Letter to R

Dear R,

When we visit in September or whenever, you will find out that I stay in one place a lot. L/L Research gave me for my birthday a new tape recorder and a new mike for me to destroy at my leisure.

I got your absolutely beautiful gift and Jim and I are tickled pink about it. We just absolutely love it and the only question is where are we going to put it on the property—near the house or at the entrance to the whole thing? You have to go down a long ways into the valley before you actually see the place in a significant way so it is question of down at the bottom or at the front gate or what?

It is after 5 o’clock so I am writing you as recreation and sharing, rather than work. I like the twelve-cylinder Jag. Somebody wrote me a note about that. I was at one time an avid car buff. It was an absolute necessity in my life because my first husband was a car buff and, as a matter of fact, he never earned any more money than it would cost him to run his car, which I really didn’t hold against him because he made me laugh and have a good time. He didn’t have any vices in particular. He just hated being married.

During that time, the twelve-cylinder Jag came out and J got so excited about it and I realized this is a really special machine. I still like a Lotus better.

About feeling close and finding that you cannot explain it, this has happened to me a couple of times in my life and it seemed not unnatural at all. Perhaps it happens more people recognizing me than for me recognizing them, if you know by inner recognition by a sense of her or him. I have had it happen with guys and with gals, so it isn’t just a sexual thing and it isn’t just a friend making thing. It is a real kind of a feeling; this is a heart-sister. This is a heart-brother and I have a wonderful heart-sister in Washington. She moved. A wonderful heart-sister in Florida. She moved. A lovely heart-sister who is still in town, but way across town so that she can’t quite make it out here very often because she and her husband are prone to his depression and she needs to be with him.

The meditation friends who are so close, S and S, and the ones who were at my wedding, that bunch, have all scattered north to Indiana so it has really been a time of not having a girlfriend. Yet, I do feel I have my heart-sisters and that nothing will change that. Any experience that we might have, I’ll work it out. I do not allow things to stay unresolved because of my own agenda, my basic agenda being to stay clear.

It would be fine to have you here and you can stay as long as you can. Thank you for the [inaudible] bloom. It was a tickly one.

Boy, do I know about Georgia clay. Ugh. Nasty stuff. I don’t think that you are that kind of clay. At least allow yourself to be pleasantly gray. I do.

I am sorry to hear that S is manipulating you and I am sorry to hear that it is working to a certain extent. Please forgive my opinion. It probably does not bear any relationship to the truth. It is just that I tend to be over-protective of my friends. I would say, don’t trust the man any further than you can throw him because you are not dealing with a man at this point. You are dealing with a disease and he is perfectly rational, but he does have that disease. He had it after he quit. He doesn’t have it just during active drinking. A recovering alcoholic is also an alcoholic and will also act in the same irrational type of manner. He is still the same person, but off the booze.

So a person that takes on a recovering alcoholic really needs to love the guy and let him go and go to Alanon faithfully. In my opinion, it probably isn’t worth it in S’s case because he sounds like the kind of person who isn’t going to stick with it. Besides he was violent and I do not feel these are good indications, but if you like the guy, I understand that anything that you would want to do to try to keep that door open. If he will go to AA and you go to Alanon and promise me not to get married again for five years, and wait until he is really beginning to cope with life as a sober person instead of having to put out the fires of danger of wanting to drink again. It is just a curse every day, every day. A recovering alcoholic is just as hard to live with as a dysfunctional drunk alcoholic. They are just as mean. They are just as goofy. They are just as irrational.

I am speaking from experience here. My mother was an alcoholic for many years and now is a recovering alcoholic who has celebrated her thirteenth birthday. I have to keep something to drink (like water or iced tea) near me at all times because I have a dry mouth. One of my illnesses is something called [inaudible] syndrome and it just means dry eyes, dry mouth. When I cry, nobody can tell the difference. I occasionally have to put tears in my eyes.

At least you say that he was grandstanding. I really like that. I think that what he said that he loved you, and that he was mortified and embarrassed at what he had done. I think on one level that is true, but it is a level, which has no control over the essential S. It is the part of S that will become S who is feeling these feelings of conscience. However, as long as he is drinking at all, and I am talking about one beer a night, anything, you are not going to be dealing with a man who loves you and feels terrible about having hurt you. You are going to be dealing with a walking, talking dangerous disease, and I really hope you think carefully before resuming any kind of permanent relationship with the man because you have a balance to keep in your own life.

You are responsible for yourself. When one is dealing with someone who is dysfunctional, it pulls you in. You become co-dependent a lot of the time, especially if you have a low self-esteem to begin with, which you do. Don’t all women? You just have to be a little tougher than you are with this guy because he can manipulate you and you still love him, but he is a walking accident about to happen.

I, like you, see through all of his emotions and everything and I see what he wants, which is to be in the same situation again and to have you share it with him again; which, if he doesn’t stop drinking or even if he does stop drinking, but he hasn’t figured out what made him start drinking, he will be behaving poorly towards you, very poorly. Predictably.

A person who has become dysfunctional with alcohol really needs some time to get it together. If you want to see him through this in a married state, then he has got to go to AA every night for a while and never less than twice a week, and you had better do the same with Alanon because it is such a crazy, mental kind of a disease that one’s responses to it are as if the person was rational and the person is not rational. The disease is talking. There is no way to communicate past that alcoholic block.

Now the alcoholic can communicate, but can’t hear himself. Alcoholics’ wives are probably known as good listeners. If you want to see him through it, you will need as much help as he to avoid the co-dependency thing that you are going to rescue him. Nobody can rescue S. No action of yours will save S. No action of yours has anything to do with S. Quitting drinking is one of those things that somebody does for himself because he realizes that he doesn’t want to die. It usually has to get that bad. When his liver starts to go, he gets scared and whatever the bottom is for a person whether it is, “Oh, my God, I think I am starting to be an alcoholic and I am going to AA,” or a family sitting down together with a party who is drunk most of the time and saying, “You are going to have to join AA and stop drinking because you are destroying our family.”

If I were you, I’d really cool it with that man because he is just a time bomb right now. The chances of his being able to stay sober without AA are somewhere between slim and none. I have found that AA is an organization of people going into almost always by my mother feeling that they are more intellectual or smarter than the program is and, therefore, why should they have to go through all of this stuff? The twelve steps, and listen to people who aren’t as intelligent as you are talking about things that you could talk about better. Yet, this accord of people in AA program for one another is quite magical and very spiritual and the twelve steps themselves are very spiritual.

You can never go home again and S and R will never be the same again. Certainly my mother and I have never been the same since she became a drunk. That is what she calls herself. She does it for the shock value to remind herself. She has been doing that for thirteen yeas. She says she does not go on faith. She is one day at a time, which is one of the AA mottos. She still wants to drink as badly as ever. It hasn’t gone away. She still loves the stuff. It is just that she is allergic to it and she knows that the next time she would drink anything, her liver would fail. And that probably influenced her a certain amount. Of course, also it is possible that I helped because I was doing a couple [inaudible] bits with her. I really hated it, but I felt that I had to. She called after she had slipped many times and I had discovered the hard way that there is absolutely no way to help somebody who has taken a drink and it makes them crazy. You just have to let them be crazy. You can perhaps stop them from killing themselves. That is about it.

I don’t think I’ll tell that story right now. I am blocking on it and there must be a reason. Yes, I know. It is because it is tough. It is something that is way out of character for me.

She called me on the phone. I was living maybe ten minutes from her in an apartment with Don, and she said, “I need you to come over and help me because I can’t walk around. I’ve taken a drink and I can’t get up.”

I said, “I’m sorry to hear that you have taken a drink because I won’t be able to see you until you are sober. Be sure and call me as soon as you get sober,” and hung up. Then I threw up, but I did it. I had done everything else that I could think of and it hadn’t helped and I had seen the Alanon message of tough love, tough love, tough love. It did seem to help better than anything else, but to this day, my mother is extremely oblivious of other people.

It is easy to call that selfishness, but there is no vice in her. There is no meanness. She just is very self-centered and she is a wonderful person. Very dramatic and very intelligent and reads like a bandit. Knows a whole lot of trivial pursuit answers and does well in crossword puzzles, and even now that she has retired, she has gone out for two months to a dance camp to help run it. That is a dance camp that my grandmother helped found. She was one of Florence [inaudible] original students and mother goes up every year and dances. She is one of the youngsters, being only 66 at thus point.

Yes, I know how it is when you love somebody. Just watching and when you pray for him, among other things, simply picture the alcohol having only an illusionary power, having no real power. Of course, nothing has any real power. I am pretty sure nothing has any real substance at all.

I am glad you liked my singing. I’ll do it for you again on this one too if my voice holds out.

I think it is very common, don’t you, that there are women who are at least being honest and has had her passion awakened in some way, would be more willing and more often to perfect that a man can get it up. Just as simple as that, especially when you are in your forties. I don’t really have a problem with that. I really like looking forward to Jim’s and mine. We still date. We looked at the people around us and it did seem like marriage was poison to a good sexual relationship and we had a very good one for seven years, so we just decided that our lovers wouldn’t get married. We’d go out on each other and meet each other as our lover and I think that trick of the mind has helped both of us in adjusting to an anomaly.

I do think that you are right about the sexuality being very fundamental to having the ability to feel passion in other ways too because if you are sexual and intense, and right there at the red rate level, that means that whatever else you have to do in this life, you can bring things into the same passion, the same point-of-view that disregards all time because you are much too caught up in what you are doing when you have this feeling at being wonderful at home and wonderful in the right place because you are serving someone.

I think that passion needs to be differentiated from lust. I think that there is an animal within each of us, or around each of us or somehow we use it to move around in, and I find that the simple mating of strangers natural, but uninteresting. I have tried it a couple of times, but it did not become interesting ever. That discouraged me right away. The only time that I have had good relationships, and I have had mostly good relationships, have been when communications are extremely clear going into the relationship and we had been friends for some time before we entered into the relationship. And we knew each other pretty well.

That simple kind of passion is okay, but it really doesn’t give you a whole lot of chance for energy exchanges that are really worth while because you just don’t know each other well enough, that you are comfortable enough with each other basically going for the gusto. But there are people who break all of the laws as far as adultery goes, who really are very service-oriented people.

A friend of Don’s, they looked like Mutt and Jeff. He was 5’ 4“ and Don was 6’ 5“. He divorced his wife. He had a list of numbers on one of those long legal sheets, I mean they were crabbed in together, one number after another of people who he took down their numbers and he would call and ask if they wanted to go for a ride in his plane and he had a really odd gift. That gift was, he was able to see the beauty in people that Don and I could look at each other and think to each other, “Huh?” He was always eager to show us his latest girl and we were always eager to see what he was going to come up with this time.

I finally came to the realization that it is a relative world and some people do not act ideally, but they do seem to have their own mission and his mission was to make quite a few, I mean as many as possible, homely women grateful.

I have always felt intensely about everything. When one is a kid, one is supposed to be cool. It is not demanded so much of you after you are grown, but you are supposed to be cool. Unfortunately I have never gotten anywhere near cool. I am pretty hot. I mean I have an opinion about things and things move me and I think about things, so I have a very strong personality, I guess. A strong awareness of myself, and it certainly comes through in sexuality. Absolutely, there is a very clear link between someone with very strong clear red root energy and a person who has passion for music or for art. As you move up the energy centers, finally, of course, our passion is for our Creator, and the passion to be with the Creator, and to adore the Creator and join the Creator. If you don’t have the passion to begin with, you are not going to get your work in consciousness done.

Life is something that you aren’t supposed to be cool about. I am convinced of this. I mean, you may act calm and behave purposely, coolly, but inside you need to be burning up with the love and the joy that you feel and when we hear a call, we need to be ready to say, “Okay, Lord. I’ll go.” I think that as women and men get older, there is a temptation to cease being so sexual because the body changes, etc. Perhaps more of the passion is devoted to things other than sexual needs because the sexual needs are not as great. I don’t know. Jim says it hasn’t happened for him and he expects to quit making love at some point after he dies.

Sexual intensity translates to a clear energy center that is allowing the energy of the spirit to come upwards. The idea of the kundalini basically comes through the red ray and goes up your spine, whereas the Infinite light of the Father is filled into the energy field through the violet ray at the top of the head, so where they meet is where you are working. You want to be working in green, at least, which means doing whatever one can to. Actually the twelve steps in AA are a very good way of doing that. You feel that there is an attachment to them because of something that you have done, and didn’t forgive or something, to try to get your business done so that if you died today, it would be fine with everybody.

There would be no person at the funeral saying, “The last time I talked to her, I was so mean to her. I feel so terrible.” Would it not be that way and be really conscious and think to yourself about every facet of your life and as you go about making things right, which you probably have already mostly done, as you seem almost as compulsively honest as I. I think that you’ll find that it helps a whole lot.

As to Rasputin, he did not write his memoirs and he was thought to have magical powers by superstitious people. I believe he did have some power, but I think it might have been more in the area of hypnotizing people than in a natural healing. For instance if you had to stop the bleeding, you could put a person in a trance and simply tell the body to stop bleeding, and the body knows how to do it. It is just that the mind doesn’t know how to tell the body to do it because it hasn’t the autonomic system and it is automatic.

I guess I am not a nymphomaniac because I receive pleasure as well as give it and not still going for my first orgasm or anything like that, but I just love sex. I’d rather have a good love making than a good meal. I’d get a lot more out of it. I find that to be an unusual attitude for a woman my age at least in the women around me that I know. I think most of them are in relationships that they are a little bit tired of so they are not quite as drawn, but I am, indeed, a sexual creature and Jim drives me nuts, bless his heart.

I don’t know who your twenty-five boys are. Things have changed somewhat on K. She may stay in the house. She hasn’t responded to Jim’s and my letters saying, “Why don’t we give it a try just for a while and see if we like it?” because Jim and I both felt that if we were going to be community, do it all the way. If we were going to do it, we ought to do it because of the dedication towards the research that we are doing. Not just community, not just to enjoy each other’s company, but to get together, to work together, as well as enjoy life together. I am hoping that she will come and that she will want to stay and that she will fall for somebody in the meditation group circle.

I have got a couple of single guys who come a lot and maybe she can get hooked up with a partner who also wants to help L/L Research. I wish that very much because I know that without it, it is just a matter of time until she has other priorities, but I don’t begrudge her that. I am just grateful for any time that she is here.

I doubt if we hear anything out the windows today. Just the hum of the fan. I turned off the air conditioner so I could write you.

K is one of those people who doesn’t even know she is beautiful. You were talking about her figure and long hair are handy, but in the long run it is better to have character. This girl has got character out the wazoo. She is probably got the least self-esteem of anybody I have met so far in this lifetime. She really doesn’t think much of herself at all. She has been through the mill. She married a fellow whom she really did love, but she wasn’t in love with. She was a virgin. He was a homosexual and didn’t know it until he tried to make love to somebody.

That was her first frustration and she managed to retrieve from it her friendship with her husband, which still goes on to this day, and good feelings all around and nobody taken for anything like that. She has shown terrific character in a lot of ways. She has even stood up to her missionary parents and said this is not what I believe exactly. I believe somewhat differently. That girl has got character. She’s got a lot of loyalty and she is a good channel potentially. She hasn’t had enough practice yet to be a real easy. She is not real easy with it yet, but I don’t blame her. I think it must have been five years before I even began to start feeling easy about it. Easy in my mind that it would go okay.

You never feel like it is going to go okay because people ask questions that generally you don’t know and you think about. Sometimes they will ask the same questions over and over again, but even then you will discover if you are a working channel, that the velocity that comes out is slanted or tilted a certain way and it will give you completely different information and material to work on than another day one asking the same question would get due to the make-up of that group.

C is pretty much where Jim is. He is an unchurched Christian and so is K. I don’t think she will be going to church with me, which is a shame because I could use a ride, but she will be singing in the Box Society with me and I am really tickled about that because that is a ride that I’ll really like all the way across town.

I think she is a lucky girl. I think the chance to do an actual, committed work in consciousness is real rare because of the need to earn money. The fact is that Jim and I do not need to earn money as long as we are content to live on our budget and we would much rather live on that budget then get jobs and limit the amount of time for our labor of love. Both of us feel that is what we want to do so we have made the choice not to be particularly wealthy or well off. Worldly ambition is no where with us. We have no reputation in the community. We are not fine up-standing citizens. We have the cheapest house in our subdivision, I am sure, and certainly the most loving one. Everybody who comes here.

The first time I came here, I thought, Gosh, these are great vibration in this house. I don’t know why because the couple who lived here before us divorced and that is the reason for selling the house and the woman in that couple divorced another guy first and married the second guy, so she had gone through two divorces in this house, but she must have been tremendously strong because I felt angelic presences. I still do and people comment on that when they come in.

It certainly isn’t the arrogance of the furnishings. I am still an early era addict. I have yet to get house-proud. About the best thing I can do is when things get too terribly awful, I get them recovered. K’s two cats will be coming too so we’ll have a probably slightly hilarious and slightly scary time where all the cats are staking out their pecking order. They all do that.

About Jim going down to Avalon. It doesn’t bother me at all when he goes down to Avalon. When I was in the relationship with Don, happily unmarried as I used to say to him, he was gone a little bit more than half the time. That was the job. That was just the nature of his job. A pilot has to travel. It made two things possible. One: It gave me a chance to be completely by myself’; and Two: It gave me a chance to be a sexual being because I really couldn’t see making love in front of Don even though he was denying those feelings. I was quite aware that he had those feelings. He just was choosing celibacy for some reason, which I never ever got him to tell me, not ever. He died a man of mystery. So I was alone for usually, Don tried to make it about ten days at one time, which is keep going, keep going and get all of the hours done. Ten hours means ten hours in the cockpit. It could mean days of work and then he’d be home for a solid week or so.

Then I would go one or two weeks and not see a soul even. It isn’t that I don’t like people. I love people. Every time somebody comes over, I am so glad that they are here and I enjoy talking, I enjoy listening and I love to catch up on the news. I just don’t call people. I have too many things that are interesting to me that I am doing, or thinking about, or whatever and I just don’t know what it is that makes people spend a lot of time on the phone because it really is a waste of precious time.

Not people who call up and say “Tell me about this because I need to know it and how are you?” It is all right to be polite, but I have had friends who call me just because they wanted to talk. I have had to tell acquaintances like that, “I’ve got to go. I have work to do.” It is not really true. It is not work. It is a labor or love, but it takes all of Jim’s time and my time and we still have things left over to do. I have many ideas in my cranium, some of which may be valuable that we could do if we had more people.

I am thinking of Avalon as an eventual community, very intentional, that is, following the Law of One and working for that cause. We don’t want to get a lot of people in there on that land. We simply want to get the ones who feel the most strongly and the ones with who we harmonize the best. You are a heart-sister so you qualify for at least a shot at it, but it is a long time away actually. I think it is at least ten years in the future. Jim says five to ten. I don’t think so. I think that as I look at the kids that my friends have, like S for instance has got the 3-year old. He has also got a 14-year old and 10-year old. She is going to have to be home on the range, as it were, until that child is gone and if you count up from three to eighteen, you realize that we have about fifteen years to go on some of them.

Jim just really likes children immensely. He likes individual kids and he enjoys them for a while, but to be in community with kids, Jim says it would scare him to try that because he would be afraid that he would get angry at one of them, especially one of the little boys and physically hurt them because he had a great urge to do just that the last time we had a great big party and invited all the meditation folks over from years past. One little boy just trashed the basement.

The medical scare is over. It seems to have been a particularly nasty bug, but I feel badly anyway and I did not differentiate it from the way I felt. I feel about like that anyway. I did have a thick coat on my tongue, etc., pretty well convinced that I probably did have some viral disease, it healed itself thanks to your prayers and I am sure many of the others.

Time for singing. Is there anything else that you need to know?

You will be coming in September. You are welcome to come. S will be coming. S is one of my heart-sisters and she is also dealing with a drunken person and she told me yesterday that she had it and she wanted to leave him and I said, “Hey, we’ve got a bedroom just for you.” I can hope for her.

I promised you some singing and I can’t think of anything else that might help you.

All is well here really. Jim and I rub along together very well. He is far more patient and far more advanced spiritually than I could have hoped to be and manages somehow to get along with me even though he is very able by himself. He is very sweet in that sense. I think it will be a marvelous thing for him to have the time off on Avalon. I like time off myself. I like to be alone. I get a lot done alone.

I finally found some singing.

[Carla sings and explains the history of the song before she sings each.]