Dear R,
I take letters as they come in. I felt for you, basically is what I am saying. When people can honestly come out and say, “I feel the need for some love,” I think that help is just around the corner because they know what they need. Most people are tooling away their hopes and desires on things much more perishable.
As for judging, that is not my specialty. Nothing seems meaningless. You are simply having a rough time. I only have about ten minutes before dinner so this will be at least a portion because I can’t get all that I want to say in, so I’ll start with things that don’t take any brain power.
The International Woman’s Artists archives, I hadn’t heard of it. You are absolutely right. I don’t know if it would be worth the investment in time to do it or not. I have quite a few published books and quite a few unpublished things and it wouldn’t trouble me at all for somebody to have them listed as being done by a woman. It would not trouble me at all to have my background known or anything like that. I have a very mild one.
But I am not particularly sure whether writing a book about channeling is the same as writing the “Crucifixion at Sweet Rock,” which was a fiction. I even have music tapes that I have written stories and songs, so tell me what of those things appeal or even if it is even going any more, and what you would like out of it from me. I will be glad to send it.
As to the harassment by J.S., I can see you have a little problem. People that are drug dealers are not wise nor have they any particularly acute sense of consensus reality. Such a woman would just likely hurt you because she would just as soon do it as not. Otherwise she wouldn’t be in the business of turning people on to these dangerous and very destructive substances.
In Louisville, there is a downtown area where a person can go in and homestead a house with a 3% loan, nothing down (I think this is right). It is in a downtown area that has just been allowed to dissolve over the years and I think our church has been part of an ecumenical effort to restore several of those houses and sell them cheaply for the cost to renovate them to people. There ought to be programs like that in Massachusetts. It is a strong one, a liberally represented state speaking of Kennedy.
I can’t imagine that some form of intercity renewal funds have not been placed for people in exactly your position, who don’t have the capital to begin a decent, appropriate life style, but who has the desire to, and the mental and emotional wherewithal to follow through with keeping things nice and all of the things that go along with being responsible.
Check it out, why don’t you? Call whatever county agent comes closest to being the one to have information for that. You may get tossed round from person to person for a while on the phone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t find some way to move, some options that you do not now know simply by stirring around and asking for help.
Asking for help is the most important thing in the world you can ever do, I think, because you are grounded well in humility. You know you can’t do it all. You accept the fact that nobody else can do it all either and that life is a very cooperative effort. There are a lot of good vibes around that kind of feeling and around that kind of improvement program. I expect that they would be perfectly delighted with you. I will keep you in my thoughts that things are going to better for you.
You are 38. I am 46 and [inaudible] one-eighth Cherokee so I don’t have anything to brag about at all. I suppose I could brag about my royal blood, but who cares? It is the wrong country. The family shouldn’t have come over.
Just to let you know about my background, I was trained as a librarian, worked as a librarian during the sixties and took a job with Don Elkins as a researcher in the seventies. After working with him for a couple of years, I became disabled about a decade ago. My kidneys failed when I was 13. I had something called Bright’s Disease and I wasn’t expected to live. With the kidneys, what they can do now they never had a notion of in 1956. I actually died for about twelve seconds.
It was a very enjoyable feeling because I was out of pain and the only sticker was that a voice came in over this beautiful landscape I was seeing and told me that I really hadn’t finished what I came here to do, and it was my choice as to whether or not I wanted to go back and finish and do it. Well here I am.
That decision to come back meant that I decided to come back to a body that was very weakened and I have been disabled for ten years, had ten operations on my hands and wrists, and six operations on my toes, even the gall bladder taken out a couple of years ago and I am not even fat. It wasn’t there. Now I am looking forward with an emotion I cannot express to having my neck fused some time after the first of the year as it has become dangerous and unstable, so I understand.
I always knew that I would forget my head some time. It is getting closer to that time.
My undergraduate degree was in English Lit. I could have gotten it in philosophy or in Russian, but I just didn’t want to take a couple of ragtag courses I had to do to fulfill the other major sciences and went ahead and graduated in one major. My graduate training was in library service.
I was a real lonely kid. Not physically abused as a child too much. My mother would get angry and slap at me sometimes, but not too bad, but verbal abuse was pretty severe and I had an alcoholic parent actively alcoholic, so I was cooking at ten and was baby sitting at seven. That kind of stuff, so I guess I developed into sort of a tough cookie in a way. I am a little person and I don’t look tough, but what with having to deal with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus and rheumatic heart and gosh I don’t know what all I have had, you can’t imagine.
I do feel that we both share something that is very precious to us and that is suffering. It is hard to appreciate suffering. I know. At this moment, I am contemplating spinal fusion of C-1 and C-2 vertebrae in my neck. They are going to harvest a piece of bone from the crest of my hip and slap it on my neck and glue the whole thing together some way so that my head will stay on. Apparently, there is some danger now.
This is not an operation that I am looking forward to. On the other hand, here I am and it is what I have to do right now to be the best person I can to myself. We do it.
It is too bad about your being a bright little kid, a gifted or child prodigy type and having absolutely nothing done for you. I wondered exactly the same thing. I don’t know why people are like this, but they gave me an I.Q. test to see if I could start in third grade. Mother wanted me to start in third grade because I definitely was at third grade level as far as what I knew and things like that. As far as thinking went, I was always highly able to express myself. I am a good communicator. I could probably have written a perfectly good college paper at any age.
My I.Q. came out over 200 somewhere, it went off the scale and then they gave me an I.Q. test for an older child and then it still went off the scale and then for a high schooler and I still went off the scale and then for a college student, I went off the scale and for a college graduate or advanced degrees, I made 185 on that. I scored low enough to get an I.Q. so I have a real high I.Q. too and that makes for a really lonely childhood, doesn’t it?
The I.Q. was fine, but then they were going to test my social skills so they put me in this room full of very tacky, old stuffed animals, and used doll houses and just ratty funky toys of all kinds. A young man, I suppose he must have been in his early twenties doing his graduate work as a social worker, he was going to judge me on my ability to be sociable.
He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Well, let’s just sit and talk.” To me, if I couldn’t read, I would much rather chat and find out what is going on with somebody else.
I didn’t play with dolls. The only doll anybody ever gave me, I took the head off to see how the eyes worked and couldn’t get it back on.
There is nothing wrong with my femaleness or anything like that. It is just that I would take extremely good care of a real human baby, but doll babies have no relevance to me at all. It just one of those things so I was finally looking around, and he kept urging me to do something besides talk with him. I spotted a dart set and I like targets. I enjoy things like that. So I selected the darts and did a fair job of getting the darts on the board and he said, “Thank you.” I went home and he said that I was socially retarded.
So I had to go through all of the grades at the right age level supposedly, but I didn’t even have a teacher who knew what I was talking about until I was in the sixth grade, really. I was considered a throw-away girl. I was sent to the library so often I think I read every book in it in grade school.
Things worked out. I got to be a certain age, about 17, and all of a sudden everybody else was like me instead of my being very different and I just never have looked back. It is extremely seldom that somebody will meet me, and dislike me or even be indifferent. Most people enjoy my company, and I guess it is that everybody had to grow up. The boys, it took a while to get there.
Let me talk about the real reason that I answered your letter early instead of waiting until it is the next postmark. I usually answer letters by looking at the postmark. It is the only fair way I know and I answer them in chronological order. But I really felt that I needed to talk to you as soon as possible because, I don’t know. Because the letter felt a certain way and I know that you are suffering, and know that I am suffering, and I know that feeling of hopelessness and meaninglessness on the inside. And I have often actively wished I was dead because of the pain of arthritis and stuff.
Of course, when Don died, I wished I was dead too after sixteen years with him, I just thought I couldn’t live without him. And I almost didn’t. I never tried to kill myself. It is just that I had real health problems after he died. That was when I had my gall bladder out.
There is suffering. There is limitation, there is pain, there is angst and there is loss. All of these things are blessings because we are not these bipedal animals. We are consciousness, and the lessons and the biases that we are learning are imperishable as we are. So if you look at a life that is likely to go on being fairly lousy, which I certainly have to do, I am 46 and I expect to live a long time. Arthritis doesn’t kill you. It just makes you wish you were dead.
I honestly feel that it is the experiences of being in the desert that teaches one the most compassion. It is one’s failures in various things that teach one that everybody has a dark side and anyone’s behavior is possible to be forgiven. The fruit and harvest of compassion, and wisdom, and unconditional love and feeling of self-worth that is the end of these trials seems to be enormously all right. But there is a trick of consciousness that I have used to good results and that is to say, “Where is the love in this moment?”
When I do that, I can look around and I can see that I sit in a warm house. I’ve got six cats, a husband who is fond of me. The music that I am hearing or whatever it is, is beautiful. Today the scenery outside is beautiful. Tonight I have a really cozy little nest of a front room. It is very nice because like a lot of dining rooms back in the early 1900s when this was built, they put a wonderful bay window that has eight windows, all of them six feet tall and three feet wide and we have lots and lots of plants hanging at them. It is just a every nurturing environment.
Things sort of begin to ease up on me, and I begin to see that there is love in the moment and it is a matter of placing my mind somewhere else than on my woes, and worries and troubles. If it is necessary to sit and read a mystery or watch TV or something equally brain-dead, that is what you are supposed to do. I certainly do enough of it. I read romances a lot these days. They are truly the most junky, most inconceivably inconceivable story plots that you could ever read, but for some reason right now, the romantic has an appeal for me.
I was in a very romantic relationship with Don Elkins, who never married me, but worshipped me and I think I like to read the romances just to kind of remember how that felt. It is a wonderful feeling and it really only happens to you once if it happens at all. Jim is very loving. He loves me a lot and I love him a lot, but our marriage was based on working together, living together and being nice to each other and we have been friends for a long, long time.
But it was not a romantic passionate, mad affair and so I read romances from time-to-time when I can’t do anything else. God knows whether I will even be able to read with my head in one of those crazy halos that they put on you. It screws on your head and they put this round thing to keep your neck completely immobile. Doesn’t this sound wonderful? I am not looking forward to this, R., I’ve got to tell you.
I just wanted to make contact. I am odd. Most everybody is in one way or another. I feel a lot of sympathy for you and more than that, I feel a lot of empathy for you because of not only did you have the kind of rotten childhood that only a very bright child could have that was increased by the intelligence, I think. Of which you are suffering from some of the same things that hurt me.
I have sciatic problems too because I’ve had so many pain shots in my life that they have wandered onto sciatic nerve territory too many times and one of those will start getting me and sometimes it will go all the way down my leg to my foot, and I just think, I am going to croak from the pain. Aspirin doesn’t do it, as you well know, so I haven’t any desire to be impressed. I have no desire to judge, but I think that what you are really asking for is somebody who cares and who would be glad to talk to you. I fill that bill.
I can’t ask Ra anything any more because the Ra contact ended when Don died. Ra, themselves, warned us before Don’s death not to attempt contact after his death because without the harmony of the specific threesome of Jim, me and Don, it would not be a safe contact. I would be in jeopardy.
I do still channel and if you want to ask a question having to do with general spiritual concepts, tools for growth and that sort of thing, by all means write them down and we will put them in our question book, which we refer to when nobody at the Sunday meeting has a question, and if we ever enter one of your questions, I’ll be sure you get a transcript of the answer. Meanwhile, you are probably as well off with me as with Ra because Ra had a strong feeling of protecting the free will of those to whom he spoke and he, undoubtedly, would give you the advice to remain in the light and love of the Infinite Creator, and clear your chakras, and do your meditation and just keep with it.
That is not what anyone wants to hear, but it is actually the proper design for living. I think you can limit life in that consensus reality way, which is kind of adversary, me against the world. You get, and you give, and you get and you give. You balance it out in your mind and you figure out whether you are being shafted or whether you are lucky. I think with enough meditation, enough time spent in the presence of the Infinite Creator, you begin to see life as a no-lose situation because there are no adversaries.
This S. person, J.S., she can always serve as a bad example, right? I want you to feel that you are not alone and that you can ask anything that you would like to.
The reason that I am going into the hospital, I have just been told this week, that I have some kind of weird something wrong with my urinary tract and another kind of weird something wrong with my liver and I am not a serious nor even a non-serious drinker, obviously. I kind of got done in on drinking because I was watching my family all over the place and I really didn’t think that was too cool.
No, you don’t have much to lose when you ask for help and you have everything to gain. I accept everybody. I am a loving person. I encourage people who are suffering to allow themselves to feel sorry for themselves for a certain amount of time—not very long. When we really are in bad trouble, we have every right to feel sorry for ourselves, but it is a self-destructive mode of limitation and so that is where the love in this moment, that is where that comes in. You start widening your view, and lengthening your point-of-view and looking at all of the things that you are not perceiving that are right in your environment that you can focus on instead of the problems that you have been completely vanquished by at this particular time.
Something that really helps, I think, is the concept of faith. Faith is a sort of spiritual buzz word; a euphemism for hard-to-swallow belief systems of all kinds having to do with settled limits. I do not use faith in that way. In other words, I don’t have faith that I will get through the operation because my chakras are cleared or my inner has talked to my upper, and outer, and lower and enfoldment, and all of that talk or anything. I just have faith that this is what is supposed to be happening to me right now; that this is the best thing that could be happening to me right now; and I should be paying attention to this present moment because there is love in this moment. This is the only moment that links us with eternity—this present moment. As we speak, this present moment is gone and something new is happening.
It is pretty easy to coax yourself out of feeling entirely sorry for yourself. If you start feeling self-forgiven, self-worthy, interesting, intelligent, the kind of thing that a friend can do for you who is willing to accept you as you are, is to give one that kind of feeling about oneself. That one is acceptable. That one is okay and I am absolutely sure you are. You sound down, down, down in the dumps, and there is enough reason for it, I can sure see that.
Remember that I can love you as I love—this happens to be a quirk of my personality. I tend to love everybody. It is no effort to say, “Oh, yes, I’ll love you,” because I always love people even if they are rotten. I get used to them and I am fond of their idiosyncrasies. I am like Will Rogers, “I’ve never met a person I didn’t like.” Although I will admit, I have my favorites, but you just need to feel worth while again; to feel competent again. All of that intelligence didn’t go away. Keep looking for options with faith—not in faith because Jesus Christ sat on a cross and you are going to get what you want, but faith that the eventual outcome will be nourishing to you. You’ll be glad of it.
What is the worse that can happen? You die, for some reason. You get mugged or something. This is no big deal. It is nice to drop bodies that aren’t working so terribly well and be in a body that doesn’t hurt. I always remember the fact that when I died when I was 13, I had been feeling extremely depressed and I was praying to God, and so I take full responsibility for that death experience when I was 13. I honestly did pray to God because I didn’t think I could help anybody ever. I was devastated as only a 13-year old can be.
I got a massive allergic reaction to something and my kidneys failed. Now I take full responsibility in the New Age tradition for my illness. But I also think that it was predestined so that if I chose to move into spiritual studies, into the contemplation, meditation, channeling, teaching, etc. that I would be a contemplative because I would be limited and I would have to be a [cat meows, inaudible] contemplative. [Carla describes her six cats.]
You do care about yourself, and about learning, and about living a life of faith, and carrying on and sharing with me because I am interested in what you have to say. Don’t be discouraged with your failures. We have all too many of them. It is an obviating thing, but true. The universe is inside of us. It is circumstances that bring out what part of that universal behavior will be displayed.
I would go, if I could, I would head for the country. If you like to serve God, and do good, and want a safe home and be around congenial, honest people, my feeling is that country people are much more aware of the value of other people than are people in the high-density population of cities. They appreciate their neighbors. They support their neighbors because they know they may need their neighbors’ support in the future. It costs less to live in the country also so I really don’t know how to help you with this.
I mean, for instance, I know there is a program in Louisville. You might write and say that you heard about it and you’d like to know more about it. I don’t know who you would write. Jefferson County Courthouse, Louisville, Kentucky, County Clerk or someone, 40201, will probably get you an answer eventually.
Really the advice that I have isn’t on how to make things better outside. It is how to make things better inside. That is really all we have control over, I think, because things are going to happen to us. As the comedian has it, “We are born. We grow up. We go on diets and we die.” I am okay with that, but that is all right. But it is good to keep a feeling of goodness for the self and the only way to do that is to do things for other people. You would think that somebody in your condition would not have a lot of ability to help other people, but it isn’t so. I don’t know what volunteer work or special project lies in front of your face at the moment, but I know that you could help. Everybody always can help. It is just a matter of being conscious of the present moment; being conscious of the resonances, of the depth of the light motifs that are in that present moment and having a feeling for acting the way you wish to act towards that present moment rather than blindly reacting against the present moment.
See, the spiritual path is one of ceaseless change and change hurts. Change is always painful. If you lose it hurts. If you lose somebody, it hurts. Change is stressful. It is painful. It is uncomfortable, so it sounds to me as though you were very much on the spiritual path, that you have a feeling that you have failed yourself and your path and feel rather hopeless.
I am here to say I am in kind of the same boat. I have never made any money and the only reason I have this house here is because it was left to me when Don died. It is the first house I have ever had in my life. I always have lived in little apartments and the most money I ever made was $400 a month. I took jobs because I liked them, not because of the money.
Your thinking is toxic right now. It is like having a disease in the mind. This is very stubborn and if you try to fight it, you will just be worse off than ever so don’t try to fight it. Give yourself the right to feel crumby about this situation, which is crumby. That is just the way it is.
Life is not fair. We knew that going in. The only people that tell you that life is fair are people that are working for the justice system and should know that it is unfair better than anybody else in the whole world. But it is unfair so that we will suffer, so that we will learn, so that we will grow so that we will choose to serve others in serving the Creator instead of serving ourselves and controlling others. Any decision that you make could be of help. It is bound to give. It may not feel like it because you are the one that is giving. But believe me, for everything you give, you will get back a hundredfold. You don’t give with the expectation of getting anything back.
I may never hear from you again, but I have spent this time with you really caring and really sharing. Really trying to establish the beginning of a relationship where we can be sisters, and support each other, care about each other, and are mirrors to each other of both the excellence and the ill-thought out in our characters.
That is a real blessing to have a friend. I believe that the most powerful spiritual tool other than meditation is communication with other people who are on the spiritual path. I call it “exchanging notes from the road.” Usually the people that I write to have more questions to ask me than I have to ask them so usually the form of writing that I do is to go through the letter and answer questions and then just tell the news of what is happening here.
Let me tell you the reason that I am sending you this on tape. I am sending you this on tape because my hands are basically decorative. It bothers them quite a bit to write for as long as I would need to write in order to convey to you the feelings and the ideas that I have spoken. I simply can’t write that long. On the other hand, and this is purely selfish on my part because of the fact that I write many people. Since the channeling handbook came out, I get three times as many people now as I did before and it is just getting more every time.
The book has sold because a lot of people write me because a lot of people are involved in New Age stuff and sort of foundering. It is easier for me to take a piece of paper and take a high liner pen and mark the things I want to respond to. It is like, I read very quickly and you can only listen in real time, so it takes me a lot shorter time to read your words than it is taking you to hear mine. If you could just send me back the tape, it would be nice because it is somewhere around a dollar for the tape, but to answer me on paper I will be a faithful correspondent. You can depend on me. I was the one that they always made the banker in Monopoly when I was a kid. We are talking compulsive honesty here.
I have a great love in my heart for all of the children of the Creator and that means you. I care about you and I don’t want you to let yourself go down the drain because you feel hopeless. There is always hope. Your life is a gift to the Creator. You are experiencing the wonder of the dance. By your attitude, you can pretty much make the experience what you wish. If you need consolation, go console somebody. If you need forgiveness, go forgive somebody. If you need help, go help somebody. It is the 180 degree rule. Whatever you toss out and make your reality, you have created reality. It becomes more and more real as you continue on that path and you will find your environment reflecting the changes in your attitude.
It isn’t magic. It is just natural law. We are mirrors and people reflect back to us what we reflect to them. I wouldn’t be so sure of this were it not the fact that Miss Smarty here was in college, I had a Ford Foundation fellowship and I was going to be a Rhodes scholar and I was very full of myself. Then the guy that I had been dating asked me to marry him and he said that he wanted to marry me so that he could protect me from the real world, which I had no idea of.
So I quit school, gave up the Ford Foundation fellowship. Of course, I didn’t marry the guy either, and gave up the Rhodes scholarship and went to work after a long search for work in a bar that was really a junky, terrible go-go dancer type bar, which was frequented by people of the underworld, criminals, mobs, prostitutes and their johns. All of the waitresses in the place were pros also. And that is why it was so hard for me to get the job because I had no intention of being a prostitute. It wasn’t that I thought that it was wrong. I don’t think that sharing love with people is in itself wrong. It is simply that I knew that my character was such that I would care deeply for each and every person with whom I came in contact and my emotional life would be completely wiped out. It would be too much input. My computer would be going crazy.
I didn’t want to be a prostitute, but I did want to be a bar maid in a place where you could depend on having real supposed “scum” as the people that you were dealing with. So I carried my drinks around and guys would ask me for dates and I would explain that I wasn’t a pro, but that Debbie or whoever didn’t have a date yet tonight. I bet you she’d like to be asked. Then you get this, “Oh, I am sorry. I am really sorry.” I’d laugh and say, “You know it is a compliment to be asked. You shouldn’t be sorry. But I have a friend.” I would sit down at the table of the whichever person was closest and alone and just sort of sitting there soaking up the atmosphere of the bar because he didn’t want to be alone. I just let people talk to me.
I think that job was probably one of the highest service jobs I ever had. The heart of the matter is that I was always treated wonderfully. I was precious to people there. The only time that they got rough on me was when some new person came into the bar that didn’t know the place that I held at the bar, not as a prostitute, and would come on to me in a vulgar way like starting to take my clothes off or something. And you’d hear beer bottles breaking all over the place. I really feared for a couple of guys who made a mistake of coming on to me without checking me out. Of course, they always thought I was drunk because this is just who I am. I am just spontaneous and uninhibited, although I don’t have any small talk. I am not afraid of saying anything.
This is who I am. I respect who you are and I would love to help. I would love to be your friend. Do write me and send back the tape and I’ll write you back.
Lots of love and light,
Carla