Letter to L

Dear L,

Good morning. It is about 5:15 a.m. and do not be astonished at this. I awaken early and I go to bed early whenever possible. It is just that I am a morning person. I love this time of day. Nobody is up. There is no traffic, even in this little hamlet. There is an occasional bus and not through traffic exactly, but about 3,000 people and their families live here. There is a coming and going, a sort of distant-traffic sound and trains that come by during the night time. The trains are obstacles, but when you are tucked in at night there are lonesome wails that barely come to the ear, a sort of whisper that promises adventure, and somehow makes one feel snugglier, and evokes a feeling of sharing and not being alone, that mournful whistle.

Since I know what you like, it will make it easier for me to talk to you. Some people enjoy the personal news and others simply want to get on with questions and answers. After I get up, I sneak downstairs so that I won’t disturb the others.

I will tell you about myself, but first I want to respond to your letter, which I thought was remarkably clear. You have had some sort of experience that has spoken well to you in a very deep sound manner, and I celebrate and give thanksgiving for that. If you think I had anything to do with it, okay, but whatever I had to do with it was that which came through me. Not that it came from me. I am just a bozo. I make the same mistakes everybody else does. My memory is dog food. I am your basic ding-a-ling.

[Question is inaudible.]

The cops patrol very carefully because of the fact that people stake out houses to steal from when the people are gone. When they see that they are gone and that the house is empty, they just take a moving van up to it and move the stuff. This has happened several times lately.

You are selling tombstones. Well, somebody has got to do that and it is a perfectly respectable way to make a living. Personally I intend to have my ashes scattered on Avalon. There is no way to come to some place and bow a knee to some one named Rueckert who was fortunate enough to have experience with spirits and perhaps had a little guidance within a little more approachable or easier to have come through that semi-conscious curtain that lies between consciousness and subliminal thought.

It has been my great fortune to be blessed with a sense of intuitiveness, a sense of knowing the importance of feeling tones that is as strong as my considerable [inaudible]. The I.Q. by itself is a slave driver. It is an imposter and the one who is driven by it, the intellect, an impersonal thought, is like a continuous nightmare because that is not the way life is as you have so aptly put it.

I am so glad that you do well with that. I would be a terrible salesman unless it was something for charities. I don’t have the temperament. I think I would be wishing that everybody wasn’t home and I wouldn’t have to go into my pitch.

Also, I think probably it would be very difficult for me to do it on the basis that I would be dealing with suffering people and someone like you with a tremendous amount of energy can absorb that sorrow and feel the compassion flowing through you. You are tough, much tougher than I in that way. Much more able to be a part of someone’s pain without taking on that pain. When someone who is close to me is in pain, I am too. I am too sympathetic, too empathetic and those are my great strengths and my great weaknesses. That is always the way it is. Your virtues are always your excesses, the flip side.

I loved your serious statement here where you said, “There is a lot to know, believe it or not, about how an individual person is a monument.” Of course, there is. There is a lot to almost any endeavor and a one-day experience is worth three years of school, I swear.

I did every single bit of my librarianing and got really good marks on my skills from the local librarians for years without a degree when I finally got my degree, which Don insisted that I get. I was so healthy then, relatively and could work if I wanted to at something besides what Don wanted. Don wanted me to have a parachute so that if he died, I would have a means to support myself. This was back when I was more able.

So A. is being trained too. This is great. You are really getting your life smoothed out and I am thrilled to death for you.

The tour company idea seems to me to be real snazzy. I like it. The four corners area is pretty cheap. I say it in a mispronounced way because I tend to be world-weary. I think the German word (?) covers it much better than any English phrase that I know of, but it is not cynicism, but simply a realization of the human condition and foolishness that one particular area would be cordoned off rather by people with metaphysical minds as a place where holy things were happening. I am not saying that there isn’t a grid system in each density on the earth plane or that there aren’t centers of power. What I am saying is that is earth energy.

Any business that is purported to be of New Age significance in the four corners area would sell right now. That is my feeling. It is the upscale side of the spiritual supermarket and people with money go there. So your public awaits you. It is right there. It is already being drawn to that place. Every since I got into spiritual work, I have heard of the four corners area.

It has produced an enormously and disproportionately large number of artists, craftsmen, writers and composers, mostly very obscure ones who are self-published and my guess is that like most artists’ colonies, it occurred because life was relatively easy to maintain without too much money. My second guess is that most of the original creative talent there has managed to make some accommodation with wealth.

[Carla discusses a woman who wants to be a movie star relative to her cat Freeway and continues on a discussion of killing of animals and vegetables we eat and our attitude.]

Who knows about health foods? I like hot dogs, which by the way are graded by the amount of matter in them that is not pork. In other words, they get rats inadvertently ground up with the meat because the rats are closer feeding on the scrap pieces that hot dogs are made from, so basically you are eating rat dogs as well as pork dogs or beef dogs.

The quality control in most things I have been told is by density of worm fragments per cubic centimeter or something. A typically scientific measurement. I digress. Let me come back here.

It sounds to me as though this operation is definitely going to fly and I am tickled for you, truly. I am very glad that J. and B. are attempting to become yoke fellows and that you and A. are attempting to do so also. I think that a great deal of the difficulty people have in maintaining and improving their personal relationships is in misunderstanding the purpose of personal relationships. You get with someone else on a have-to basis—in other words, you become committed to a person so that you will have catalyst. You are here to work. It is not a walk in the park. You need to have wonderful times with infatuation and a continuing sexual infatuation if you happen to have the imagination to do that.

But you are not engaging in a relationship with someone else in order to have fun. You are engaging in a relationship with someone else in order to look at yourself because if a relationship is working properly, and people being honest and communicating with each other openly, they are mirroring you. Anything that they say is basically a projection of yourself so whatever they are all about has meaning in your life and when you say what you think, it has meaning in their life. Therefore, each is a teacher and each is a student. The work is often extremely hard.

The only peace in a life of true conscious working or working in consciousness is that peace which passeth all understanding. It is the peace of knowing that you are working, that you are on a path, and that you are where you should be. It doesn’t matter what condition you are in, not at all. There is no greener grass anywhere else and there is no better condition for you anywhere else or any how else. Or as Don used to say in his laconic manner, it is not where you are, it is who you are with.

I am really glad that you are working on clear communication and relationship, realizing that you come together to work together and learn together. Not that one cannot laugh. One certainly laughs all of the time if one has chosen one’s mate well because I honestly believe that one of the greatest spiritual gifts is the sense of humor. That first attracted me to you even though what you were writing about was fairly chaotic and your life did seem to be somewhat like this for a while: trays were wild, fours for a while, fives were wild Thursdays, and sixes were wild on Tuesdays. Your life had a lot of wild cards in it. That makes for a very exciting existence, but not necessarily for a steady progress in emotional or spiritual growth.

I am glad that you are no longer of the opinion that the grass is greener elsewhere. I think it is important for you to guard that little part of yourself that is the gypsy and yet goes with that mournful whistle and the rumble on the tracks as a great move across the nation, across the darkness; lonely and yet making people snuggled in their beds feel more safe and more snuggled.

As to divorce, darling, don’t I know what you are talking about! When J. D., my first husband, decided he needed to divorce me in 1967, we got one lawyer because somebody had to do the paper work. We paid him $250 and that was it. I don’t know what pressures were on J. I don’t think anybody was urging him to take me for all I had for the simple reason that I had supported J. for the three years that we were married. It took about a year after we started getting a divorce that the divorce finalized so I tend to think of it as a four-year marriage with a three-year relationship. Although J. was very clean and wanted to stay with me sexually, physically in every way once we got the divorced, it was very difficult to get him out of my one-room apartment because he simply liked my company. When he wasn’t married, he could see that, which was tremendously sardonic.

God has a truly Jewish sense of humor. There are some points in the Old Testament after all, yes? Not much, but some.

J.’s mother told me to go out and buy all the sheets, and towels, and linens and things of the house that I would ever need in my whole lifetime and charge them to him. That I should go out and fill up my charge accounts to their limit because J. would be legally responsible for those bills until the divorce became final. Now that is hateful. That is just pure mean and this woman was full of love for me, but she was so mad at her son for dropping me from his life that she was giving me this kind of suggestion. Not to mention what my mother and father were saying.

Actually my father never held a grudge against anybody. He was cool. He was like the J.C. type. He was a dharma bum. He wanted to be a traveling musician and then I was conceived unexpectedly and his path of service became that of provider. He was an engineer, but he always remember his first love and he always played jazz whenever he could find them. He was a drummer, specialized in Dixieland. He was much more with it, in a spiritual sense, than anyone else in my family except my grandmother on my mother’s side. Well, both of my grandmothers were pretty much spiritually-advanced people.

My mother was definitely in babyhood the whole time I was a child because I was her mother. This was noted at the time. At any rate, mother too was telling me to gouge J. for all I could get and sue him for alimony and all of this stuff. J. never had a job the whole time we were married at anything other than minimum wage, which was about enough to keep his car running. As I recall, minimum wage at that time was $1.75 an hour.

I don’t know why people are so incredibly nasty, and selfish, and tight-waddish, and insensitive, and cruel and all sorts of unnecessary things when it comes to money and the disposition of it. It is a form of energy and if you give it, you are going to get it back. There is no loss of energy at any time. It might not come back to you in dollar bills, but it comes back. If you have a sense of balance of things, as you were talking about in this letter, you know perfectly well that you are so in tune to your own harvest, but that the seeds that you sow will be harvested by someone else. The seeds that someone else sows will be harvested by you. That is the way interactions work with people. We don’t sow for our own future. We sow for the service to others and others reap your fruit. Meanwhile, they are ministering to you that wonderful and angelic presences in your life and often they are angels unaware—unaware of themselves, unaware of their roles, unaware of the good that they are doing.

But I never heard, or listened to or felt so much negativity as concentrated on one subject as just about the twelve months I went through the process towards a legal divorce. J. and I were trying to give each other everything. We wanted each other to have everything. We fought not over, “I get this. You can’t have it.” but, “No, I want to give this to you.” “No, I don’t want to. I want to give it to you.” We were the opposite. He never once said he didn’t love me. The sad thing of it is that he proposed to me every day after the divorce was final. About two months later, he started proposing every day for two years and the last time he proposed was the morning he got married to somebody else.

The divorce was completely and utterly unnecessary if either of us could have had the wisdom to bring out a larger viewpoint, a more universal stance. All I knew was that I wanted to help him and to be his friend. I would not ask him for a divorce because I don’t believe in breaking my word. That is pretty rigid, I know, but I live by certain innate, inalienable rules. There aren’t very many of them, but I don’t break my word if it is physically possible. There are times when I have broken my word, but that was because I was not unconscious of something.

I have had meditation classes here when I was flat on my back and have been so grateful since I channel, which is something you can do in any circumstance as long as your mind is clear. I would just stop the pain medication long enough to get my mind clear and do the channeling, and then rather gratefully climb back into the never-never land of pain medication.

I am glad that you are working on your relationship and I do think it is terribly sad about the money issue having to do with divorce. I don’t know why people have such a stingy attitude or such a lack of personal pride. My attitude basically was, “Well, gee I am sorry I can’t help him any more. I’d like to be of service,” and we are still friends. I certainly don’t want to take anything from him. He was in enough misery already for ten people. He got the divorce from me. I wouldn’t ask for a divorce. He begged me to ask him for a divorce and I told him that this marriage contract is real simple. There is no small print. For better or worse, for richer, for poorer. There are no guidelines that show me that I could say that I quit the marriage. I wouldn’t be keeping my word if I didn’t stick with you and try to be your friend and help you.

Finally he admitted to himself and it took him three years to do it, that he hated being married. He despised it. At least he thought he did. The grass looked very green on the other side of the marital fence. Of course, when he got out there he found out that being by himself instead of being with someone intelligent in a world full of mere idiots was rather a large blessing. He couldn’t go back because I could no longer trust him.

When somebody has upped and divorced you, it is very difficult to find trust so I failed him in that I simply could not muster up the trust to enter into a re-marriage with him. As a matter of fact, I cried my eyes out for 52 hours the last day we spent in a motel on the way home to get the divorce because I knew that once we were there, the wheels would be set in motion and our marriage was basically over when we hit Louisville. I grieved for that marriage and J. kept saying, “It’s okay. Nothing will change. We’ll still be together.”

Don’t you love love at first sight? I don’t trust it in particular, but it such a wonderful thing to happen and such a rush.

I have marked what I wanted to talk about in green and so I don’t read the whole letter twice. Sometimes I can get confused on the pages because perhaps this top of the page won’t be underlined in green and I won’t have read it, at least not consciously. Not at this time, although I have an awful lot of green marked on this particular one. It may give me some insight on something that I would like to resonate with or as they say in the jargon of psychology, “validate.”

All I only know about divorce is that we used one lawyer, that it hurt like hell, and that what hurt more than anything else I think was that everybody I knew, my friends, my family on both sides, everybody was telling me to gouge this guy. Get some money out of him as “he had wasted the best years of my life.” It was just a problem. I was appalled. Of course, I tried to pay attention and tried to see what really motivated people and I think what was motivating people was the fear of rejection. The feeling that if somebody rejected you that owed you for that rejection and actually J. never rejected me.

It was marriage he rejected. I was very clear about which was which and I have never been able to understand why people don’t get that. Sometimes you just don’t want to be married. He had made a wrong responsibility and to take responsibility for that does not seem to me to be a difficult thing, but to most people apparently there is so much anger and so much greed about who gets what, that it devolves into a very gross, and discomfiting and distasteful wrangle; very nasty.

I know what you mean about staying detached from the divorce process that your friends are going through. A. has made this his own decision. You cannot rescue A. There is no way. There is no effort you can make that will materially change what A. is experiencing. Your being in your steadfastness will mean a lot to him and he will remember that.

You said you were trying to quell the urge to spank everyone soundly and put them to bed to see if they can behave like better children tomorrow.

I tend to see light in the series of cartoons that capture us. Some people are very, very funny and worth reading every day.

[inaudible] has two n’s in it. Pardon me for the correcting, by the way, but I love the language and you write so well that if I see a mistake I tell you. It is not that I think it is so awful. It is because I want to help you out and one weakness that most authors or most anyone has is spelling. I love this language. I think anyone should love it. It is a beautiful, beautiful language and it is a good idea to be correct. Judgment does not have an e between g and m.

I, too, am bewildered why people do what they do. It is very important to tend to put oneself into other people’s shoes so that you can understand and so that you can provide real service. Otherwise you fall into the trap of pleasing people, which is often exactly the wrong thing to do, although much easier.

You do sound as if you have been growing up and your focus is very crystalline and lovely. I would like to encourage you in your realization that what is going on within you, what is going on in this letter, is a better literary effort and a clearer literary effort, if public, than the “two accounts that you began when writing your book.” You have come into contact with an area deep within yourself that is very eloquent, accurate and, to me, very creative and meaningful. This is very high quality work that you have been doing.

If I had been part of the catalyst for that, I can only say, “Thanks and glory be to the Creator.” It is so true and I have it marked with stars and arrows as I was going through it. I will read what I starred.

“These events are not what my mind is prone to evaluate as a large practical joke. It has spoken to me often about the acceptance of this knowledge.” We are talking about mundane human events. You see, I am a mystic so it is the realization that is basically part of me. I didn’t come to the realization. The realization was in my memory banks when I was born, as far as I can tell. Everything is holy and the mundane is a word of misunderstanding because mundane simply means “of the world.” That is where we are. That is where we came to be. This is where we are supposed to be. This is what we chose. And we experience the unfolding of life’s bloom, and the shedding of life’s winter coats and the blossoming of new skin in this heavy, chemical illusion.

So if you are doing dishes and are able to connect with the consciousness of those dishes, you realize that the dishes are saying to you, “You really did me. I am really clean. Thanks a lot. This is great.” Dishes have very high voices. All places are holy ground. All actions are sanctified and blessed to those who wish their actions to be sanctified and such. It is the intention. It is not manifestation that is subjectively apparent to the seeker, but rather the attention, which the seekers have to love in each moment because there is a resonance in each present moment that goes far beyond the mundane, but includes the mundane and is closest within the mundane. It does not do well to turn away from the world entirely. It is well to maintain contact with that world in whatever manner you may choose.

I don’t choose to watch much news, but I do choose to pay attention to what is in front of my face. For instance, we had a girl name K.H. come to stay with us and Jim and I are, at present if I allowed it to be, at logger heads over the disposition of this woman. She is mentally slightly off, something that we did not catch when she visited us for three years running for about three weeks each time. She was delightful. She helped in the kitchen. She helped with my maintenance, which believe me, is really time-consuming, to the point where I get depressed sometimes and wonder God, am I worth it? Am I worth taking up this time and space?

If I listened to K., I would soon realize that I was not worth it, but I have so many supporting people around me that say, “Of course you are worth it, silly.”

K. comes and she is supposed to be helping. She arrives on the scene with $3,000 worth of debts, several thousand dollars of debts, plus a debt that she hasn’t paid off her student loans and she has five years to go on that. It is $112 a month. All of a sudden we are not dealing with a third person at L/L who is willing to work for nothing except room, and board and a goodie once in a while, which is what Jim and I do. We don’t take a salary except that Jim has to take a dollar a year in order for us to do something or other tax-wise.

She really basically wanted a free flop and I think she had every good intention, but as soon as she got here, she began to identify us as authority figures instead of as friends. She became hateful, and spiteful and mean. I am sorry to say, but this is accurate and my mouth just was permanently open for weeks when she first showed up because I had no idea she had all of this trauma in her system that she did. I have come to believe that the woman has acted as provocatively as possible so that we will throw her out.

My response to this is very different from Jim’s response. Jim’s response is, get rid of her. She is not performing what we expected of her and, consequently, she is not worth keeping. My reaction is completely different. My reaction is, look, this is in front of my face. This is a needy person, an ill person, a person that needs professional help, but is not going to ask for professional help. She is probably not going to get any help from anything that I say, but will only be helped by observing the way I live.

She had had a very rough teenagehood and early young adulthood, which had left her viciously hurt so she was hurting back. She was trying to be hurtful without really realizing it.

I wanted to nurture her just like I took Little Freeway (cat). It cost me $500 to have his little left front paw amputated. He is a three-legged cat now. I had not seen him when I told the Vet to go ahead and do the operation. The poor cat had two different kinds of fleas; two different skin disorders; ear mites; worms. The cat was in trouble, but I could not say, “Let the cat die.” It had been brought to me and so I said that I would take this cat.

Jim’s ability to take these things in stride is tremendous. I don’t know of another mate in this world that would accept a $500 three-legged cat as being a good business decision or a personal decision or any kind of decision. But Jim stood behind me and said, “Okay, if that is what you want to do.” We have had the most wonderful times shared with this dear sweet cat. He is truly being of light and recognized us by the way. He is very shy of anyone in the world and will hide under a bed most times because people often are just too loud for him. After all he was hit by a car on the freeway after he was tossed out of a car on the freeway. That would be my guess anyway. That is why his leg had to be amputated. There was no nerve to it any more. It had been crushed in some way.

Out of that terrible tragedy of this little cat, he was starving to death, but he was playing. He was along side of the freeway playing in the weeds so when we brought him home, and, oh my goodness, he was a bedraggled son-of-a-gun. He had been dipped three times for fleas. He had been given several ear mite treatments. He had been given worm treatments. He had been done in. He knew that we were his people. He would go to one of us and purr and then he’d stagger over to the other one of us, and purr, and rub, and lick us and then he’d sort of stagger to the end of the bed and flop down on the floor and eat about three pieces of cat chow, which is all his stomach could take. He was so near to death, and stagger back up on the bed and just purring so loudly.

Yes, the dark corners of existence are all illuminated if we can but trust that there is illumination there. I am so glad that you have found that secret. That heaven is not elsewhere. Heaven is not other worldly. Heaven is here and now. And locked within the illusion, just as we are, to get out of this illusion is to act in a way that does not do honor to the lessons we are learning within this illusion. I think we need to be engaged in our own soap opera. It is okay to see it as a soap opera, but it is not okay to put that soap opera down or to denigrate yourself. We all go through a soap opera. That is what life is, one thing after another. That is the process of learning. That is our lesson.

I am so glad that you are beginning to feel gratitude for the tremendous gift of this planet’s illusion, which is to make things very hard to understand, impossible to understand, and thereby paradoxically makes one wish to seek ever more deeply.

As to whether you would be able to write a book that rendered the Ra material more acceptable to non-wanderers, basically you’ve got a yes/no answer from me. It is mixed and I don’t know whether you would want to do it or not, so I’ll just tell you my own feelings about it.

I have always felt that someone or anyone could attempt to rewrite the Law of One material in a way that would be simpler. I have also felt very strongly that someone should not be anyone connected to the Ra contact because people give us too much authority, even though it was channeled information. It came through, not from us, and people have this ridiculous idea because of the mundane nature… I give you free permission to work on such a book, but I must tell you I cannot help you with it. I cannot be involved with it. It will have to be your take on the situation.

I can copy edit it. I can clean up your paragraphs or whatever, but you are also literate. About the only thing I see in your writing that are mistakes is some misspelling. Basically you have an extremely high level of intelligence. That really sounds as if I were being patronizing and I am not. It is just that so few people do sound coherent and really able to express themselves on paper. It is a pleasure to read a letter such as yours.

I always remember why I was attracted to your writing when you send me a letter because you express yourself so well and I do thank you for the gift because you are a great mirror for me. I think you are too kind, but you still are very helpful.

I do think it is possible to translate the Ra material, but I don’t think it is possible to translate the Ra material in its purified form. I think it would have to be bastardized; that is, put into simplistic prose that would not have the nuances that are available within the Ra material. The equivalent of this is probably the material that I channeled before the Ra contact because I was progressing in my channeling abilities during that time and the messages were much simpler and shorter.

About 1%, if that, of the stuff that I have done has been published. But we have it all archived and the next millionaire that dies and leaves us bunches of money, will give us the opportunity to publish some of that stuff. That would be my take on bringing Ra to the masses because Ra’s message is one with all of the messages of spiritual leaders, discarnate and incarnate, and that is that we are all one. Our business is to serve each other in serving the Creator. So go to it, if you like.

You had the idea that you wanted group topics in logical order, keep the personal material about psychic greetings because of its interest in information, and keep the basic clarity and common sense aspect of the Ra material. The title would be, “The Law of One, an Interpretation.” I have no trouble with anything about that, but I cannot help you with it because I cannot have my name associated with anything having to do with the Ra material. My name is associated with the production of the pure, unadulterated, unedited (except we did edit out some personal stuff that couldn’t possibly help anybody).

We have kept the material pure as far as our group goes. And we have been given a certain amount of authority that we don’t really deserve, but we feel those who read the books confuse the channeling with the channeler. What I am is just another human being with clay feet.

I don’t mean to say that is a bad thing. We all are human beings with clay feet and we are here to learn. I refuse to be guruized. So you have my approval. You do not have my literary aid. I cannot be involved in the project.

If I were you, I’d let the idea sit for a while and see if you feel that you have the energy and the inspiration to work on such a book. I think you have the ability and since you have become much more clearer about what you are doing here on this earth, I think that you have the insight that you need to proceed in talking with people as an equal, as a colleague, and realizing that we are in the same boat. It is a most blessed and spiritually reliable boat, sound and a true Noah’s ark. We are all on a journey, as are all those around us, and our only hope is to help each other and to send out the birds of hope into space, seeking Mt. Ararat, seeking the high places within ourselves and seeking the truth within.

So much for your letter, which was truly a delight to read. As to what is happening with me, you asked about the operation. It hasn’t happened yet. A couple of minor miracles have happened. I had, I don’t know what was wrong with what, but I think it was the Prozac just as the doctors thought, but it was disturbing my liver function and whatever elevated liver function means, that is what I had. I haven’t even looked it up. I didn’t care. I didn’t believe in it. I knew it was going to go away. I wasn’t really worried about it because I have been told so many times by so many people that I am going to croak for one reason or another. I never do.

Even when I croaked, I had that experience where I was told, “Your job is not done. Are you going to go back and do it or not?” I ended up back here, even when I did die. I am actually determined to live out my life and be the maximum amount of service until I am no longer breathing because as long as I am breathing, I know my mission is not complete. It was a very illuminating experience to be dead. It was only about a twenty-second experience, but when one realizes that one has come here for a purpose, I think it makes one take life in a much different manner. One becomes more observant. One will take it more seriously. At the same time, one begins to have a divine sense of humor about the whole thing.

The human comedy is a soap opera and sometimes it can be very black comedy, but really it is always funny.

One of the things that is so delightful about you is your wry sense of humor, which does see things as humorous all of the time. No matter how tragic things are, their profundity is only made more real by the fact that it is also funny.

The miracles having to do with my liver were: I was on Prozac, which is an anti-depressant. I get depressed, and we are talking big-time depression, repeatedly when my condition worsens. Every time it does. Right now my condition is worsening quickly. My back has gone out on me. I am having trouble sitting up even long enough to go to the church service or to see a movie is torture for me right now. I put myself in a mental hospital because it was recommended to me that I do that in order to get off of the medication that they thought was elevating the liver function.

I bounced around the ceilings and walls of that institution for several days. I was told that it was going to take at least ten days, probably two weeks to see any difference in the liver function. They were siphoning for blood as if vampires were loose on the hospital to make tests to see about this liver function. In four days, the liver function went to normal. The reason for that seems very obvious to me. I had prayers for it from all over the world. I refused to get depressed. I refused very simply because the last time I was in the hospital, I got Don to ask Ra (we still had contact) what I could have done better in the hospital, and Ra said, “You should have offered praise and thanksgiving.”

In the hospital? Is that realistic? I was determined that was going to be the way it was and I kept noticing the little things. How beautiful the sky was outside my window. Or how lovely a certain tree looked outside, or that I could sit and listen to someone and perhaps be of help that way. I only had to stay in the hospital a week. The last three days of it, which was simply a matter of convincing the doctors that there were not other mental problems that I had that could be addressed in the hospital.

What came out of that experience was the tremendous amount of physical suffering, because nobody could believe that I had the arthritis that I do have. The reason for that being that Jim does everything for me. Consequently, my hands are not swollen up or dysfunctional. I can walk without limping most of the time because I don’t walk much except for my zero-impact aerobics, which I do faithfully. I generally stay in one place. We are talking, tomorrow I get a hospital bed put in the living room. I am tired of dealing with not be able to lie down flat because I have to lie down flat a lot these days.

I will continue to try my hardest. As a matter of fact, I am determined to try harder than I ever have before. That is, I am going to attack on four fronts instead of three. I was doing either a walk or jazzercise, plus the whirlpools and massage. I think what I am going to do is do the whirlpool, and massage, and the jazzercise, but I am going to add a walk. I know it sounds as if I am pushing myself ever harder, but I think it is necessary because I do want to continue to be viable as long as possible.

I made the choice to live when Don died. I could have died with him. It could have been a double suicide very easily. As a matter of fact, that wonderful movie, “Sophie’s Choice,” had a tremendous amount of meaning for me and really helped me in my decision-making process at the time to see that dying when one’s loved one died was perhaps romantic, but not necessarily useful. So I managed to survive Don’s death when really in my heart I wanted to die with him because I couldn’t imagine life without him, we were so close.

I have a very intense, passionate love of life and appreciation for it that I think comes from realizing that each moment is resonate with eternity. That it rings with the bells of imperishability. We are just a whisper in eternity, but oh, what a wonderful whisper and how solid we are, metaphysically. In this illusion, we are just energy, just shelves of energy. We are playing and we are dancing in that energy flow, but the real us that lies within us, that we get closer and closer to that recedes ever before us so that we never really ever understand anything, that is the interesting part. That is the fascinating part.

So I got out of the hospital in a week. I no longer wanted to kill myself. I was contented once again with my condition. I had made peace with how much I hurt. I made peace with the fact that I was going to have to lie down, but at the same time, I promised myself that I would work harder than I ever had before on helping. Instead of turning on the TV at 5 p.m. so I won’t keep working (that is one of my besetting sins is that I like to work to the point of being a workaholic) and I just push myself past my limits and then take it out on my nearest and dearest by being full of aches, and pains and cranky.

I have decided to try to major in cheerful this year realizing that being is more important than doing, or as Frank Sinatra said, “Scooby, dooby do.”

What else is happening in my little world? Miracle number two was that the second opinion on the neck fusion was, “Yes, it would stabilize my neck to have it fused, but that I have most of my real painful troubles coming from lower in the spine and if I could take the pain for long enough, than one operation would probably be able to relieve the discomfort, where if the operation was done right now, it would heal my neck so that I wouldn’t inevitably die in the next car crash I was in.” It would stabilize the neck, which at this point is impossible. If my head goes backwards, I have to use my hand to pull it back up. Talk about losing your head!

I have nerve pain in my head all of the time and that is sort of like living with a toothache. It is not particularly comfortable. I have made my peace with it and I am ready to go on living a joyful life and accepting it as it is. I hope daily for a miracle, but if it doesn’t come, I have come to the acceptance that is all right. That is where I need to be and that is what is supposed to be happening. I think I had the grace to do that. I woke up with it in the hospital one morning. It was as if a burden had been taken off of me.

Once again, I was up with my catalyst and it was really a gift of grace. Always before those realizations have been gradual. This time it was instantaneous. It was a wonderful, wonderful gift from the Creator.

I am feeling very, very grateful right now to be alive and to be able to taste the fruit of this illusion and share with friends like you. It is, indeed, a privilege to know you, L., and I think it has made such tremendous progress; such admirable progress in that you have retained your sense of humor,and your adventuresomeness and all of those things that make you delightfully unique. I hope you never lose any of that.

I always encourage people to keep their private myths going. Keep the sense of themselves as special going. It has each person unique. Each person is special. Each person is necessary to the working of the whole of creation because each person recapitulates creation and is an essential part of the body of the Creator in manifestation. We are all part of the active principle of creativeness. It makes us co-creators and it makes us responsible. A hard pill to swallow—responsibility. And an even harder pill to swallow is the fact that it is a responsibility to which we must surrender our sense and proceed from the heart.

Part of the Jimmy Blossett song, (Carla sings it) “if you keep living straight from the heart.” It is a real nice song. It just came out this last year or two. “You will know when to stop and to start. You know it is going to hurt some. The magic will come …” Along with the song that says, “I may be going to hell in a basket, baby, but at least I enjoying the ride,” I identify with that one too.

I do feel truly blessed at this point in my life. And so what if I have to lie down a lot? Big deal. Okay, I am horizontal. I’m looking at the ceiling. So what? I’ve got a different point of view. I can watch the fan go around. I can move the hospital bed so that it will support my neck and I will be able to sit up and do my work too without having to put stress on my spine. It will get me through this period before they can operate and really make a difference. I will admit the pain is excruciating. I refuse to let that get me down. It is just not going to do it. I am not my body.

But my body is so necessary for me because it is a vehicle in which my soul resides and that which is imperishable within me can only learn in this mundane world. So that is going on with me. I am very fortunate in having extremely understanding, singing people. I don’t know what you call them. They are not my teachers, they didn’t teach me to sing, but they are the directors of the local Box Society and also the choir at my church, which has, of course, a bonzo music program because about half the Box Society come to sing at our church. They let me sing sitting down.

They let me miss rehearsals when I am flat on my back. I have missed very, very few concerts and this is my 23rd season with the Box Society even though I miss many rehearsals because they trust me to practice at home and all of these things to me are very special. Most people would not be so generous. As a matter, just the fact that they let me sing sitting down amazes me, but I am grateful.

It has been a joy to be with you and share with you. I thank you so much for writing me instead of taping me a letter as I am sure I have said to you too many times, I feel very rude when I send a taped letter because of the fact that one has t listen to it in real time. In other words, it will take you 1 ½ hours to listen to what I have to say and what I have to say is probably 90% bull shit, whereas if you could read what I had to say, you could get the gist of it in probably fifteen minutes. It is not really fair.

I am asking you to do me a favor, but it is very helpful to me to have the letter in front of me so that I can look at the key phrases. I don’t have to listen to it in real time. I can read it very quickly. Your handwriting is wonderful, very legible and it means I can do more work. That is basically what it means.

I’ve got a real love of doing this work. It is truly a labor of love to work with what I call “unchurched” people. They need the sense of the holy as much or more than most people who go to church. Those who go to church often go for social reasons or for reasons of ritual, making it meaningless, whereas those who are seeking and not going to churches are real. That means a lot to me. I salute your reality and your personal faith. I encourage and exhort you to look ever deeper into the present moment and to write the book of your life.

I am at the end of the tape so I send you my blessings.

Cheerio,

Carla