly level, but very, very often that which we think of as free will is basically willfulness. It is misbehavior as well as behavior. It is whims of iron as well as good ideas carried through. Yet, as one begins to make some progress along the spiritual path, or one has been on the path for a while, one finds oneself trying to hollow oneself out. Trying, not precisely to get rid of the willful person, but to arrange that will in such a way that it is behind our deepest desire and not behind the various things that free will brings before our eyes, be it somebody to date or somebody to marry, or a new friend or a new situation of any kind.
We want to become earthen vessels, which carry precious contents. We cannot help our vessel being one of earth. We can, if we are a certain kind of person, desire to become a hollow vessel, ready to be filled with creative Love and Truth. It is somewhere along that process that we begin to experience true freedom because true freedom, as far as I am concerned, is the freedom to do the work that we came here to do. It is not the freedom to do anything one cares to do. That is one of those grab-all-the-gusto-you-can sort of cliché things that sounds great, but actually we want our lives to have a point. We want them to be a tapestry woven beautifully and not randomly and so we really do work towards real freedom and that work must be done in an atmosphere of humility.
You must, I believe, begin to see yourself in your true situation, which is that you are completely ensconced in an illusion and you must do some minimal tacking, etc. to get into proper positions, these of the government, the IRS, getting along with paying taxes and just being a pepper. Getting along in the world, but that is a minimal part of the self and becomes more and more so as the person is more and more spending the time in the now, in the present moment, in the infinite moment, and attempting to be a hollowed-out channel for love and light.
I say this not just to anybody that would channel, but to anybody.
I feel that you are a deeply humble man and that the sharpness and pride in your letter was part of the process of learning who you are, and this is the first requirement that I ask of the people that I work with anyway. Is that they go through this deep soul searching to figure out what they are living for, what they would die for, what they are passionate about? I want to create the kind of soil in which intense emotions may grow. The emotions of love, compassion, humility, thanksgiving, worship, all of these things. The ground is made ready for these things and softened—the heart is softened by humility. We have to think of how well we think of ourselves. And it is fine to think well of yourself, that we are only dimly aware of what the true situation is. We are only dimly intellectually aware of the fact that we are a whirling mass of energy, totally illusory, in which sits the only real thing that I know of: consciousness.
M, I just felt, since you sent me the new and improved letter, which was actually more radical than the first one, I wanted to do several things. First of all, I wanted to try to help you see what you could do by rewriting the letter to T. That is, give her her self-respect and let her go and realize that you are going to hurt like hell, for maybe three years or so. You have been together seven years. These things don’t end in an instance and it is very painful to say good-bye to someone whom you have loved. I think you will be causing her more hurt personally by marrying her than by letting her go to seek another earth-normal person, but that is for you to decide and if you marry T, she will be loved by me as if she were my sister, so don’t take this as anything against T. I like T fine. I just recognize a civilian, as Don would say, when I see one.
And the other thing that I would say is that I feel that that letter is one of the most inspiring and marvelous letters that I have been able to read from anybody. Yes, your language was strong in some cases, but it is because you cared so much about the Infinite Creator and my heart goes out to you completely. You and R are two of my favorite students ever and really colleagues more than students, although I do accept the teaching role, especially with R, but you are very dear to me and I don’t want you to take any of the things that I am saying to you about spiritual pride or any of that as criticisms, because they are just temptations that come to people who are trying very hard to do something that is difficult, and that is to live the life of a priest or a monk. I realize that chastity, and poverty, and obedience are supposedly the hallmarks of a monk, but I think that you do many sacrificial things in search of a better life style that expresses your faith and your abiding and I think a lot of you. I really do. I love you dearly and I hope that you recognize that as I suggest that you let T go, that I know at the same time, what a sadness this is going to bring you and T. I just want you to let her down as easily and gently as you can.
If I were to write the letter, I would probably say something like:
“Dear T, I’ve thought and thought since I came to California, and I am afraid that I am not the father for your children. I really want you to have children. I want you to have a good life, but I am not ready and I can’t ask for you to wait for me because I don’t think I will ever want the same things that you do. We gave it a good try. We gave it seven years and those seven years are gone forever for both of us. I will never be able to be a young father and you will never be able to be a young mother, but perhaps who knows what life will bring in the future? A husband that really appreciates you in a way that I have not been able to. Perhaps someone that wishes to follow my path with me as a team mate will come to me, I don’t know. Perhaps I will never have another love in this life.
“I feel dreadful about this. I don’t think there is any other way out of it. I am so, so sorry. I am sorry for being weird. I hope you realize that I don’t think you are weird. I think you are the normal one. I think the world of you and I wish you the best.”
And I think that would be the kind of letter that I would write. That would be a letter that would give her back her pride in herself because for an earth-normal person she is a real sweetie.
I hope this gets to you in time. I sensed that things were sort of coming to a head right now and so I wanted to get this off to you. So having done so, let me think if there is anything new. I don’t think so. I am down to something like five letters to write instead of twenty or so, which was the truth when I struggled up from absolutely flat looking at the ceiling which was indeed a drag. I had about two dozen then, so I am making progress slowly, but I usually take people strictly in turn, but when I read your little note and the improved version of your letter, I had this feeling of urgency and when I have those feelings, right or wrong, I just go on with them.
The kitty cats are basking in the sun and hopefully this is my last week down. I have cleared the week completely. I had to cancel three different things to do it, but I have done it so that I won’t be sitting up until church on Sunday and that will mean that I will have been leaning against something for a good long time so hopefully that will be enough and, of course, I have been going out and doing the hour of hard exercise every morning, but other than that, I keep my body down. I can’t really do without the exercise.
Got a letter from K and B, some pictures, real cute. B’s baby is big, really big. They are still flibling around with that idea that K and his room mate had in the hoosegow about an AIDS number or some kind of help number for something, information about sexually transmitted diseases. I am not sure what all they were picking up, but I told K in my last letter, I said, “Do not accept any more ideas or writing from the boys in jail.” Because they don’t have any idea of how to write a grant request. These guys were going on and on with philosophy and the whole bit and a person that looks at a grant request wants to know what it’s about, what it’s going to cost and what the results are going to be, all on one page please, and in as few words as possible. And there are some buzz words that you are supposed to use. They differ from grant to grant, but none of the buzz words were happening in the grant request forms that I saw.
I don’t know where they all are with that, but I think the girls can do a much better job than this K person. I shake my head over him. I certainly hope that things work out, but in a way I just sort of had this feeling that B is not going to accept K once he gets out, but not my problem. Not my business.
Just what B said, I am passing it on. And she just doesn’t know she is going to have to evaluate him once she sees him and he seems to have improved in jail, but you know, it is pretty hard to marry somebody and then discover everything he has told you has been a lie. That is pretty hard and it is hard to build trust after that so we shall see. That is, B keeps saying. “We shall see.”
K looked happy and good and she has her cat with her and they seem to be settling in well. I think Kim is tamping, which she hates, but it’s a way to make money. And they have each other now, which is really important so at least they are happy even if they are not rich. That was nice.
Any other news: the newsletter is being mailed out this afternoon. I hope it is a good one. I got Jim to say, he was going to put in newsletter renewal time anyway and so I just got him to say that it was time to renew, like send in a post card if you want to keep receiving the newsletter. Then I got him to say, donations are most welcome. I hope that wasn’t compromising our metaphysical principles, but you know if you don’t let the people know that the donations aren’t really keeping up with the cost of mailing, etc, then people don’t even have a chance to respond, so he is doing that. Then in the spring issue, he is going to lay out just flat what it costs to print and mail one copy of the project that we would like to undertake next, which is this Book of Days. I guess we would. I haven’t read it yet. I channeled it, but it is a little scary for me. I haven’t read it yet. Jim thinks that they are all real good and thinks that a Book for Days would be really a good thing.
My idea on that would be to let people draw as many borders as they wanted to, given the format so that we would have perhaps a little border around each day’s thought that would be sent in by one of our readers. We could pick the best ones and use them over and over again. Undoubtedly we’d get a lot fewer than 365, but maybe we’d get a special one for Christmas, or a special one for Easter, or a special one for Labor Day, or a special one for the Vernal Equinox, or the Summer Solstice, or just different people seeing different garlands of flowers or geometrical designs. You know, how all the different many, many ways to decorate a page around which there is a fairly short piece of channeling, just one or two paragraphs that all fits in one page, but Jim thinks that might really be expensive. He doesn’t really know and he thinks maybe we should just get one template, one design and use it for all the days, but at any rate, that is the next project is a Book of Days so that you can take it each day and maybe read it in the morning as a one minute meditation before you are out in the traffic and going, etc.
And he’ll let people begin to donate for that and we’ll hold everything in a special account until we are sure we can afford to print it. If we can, we’ll print it and if we can’t, we’ll return everybody’s checks, but that is another one that is hard for me. In an earth-normal way, I am a very tightwad kind of a person about money and not that, I am not generous in giving and I like grins and all that, but when it comes to knowing where our next bill is going to be paid, it concerns me first. And Jim says I am going to have to make a deposit before I can send the newsletter out and I said, “How short are we?”
He said, “I have about $200 in the bank and it will cost $270 to pay postage.” And so we had to open the email and get the checks out and process them before we could pay our big debts. That’s how close our bills are right now. It is really hand to mouth from L/L and that is with nobody taking a penny for salary ever. I mean we don’t take anything so I am sure that those little hints will do the tricks, but I have to keep schooling myself and I am sure Jim gets really upset with me from time to time because I am a little bit on the materialistic side when it comes to, “Do we have enough?”
One thing that we do have enough of, and you can never have too many of, and that is spiritual friends along the path. M, I’m pulling for you. I believe in you. I very, very much would like to see you avoid the pain of marriage to an earth-normal person. On the other hand, the catalyst involved would help you grow and if you want to add to the gene pool, I am sure T would be a good mother and all that sort of thing. I imagine you have thought it out pretty carefully by now and whatever your decision is, I encourage you in it, I support you in it, and just keep in touch. Let me know how things are going when you can. Jim and I send our love. Give some to R, give some to K. I have yet to respond to Christmas cards.
Tell her I still have these five letters of working with future students and that kind of thing to get through and I think I owe them first because K, more or less, she may hear the tape so I am, “Hi, K, are you hearing this tape?” So basically I think she is more nurtured at this point than say the lady from Holland that is trying hard to understand my English. And wants to come over and learn to channel, and I’ve got one in France. It is the same thing and I am sitting here going, “God, I hope they don’t channel in French because I am not up for this, or Dutch or whatever.
So we bid you adieu. Do you want to say good-bye to M? (Jim: good-bye Mark.) Do you want to say anything about marriage? (Be verrrry careful.) Be very careful. I think that is verrrrry good advice. God bless. Much love. Good-bye.
Carla