[This is a letter from Carla to J on the June 5, 1990.]
Dear J,
I thank you very much for you loving, and caring, and sharing letter. I read it carefully and for once in my life, I am up with my responsibilities elsewhere, household and what not, and am able to answer letters in the same week I get them, which for me is almost a first and really, really enjoyable.
In the first place, greetings, and blessings, and love to you. And thank you so much for your communication of May 31. It is very kind of you to write me, especially on a holiday and I appreciate that.
Following my usual practice, I am going to answer your letter paragraph by paragraph, so my discussion will skip around insofar as your turning a thought skips around. The fact is that I am the queen of digression and may move into areas previously unknown to humankind. And then I can’t remember what I was talking about, but I have always been that way and I don’t worry about it. I have the absent-minded professor syndrome.
Your first paragraph talks a lot about suffering and people withdrawing from me because I am suffering.
It is the first time that that notion has crossed my mind. No one has ever withdrawn from me because I do not feel the appropriate state of bursting forth of great energies and the desire to play softball until I drop. People have always pretty much known me as a person that thinks and a person that communicates rather than a person that does things, except of course for channeling, teaching, and writing letters and things like that, which are pretty much sedentary. Not that I have led a completely sedentary life.
In my childhood I was a dancer, and the direction of my path of service has been a series of two-by-fours striking me firmly on the forehead and directing the way in which I am to go. You know what I mean if you have experienced psychic direction before.
I haven’t had anyone ever relate to me as a disabled person except that when they go to the kitchen to get themselves something to drink, they’ll ask me if I would like something to drink. And if they are going to the kitchen to fix something to eat, they will ask if I would like something to eat. When it comes time for them to take a bath, especially if they are female, they will ask if I would like to share their shower, that sort of thing. I don’t have the mentality of an ill person at all and yet, I appreciate what you say, and I appreciate the world opinion, and the fact that people do, indeed, tend to withdraw because they are uncomfortable dealing with someone who sees herself as an invalid.
An invalid, pronounced otherwise means in-valid. I don’t see myself as in-valid in the least. And, as a matter of fact, feel that probably I am more genuinely well as in true health than most of the people that I know, but that takes a lot of explaining. I will try to unwind that for you without having too many digressions.
I see wellness as another word for peaceful wholeness. The things that have occurred with my body are seen by me in a special way, which I will explain to you when the next paragraph comes up, because that is when it is appropriate. Meanwhile I accept myself to a greater extent than just about anybody that I know. I accept the 360 degree me, the iniquitous me, the murderer me, the rapist me, the prisoner me, the me of all probabilities and possibilities out of which I have made certain choices. I love myself very much and when something about me requires attention because it hurts, I love it, and nurture it and hold it in the arms of my heart. I do not suffer. I am in, what would be called by others who feel it, constant pain.
I know this because there are psychics who have visited me that have remained too open to my being and have not drawn enough careful limitation of boundary between us and have started to take on the way I feel, and they go, “Oh my God, I can’t stand it. This headache, etc.” And I say, “Don’t you dare take that. That is not yours.” And they give it back and then they feel fine.
So from them I know that this is not something that is in my head, and I knew that anyway because you can’t really fake x-rays. But there are reasons why my inability to do a great many physical things, far from bothering me, has more and more seemed to me to be an inevitable and blessed occurrence, part of a progression of consciousness special to my life, which does not smack of being saved or someone who is a martyr. Just simply someone who wishes to get the job done she came here to do.
The various statements, which you refer to below, are simply expressions of the way things are. If someone asks me to do something, which I would not be able to do without significant difficulty, an explanation is in order.
Now you are speaking in the next paragraph of disabilities and that you feel that the underlying causes of a very serious disability are the same sort of causes that might cause something as simple as PMS or acne and the cure is the same. I think that that is a clearly true statement. There probably though has never been a statement to which the exception does not prove the rule.
When I was working as a channel for the Ra contact, there was a variety of information that was personal to us and not particularly interesting to anyone else that didn’t get published, and I think among that unpublished material is Ra’s statement that I chose to limit myself as much as possible in this life, and that the more I was able to do, the more limited I would be. My choice was whether or not to have pain.
In other words, by accepting my limitations without being disturbed by them, I would not suffer pain. If I kept trying to do more than was optimally helpful for me in order to achieve the state-of-mind necessary to do the job I came to do, I would experience pain.
Anybody that knows me knows that I am always pushing the envelope, trying to get a little more in. I have never been very good at accepting limitations. I always try to stretch them a bit. One of these days I will grow up and stop being such a child about it, and probably one of these days there won’t be any pain, but just the limitations because the limitations are what Ra said was necessary for me to do this work. According to Ra continuing on with this same reading, my tendency had always been to be a very active and galvanic leader, person of adventure, a real gypsy, a real motivator of people, and I threw myself into everything that I did and, therefore, I was likely in this life to be out doing volunteer work and supporting the causes that I believe in—feeding the hungry, and helping museums stay alive. The whole gamut of valuing the artifacts of mankind’s creations of duty and valuing people, whoever they are, to make sure they are not hungry and not without places to sleep.
When I began to work with Don Elkins, sure enough, although I had had the arthritis since I was 13, I had not been troubled by it. As soon as I began working with him, it flared up when I tried to sleep. Since that time I have had twelve operations on my hands and wrists, and six on my feet, showing that I am not particularly good at keeping within my limitations. I used to love to cook. Loved stitchery of any kind, knitting, crewel embroidery, etc. And I didn’t yield easily to the concept of being still. Therefore, I was less than a temple of being, although I had been given great gifts, I think. I had been allowed to remember and I was a person of faith. Even as a tiny child, the first word I ever said at seven months was “light,” and mother has written in my baby book that when I was about a year old, she was playing, “Who Am I?” and she asked me who I was. I said that I was a child of God. She was not particularly pleased at this saying and sort of wished that she had some part in who I was. Anyway I was a little odd.
As far as Ra described the situation, the limitations were preincarnatively chosen so that I might do a specific job. That is, to be a vocal channel. I did not want to be a vocal channel. I liked to listen to wisdom. I don’t feel that I am wise and I always feel that I can really use people’s insight, and the inspirations, and the information in the material I would channel is always extremely healthy and helpful. It is also true that the reason that I am still writing you, where many people would just say this person doesn’t agree with me so I won’t write this person because it is too much trouble to try to explain things and work with things and work with ideas, is that I know that you’re a serious metaphysical student. That you are trying to live your life very fastidiously. That you are very much a creature of the road of seeking truth.
This means that you can be to me the most valuable of all spiritually-oriented friends and, therefore, the mirror that you hold up to me, no matter what your own distortions at this time, and right now your distortion is fairly heavy having to do with feeling that I am causing my own sickness, helps me and gives me something to think about. If it disturbs me that you say these things, then I know I have a problem. And that I must think about this and meditate upon this. If I am not disturbed, then apparently I don’t have a problem, but I still feel that I should respect you and communicate with you on the subjects that you care enough to talk to me about.
Although I do not feel that the cause of my arthritis is karmic, although I feel that I do have balanced karma simply because Ra says that my karma was balanced in this illusion, as far as I know, I have never left anyone unapologized to that I thought I had wronged or done anything like that, which would stir up karmic balance. Still, remembering the power of karma to hold any wanderer with the same glue that holds those native within this third density illusion, is a very good thing to remember, and I thank you for saying that.
I don’t know what attitudes from past incarnations I would need to change because my attitude as I came into this incarnation was that I wished to help, and the whole reason that I despaired at such an early age was that there did not seem to be any way for me to be of help. I really had not come into my own at all and was dealing with circumstances, which were quite beyond my ability to comprehend any usefulness that I had in these dealings.
And I certainly forgive myself for that. Twelve and half is not a wisdom age. Twelve and half is a very strongly emotional age, a very intense age, and I would say an age of great passion, which pretty much precludes great wisdom.
I am looking at what you say. “A lesson learned through sorrow and pain is as valid as one learned through joy and acceptance.” I think that is very true and worth remembering always, along with the positive affirmations you suggest on the next page. It is true that words are very powerful and thoughts are things so that when I say, “I am ill,” or “I am disabled,” it may seem like a very negative thing to say and it may be, although I don’t feel any pull towards examining this further because as far as I am concerned, it is simply an explanation of why I am not out playing softball instead of spending all of my up-time (I have to lie back all of the time, but still I am up.) six days a week.
We finally decided to give ourselves a day off as we were getting a little ragged working with people from all around the world on a large variety of subjects.
Spending time being very intensively obscure and like a hermit, we keep our weeks free and we almost always have the telephone machine turned on and take up the messages at the end of the day. And, simply, we live in a very quiet contemplative atmosphere, Jim, my husband, and I. Don died in 1984 so sadly enough we do not have his great wisdom in the flesh with us at this time, although I do not feel he is ever away from me as he is always in my heart.
I do think that you have very good grasp of the basic mechanisms of dealing with helping yourself to be healthy. I don’t think that physical health or wholeness is necessarily an indication of wholeness of being, or else we would have a great many very wise basketball players and a great many gurus whose broken-down condition would declare them to be quite beyond the pales of any wisdom whatsoever. Actually I think that my cells are full of light, and hope, and joy and have a tremendous amount of heart and working with the physical vehicle that I gave it at the age of thirteen because of my lack of faith, have done a tremendous job at making it possible for me to continue doing that which I came here to. I have very little doubt, if any, that this is what I came to do because I have been disabled now for many years. I will be 47 and I was disabled, I think, maybe ten years ago, maybe more. I don’t remember.
During this time I have been able to work with what I had to work with, which was basically flapping my gums and using my little gray cells to write, to channel and to teach. All three of these activities have been blessed, at least as far as I am concerned. I have made through the years a goodly number of spiritual friends who do exactly what I hoped they will do. Treat me with all of my words, with my clay feet, with all of the things that are foolish and silly about me, as spiritual friends, and they will share where they are, and what is troubling them, and how they feel and they will call me on those things that they feel are not true. That I may be saying something that is not so, and then I have to know this very carefully.
Does this grab me? Does this bother me? Does this hold my attention in some way? Am I am pushing it away? Am I failing to finish reading this letter? And if that is so, then it is something that I do need to work on.
In that way, our sharing of notes from the road is inspiration, and informational and a very, very effective technique, as far as I am concerned, in gaining greatly in compassion for yourself and for others, and in an understanding of what amazing diversity lies in the spiritual path and yet, what amazing unity there is in the spiritual principles involved in working on the spiritual path.
I will leave it to you. If you can think of a way to say, “I cannot get up and walk for longer than an hour. I cannot sit up for longer than an hour, unless I put my back down all of the rest of the time. I am working on this daily by taking walks, and by doing stretches and by seeking out alternative sources of healing,” in a way that is positive, I would be most happy to hear it because I certainly do think that I can make many improvements in the way I talk about myself. If you can think of a way to say that I can give the information that this has been a condition that has been with me for a very long time, without sounding negative again, offer me this, if you will, as a gift. And I will tend to be more affirmative in my statements.
My statements have no self-pity or energy of an emotional nature to them. It is simply a statement of the way things are. And I think it is the emotional power that lies behind thoughts that drives them into thought form status or makes them stay around. But with this attitude that I am very healthy and that all is well and that I am self-forgiven, and whole and perfect, obviously the simple fact that my body is not manifesting a radiant health has created stress for you. For this, I feel much compassion because I would not wish people to think that I am suffering.
I am not suffering. I am very happy in my heart. The aches and pains of this body I have learned to take to myself, and love, and nurture and care for. I take care of myself. I love myself. The things that are wrong with me are things that I simply work around.
Of course, I am still pushing the old envelope. I am supposed, according to allopathic doctors, to remain completely still. I am not doing so because
that doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever and I have never done anything that doesn’t make sense to me. I am not a rebel. I just think for myself.
I think you made a point that will bring you closer to understanding what I am trying to say when you talk about your bladder condition. Yep, that will keep you close to home all right. And what you said was that you needed that to stay put and study because you were too scattered. And basically that is what I am saying. And I am afraid that my energy, even though it isn’t physical, is such that could I get up and do things for people, I would constantly be doing that because I love to do things for people. It isn’t rational particularly and I don’t make distinctions between one person and another. Anybody that needs anything, I want to go and fix whatever it is.
I want to help and the help that I have to offer involves a good deal of letting that side of myself fly and losing the narcissistic part of myself that wants people to see me as helpful so that I can be more and more a hollowed out and impersonal instrument through which the Creator may speak. That I think is my vocation in life. That is what the Spirit has for me to do.
And that is what I am with, shall I say, a will of steel, intending to do. That is, not this or that, but whatever the Creator wishes for me. Day-by-day I ask, “What is my service?” And day-by-day I look at that which is in front of my face. I believe that people’s path of service lies directly in front of their eyes and because people want to be of dramatic service, they often do not see how incredibly full of service their life really is. This is especially true of parents.
You did not at all sound pretentious when you described yourself as a thorn in the side for the loyal opposition. I am familiar with being a thorn in the side of the loyal opposition. And I am familiar with taking that loyal opposition and holding them and myself in the Love. That involves who I am and that is why I say, I am truly the beliefs of all Christians, and the only thing that I can honestly say is, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” for there is no sainthood in me. There is only a bozo, like everybody else on the bus who is simply gifted with a great deal of stubborn persistence. Someone once compared me to a stubborn character in Hill Street Blues. The comparison other than actual biting of people is apt. I don’t let go of things until I understand, or at least understand as much as I can.
The most negative thing about me, as I see myself right now, is almost gone. I used to be very negative about how I looked. I used to be very negative about how much I thought people should do for me, and that is because I went through a childhood where I did things for people all of the time, and I was never praised for it. I was always told that I was an ugly child. These childhood things do take some time to clear, but they clear. They get clear.
I have many, many thoughts that are erroneous. I take them to myself in unconditional self-forgiveness. I hope that you can learn to do this too. We are all creatures of part of the creation. We have everything, the whole, every possibility, every single thing that you can imagine. It is our choices that have brought us to where we are. The rest, the dark side, exists in a place within us, which circumstances could open, and the sooner that we see that, and embrace that and love that part of ourselves too, the less negative, or loyal opposition I like to call them, has to do with us or can do with us.
Certainly one thing that you said strikes me as being very wise. Our thoughts, you say, reflect our sum total. And that scares me enough to seriously monitor mine. I think it is very important to monitor oneself, essential, really, and I try to spend some time at the end of the day looking at what has issued forth from these Cupie doll lips and done any harm, or shown any petulance or anything. And if there is something that I see in myself that is not acceptable to me, I’ll try before I go to sleep to fix it because most of the things that we do that are unacceptable to ourselves are those things done with the people we love. They are handy. They are right there Why not? And we simply are feeling discouragement when we see these things. And we take these things and we make the choice not to be that, and we ask for forgiveness, and we ask ourselves, “Please forgive ourselves.” That is the thing that most people forget. And we ask forgiveness of the situation itself because it is not the situation’s fault that we reacted the way we reacted. And we continually have feelings and are malleable to our asking forgiveness for judging or hearing in a certain way.
I would like to romp on Avalon. I would very much, but if I had to give up what little I can do in the way of channeling, and teaching and writing to make information and perhaps inspiration available to people who may wish to have that information, then, no, I will gladly give that up. One cannot do everything and it is not my desire to test that theory. I am not just happy, J. There is something that glows inside me that is radiant with space, and love and hope, and I don’t know where it comes from, but I know that nobody ever is bothered by my physical condition; that people perceive me as being very well, very healthy, and a very bad punner.
I don’t want to be canonized. I am no saint. Ask anybody who has known me for more than two days. I don’t take that on. I do try to give as good as I can, but I really am just a bozo, and a jerk and I really do have clay feet, and I do say things in haste sometimes and I do have to apologize, etc. I do not see myself as being anywhere sainthood, no, not all. I see people around me all of the time that are far more spiritualized and far more steadying down to creating only beauty and not create the ups and downs that I have.
You see, I have chosen whole over crippled or broken. But my version of whole is to be completely satisfied in myself that I am following the will of the Father, and that is all I care about. I don’t care what happens to the rest of me except that I
Try by my attitude to some extent, diet, to some extent exercise, to maximize my ability to sit up. Right now my goal is by August I want to be able to sit up for four hours. It doesn’t have to be unpainful. It doesn’t have to be pain-free. It is just that it takes me four hours to do choir practice and church and it takes me about four hours to do the local Box Society performance or rehearsal and I think if people stop serving me, I would not die. I mean, this is a weird thing to say, but I just don’t ever get hungry. I mean I have to drink, but I think if I couldn’t worship and sing sacred music, something within me would shrivel and would die, and I, as a person in a body, would not be far behind from that.
I am praying, and interceding for myself daily and meanwhile working my ass off trying to get into position to be able to sit up for four hours. Like I said, it has only been a couple of three weeks that I have made it to one hour up, sometimes two, so I feel that by August, which is when I need to be sitting up, I’ll be in pretty good shape because I’ve got most of June and all of July. So I am very, very happy, and grateful and thankful about that.
“You may be angry by now,” you say to me. No, I really appreciate the care that you have taken to really write, and care, and share and be with me. Thank you. There is no feeling of anger here, but of appreciation and thankfulness. I feel humble that people care about me enough to try to help and even if the way you help isn’t the way you intended to help, help is help. And I welcome it and I thank you for it. And I think you are very right in saying that truth is always simple. My truth is I wish to do the will of the Creator. I have no other wish. And I think the same faith that I had when I was twelve exists within me now, and is as fervent, and as strong and as determined. When I was twelve, I was told I had something to do and I haven’t finished it. I am quite determined to finish it before this incarnation is over. And there is no slacking in this particular mind/body/spirit complex. I am not going to leave anything undone.
Don’t think it. Not for a minute. I will be enthusiastically, and lovingly, and whole-heartedly and single-mindedly working to do the will of God as it comes to me each day. And I really take it pretty much one day at a time.
You speak of seeing myself as the Father savior, whole. I do see myself as whole. And I do see myself as in the immediate presence of the Father many, many times through meditations and feel very, very blessed.
I appreciate your sense of humor in talking about attitudes are meat and hoping that it doesn’t make me wish I was vegetarian. No. I love to learn. I won’t say that I love to think. Abstract thinking is not my meat, which is probably why it has been my path of service to channel and not to be a scholar, or a great writer, or any of the other things that involve the use of the English language in a good and careful way. I have no ambition whatsoever except, of course, to do the will of the Creator. I enjoy understanding people. Let’s put it that way.
Thinking for thinking’s sake puts me in a place I am not interested in. It puts me in my intellect. I have a lulu of an intellect. It is not a helper to me unless I am its boss completely. Unless I live and move from the heart, then the intellect works as I ask it to for me. If I allow the intellect to rule my heart, I am hag-ridden as if by a nightmare, and I have seen a lot of very intelligent intellectuals get trapped in the feeling that they can, by effort, understand the way things are. And when the way things are is subjective and intellects depend on subjective reference, the intellect becomes worse than useless. It becomes something that denies those things that are given to you subjectively and invisibly through the heart and the intuition. So that is my feeling about minds.
I enjoy understanding you. I enjoy talking to you, be glad to see you. I would ask you a very big favor. Don’t call me. Please don’t telephone me. I have a great love of solitude and so does my husband, the other active part of L/L. We have one discarnate part of L/L and we have one part of L/L, which in this point in her development is able only to come over for meetings and to help us with transcriptions, for which we are very, very grateful. But for the most part, from Monday through Friday, it is Jim and I in the house by ourselves creating our own environment and in that obscurity, our beings flourish. I make a very strong commitment and always have that my weekends are for people because I love people.
Jim is much more of a hermit and he is the one who is doing all of the things that I don’t do, so Saturdays are verboten for Jim, but I will see people on Saturdays. I will talk to people on Saturdays. There is a motel right up the road, rather inexpensive, $30 of $32 or something, very nice, clean. One of those mom and pop deals where they haven’t quit yet. It is a Best Western, I think, and all of that stuff is on this sheet that I will try to discover from Jim.
He is absent today because this week we are teaching a new channeling student, which is a rarity for us any more. We used to teach channeling to anyone who asked and discovered that it was a terribly frustrating thing for people to learn to channel, and especially with the fastidiousness with which we were teaching it. And then for them to go home and not be able to have a support group so that they could channel in comfortable safety. I do not believe in channeling to oneself out loud. I think working with oneself on the computer or by journaling is safe, but not pulling in these very impersonal, outer entities, which really crank open the personality, and I have seen people end up in a mental hospital from trying to do this stuff alone. I always tell people, “Please, please never channel alone.” Well this one chap has a support group waiting for him when he gets home each time so that his channeling has its own nest, its own support group, its own protection and there is much love in that threesome so that he is very well oriented to become a channel of the type that I am, which not everybody wants to be.
I can easily understand why in an age of quick fixes and do it now, learning about spiritual principles is a very small plotting process of figuring out what you should do tomorrow about this problem. It is a lot more fun to ask an inner guides master what you should do tomorrow and be told what you should do tomorrow. It feels good. It might cost you some money. I never charge anything. And people can get very addicted on both sides. People who channel can get very addicted to being powerful figures and gurus, and people can get addicted to asking what they should do next, not from reference to themselves or have a feel of what their intuition or inner guidance is telling them, but from someone on the outside is telling them.
I don’t let authority go beyond myself and I don’t advise it for others and this, of course, includes you, so please, if there is anything that I have said in this letter that you don’t agree with, just drop it and ignore it because it is not your truth and you don’t have to honor it just because I said it.
At any rate, I would be very glad to visit with you. I would be very glad to talk with you. I don’t know how long it will take for you to get over this notion that I am ill, but I have patience. I’ll see you through it. And meanwhile, I cherish you and thank you for your caring and send you a lot of love and light in hope that your work is blessed.
Until I talk to you again, lots of Love and Light,
Carla