Letter to TB

CAVEAT: Warning! These letters have not been edited by Carla. Expect errors.

Dear T,

I am answering your postcard of October 27 of this year and wish first to clear up any misperception that you may have that this is any sort of psychic reading. I do not use my channel to prophesize the future or to plumb the past in any intentional way. Sometimes information comes through during the course of a philosophical discussion, which might pertain to the past or to the future, but it is my opinion, at this time, and I don’t want to push anything off on you. This is just my opinion that there is no virtue in attempting to gain psychic insight into your own probable future as a means of softening, cushioning or easing your passage through life.

The heaven, the hell and the battleground between them is neither in the past nor in the future, but in the present. In the very present moment, in which I am speaking to you now, that moment has already passed and another one has been born as I have spoken. This process continues endlessly. It is always now and it is in the now that you will find yourself working on the questions of your incarnation and coming to some kind of grips with them, whether it be an incomplete or complete balance, before the incarnating experience is over.

That having been said, perhaps there are some general things that I can say to you person-to-person. Just one person to another. There is nothing psychic about it, just good common sense. Words that might help perhaps to turn your mind in a direction that might be useful to you and I shall attempt to do so.

You say that you have had a very unpleasant life since you were born in 1929. This makes you 60 very soon. I know nothing of astrology in terms of anything more than the domains of the signs. I have never studied it so your date of birth doesn’t mean anything to me besides thinking to myself, well you are probably an Aquarius, and all that means to means to me is that you an Aquarius. I don’t know exactly what you are supposed to have on board as your various personality quirks because of that. I have only known one Aquarius and it would be foolish to generalize from one Aquarius to another.

This particular person, however, was a person who liked to play with people, not in a mean way. He was always playful. He would tease them. He would call them up and they would think he was calling for one reason, but he would actually be calling for another.

For instance, he used to call me every morning. This was Don Elkins’ father, when he was still alive. He called me every morning at about 8:30 and asked me a question, and I would tell him the answer and he would hang up. It took me a good two years to figure out that he was doing the crossword puzzle. For some obscure reason, testing me. This was his idea of something funny to do. He was getting help on his crossword puzzle, but as long as I didn’t know it, it sort of counted. Anyway that was the Aquarius that I knew. As you can see, I would not want to make inferences from that one because I expect that if there is a positive and a negative in a sign, he had more of the negative characteristics.

I think what any human must do is accept one salient fact about the incarnation, and that is that it is unpleasant. I don’t care how fancy the house, or how full the stomach, how large the closets full of clothes, or how fat the bank account, there is no way to protect oneself from the unpleasantness of life. It will find you out no matter where you go to hide. There is no place so obscure that it can unfailingly be pleasant. The most beautiful countryside is driven by storm, wind and weather. They are eventually eroded. Things eventually change and in the context of that which was and is no more is an unpleasant fact.

When you add to the very nature of the mutability of all things living, that is, that they will disintegrate and die, the special circumstances of poverty, abuse, any kind of difficulty that you may have experienced in your lifetime as a child or as an adult, the situation can seem overwhelmingly negative.

At this point I want to share with you that perhaps I have a right to talk about

unpleasant lives because although I do not feel that my life is unpleasant, it certainly can be said that I have difficulties. For instance, right now I am speaking to you instead of writing to you because I have been in a car accident, which reinjured an arthritic injury I already had and was trying to work my way out of. I had been for the last nine months, in my back, so I have a collar around my neck to hold my head up and a sling around my right arm to keep the weight of it from hurting that place in my back that is pretty bad right now.

I am on pain medication at this point so it is not nearly as bad as it would be if I were just toughing it out without the pain medication. I am not very comfortable. However, the ability to work with other people always makes it better for me and I think that is a key for anyone who is undergoing unpleasant circumstances. Certainly pleasant circumstances are a gift and never a gift to be taken for granted in any way. Any pleasant circumstance should be a cause for great rejoicing, for recognition of the beauty that is in that pleasantness.

The key to balancing the unpleasantness of life is an intensity of being that wills itself to seek that which is beyond the circumstances of form and manifestation. We ourselves cast no true shadow in any metaphysical sense. We ourselves in our physical bodies that seem so solid and function as solid and separate are, in fact, patterns of energy. This is not a metaphysical truth. This is a truth of physics. This is a truth of our science.

Our science has said, “We do not see the electron. We only see the path it makes.” There has never been one single researcher who has been able to weigh any mass in an electron or an atom. It is possible only to measure the energy path, the traces, and to differentiate it thereby. So what you are talking about is unpleasantness that is perceived by a consciousness within an illusion of energy fields, which interact with each other in many ways.

This means that our minds have a great deal more control and influence over our physical, mental and emotional perceptions of circumstance than it would seem on the surface of things that they would have. Our minds, if fixed in faith and abiding in a positive faith that the Creator is a Creator of Love; that we are beings of Love; and that we are learning the lessons of Love, yield to one a sweetness of character and temperament, a point-of-view regarding the unpleasantnesses of life that transmutes those unpleasantnesses into the kingdom of heaven. There need be only a little joy to lighten a very large amount of sorrow.

So the first thing that one, with much difficulty perceived in the past, must do is go through a process of healing. This process includes identifying those things, which you feel, have hurt you. Write them down, objectify them, name them and face them. These are the things that have hurt you, whatever they are: If they are people and relationships; if they are simple circumstances such as poverty, see them, name them, hold them in your mind, and work with each of them in this way.

If one certain circumstance, or relationship, or whatever brings up in you a strong negative reaction because of the unpleasantness involved, hold that unpleasantness in your mind and encourage the accentuation of that unpleasantness. Allow yourself to intensify that feeling. Feel just how disturbed you truly have been. Allow that to be. This is you. This is acceptable. This is you feeling badly about a certain circumstance, just as you are. Allow that to be. Keep increasing that feeling until you feel that you have intensified it to the point where it is the most intense and you will not be able to intensify it any more.

At that point, release the attempt to hold it and encourage instead the natural influx of the opposite emotion, the antithetical circumstance. Allow the healing that would balance that to come into your mind. Your mind is the seat of your reality, not the outer experience. Therefore, if you create within yourself the dream and hope of the goodness that is the antithesis of the unpleasantness you have suffered, and then allow that to intensify until it is as real to you as the unpleasantness was, you have then begun to balance and forgive those lessons, which you have learned less than completely.

All of this is just my opinion and I urge you to remember that. This is not a psychic reading. This is just one woman talking to another. Once you have identified the various things within you that have hurt you, in other words, you have found your “buttons” in the pop parlance of psychological terminology. You have found the things that push your buttons and you have maybe even realized from whence they come, like in your childhood, or where the first occurrence was of that particular unpleasantness that has reoccurred throughout your life.

Look throughout your life using your intellect. Analyze situations as you have gone through your life that have been meaningful and difficult. See if you begin to see one particular lesson, or two, or three that you have been working on, but have not completed the work on so that the lessons reoccur again and again.

The intellect is an excellent workhorse as long as you don’t let it take over. It is the heart that recognizes the truth, not the mind. The mind is simply a computer that you use to make choices.

You make choices depending on how you have programmed your computer. If you have programmed your computer, for instance, to believe that all Irishmen are evil or unworthy, as many people did in the early nineteenth century in America on the east coast, then when an Irishman presents himself to you as an employee, you as an employer will use only one piece of information in your program and that is, that the person is an Irishman. You will not consider anything else about that person because it is your fixed opinion that Irishmen, you see, are no good. So you will not hire the Irishman because it is beyond your capacity to comprehend that an Irishman is not an Irishman, but merely flesh and blood. This is a kind of over-whelming programming, which is a distortion of the truth of a situation.

In other words, it is not the truth that an Irishman can be summed up in the word “Irishman.” It is also true for you that whatever has come across to you as unpleasant can be summed up in terms of its unpleasantness alone. Within the unpleasantness there has been a lesson and you should, upon reflection, begin to discern an incarnational pattern of lessons you are to learn. These lessons always have to do with increasing your ability to love unconditionally, sacrificially, whole-heartedly and merrily. You have to begin with yourself and that is why the first work is interior.

Once you have seen or begun to see an incarnational pattern emerge of the lessons you are to learn, you then have a lot more to go on because at least you have something in your computer to apply to the next unpleasant thing that occurs to you. You can say, “Let’s see. Is this the lesson about prejudice and not succumbing to it; or is this a lesson about having no attachment to the outcome of a charitable gesture? Is this a lesson about returning a soft word for a harsh one if the person that you are in relationship with has a harsh way of speaking, but no true bite behind the bark?

You see how many ways we can separate ourselves from other people. The whole purpose of this illusion, in my opinion, is to give us an arena in which to run a certain kind of race, as St. Paul would have it. I like the metaphor.

The course of the race seems fairly clear. However, the nature of the race is individualistic and unique to each soul. Thus one person’s well-run race would not be another’s. One person’s path is not another’s. We can group paths into large divisions like Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, things like that. I always tell people right offhand, I am a Christian myself and for that reason, if you wish to pursue the Christian walk I can perhaps be of a different kind of help to you than if you are a New Ager who is not following any particular program of spiritual seeking such as a church or ashram setting would offer.

I do not work with many Christians. I work mostly with New Age people. The reason for that is that Christians who are in the fold of the Christian church and have access to the resources and tools of the church, such as Bible study, various discussion groups, prayer groups, meditation groups and the things that a church family does offer one, do not have the hunger and the intense need for some sort of program to work so that they may step out in that race that we are running on in this incarnational path.

The foundation stone of running that race is the realization, deep within the self, that the race is important, not in terms in how it looks to the outer eye, but in terms of how we run it by intention, by will and by faith.

I think if I were to give one piece of advice to people, and that would be all of it, I would say, “Think of God and be happy,” because the end result of a well-run race of life learning the lessons of Love in this density, I think, is a person who is cheerful from the inside out; whose sunshine comes from within; who is not dependent on the outer sunshine so that person becomes a channel through which light may flow in an infinite quantity and intensity. That one truly does become the lamp set upon the hill, the lighthouse seen afar at sea, one who becomes luminous to others, not by intention, but simply by remaining fixed and staid in one’s mind upon the Creator.

This is done naturally by the hardest. It is never, ever easy in this illusion to think beyond the illusion. Yet, that reality is there, is palpable and will increasingly become more palpable as you spend time daily focusing upon that infinite source and beginning, which is the Creator. I believe the Creator has the name of Love. That Love is not a sentimental gooey romantic sequel of human love, famous for its inconstancy, but the kind of love that creates babies, stars, galaxies and consciousness. A love that creates and destroys. A love that is beautiful and terrible. A love that is all that there is. That is what created us.

To come into communion with that ineffable presence, that mysterious, unknown face of the Creator on a daily basis, is the foundation stone of achieving a moving forward in one’s life from being a victim of circumstances to being above circumstances in all but the most mundane aspects. Once one has made a commitment to oneself to seek the Creator daily, one will find oneself beginning to change. This may take between two to six months because of difficulties involved in disciplining the body to remain still enough to meditate for even five minutes, much less fifteen or twenty, which I do recommend about that length per day or even twice a day at the beginning.

I do not recommend long periods of meditation as one is liable to be opening up higher chakras without having cleared lower chakras and because you are Indian, I am not going to take the time to talk about the chakras because that would be part of a belief system that you had grown up with, and whatever differences yours and my chakra systems may have, the only chakra system I have studied is Ra’s. The idea is basically identical, whatever the chakra system that is: that the lower chakra centers are involved with survival, reproduction, and relationships with the self, to others and with self to society.

Those are the great stumbling blocks for the spiritual seeker and after you have gotten past any physical difficulties that you might have in meditating daily you may experience physical disturbances. Sometimes people will complain of headaches. Sometimes people say they get nauseous every time they meditate.

People will predictably see some monsters from their childhood, if they had monsters in their childhood, coming up from the top reaches of the subconscious because that is what meditating is attempting to do—strengthen the bridge between the subconscious and conscious so that one is using more of one’s total mind, one’s total assets. The basic idea is to change the programming of that computer that we call the mind so that when we spontaneously evaluate the circumstance before our eyes, we are evaluating that circumstance, not in terms of the difficulties it gives us, but first of all and primarily in terms of the opportunity it may give us to learn our particular lessons concerning how to love.

For instance, in my incarnational pattern (this is already published, so you probably know this already if you read the Ra material), I was able to see in my incarnational pattern that one of the goals of my incarnation this time was to make absolutely sure that I was able to give love without expecting love in return. For that reason I was placed in a family where there was no obvious love returning to me at any time. It was an alcoholic family. It was a self-absorbed family, both mother and father. They were both extremely good people. They were mismatched. They did a good job of holding everything together as best they could and they are still together, but it was difficult for them and they had many, many problems. Too many problems to have a lot of love spill over for the children.

Consequently, I, as the oldest child, was always attempting to please, but never pleasing. The only way I could please them was to be perfect. If I were in any way imperfect, they mentioned it. If I were perfect, nothing was said. This was an excellent training for me, although it was very painful at the time.

Later in life, several of my relationships had the same characteristic, that of giving without the expectation of return. And, indeed, in the work that I do now in writing you a tape in response to a postcard, you, T, are a face unknown to me. I am not psychic. I cannot bring you up into my vision by saying, “Let me see T.” I know what a sixty-year-old Indian woman tends to look like because we have Indians that go to our church, but you can’t generalize like that.

They seem to be much handsomer actually than American women, or lighter skinned women of the same age. I expect it has to do with the attractiveness of the richer skin tone and the tendency not to wrinkle. In other words, you probably look pretty nice compared to a sixty-year-old white woman. What is going on inside of you, of course, has nothing to do with the way you look.

What is your incarnational challenge? What lesson of love did you want to work to perfect in yourself this time around? That is a question only you can answer, and perhaps you will only find the answer to it as you change because if you seek, and pray, and ask to be enlightened, to be in communion with the Father, to take on the peace and blessings of the kingdom of heaven, or the larger life beyond this little one, you are then able to center—even in difficult circumstances because you know what you are about. You know why these things are happening to you. You know what it is you are attempting to do in response to this catalyst that has come to you, and you are able to make more intelligent choices.

This is what the meditation does for you. It gradually alters the programming of your biocomputer, your brain. Therefore, when you consider a choice, you begin after, I’d say about two months of daily meditation, to notice that you are making difference choices and doing things for different reasons than you had at the beginning of the very dedicated period. During this time, you will be very self-involved. Accept that about yourself. Before you can be of service to anyone else, you must, in Christian terms, be born anew, not of the body but of the spirit.

In other words, you must recover for yourself that awareness of yourself as a spiritual being that was before the world was made and will be long after the planet is no more.

We are concomitant with all the first things of creation. Before us and prior to us only one thing exists and that is the uncreated Creator. So you see, we are both old timers. We have been around an infinitely long time. We shall be around an infinitely long time. We shall move in and out of the Creator through eons of countless years. Our source and our ending are one thing and we are, to use a Christian parable, all “prodigal sons” and daughters wending our way, running the straight race around the track of life, coming home to Father/Mother/God and having nothing to offer but our hearts and our love. And that is not difficult to offer because Love loved us first and created us in Love out of Love. We are Love. That is the spiritual truth of our being. That is the gemstone at the center of all that seems unpleasant, difficult and contrary.

Once you have begun this dailiness of meditation and this daily attempt also of sitting down and thinking over the events of the day, examining them for where is the love in this situation, you are ready to move on to outer work.

Before I go on, let me give you an example of where is the love in this situation? I told you I was in a traffic accident recently. I was the passenger. The car in front of us stopped for no reason without a signal from about 40 mph very, very quickly. My mother, who was driving the car (I can no longer drive because of my disability of rheumatoid arthritis), has very fast reflexes. She is about five years older than you, but much quicker than just about anybody I know in reflexes. She has always been amazing that way. She got her little car stopped, but the pickup truck behind us didn’t, and it tried to avoid us by swinging to the right, but it ploughed into our back moving towards the right and crumpled in my side and the back of the car. It just totaled Mother’s car. But an amazing thing happened.

I have a subflux neck. I don’t know if you know what that means. I didn’t until I looked it up. It means that the two vertebrae in my neck, which they call for some reason C1 and C2, are not sitting on top of each other. C1 is sort of teetering on the corner of C2. It is crooked and, therefore, is very prone to breakage and I, undoubtedly, would have been no more had my seatback not failed and fallen backwards on impact. That particular seatback goes all the way down to flat so that one can pull off of the edge of the road and rest for a while, if one is on a trip and gets sleepy. It makes a perfect little sleeping place.

It went all the way down so that instead of taking the whiplash with my weak neck, which would undoubtedly have broken and I probably would have strangled even if I had remained alive, I would have been paralyzed, I took that with my whole body. I just sort of surged forward underneath the seat belt into the crash of the pickup truck moving along the right side of the car.

I have a lot of damage, but I did not die. That was extremely providential. It was a very lucky day for me and the luck in that moment for me was, I have spent four years since Don Elkins’ death mourning, grieving, wondering whether I had anything left to do in this world. Wondering if I really were enough help to offset the tremendous efforts people have, especially dear Jim McCarty, made on my behalf. He dresses me. He washes me. He washes my hair. He combs it out. I am just like a five-year-old. There are just so many things that I cannot do. He is the one who fixed up this tape recorder so I could talk to you. And I have often questioned as I become more and more limited, am I worth the upkeep?

I had gone through a profoundly punitive experience that lasted for some weeks prior to this accident in which I thought through everything, and I accepted my lot. I decided to rejoice in the fact that I could still talk. That meant that I could still channel and still do my teaching and my correspondence with people such as you. I feel that seatback failed because Love said to me, “Yes, you have learned that you are worthy to stay here. Worthy to be given unto. You have proved already that you can give without expectation of a return. Now you have to prove that you can take without expectation of giving because that is the other side of the coin.”

I am assured by Jim, who does 98% of all maintenance, all the extra things, all the places I have to go that he takes me to, that he feels that I am more than worth it; that I should never even think about it. He has many reasons that he thinks I am definitely worth my upkeep and he is glad to do it, but that is not the same thing as forgiving yourself.

I think self-forgiveness is the next great key. Once you have worked with your heart to dedicate to yourself in faith to the unseen hope that God is a God of Love, once you have begun meditating daily, once you have begun analyzing those things that have occurred to you during the day so that you are caught up with your catalyst, and you have a feeling of thinking about and having some opinion, or at least some puzzlement, at least you are grappling with things that are happening to you right now.

I think the next thing is to work on your feelings of self-worth, and to free yourself to act in the world. Once you have gotten yourself on the road running the race, doing your daily work, and thinking over your catalyst, keeping a dream book is also helpful because you work with your catalyst a lot in the dream state. Once all of these things are in place and you are beginning to work on changing your old biocomputer so that you will begin to think in a more useful and harmonious fashion following the laws of the creation, then it is time to turn outward: not in a pushy way; not as an evangelist; not as a person who pushes one’s opinion on anyone else unless asked. (You notice, I haven’t tried to convert you to Christianity.) Nothing like that, but just begin to be open to guidance because one who is centering upon the Creator in a daily fashion and affirming over and over again during the day that the center of your life is God, that the center of your life is seeking that Creator, that the center of your life is Love, then you begin to be able to turn outwards without damaging what was at the beginning, a tiny infant spiritually.

Only you will know when you have nurtured that infant long enough that you may trust it to go forward into the world and in its childlike innocence, offer laughter, merriment, joy, bliss and peace to a world that is trembling in its fear and standing in its excrement, metaphysically speaking. It is a very toxic world right now. Consequently, the most important work you will ever do spiritually is the work in detoxifying your lower energy centers. Detoxifying your attitudes towards yourself, your sexuality and your relationships with others if they are attempting to take advantage of you. If you see things that way, if relationships are difficult, it is time to communicate, attempt, attempt and do the best you can and then let it go in the serenity that you have done your best.

Those energy centers may not necessarily be triumphs of getting everything exactly the way you would like them. The point is for them to become clear so that you are not blocking and holding onto negative emotions about somebody or some governmental institution, Social Security, whatever, might be giving you hassles. I know I have the problem with Medicare a lot because I am disabled and Medicare is somewhat idiosyncratic in its treatment of claims, sometimes much to my dismay, but at any rate, it is time for you to spend time to be on the lookout inside, listen for that still small voice that says, “This is where you can do some help now. Go. Do this.”

I don’t know if you are much of a Bible reader and I have not read the Upanishads, only the Bhagavad-Gita. Perhaps I ought to use the Bhagavad-Gita as well as the Bible in talking to you so I will use Arjuna. Arjuna, in the Bhagavad-Gita was forced to face an unpleasant life. His family was waging war against another part of his family. Of course, this is the way it is. Whoever wars with who is that we are fighting ourselves. That is the true nature of souls that we are all creatures of God so there is no entity that we kill upon whom we have not committed crucifixion. It is as simple as that.

To kill another is to kill the self. Yet, Arjuna was counseled by the very Creator, that is, the Creator of Love to go and do what was before his face, in front of his nose and staring at him right then in the best way he knew how. Not to back away from the challenges; not to back away from the difficulties and unpleasantnesses, but to perform according to the best that he knew at the time. The best that he knew at the time was that his family needed him to go to war. He was made to see in that beautiful little book that war was the illusion and that all forms are illusion over which splendor, ineffable and mysterious, reigns in a final fashion.

There are many, many services that one may render simply by being a certain way and I say that, not in an idealistic way but as a person who has been told over and over again, “I feel so good when I see you coming because you always give me a big smile.” The ministry is in the smile, not in me. The ministry is made more pointed to others because I am fairly obviously disabled and have every reason not to smile. But actually, any smile from anybody carries an enormous amount of positive energy and lightens the consciousness of planet earth. Something we are desperately trying to do at this point because it is truly a toxic metaphysical atmosphere in which we are plunged at this time.

And yet where is the Love in that toxicity in attempting to be part of the solution? The first thing that comes to mind is the feeding of the hungry. We have, for instance, in Lowell, several different organizations, which feed the poor freely, or house them for 50 cents a night or you can get slips that let you into certain places by going to certain churches, that kind of thing. The ministry of hunger is probably to me the single-most obvious ministry.

You don’t have a M.D. by your name, so I won’t encourage you to be a doctor for underprivileged folk. I think that is a very important ministry and I wish more doctors would donate their time sacrificially. Of course, they wouldn’t make any money at all and spend time in under-developed countries helping people who are ill and helping them to pull out of that.

You sound like a person who is kind of feeling sorry for yourself and probably with good reason. You also haven’t told me in this little postcard anything about your physical health. If your physical health is good enough, I can see one way of service that would be open to you that you would have special skills in actually. That would be the Peace Corps because I believe the Peace Corps does operate all over the world and in places in which your native language (I don’t know if your native language was English or if you had one of the dialects in India as your mother tongue), but that extra language, any extra languages that you have would make it possible for the Peace Corps to place you in different positions where your language ability would come in handy. That is basic ministry and it is wonderful.

There are other more specialized ministries, obviously healing, channeling, etc. and they are more dramatic, but to me, it is the undramatic, seemingly small services where one becomes and is aware of oneself as a servant that truly are of the most benefit to the south and to the person that you are serving. Tying your child’s shoes, or fixing a meal, or washing the dishes, anything to do with making a home for people. A place where they can be comfortable, and at home, and can ease their worries and the stresses of the day. I think that is probably my own choice of any job that I could ever possibly want. It is not one like wife and mother that I will ever be able to fulfill because I am barren, and also 45 years old. My time is past just about. I am sure it will be within the next ten years, but I think probably I still do make a kind of home and I do feel that is a very important part of my service. Certainly more important than the channeling in terms of lightening the planetary consciousness.

I have given you a lot to think about. I repeat again, this is not a psychic reading. This is simply the best opinion that I have at this time, woman-to-woman, as how to turn a perception of difficulty into a perception of challenge, daring, beauty and ultimately the joy of surrender. It is that surrender that sets you free. There is a phrase in the Anglican Church service. You may be familiar with it because I know there are a lot of Anglicans in India. “In whose service is perfect freedom.”

I think that until one aligns oneself with an ultimate principle for which one would die and by which one is living, when one does this, one becomes a magical person. You see, what I have described for you here is working out your relationships until they are harmonious. Working out your feeling about sexuality, not that you should or should not make love, but that you should see it as a beautiful way to know the Creator and not have blocked feelings about your sexuality, but rejoice in it. Once you have cleared that up and you have cleared up your relationships with others: made amends to people as best you can if there has been an attack or separation and if you can’t do any better than that, then you have tried. That intention is everything.

The same thing with the government. If you are having problems with government agencies, can you tell when you have come to a decent, open point-of-view regarding that, whatever the action of the government, or football team, or whatever group you are involved in that has handed you something that you are not fond of. Then you have the right, the ability and almost the logical necessity of moving into the heart chakra. Once your heart chakra is open with the energy flowing freely into it through the lower chakras, the possibility of unconditional love grows.

It does not grow from you. It grows because you have become a channel through which love makes love. If you attempt to love and be of service on your own, you will run out of energy after an unpredictable length of time, but a finite length of time measured either in months or years, and you will burn out, as they say, and not be able to do that service any more.

The only way to avoid being burned out in a life of service-to-others because it is sacrificial and it is difficult, is to allow Infinity to pour through you. That takes surrender.

Whatever your highest principle is, you must surrender to its will. Different people have different names for this ultimate principle of goodness, truth, duty and love. Some are content to call it Love itself. Some call it Christ Consciousness. I don’t care if you call it mayonnaise. What I care about is that as a soul, you become passionately and intensely aware of the central goodness of your life. The central thing, which guides the ship of your actions; that great star by which you navigate; that great truth for which you would die if you had to repudiate it.

Again for me, that great truth is embodied and personified in Jesus the Christ. For Jim, who is not a church-going person, Jim challenges Spirit in terms of Christ Consciousness. He would die before he would deny that there is such a thing as Christ Consciousness. That is acceptable. So you need to go through, once you feel that you have begun to change, once you feel that you are on your feet as far as the meditations go, concomitantly with all of this, you need to start pondering the center of your being. Where is it? Once you peel all of the little pieces of onion away, then you come to the very center. What is it made of? What is the nature of yourself and how intensely, once you grasp that nature, can you get behind yourself? Be confident in yourself and go forth in Love and service-to-others?

You see, the idea is not to control life, but to take control of your own thinking processes. Life will happen to you regardless. You will ameliorate your experiences firstly by analyzing the difficulties and finding the Love in them and moving in positive paths as much as possible with these difficulties. Secondly, you will discover as time goes on that once you have figured out your incarnational pattern, you will spot, “Oh, that is this lesson,” when it comes up. You will see the characteristics of it shining through. You will see the principle and you will be able then, through the grace of this surrender to a higher self, have the infinite strength necessary to change your reaction to that. To become the creator of your consciousness, not the passive reactor that registers upon your consciousness.

You cease being done unto and you begin creating your universe. This is not to say that you lie. It is well to remain completely realistic, including worse case scenarios and the whole thing. It is simply not wise to dwell on any, but the highest and best that you know in any situation.

I hope this has been of help to you. Anything that is not of help to you, I would ask you humbly to forget immediately because I am just a person and this is just my opinion. Good luck and as you start about this fairly lengthy process, remember that you will often fail. You will not do, say, a reading that you have chosen to do before meditation each day. You will find yourself skipping the reading, or skipping the meditation, or both. You will find yourself being unable to get in the evening meditation or falling asleep during the first two minutes of it. This happens again and again and again. You don’t let that bother you because if we were perfect, we wouldn’t be here.

It makes complete sense for us to fail again and again. Failing is how one learns. If one does it perfectly the first time, one obviously didn’t need to learn it. It just was a gift. We are not here to work on our gifts, our little tricks that we can already do. We are certainly here to use them for good, but in terms of lessons, in terms of why we decided to come to this illusion and suffer, the answers lie within our experiences, and as you become stronger, you become more and more able to internalize the various means of meeting your challenges.

Again, you will fail. You will become impatient, angry, discouraged and despairing, not just once, but several times, or from time-to-time. This is inevitable. Never condemn yourself for this. It is natural. It is necessary only to rededicate oneself and carry on. If you are too weak to carry on at that point, tell yourself that you allow yourself to sit by the side of the road and cease from running that straight race for just a little time while you catch your breath. Then when you get up and run again, do it with a merry heart, with a light touch, knowing that the Creator runs with you. You are not alone and this little life is merely as Joel Goldsmith said, “a parenthesis in eternity.”

We hope, all of us, to live our lives in such a way that they may be a gift to the Creator whom we love. See your life that way as a poem, as a composition, as a tapestry with many, many colors and weavings. Let those weavings be as beautiful as possible. Allow beauty and peace to overflow your life regardless of what it is in the face of. Whatever difficulty, whatever unpleasantness. The ocean of Love will ameliorate the condition. Your change in viewpoint will ameliorate the condition and once your heart chakra is open completely and you are not blocking relationships or a relationship with yourself or with society, you are then able to go on and do work in consciousness much more safely.

I do not recommend the longer periods of meditation for this reason: if you work too hard on meditation at the beginning, you might well begin to open the higher centers with very little actual pure energy coming through the lower chakras so that the entire exercise will be a limited success or none, so you must first go through this period of getting yourself squared away so that you no longer feel sorry for yourself when you are in good shape. There are times when you will feel sorry for yourself. I certainly have them, but in general, you simply no longer feel sorry for yourself because you can see how perfectly everything really has worked out in terms of what you had to learn.

Be good to yourself. Be passionate about what you believe. Be generous and compassionate in your giving and more beauty will come to you than you can ever imagine. Seek for ways to help people and I always suggest to people to begin with the hungry. It seems to me that is where it really begins: the immediate red ray, red chakra needs: survival, clothing, a warm place to stay in the winter, food. If other things draw you to them as service, other kinds of volunteer work or a service such as healing, or teaching, or channeling or whatever, that is fine, but don’t make a decision about what spiritual avocation or ministry you may be fit for. Simply know that every smile that you give to a stranger is a service to the Infinite Creator and to delight in the consciousness on planet earth. Above all, T, keep a light touch. Don’t get serious.

I believe Oscar Wilde was the one who said, “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” I am very intense about my feelings for the spiritual life and I guess one could call me serious, but few could call me sober sides or without a sense of humor because I have one of the worse and most universal senses of humor of anyone I know. I laugh at absolutely anything and I feel sure it is because I have been meditating all of these years.

If you don’t have enough laughter in your day, go rent a Marx Brothers movie or something and put some in it. Find things to laugh at. Find things to be happy about. Go seeking adventure if it is every day. Just simply do whatever you can afford to do, etc. in the way of changing your circumstances and not to lighten your mood. But always, always forgive yourself, realizing that you can’t always forgive yourself by grace. We will none of us be perfect in this illusion. We simply must forgive ourselves for being who we are and acting the way we do.

Keep up with that in yourself. Keep a good opinion of yourself. Keep the pressure on to run the straight race and you will feel that you have at least done your best and what else can you do, but your best?

I will close with an old joke that I heard many years ago and have always remembered.

“God took someone down a long hall. There were two doors—one on the left and one on the right. He said, ‘This is hell, and this is heaven, and which would you like to see first?’”

“And the nervous fascinated person with God said, ‘I think hell. I would like to see what hell is like.’”

“God opens a door into a huge banquet hall filled with hundreds of people who have two-foot long forks strapped to their forearms in such a way that when they attempt to bring food to their mouths, the fork ends up somewhere above the forehead and nowhere near the mouth. There is no way to get the fork into the mouth. The table, of course, is just groaning with food. It has all possible wonderful food, but they cannot eat it. They were, of course, wailing and gnashing their teeth most extremely.

“Then God said, ‘Would you like to see heaven?’”

“And his companion said, ‘Oh yes.’”

“They walked across the hall and opened the door and there was the same scene. People were sitting around a huge banquet table filled with every possible dainty morsel of goodness, delicious food and drink everywhere and they had these huge forks strapped to their arms so that they could not feed themselves. And they were laughing and chatting and having a wonderful time and feeding each other.

“Whenever you get down, do something for someone else. Whenever you feel that life is unpleasant, make it more pleasant for someone else.”

I will leave you at last with a prayer of St. Francis which I use every day because I too have some unpleasantness in my life.

“Oh Lord,” St. Francis of Assisi said:

God bless, T.

Love and light from Carla.