Dear R,
I have to use a tape recorder to write because my writing is so bad that I just recently got a letter that said I didn’t understand anything that you said because I couldn’t read your letter. Which makes the even more debated reason to use tape than I was before.
Thank you for your very interesting letter. I am pretty well swamped right now. I know it is crazy, but I have been disabled for a long time. I still ask of myself that I do some sort of presence between nine and five as if I were working for money instead of love and feel that I should be able to work the same amount. I sort of deal with my awe until that point and then if I am really super tired or having some problems with my time, I don’t have to feel guilty by stopping because I have put in my time.
It works for me. It gets me through the day; even when I am feeling lousy, I know that I can quit at five. It is 5:30 in the morning and so I have a little bit of time on my own time. I am leaving the church business until no longer than an hour. I am the chairman of the local arrangements committee for the diocese and convention of the women of the church and all I do is I put on and do a couple of services, and get guys to make sure that the street people from Louisville don’t interrupt ladies who have never seen a street person because we do a very big street ministry at our church, combined with the cathedral. I am an Episcopalian.
I did not mean to catch you with your britches down. I wouldn’t have embarrassed you by asking you what you meant except that you sounded like a pretty perfect person and the words were succinct and clear. I couldn’t grasp what you meant. You have to realize my whole life is communicating. My most favorite love is communicating with the unchurched. But I myself go to church and work with two prayer groups at church—one for me and one that I run for the parish. I just couldn’t figure what you meant and I was interested in what you meant because you sounded intelligent and that is not easy to do, as far as I am concerned.
So don’t feel that you were born in a china shop. You say you know that I am tough, but that you are worried that I am going to be bothered. No. It would bother me if you had a cure for cancer and you ate it. It would bother me if you hurt a kid. For you to say something about me that I don’t even understand is an occasion for me for interest, not botherness. Nobody can sarcastically insult me like my father anyway.
Forget about hurting my feelings. I can be hurt and I don’t take it very well, but the only way I can be hurt is if something is pointed out to me that seems to me to be unfair and I feel that I have been misunderstood. That is one of those little iniquities that makes me human along with everybody else, but there isn’t any way that what you said about me could make me feel poorly, really. It is okay.
I did know that Jim was answering your letters and the only reason that I wrote you the first time (it was on rather short notice I recall), was that interesting point that you made that I didn’t understand. That is why I can’t remember what it was now. Something about a fight going on within my body, and healing and all of that kind of stuff. People have been trying to heal me for so long that I am familiar with most of the ways people put it. You put it in a different way and I thought, Well perhaps there is some way that I can get more understanding from this person on the subject of healing and can be better.
Actually I consider myself to be incredibly sturdy and I’ll tell you why. This involves the willing suspension of disbelief, but it is not fiction. It is what happened to me even though it seems rather strange. I was a child that was born with an I.Q. of somewhere over 200 and an eye that could be barely seen on the lap. It was turned at birth towards the pineal gland. I was reading music at two. I was reading words music at three. Music came first, you will note. I looked like a little professor and I got skinnier and skinnier and longer and longer, and I am still all arms and legs, 5’ 4,“ though it is not tall for these days.
I couldn’t make a friend of my own age. I just was not socially there. I was given a doll for instance. I remember that. My first doll and its eyes opened and closed and its hair grew. I wanted to find out what made its eyes open and close and made its hair grow. How it worked. I had to have that doll real quick. I got the doll all apart and then I said to daddy, “I understand how it works now. Do you want to put it back together for me?” And he just looked at me and that was my doll. I am not real good at playing with dolls.
I am very much probably in my element talking about ideas. That is why I wrote you the first time and why I am writing you the second time. You still sound like an interesting person. Concurrently, I am going to write you back and hope that works for both of us. As long as you are on the path of seeking, I am not particularly interested in the kind of letter from a stranger that reads, my boy Mike is doing this and my boy Pat is doing that and I have gone along and the weather is fine.
But a letter that is full of ideas and feelings is a letter I relish because I believe that we really help each other more than we can help ourselves. Jesus said, “You reap where you do not sow and you sow where you do not reap.” I think it is all of us together that are working within our own consciousness to be a lighter influence in the world consciousness. All of us are comforted by knowing that there are others that are seriously trying to do this work. Now it is a very tacky field and one can get discouraged.
Jim is discouraged right now. A new periodical on channeling came out and he didn’t really like the cut of the jib. Probably it is mixed channeling, but she is talking the day of doom and she is going to be taken on board and all of that sort of stuff. Not very good channeling and I feel that I know why people get that kind of channeling, but at any rate, some people find anybody channeling very helpful. I have learned that there is no book that somebody won’t tell you that it really helps them out a lot so I try not to criticize other people’s books and ideas. But when pressed to the wall, I will give at least a partial opinion.
You said that you thought that all of us together were the teachers and that there is no way that we can separate ourselves from our complex. It is an interesting thought. When Don died in 1984, as per Ra’s instructions we stopped the contact cold because it was what Ra called a narrow band contact and apparently that meant that it was very easy to screw up from the standpoint of protection.
I always do things the hard way. I don’t know why I was going into trance doing that. I never intended to go into trance and I haven’t since. Of course, Jim has been holding my hand every time we meditate and he doesn’t want me to leave my body. He is afraid that fifth density guy is still after me.
We have a new third to our group. K.H. who is an absolutely delightful person and very much wishing to serve. But right now she is serving by paying off her debts so she can retire and come to live here where she will work harder than she ever did in her life. There is just a lot to do. All of it is very good work and I don’t think very many people get as lucky as I do.
I am just going to your letter now. I have been telling people that for years in my classes. It is not the answers that matter. That is why I criticize the New Age religion. It is a bottom-line religion and you don’t simply go to the bottom line. You work a spiritual path persistently for a long time to make it pay off and you are absolutely right. It is the questions that matter. The answers you’ve got all about it.
I don’t know if you were teasing or not when you said that we are under the law of confusion and that was a dirty trick. You must understand that of our own free will, we incarnated into this Marine boot camp to take a very tough course and maybe graduate within a whole 75,000 years or we came from some place else and went through the forgetting process ourselves because we wanted to lighten the consciousness of planet earth and we could only do that without infringing on free will if we became immigrants.
I consider myself a wanderer because it has been established under hypnosis and confirmed by three other people under hypnosis. That is all in The Secrets of an UFO and then I wanted something new to write when they asked me for an introduction to the first book of The Law of One, which they changed the title to the Ra Material, so I used the fourth regression, which I was glad to have.
In my opinion, always understand, I don’t worry about hurting people because I just tell the truth the way I see it. And I always say, “If it is not your truth, you don’t recognize this, throw it away. Give it to the Salvation Army because it is not your personal truth.” I am not an evangelist of any kind. This is the way I believe free will works.
I believe that we could not exist without it. I believe that it bonds with our God itself, or the Creator or Infinite Intelligence in its kinetic or active phase to form a self-conscious person. Consciousness is the ultimate noun in our study of ourselves because consciousness is not only what we think. Consciousness is what we are before we think. Consciousness is, in fact, basically the active principle of the Creator in each of us through our free will to choose in this dim, strange ocean to turn our will to the use of good and the use of the Creator in the service of other people. Some of us have days when our will may not be changed and we are all free will going in different directions. Some people spend their lives like that.
For me, I thank God that It decided to get to know Itself and by free will chose to make each of us, using the very stuff of Infinite Intelligence and free will. We come into this illusion completely free and with the veil dropped so that we must make choices, not based on things we know for sure, but based on pure blind faith and hope. Now the will to do that starts out as a mischievous child, willful, wanting things to be one way, wanting the truth, narcissism is up, a living monument to man’s search for metaphysical truth. Thomas Aquinas and all of the bunch after him, another one. You cannot discover the truth to the mystery. It is just the way it is.
But the fact that we are here to experience what we are experiencing, the fact that we are here to help, and maybe we are helping by being who we are and realizing it. That is, we see enough through the veil to see that we are in part our God-self and that we can share that, no matter what the path of service is. I have a lot of people that write to me that say, “I wish I had a service like you do. I am just a mom and I just take care of kids.” I think to myself, Is there any more sacrificial or difficult or tricky service-to-others than to be a parent? It is like a quagmire. You put your foot wrong all the time. Talk about a bull in a china shop. You are dealing with a kid who is not able to express himself fully, can’t make his needs known even in the beginning except by wailing and you are supposed to indicate unconditional love to this kid, while informing him of etiquette, business etiquette, social etiquette, social taboos, what you can do, what you are not supposed to do, but you can still do; what you should not do ever.
I mean it is a very complicated thing to bring up a child and let him know that he is loved unconditionally and at the same time, train him to be able to deal with a consensus reality that is completely irrational and very painful to observe, because you don’t want to bring up a child to be unhappy. You want to bring up a child to be interested, and alert and alive.
I don’t feel that happiness is the objective. I feel that it is an offspring of living a conscious life; that is, living consciously day-by-day, thinking about the Creator.
That probably is all I need to say about free will because I am very grateful to it and if people weren’t choosing to polarize negatively, would I choose to polarize so positively? It is something to push against. It is a good dynamic and we, all of us, have within us everything so every time you see the unfortunate things on the news you can’t say, “Oh dear, I don’t want to see it. It has no part of me.” It does. No man is an island. We are all one so with our free will, we choose how we treat each other and ourselves.
As to God, I think this is one of those interesting things to chew over that you can. In the Episcopalian church there is a strong strain of mysticism. It is heterodoxy, not orthodox, but it is accepted and, therefore, in a religion that has had apologists like C.S. Lewis and the lady who wrote the book “Mysticism,” Evelyn Underhill, and all of these mystics, just in this century. Mystic tradition goes back to the beginning of the Church of England and, of course, it was only separating itself from the Roman Catholic Church. It still considered itself catholic, that is, a universal church. It had part of the apostolic succession of the laying on of hands through Jesus and Peter, etc.
But it was made up of people who went along with the king who changed his religion so he could marry somebody and get rid of somebody else. This leaves the Episcopalian religion a little bit open to doubt and questioning and things not being absolutely literally true. We had humble beginnings. It was kind of a crazy time in England anyway. It is fun to read about, but I wouldn’t have liked to have lived there. If you will read the doctrine of any Episcopalian church, which does not include original sin, it gives you the God story and then you are supposed to say that you believe it.
When I was fourteen, I said to my Bishop, “I can’t buy the virgin birth.” He said, “Neither can I.” It opened up the whole religion to me and I realize at that point that I could doubt all I wanted to. I could be totally unsure. I could know nothing for sure, but there was a function that religion was going to play in my life and I would be a fool to let that function go because I was a mystic and other people were literalists. The Bishop wagged his finger at me and said, “Don’t you ever leave the church because nobody outside of the church is going to be able to give you spiritual counsel like those within the Anglican community and I have found that to be true.
They are very well versed on mystics. They do not think they are heretical. My ministry to the unchurched is supported by the church. My spiritual counselor reads a goodly portion of what I put out. He reads everything I put out and he even reads some stuff that I haven’t put out just to make sure I am on the beam and he thinks I am. He thinks I have a gift.
Believing in a God of love and a God that is cruel and jealous: I believe that the God that was cruel and jealous was a sub-logos that is one of the beings that was intended to guard this planet, who had a bright idea and had it passed by the Council, and did some genetic stuff, causing a bunch of people to be bigger, and stronger and more intelligent so that they could lead their lives, but instead they formed an elite and became a nation unto themselves. Not a nation of priests, but a nation of clever people. This obviously was not the Creator who did this because they made a real muddle out of it.
I have my doubts about the God that is loved and the God that is love. I feel that to me, my personal mythology, another word for religion that I like, accepts the God story because of the emotions that it makes me feel. I feel that the function of religion is to discipline and free my deeper self so that I may choose with more and more intelligence to pass before me and, therefore, I go through the church year through the many moods of the different readings of the Bible.
It is 6:15 and it is still dark. I don’t like winter. The only way I get through it is Christmas, which I love. Right now I am doing church work, as I told you before, and I don’t do it for the church. I do it for myself using discipline in that way with willfulness as I find it difficult to say, not the will of the small self, but the will of the greater self within me. Not my will, but thine.
I don’t believe in the creed. I doubt much of it, but I need that story. I need spiritual discipline. I need a myth. It wouldn’t have to be that myth. I simply chose it because I have to have the faith and for some reason, I love Jesus Christ very much. So it is a sentimental thing where I went with that, but I am in full awareness of the fact that it is in the solitude that adhere to. Not a doctrine or dogma. It is a story about God that I can relate to in such a way that it brings me nearer and nearer to myself, to the God-self within and then I glow more and more, and radiate and really become a force to lighten consciousness on planet earth.
I do believe in God. I do believe there is a Creator. I find the idea that there would not be a creator ludicrous. Nothing less. If you were walking around and you picked up a clock still on the ground, a time piece, one of those old fashioned watches for the weskit pocket and the fob. You opened it up and you see the thing is marking time accurately, and you look inside, and you look at all the springs and gears and stuff that a normal watch has. Then somebody says to you, this was created out of the primeval ooze and you go, “Sure.” This was a random happening. Uh huh. No. We are not a random happening. We are the Creator getting to know Itself.
I am extremely grateful to the God that I do not know. There is within my society a church to which I can go and practice a life in faith. I practice it every day here at home, but worship with other people is magical. And I go to the Eucharist and sing in the choir and have a big whoopty-do service every Sunday and I go through the emotions that are requisite for me to polarize my service-to-others. I cannot defend the faith on a basis of anything that we might know or not know. We do not know this mystery, but there are just so many options open to us about the mystery of the creation. We can ignore it. Many do. They just grab for the good stuff and forget about relating to the Creator, or who they are or any questions like that. It is just like, “Oh come on. Books rot your brain.” They’ll say stuff like that.
Then there are the people that find it necessary to have some kind of real structure in their lives. Somebody to tell them what God is like so that they can get it secondhand and then they can say, “I believe all this.” Then they are saved.
There is another option and it is one that I have made.
[Carla discusses K. having come and her contribution to the community.]
Part of the intentional life is that I acknowledge God as a mystery and I seek to plumb the depths of that mystery through worship and adoration, praise, thanksgiving, prayer, humbleness, various of the emotions that are involved in digging deeper and deeper into yourself, into your subconscious, into the portions of yourself that are impersonal; finally, the portion of yourself that is purely the Creator within us. Free will has been turned into thy will.
In order for this to happen, you have to go over, and over, and over and over the same emotions. They need to be evoked ever new. You cannot get to a mountain top and stay there. Life is lived in the valley of experience, not the mountain top for the most part. But we can give ourselves the nourishment that we need the mountain tops that we need by understanding the nature of the unit. Why it is necessary for us to have it. We need to become aware of ourselves as imperishable eternal beings and that is virtually impossible without the persistent practice of some personal myth, some holy grail towards which one seeks and guiding one’s footsteps for no other reason than the will of God.
I am not afraid of the liturgy or what is in tongues because nobody has ever been able to get anything into this hard head of mine unquestioned. This girl thinks everything through. I remember one time Don, and Jim and I were watching the Hill Street Blues years ago and Don said that Jim was Ranco, always wanting to do something. Very impatient. Jim is a very active guy and Don himself was Captain Carrillo, which was true in a way because Don was a controlled, quiet guy who had very wise things to say when he opened his mouth. He said, “Now you, Carla, you are a [inajudible].” I am the one who hangs on, I am a persistent person and I think in the spiritual growth that is the single-most important characteristic. You have to keep at it like the old joke how you get to Carnegie Hall by practicing and practicing.
I sing the songs to feel the emotion. I do not take anything literally, including the parable of Jesus’ life. I simply seek in an humble way to learn from it, to grow with it, to use the way things are set up in that system of beliefs, not that I might believe and be saved. That is not it—tat I might learn how to be a person who lives a life and safe. How to be a person who can abide no matter what the circumstances of the illusion in the knowledge that the Creator is kindly and that everything has a reason in the end that is beneficial. Enough about the Creator.
The healing body that doesn’t need or deserve this pain and it is not necessary for me to accept it. Yes, you are absolutely right. All I would have to do is just stop moving and I don’t think I would be in pain. But if I totally accepted my limitations, I really don’t think I would have this pain, but I think I will have this limitation for the rest of my life and I’ll tell you the story of why I think that. If I told you last time, I am sorry but it is the only way I can explain how I go about my life in faith. I started to tell you and then didn’t get very far.
Often in childhood I could not make a friend of my own age to save my life. [inaudible] I was very friendly. I didn’t know a stranger, my mother said. But kids my own age sort of squinted at me and went, “No.” Boys were kinder than girls so consequently I was known as a tomboy since I had acquaintances that were boys. I played with boys. The truth of it was though no girl would play with me because who wants a playmate who takes the head off of your doll? I read voraciously from the age of three when my father taught me how to read by reading the comic strips to me and running his finger along the words. So when everybody else was reading, “Run, Spot run,” I was reading “Little Women.”
I wanted one thing and one thing only when I was born. I had one ambition. I had a burning ambition to help people. I didn’t care how I helped people. I didn’t care whether I was barmaid and helped people or a doctor and helped people or what. Really I think my only really ambition has been to be a mom and have six kids because I think it is the hardest path of service in the world and I wanted to do it. But I just never got into the right situation to have a baby.
When I was twelve and half or so, maybe close to thirteen, I decided I suppose in the throes of puberty, that it was hopeless that I couldn’t serve anybody. I couldn’t help anybody. There wasn’t anything for me here to help. Nobody wanted my help and so I knelt down where I happened to be when this great realization came, I knelt down on that cool tile floor and put my forehead on the porcelain of the tub. It is funny how you remember very little things like that as being keys to a lot of emotional feelings. I prayed to die with absolute faith that I would be taken at that instant. I was just a little naïve. To my surprise, I was not taken on the instant. I did not go up to heaven in a whirlwind like Elijah.
On with life. But I remember that moment. I just plain said, “There is nothing I can do here. Take me home.” Not two or three months later, my kidneys failed. This was in 1956 when I was thirteen, and they did not have the technology of dialysis or of kidney transplants or even proper medicine for the disease that I had, which was something called Bright’s Disease. And I died, and I went immediately and I didn’t have a tunnel or a light at the end of it. I was just immediately standing in the archway of this incredibly beautiful place where the colors were all livid and had depth. I could see the music that was in the air, hear the music of the spheres. I could talk to any plant or animal and I was no longer in pain nor did I have disfiguring marks as a result of the disease, a kind of a rash. I knew I was dead because I was free of pain and because I was without blemish.
A second ago I had been lying without any covering at all in a hospital bed with no sheet over me because I couldn’t stand anything touching me.
Basically I was going through this lovely park, going to the temple and suddenly the music of the spheres was cut into a voice over and the voice over was masculine and very deep and it said, “You may choose to stay here if you wish because you chose something that is very difficult and it is acceptable to us if you cannot do it. But you did move into this lifetime for a reason. You did have things to do in this lifetime and it is your choice.”
I am so responsible, it is totally foreign really. I am always the treasurer, even at Monopoly when I was a kid. I was the one who everybody trusted to be the banker. I can’t steal. There was once a quarter on a washstand and at that time my favorite pack of crayons cost twenty cents, and I still couldn’t take that quarter. I knew it was somebody’s lunch money. I was just too responsible to accept the easy way out. I came back.
I came back to a dead body and did the best I could to revivify it. The doctors were amazed. I got off the crucial list. I was in the hospital for months. The poison all settled in my joints and I became an arthritic, a juvenile rheumatoid arthritic and a juvenile lupus victim. I didn’t feel it, not really. Maybe I’d get a little ache when it got cold or rained, but I was active and healthy. I danced. I had a total of twelve years of dance. I was on the swim team.
I only had about half of each kidney in the physical sense, but that is more than enough. You only need about a quarter of one of your kidneys to live. But I did come back into a dead body so I am going to have a lemon. We know this. We concede this, but I am not going to be able to restore it to perfect health—a dead body. My God-self isn’t that clear to me yet. I can’t do that yet. So what I have done is try to make the best of it.
I began getting limitations almost the instant that I had taken up with Don Elkins and was with him about six years when I was disabled and unable to work. Right now I am lying back talking on the tape because my handwriting is a joke. You simply can’t read it. I am exceeding my limitations because in half an hour, I am going to cuddle with my husband for half an hour, and then we are going to get up and do a morning offering. I am going to get my exercise clothes on. I am going to go off and beat my body for an hour, which I do six or seven days a week because with arthritis and lupus, it is either use it or lose it. I am not saying that there is not pain involved. It is just that the options are very limited and with my feet as bad as they are now, no impact aerobicizing is better for me than pounding the pavement walking.
I am very sorry that you have got into my toxic aura. I know it is toxic. When people work on me, and they often do, I make them go wash their hands afterwards and say cleansing prayers about getting rid of it because a couple of times I have caused people who are massaging me to have instant arthritis and it is just really painful to me to know that I would be doing that to somebody. I know it is transferable.
You say, “It is not willfulness nor ego to live in a healed and pain free body.” No, I don’t believe it is. It is just that this particular body has some problems and it is doing really well with the problems, I think. I look almost healthy. I would look completely healthy if it weren’t for the fact that right now I have to wear a cervical collar when I am not lying back because I was in an accident and I screwed my neck up again. No news here. Carla has messed her neck up again so it is pretty obvious. There has always been something wrong with me but I can honestly say to you that I don’t think that most people are aware that I have arthritis. It is just that I go into that environment, the Box Society, practicing singing for church or something, and come home and collapse. They don’t see that part.
It isn’t that I have an attitude that I deserve this illness or there is some reason for this illness that is spiritual. I think basically what it was, that my higher self and the God-self within felt that I did need to be limited in order to become a mystic and to develop as a metaphysician. The old joke, I never met a physician I didn’t like. Pardon that. It just came out. I hate it when it does that.
I think my body is doing really well. When I started to work with Don, it was incredible how fast it happened. Within two months I couldn’t climb stairs, sit up, open a door, dress myself, and wash myself. I was defunct. I sat down and thought about that and was in denial for a while and didn’t take any aspirin, figuring it was just a phase. I hadn’t had it all these years even though it has been diagnosed, so it will go away again. This is just a flare-up. Finally I acknowledged my defeat and also my hands and my head and having pain enough to go to the doctor and see about it. The doctors gave me lots of pills that hurt my stomach so now I take pills for my stomach too. I tried a diet proposed by Cayce the longest. It was very like the natural macrobiotic diets. Very few things that were different. I did lose a tremendous amount of weight on that diet. I found the food rather untasteful and so it was not difficult to quit eating when I was full and I lost about twenty pounds and then held a good weight, which is what I weigh now, about 102 to 105.
Because of the fact that I had come back and because of the fact that my personality is such that I am losing a lot, if I am healthy and feeling well, I am doing a lot. I think that the limitation, not the pain, but the limitation in order that I live a life that I needed to live in order to become a channel and cause this particular ministry to the unchurched. I would love to live in a pain free body. I would love to be healed. I have a good attitude. I have earned healing. I believe in my body as a terrific body. I visualize life into it. I like my body, but I have explored the subject fairly deeply and as near as I can tell, it was a pre-incarnative choice that kicked in when I started working with Don. But it was going to have to be limitation, limitation, limitation so that I could, in fact, do nothing but read, contemplate, meditate, etc.
I accept that. I don’t resent that. It is a part of what I agreed to do when I came back. I agreed to come back to a totally dead body. It was revivified, but it was a miracle. No doctor had any clue either as to what caused the kidney failure or as to what stopped it. Not a clue. Not to this day.
I would will to be healthy. I pray daily to be healthy, but I pray in assurance to the Creator that if I become healthy, I will continue this work. I will continue observing the limitations that I need to and I figure that maybe one day, I’ll get that all the way through to my God-self and I will be able to be free of pain. But it is a very, very deep commitment that I made to come back and do this whatever, and it is very difficult for me not to exceed my limitations by pushing myself. Just like I am doing now. I got up at 5:30 in the morning so that I could do a little L/L work because today I am going to be pretty swamped with church work. Church work I do for my own discipline. The L/L work is strictly a labor of love.
I don’t scan people for truth. I just am gullible and believe what they have to say. I take a lot of short cuts. Just trust and if it doesn’t work out that way, well just write it off.
Sorry about the blank pages of Esmeralda. It is not the first time that somebody has written, but it is never the same pages. We can’t figure out what in the heck happened. It is weird.
I’ll tell Jim if you like, to send you another copy. I will tell him when he gets up. I am going to wake him up in fifteen minutes.
Your most sincere prayer that you have not upset me in any way is answered. No problem. You are talking about religion again and you are talking about original sin. The Episcopalian church does not believe in original sin. It believes that God created good stuff. Why wouldn’t He? He created it out of Himself and truly I do believe that it is so that if you do not seek, you will not find, but if you do seek, you will find. As a matter of fact, I try to warn people not to desire things too much unless they really, really want them because they are going to get them and they may be sorry to get them. They need to think it through.
In 1974 you sort of became aware of a principle of some kind, a Godness that was going to help you. You must release the sadness that you feel that you didn’t know how to treat somebody the best at the time that you did it. You did your best. Nobody can do more than that. I have had nauseating and humiliating failures in my life, the worse of which was my inability to keep Don Elkins alive. He was sure he was going to die and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the course of this year or so of total negligent dysfunction on his part, I became progressively less able to function myself and finally had a nervous breakdown and catatonic. I guess I was just over-stimulated by his constant [inaudible] and he wouldn’t seek help and he wouldn’t take medicine. I simply became so ill myself that the last five weeks of his life I wasn’t even here. I was at my parents’ house because here all I could…all I remember is that one day I woke up and I was looking at the molding. It was an old house, an old fixer-upper, and it has got real pretty molding and I was looking at it very complex in the doorway, and that is all I remember about that day.
But apparently people were talking to me and moving me around, dressing me, all of this sort of stuff, and that is all I remember. The next thing I remember is basically I was at my mom’s and sleeping in my brother’s old room because mother had taken my old room. She tossed pop out on his sorry ass. He was sleeping alone. Anyway I was grateful for the room, but I felt terrible that I couldn’t stay with Don and do what he asked.
You see, he was crazy and I didn’t know how to deal with mentally ill people. It is not taught in school how to deal with mentally ill people and that is too bad, but it is not the only failure that I have ever had in my life. It is just the worse one.
I felt as if I should die. I felt that the result was death for what I had done. I really felt badly. We are not talking sad; we are talking suicide. And I am still in therapy working it all out and working out the fact that my future is towards my limitations unless a miracle occurs, and more pain, etc. And I really don’t care for that.
But you have to realize that you did the best you could. Everybody does the best they can at that time. You give it your best shot and have to release it and live a life of faith. You have to forgive yourself. So forgive yourself and if you do something current that you can’t forgive, forget it. Make that part of your balance so that you are constantly self-forgiven.
The last thing that I really do want to get to is the thing about the donation. I would like to defend the notion of donation as opposed to price. If we put a price on our stuff and sold it, we would have to price it to make a profit sufficient enough so that we could reprint when it came time to reprint, and we could buy our postage, and we could buy our mailing supplies and stuff. We do not ask that this labor of love keep us. It was Don’s life work and he hired me on for a big $300 a month. It was what I figured I could live on and I worked with him and then Jim came in 1980. Don died in 1984 and he left his life insurance and stuff to me so now I have that. I have that insurance, what wasn’t taken away by the government, and my Social security disability and we have been pinching for years just to make it for the two of us and now we have three so I guess we will really be pinching it. Like we will go to the second-hand shop, but that is okay.
I really prefer the luxury of not having to work from 9 to 5, even if it means that I have to live in I guess what I would call genteel poverty because I was raised differently than most people who live poorly. I don’t really live poorly. It is just that we don’t have any money.
The house that we live in is paid for and it is in a very nice little town outside of Louisville. It is like living in a park with other people’s money.
Back to money donations: if we charged the fair price, which is basically in the book business 50% overhead. You take the amount of printing costs and double it. That is the basic retail cost. Our cheapest book would cost about $6.00 and our most expensive book would cost (actually it is a tape) $16 because we buy that from my brother’s agent. My brother feels very apologetic about the fact that we have to spend this much money, but he signed the contract. He is into religion too. Trust and all of those foolish things that don’t work on the earth plane. Why do you think I have Don Quixote on my stationery? I know I am being foolish from the viewpoint of the world.
I want people to have this material, whether they are young or old, whether they are poor or rich, no matter what. I have got a lot of prisoners who don’t have penny one and they want this book. They can only get it if I send it to their chaplain. We send them to the chaplain. They can’t pay. So why put a price on it? Basically what I say to people, or what Jim says to people, ideas come up from all three of us. Don too. We say, give what is comfortable. You know how much you have got in the bank. You know how much you can spare. And you know how much you value our work and that equation comes out differently for everybody and we get $100 checks from people. We also get a whole lot of people asking for everything we’ve got for free and then having the brass balls to say, “Please send six more copies,” which does amaze me to some people’s ability to sponge off of people.
I really feel that there is a metaphysical principle involved. An affirmation to live an affirmative positive life. I do not think about what is happening with Don’s insurance money. It is in a trust paid out by somebody at the bank. I don’t know if I own anything the world way. I just can’t do anything about that. But the way we set up the corporation, it is non-profit. We take donations. We don’t have any members. We give our books away. It is not to trade.
It is to give and we are willing to give the gifts back, or the money that has been given to us, if any has been given to us, or we are willing to take the books back. We are real easy going because all of the jails have prisoners to send the books to that are may be banged up a little on the outside. You just can’t sell them at retail.
There are old people that can barely write even, but they are still thinking and they are still looking and they are still probing. And they are living on Social Security. They are getting $640 a month. They can’t afford this, our books. They are carried by the people who are comfortably off, who are very interested in what we are doing, which is basically living an intentional life and then publishing some of the results of it. Therefore, they give us large donations, but the biggest donation we ever had, I think, is $1,000 and that impressed me. That has happened a couple of three times, but that was because it was comfortable to the person who was giving it. Each of the three people was quite wealthy at that time. One of them is no longer wealthy at all. He will be again. He is that kind of person.
L/L gives books away free. L/L accepts donations for its research. I will admit that if somebody has not ordered anything for three years, we stop sending them Lightlines because we kind of get the hint that maybe he has had enough of our particular information. In order to reinstate Lifelines, this person has to send in a donation, or at least a request, and most people send in a donation with their request, so there is this subtle imperfection in the ideal we are trying to live. That is okay. This is ours. It is going to be imperfect. It is the best we can do.
I do not feel that it is service-to-self to say donations. I feel that it is sacrificial. But there is one other reason that I personally do it, one reason that I would very much dislike doing anything else and that is, that people who are not ready for this material will not pay any attention to it if they get it free. It is powerful information. It can do a lot of changing of a person’s bio-computer. The mind can change a lot by reading this kind of material. It is powerful material.
If you don’t ever charge for it, only the people that are supposed to catch that drift, catch it. It comes to the people that it is supposed to. If you charge for it, and I have had people tell me, charge a lot for it so people will take it seriously. I want to guard the information. I don’t want people to just be taking it up and spouting it that are going to basically ruin it. Pearls before swine and all that. I want people like you, people that think, people that are questioning and wanting the truth, etc.
We keep ourselves going as a trust. We keep L/L going on donations and we are free of the isolated need to price and that is a real blessing for us.
It is now time for me to say good-bye. I do feel that I earn my keep in the sense that I take up room on the planet because I work with as many people that I can per day, like you, that are writing in with questions about their spiritual lives, etc. and to me. This is the best life I could have. I am really in heaven because I have a high I.Q. and I never could figure out why because I had no ambition, but it takes a lot to grasp, not only what the person is saying, but what the person is saying between the lines so that you have an instinct for what vocabulary that person can talk in. I think I have been able to talk within your vocabulary, although I don’t know that for sure. I just hope so.
Why you are pouring nicotine into yourself, as far as I am concerned, you are smoking because you need something to do with your hands because you are stressed and if you stop smoking, all you are going to do is put some other kind of poison into yourself, probably sugar. I would look at why you need to have something to do with your hands. Why you feel insecure and when you have that figured out and only when you have that figured out, go through one of those quit smoking things that makes it a little bit easier. Then you’ll be all right, but until you know why you are smoking, for God’s sakes, smoke. It may be dangerous to your health, but it is much more dangerous to eat too much and that is what happens with everybody I know who quits smoking. Smoke.
Now you have had my opinions on just about everything in the world and you can ignore anything you want to that doesn’t make sense to you because I am just a bozo on the bus like you.
Thank you for all of your kind words. I think you have got the basic choice of this incarnation down pat. On that note, I will leave you with your choices. Good luck and write me, if you wish, any time. I am always glad to read a thoughtful letter and be thoughtful back. It is a real privilege. Until next time.
Cheerio,
Carla