Letter to SH

Dear S,

(Carla sings.)

I put that on there because I wanted to make a point about what difference it would make to be able to grasp what other people are thinking. That particular passage was from Bach’s “Magnificat” much brutalized by both the recording circumstances (a lousy record taped in thin air) and secondly with me taking this opportunity (I don’t waste a lot of time—I can’t, I really have to maximize my opportunities) to practice the third part—I believe very strongly in singing, not only because of the health that it offers one in that it causes one to breathe deeply and it’s the only form of upper body exercise of which I am capable at this time. I’m learning the alto part because I like to have a goal. It isn’t that I like to win anything, but I like to look towards my own goals, and to be without a goal seems to me to be unnecessary, because I can always think of something—some way to be of service and it’s just a matter of looking at your options with the idea that there is creativity possible and there are positive options, you just have to look for them.

So when I couldn’t sing with the Bach Society (I was in the middle of my 23rd season) because my shoulders and neck gave out completely, here I was, and I created the goal of putting down the alto, second soprano and soprano parts—all the women’s parts—to the various standard of that particular repertoire. The one that they were working on when I began to be unable to take part—this was somewhere around Thanksgiving—I’d been working on the “Magnificat” and for quite a while—I would say until January at least, I was pretty much unable to do the singing that I felt I should do—it was just very difficult to hold anything, but I did get back to it when I could, and laid down a first soprano, and then a second soprano, both of which were fairly clean and not too difficult to practice for and get myself into shape to sing as close to a perfect part as I could.

The idea was a “Sing-along with Mitch.” It’s a way that some amateur singers who have lovely voices can learn things who can’t really read music very well or play an instrument at all, which means they have no way of looking at a “C” going down to “G Sharp” or having any concept of exactly what that sounds like. They can’t go to a piano and pick it out and it’s very difficult for them to deal with the Sharps and Flats and whatevers.

So I had long since been practicing at home in a “sing-along” style but I would be listening to the part that I was learning that was sung by the people on the record, but I haven’t been an alto for a very long time. I was an alto when I was a child because I could read music and carry a tune—two things rather remarkable—anyway that’s why I was practicing the alto part, I’m having to practice the alto part because I’m not a natural alto. I was an alto for a long, long time because when I first heard my voice on tape (the tape when it was first invented in the reel-to-reel form was a staple at my parent’s house because they were both performers—Dad was a jazz musician and they both sang and danced, that sort of thing, took part in local musicals, mother had a Minnie Pearl type character and wrote her own comic material—anyway a tape recorder was often in use during my childhood and I was very young when I heard my voice the first time and it was way, way up here and I really didn’t much like talking up here because even though that’s where my regular voice is, it’s really distressing to hear—it’s just not pleasant and I didn’t want to sound like that so I started throwing my voice through my chest which is a much more pleasant way to hear somebody and I think it is less the archetypically irritating female voice—it is more of a neutral voice and I appreciate that it doesn’t send off a lot of alarms in people when I begin talking, I really appreciate that.

Anyway, that’s my way of saying “excuse me for not singing that perfectly and excuse me for recording it so stupidly,” but the point I was making was I picked out one of the parts played by one of the instruments (a flute or clarinet) that will express the same tune, the same subject, at any rate the text was very simply “he remembering his mercy hath helped his servant Israel”—that’s it.

It’s part of the “Magnificat”. “My soul doth magnify the Lord” is what Mary said after the angel came to her and said “You’re pregnant darlin’ and there isn’t a guy around that you can blame it on.” I always thought that a very brave thing for Mary to say.

The point I was making is that if you know what other people are thinking, you can blend your tune with theirs, so if we were to speak to each other conceptually, we would know a great deal more of what people were thinking and feeling than we do when we use words, which are rather blunt instruments, and we would be able to say things so that one single voice could say a part of it, another voice could say a part of it, another voice could say another part of it, and we would be able to work together to harmonize our thoughts because they would be out there, unless we chose, for some reason, to keep them from each other we would, even if we were not linked to each other’s deep minds, we would be linked to each other’s minds—we would not be lying to each other—we would know each other’s biases, as well as what words are being said.

The words that are being said often have only a tangential relationships to the sentiment being expressed and I know you know what I mean.

At any rate, I couldn’t pass up a chance to give you some idea in a simple and graphic way what my opinion is on the subject of how people could get along better with one another, even without the veil being lifted, were they to have access to other people’s true biases. And I’m not saying that in order to have power over each other, we would have that in order to get along with each other—that’s, of course, a personal choice.

I am very glad that you begin to feel or see or understand in your heart the nature of passion and how vital it is as a language—a conceptual language of the Infinite. The outward expression of passion is often relatively unnecessary in terms of how intense that passion’s affect will be on the deepening of one’s own spiritual capacity for love. I know that Don, the person that probably loved me in a way I will never experience again in this incarnation, he didn’t love me—it was almost an adoration and I think it was very much returned, but Don never gave me a compliment—well, I take that back—he gave me a compliment once when he was extraordinarily tipsy.

He drank quite a bit when I first began to spend time in his company and with my alcoholic parent background I could have gotten really upset with all that, but I didn’t see him behaving any differently, so it didn’t really bother me very much, and I knew that before he came to be with me that he had said to my ex-husband several times that he was really hoping that he would die soon—he was drinking as much as he could to help the sclerosis, and did not want to live when he met me, so obviously the man was not going to go around fulminating his joy at life, but he did love me in a way that is almost inexpressible—he certainly didn’t express it—the only compliment he paid me and that when he was tipsy was very simply “you’re the best person I know” which has become a catch phrase with Jim and me, because we’re very fond of the fact that he was able to get that out.

But when ten years or so had gone by and I’d never gotten a single love letter from him, I did get the other document of his incredible sentimentality, he wrote down “percentage of tolerability of humans on P sub 3 (that’s, of course, the third planet from the sun) and then he listed friends, 2%, 4%, 6%—nothing higher than 6% and then me 63%, and that was it. He ceremoniously gave it to me and I still have it—probably the highest compliment I have ever received—I’m tolerable 63% of the time to a person who wanted to die because there was nobody to talk to. (Carla laughs)

So I realize that passion does not have to show in order to be there, and it’s okay for you to realize that too. I also feel that the reason that your wife teases you is a problem. It’s something you might talk about with her, if you guys talk. Now I know that there are a lot of people that don’t talk but I’m a great believer in talking. My ex-husband and I, for instance, had a very difficult situation—he hated being married more than life itself, but he was, at that time, too religiously oriented at first, to think about divorce. My suggestion was simply to get an annulment because the hatred of marriage hit him on our marriage night very quickly. He couldn’t get up the next morning—he was completely lost.

Even though he wasn’t that willing to talk to me at first, I got his attention—I poured water (tepid water, mind you) over his head when he wouldn’t talk to me and when he saw the water coming he usually just opened right up and let me know what was on his mind. Though one time that didn’t work. He was wanting to quit school and he only had one semester left of a five year college course and he would have his degree, and he just wouldn’t talk about it and I didn’t know what it was.

So finally the water trick didn’t work—he said “that’s not going to work” so I broke an egg over his head. Well, that did work. You do what you have to in order to get somebody to talk is my theory, and maybe your wife only feels safe if you do something the way men are supposed to do things—maybe she’s caught in this stereotype too. I personally think men have as many tender feelings as women—their upbringing is different, not their feelings. Certainly men are bigger, men are tougher, there’s no question about it, it’s a difference in bone structure, a difference in size a lot of times, but more than anything, it’s a difference in the way men and women are acculturated. We absorb our parents’ expectations for role models.

For instance, although I am not by nature interested in mechanics, I’m interested in everything I don’t know about. Nobody has yet to tell me something that I didn’t know that I wasn’t thrilled and happy to sit and listen to. I like to learn things. I’d ask my father “what are you doing, Daddy?” “Fixing the lamp.” “Oh, tell me about it.” (Expression of dismissal). But when my brother was the same age, or actually a lot older, because my brother was sick for a long time, and would say “what are you doing, Daddy?” my father would say “Let me show you.”

I held that against him when I was 25 and divorced because I had to learn how to hammer a nail. I had to learn how to fix a simple electrical cord. Not difficult. Why couldn’t I have learned that as a child? Because I was a woman and my father was bringing me up to be a young lady. Young ladies did not do these things. Young ladies do now because they have to. A lot of them are single parents—a lot of them just weren’t ever adult enough to get along with the good soul that married them so they parted.

We need to know each other’s abilities these days, and I think that as we come to the end of the age, the capacity that men have for female energy and the capacity that females have for male energy is more and more apparent. In other words, a female can be very aggressive and this well within the female archetype—just not within our cultural female archetype. Women are supposed to be helpless and clinging.

Very few cultures expect women to be helpless and clinging, if you’ll look at them, and the ones that do are patriarchies. In matriarchies, men are expected to be helpless and clinging, and sexually, as far as I can tell, we are living as white Americans in this culture in a sexual matriarchy, where men pretty much don’t have control over the details of say, how often they will enjoy intimacy with their mates, because it is taken for granted—and this is very stupid and women are keeping this secret so they can remain in control here—it’s taken for granted that women are not going to be interested—men are going to be interested because “men are animals”, you know, that cliché.

But women aren’t going to be interested if they’re “good” women, and that sets up the perfect reason for the woman to have headaches, to say “no” and to completely deny a good man things.

So as you play around with archetypes and try to learn more about woman and that sort of thing, you discover you’re not precisely learning about women, you’re learning about a portion of yourself.

So I think men and women are very much the same, it’s just that men have enculturated approval for repressing tender emotions and a lot of cruel teasing if they don’t repress their emotions. The concept of a man finding nothing to cry about in life is outrageous—it doesn’t happen—it’s not one of the features of life that we get through it without loss and loss makes us sad, and sadness breeds either tears or rot within the heart of some kind that comes back to haunt us until we do cry the tears that those moments deserve—until we do the mourning that those losses require.

It doesn’t mean that we have to become emotional slobs, that we have to fulminate with tender and sensitive emotions and show how vulnerable we are, it doesn’t mean anything in terms of behavior, what it means is that a man needs to get in touch with his emotional side, his intuitive, loving, abiding, nurturing, comforting side, and men do have those sides, there’s no question about it, within, rather than finding it in external sources so much because with the external sources, of course, there is a good deal of energy put into controlling the emotions.

Women have cultural conditioning not only to cry when it is honest, real and necessary, but to develop behaviors which include crying and tearful statements, when it would be in their political best interest in an adversarial marriage or relationship, so that men are, as I said, in this sexual matriarchy, pretty well placed in a state of terror by a woman’s tears.

Now, of course, if you see a woman crying, and you’re a man and what’s happening to you is that the first person that you needed, you really needed, for survival, was your mother, a female. If she wasn’t around how are you going to get fed—precisely who’s going to change your diaper, who’s going to keep you alive? Tremendous and very primitive power there in that relationship.

So I think women could do their part by not encouraging or discouraging male expressions of emotion, but rather sharing them by simply saying, “oh, I feel that too,” or “isn’t that sad?” There is no need to tease and were I you I would think about it and see if maybe there wasn’t a conversation you could have with your wife—maybe she’d enjoy hearing your opinion, you know? And your feelings that you want to deepen yourself, that you want to feel deeper joys and deeper sorrows and you realize that it’s the same passage way that brings both, so that, of course, if you’re going to feel the intense joy of loving so completely that you would give up your life, you also will feel the intense pain that comes with the knowledge that you love enough to give up your life.

Pleasure and pain use the same nerves and I am here to tell you that if you exacerbate one, you also exacerbate the other, as I’ve had to deal more and more with pain, my perceptions of beauty, taken in by any sense, has become far more brilliant, far more ample, but also much more focused, more crystallized, I suppose, would be a word I would use. I see everything, just about, with a very keen eye, a beauty of a movie, or something else that humankind has created, an artifact of our civilization, doesn’t really matter what the medium is, I am a grand appreciator of the old school. I am not anything more than an amateur at any of the arts, and the one that I’ve stuck with longest is singing, but I have had a lot of experience in the humanities, simply because of the way I was brought up, and these things are moving to me in a much more brilliant or bright or shining way.

If I see a bloom on a flower it almost seems incandescent. They brought me flowers from church the other day and Jim couldn’t smell anything, but I could, and for all I know it was simply the odor of sanctity. Tastes are better. Intimate relationships have hit a new level of instantaneous awareness of a pleasure that is prayerful and sanctified so that I feel that the intimate portion of our relationship has become not just a joy or a praise but also a prayer of thanksgiving, and we have been working on this for a long time.

It does seem that as the pain increases, so also does the capacity to experience pleasure along those same sensitized nerves and those passageways.

So passion does not have to do with expressing yourself with passion—it has to do with expressing yourself to yourself in such a way that passion is able to develop as a driving force within you. You said “what would you die for?” Well, you could think of really only what came to your mind which was to save another human being. You see, that fits. That’s what people are supposed to be passionate about. That is, loving people without restraint, without the necessity for some payment in return, an act like that would be an act of utter unselfish love, and a basic recognition that whoever that person is he is also the Creator.

But you didn’t consider living for that. You didn’t say “and I’m living for that too,” because I think it’s often harder with an obvious answer like “I’d fall on a grenade, sure,” but the day in and day out process of loving as a way of life means that whatever comes within your view needs to have love offered to it one way or another. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to feel that you are getting anywhere but I feel that the effort is simply there to be made, it’s what we want to do if we want to polarize more and more towards service to others, is to look at any situation or relationship or happenstance, and look for the option that is positive, that is radiant, just like I can’t sing in a concert right now but maybe if I do these sing-along tapes I can help another person who’s struggling a little bit to get ready to sing and she’ll probably have a better voice than I do, so think about not how you’re coming across to the other person as much as—that’s important, but it’s not as important as keeping your heart open.

The experience of keeping your heart open is very important because a person can be talking to you in utter nonsensical terms, as far as you can tell, but you can still be charitable towards the person just by sending love to them.

I had a fellow up from Tennessee the week before last. He was a seriously distressed human being. His homosexuality did not help but it didn’t seem to be his problem. His problem seemed to be one of a more weak-mindedness, but just intelligent enough not to be able to see that he wasn’t making sense about 90% of the time. He was smart enough to be able to fool himself.

At first I tried to speak to him. He had come up especially to talk to me, not just to have a meditation, so I spent hours with the guy, but after about the first two attempts that I made to move into the conversation—it was a soliloquy for the first half hour—he gave me a 30 second window because he asked me a direct question, and I started into what I would say to him after a half an hour of a bunch of stuff that was obviously in one area that he was distressed although it was difficult to make out the details, he was so fuzzy.

Well, it just didn’t take—he looked as if someone had given him something that he’d never eaten before and he was trying hard to find out what that was. And I did that a couple of times and a full hour had gone by and I could see that there really wasn’t any possibility of any communication with this guy, so I just started consciously to send him compassion. I had a lot of compassion for him and I felt a lot flowing through me from sources far more radiant than I.

It isn’t that I don’t do that all of the time, it’s just that that was what I was focusing on in this particular situation because he was not vulnerable to words, nothing had any meaning to him except what was going on in his mind, which was considerably different than consensus reality—not dangerously so. Well, drop my teeth (I would have if they weren’t still my own) when he came to me before he left—he was afraid to touch, he was so wrapped up in denial and trying not to be what he so obviously was—he wasn’t wanting to touch anybody—it just threatened him so much, so he made a very formal and stiff reply and I accepted that, I just kept sending him love.

And when he stood at the door and started asking if he should give a donation and I said “well, you can give anything that you feel comfortable with giving, I wouldn’t want to take food out of your mouth, but on the other hand if you want to drop some money on us, that would be fine, it will go right into our books and getting the mail out and the expenses of Light/Lines,” and he gave this big grin and said “well, then I won’t give anything because I know you like me anyway.”

And see, the guy came in thinking that nobody cared, so I think passion is expressed often in my life as a willingness to search intensively in any situation to find the positive option.

Instead of boo-hooing and weep-weeping because I couldn’t do Valentines this year, I couldn’t go out and get little things to make, buy cards and so forth this year, and also because Jim and I were having difficulty because I was so wiped out at night—I just didn’t have the energy to think of something to do, and it’s terrible being the only one in the family that’s going to say what we’re going to do tonight, so I was thinking “what can I do to serve Jim?” So I decided to figure out something that we would really both enjoy doing and it will be fun to do on our days off; something that’s leisurely and fun.

So we made valentines—I would find something in a magazine—we had huge stacks of magazines sent to us by a friend of mine through the mail, a reader who is doing the illustrations for “The Book of Days” given that that book ever takes off. I think we’ll have to wait a couple of years before we can have any hopes of that because our new publisher is at this point getting all four books into the right format to be sold as a set, and Jim’s gotten Books 2 and 3 done and as soon as he’s finished indexing Book 2 then they’ll be going off.

So there are always positive options and sometimes it takes a great deal of creativity to find them, but that is where passion, faith, will, the joy of living, comes to your aid. These are the qualities that faith and passion instill in you. If you live a life passionately—if you care, if you allow yourself to care deeply, about the things that are not subject to the relativistic universe which is our illusion, then, although the world around you may find you foolish in your idealism, they will be the first ones to give you awards and prizes because of the fruits of your idealism.

Look at all the people that have thrown themselves into trying to help the cause of the hungry and the homeless. A basketball star from the University of Louisville, Scooter McCray, I believe he came from a high school in New Jersey, was one of the guys who won the NCAA Basketball Championship for U of L, good program at U of L, very strong academics—I’m down as one of their tutors though nobody has ever used me because I’m too far out here, and he stayed here—the town loved him and he loved the town.

He went into some business like accounting or insurance or something like that, some regular 9 to 5, he didn’t want to be a basketball star until his knees went out. He bought an old place on Broadway, which is, in any old city, the main drag, and is especially so when you talk about the black population of Louisville, which, of course, has been the victim of “white flight” to the suburbs for a very long time, and Broadway runs all the way from the farthest west that it can go—it stops at the park where it looks over the river, to connect with the arteries that take one into the eastern portion of the high rent districts of the county.

He bought a large building and fixed it up very nicely and he created a place where youngsters could come—no beer or liquor was served—but plenty of other stuff and plenty of things to do—a place for kids to go. And that action, simply because it was thought out and targeted and done well and he lent his name to it and he is there in person a lot, has undoubtedly changed more lives …

[Side one of tape ends.]

…in service, whether it’s just the service of being there with somebody or listening or you may see a right action which you and no one else can do at that moment in the situation that you’re in and you do that, whatever it takes.

It is the lifelong equivalent of throwing yourself on the grenade for someone else to save his life. You are not losing your life but you are losing the opportunity to talk about yourself, to make yourself be a big shot, to give anecdotes about yourself that would draw the attention to your excellence of being or in some way to guide a conversation in some way that seems to have a control to it.

When you let go of the guiding and the necessity of being right or the necessity of being considered this or that way by other people, you are then free to be whoever you happen to find yourself being and that is the beginning of a great adventure, so really, I recommend that you explore this ability of yours to feel emotion intense enough to make you cry and realize that it’s the same emotion that can make you joyful and that you don’t have to cry and you don’t have to jump up and down and yell “hallelujah” to feel these emotions. That’s another thing about the Bach piece that I sang at the beginning, the emotion is all there, but it’s disciplined and because it’s disciplined, it’s not linear.

There are relationships between the voices, there are word paintings in the words that he uses that come not from careless skill, but from carefully practiced ar. And we, too, are crafting a rather complex piece in our life that has its leitmotifs, its subjects, its counter-subjects. It has the chaconne of whatever is at the basis of our life that keeps repeating itself. I’m getting into weird languages here—a chaconne is: (then Carla sings a musical pattern that repeats itself)

It goes on in one of Bach’s pieces, the portatif organ and the cellos and the bass viol have that figure, no matter what else is flowering on top of it in one of the cantatas.

And like that arrangement that deep chaconne, that stretto is also similar musical figure lies at the base and causes all else to harmonize with it and you need to know what’s the descant, what’s the tune, what’s the counter subject, which not so important, but important to grasp as a separate entity.

What is the song of your life at this point? How many parts does it have? Where are the most beautiful parts? How can you help yourself to become more harmonious? If you look at yourself as something to be created and not necessarily by yourself alone, but by opening yourself to forces far more intelligent that our conscious minds are, then you have a good deal of tools and resources to call upon as you attempt, not to control your life but to discover your life, because you do have these deep abiding figures of harmony at the basis of your life—you do have these huge? subjects, these light motifs, these very important tunes that you’re playing with your life, love of teaching, love of learning, there’s a melody to all these things, and there’s a melody of disharmony also, and it’s not a very nice melody.

For instance, in Brahms, in Brahms you’ll hear Brahms crashing through an incredible dissonances because he’s on his way to an equally incredible resolution—especially, say, in the Motets or in Mania, one of my favorite pieces by Brahms.

Okay, onward to the letter. I truly don’t think that passion has a lot to do with behavior. You can see people, I think it was George Bernard Shaw that said that he saw a lot of young fellows in the army or when they’re out first in the world who told him that they felt passionately because they knew that they were supposed to have spirit—but it usually didn’t last the course. The point being that what goes for passion in this world often is not, and that it may be my passion for the truth or my passion for communication and my desire to help in any way I can anybody that writes me that causes me to do it, but deep inside it is simply a passion to do the will of the Creator and as I look in front of me there are fewer and fewer things that the Creator offers me to do so the choices get easier.

I’m not crazy about the pain, nobody is, but I don’t think that I have more than half the people on this earth probably, and I know I have a good deal less than many—I’m not starving, I’m not cold, I’m not wet, I have clean clothes on, I’m bathed, my hair is clean, and when you talk about penury, you’ve got to begin thinking in terms of “do I have something to hold water in—do I have a shade tree where I can pitch my tent and be out of the sun,” so little the things that people want when they are truly poor.

Thanks for your quotations of Hilarion, I’m aware of that channeling.

And if I can talk more with you about passion I’d be glad to. Of course, one, when talking about passion is using a language not designed to express infinite concepts, so I can only attempt it, I can never achieve a good solid discussion unless I simply put together a bunch of dance, and song, and speakings which I physically can no longer do, and that would probably move people, but people are doing that already.

You’re asking me what do I think men smell in a woman—sex, it’s very simple. Women look for a man that would be a good father to their children. Women are looking ahead because they know that after a night of passion they may well have a lifetime, or at least 20 years or so, of dealing with another being that has been made, so women take in the particulars of a man—his height, his weight, his hair color, and so forth, how narrow his waist is, I suppose, but they are looking for a person who is going to be around tomorrow, next week, next year, if they are women that are looking to marry and settle down.

This is not always true and I think that women who are not looking to marry and settle down are often sort of between role models and really don’t know precisely what to do and often find themselves living with a person for a very long time. It’s just more comfortable to get used to somebody and stay there and then when a tiff happens they part and if they were married they probably would have considered it more carefully, but I can’t really say that because a lot of marriages fail in which one suspects there was no communication.

Men smell in a woman not just her physical attributes although men don’t give themselves credit for it, they’re looking for something more than that, but it’s still sexual. They love “bodacious ta-tas” but that’s really not it, but it helps. But they’re looking for some sign that a woman will be enthusiastic about a thing, I think. Some sign that a woman finds this exciting and fun, that a woman finds him a possible playmate, and that basically is what men look for and there is nothing mysterious about why—it’s instinct.

We men and women are engaged in the dicey business of attempting to give children a stable situation until they get old enough to kill their own bears, and the man’s part is basically that he is not going to get into such a disadvantage situation in this society as a husband unless he is drugged in some way that inhibits his intelligence, because as far as I can see there isn’t anything in it for a man who isn’t aware that woman hold a great deal of inspiration that they can give to their men.

In any worldly sense in a marriage, especially, no, not especially a conventional marriage because I can make a case in any case for the reason a man marrying simply because he is bemused, you know, bewitched, bothered and bewildered, and he really feels that he wants to take care of this woman and to be with this person, that gets them together, and if the woman is wise enough, life will simply continue in its way and everything will be happy, but actually, marriage is also designed by fairly negative influences to be a kind of business contract and it’s astonishingly powerful in that in many states, if a man and a woman marry and if he has four million dollars and she has fifty cents, at the end of the marriage each of them walks away with two million dollars and a quarter.

So basically, what pulls a man into this disadvantageous situation is that first thing that he saw in the woman—there is that chemistry there. And it doesn’t matter so much if the woman is pretty or if she has a certain figure though I do think people respond more to certain types and it’s always different for each person. But there will be one man that likes to have a good heavier woman—something to hold on to is generally what people say in the south—other guys like people with figures like mine, figures that belong on the stage in a tutu and toe shoes, and other than that, you can’t see a figure (laughs) and everything in between.

But they’re also looking at the sparkle in the eye, at whatever it is, whatever edge that that other person is going to notice, the chemistry—that’s what a man is looking for basically. Women look at men with an eye to reputation simply because it is in her best interest to associate herself with people she can trust. For a man, there is not that long term policy—a man may be waiting for the right woman to come along but he’s not able to pursue something that he doesn’t even have, so basically he has to wait until love knocks on his door and I think what women do with all of their painting and their primping and perfuming is to try to attract that male’s eye and let that male feel the chemistry between them so that they basically are then able to get to know the person in the long run, but in the short run they realize that they really have to market themselves.

Now I’m not a person that has ever marketed myself and so I’m sure that I’m being a little bit on the harsh side but I have seen an awful lot of my friends do this kind of thing and I never have understood it but I do think that it comes from the fear that nobody is ever going to marry them, that they’re never going to be able to have children or the emotional security or financial security that a marriage would bring.

And I think that men and women are fairly mad at each other because there are iniquities on both sides so there are a lot of distortions in what a man sees in a woman and what a woman sees in a man, and I ask Jim “what do you look for in a woman?” He says “I like to listen to her for a while and see if she’s going to be at all intelligent.” So I say to Jim “I realize that but let’s narrow this down. The first time that you saw me, what did you think?” He said “I thought that you were sexy.” I think that says it all.

A man is willing to start there and just check the rest out. But that’s pretty important. And it’s pretty important to woman too and I wish that they’d pay more attention because I think that they really do need the chemistry and when I was saying when you marry well there is polarity, part of what I was talking about was the chemistry. The more polarity, the more chemistry, but when two people get together, they certainly are wise in not exploring their differences, but in exploring their areas of commonality, because until you have a language that you’ve built together, you can’t even talk about the things that you don’t have in common, much less joke about them and have fun with them, so I am a great believer in finding the chemistry sooner in a relationship.

Now I’ve had so many men friends in my life that I’ve never had to go looking—whenever one relationship fell apart under me there was always kind of a trail of folks through that were sort of applicants for the next job—hanging out with Carla and then I would just make my pick, and so I never did understand all of that stuff about setting your cap for somebody because I’ve let things come to me and I’ve been very happy with what’s come to me.

A lot of people have left me—that was not in any case my problem, but people, before they left me have all treated me beautifully and in a very loving way and that is the fruit, that is the blossom in relationship—you can’t think about what people do when they’re not well, one way or another, when they’re eaten up with something—a desire to marry when you don’t want to marry is a good example of what I mean.

Certainly compatibility is very important—you have to be able to talk with someone. But you can work on that—what you can’t work on is the chemistry. You can play with it a little bit, but if there’s no spark between you—if there’s no way you can make jokes with each other and sort of enjoy life together, the compatibility isn’t going to save it from being boring. You’ve got to be able to surprise each other, to engender the kind of fun you can have in a mated relationship and also to engender the possibility and the potential of real spiritual growth because a marriage is a place where if you’re safe enough with each other, you can really speak out and you can say “this is what I’m seeing and I may be creating this myself and it may have nothing to do with you, but let me tell you this and see if you have any kind of resonance with this.”

And then you say: “This is what I’m seeing.” And the person has the opportunity to say “I think you’re looking in a mirror and you’re seeing very well; that sounds like something I need to look at myself, but I couldn’t see it myself, thank you for being the mirror” or “I don’t know what kind of a mirror you’re using but it’s too distorted for me to see myself so why don’t you have another go at that.”

And sometimes you’ll do that and the first response will be “No, that is not a correct perception.” But synchronicity will strike and you’ll see that it is, in its own way, a correct perception and now I have something to talk about and now we can talk about this and find more positivity in this little quirk I have and so you must be able to talk with one another but I think that is something one can work on and you can see from my descriptions of pouring water and breaking an egg over someone’s head to get his attention—it was tepid water, it was comfortable water, I tested it just as I would for a baby—you can see the importance I place on having the right to speak.

Now I never insisted that Don answer me in terms of what I had just said. Don was the toughest guy I ever communicated with because he would never not communicate with me but he would communicate with me secondarily by behavior and I learned to ask him to give me a sermon on what would things matter in 10,000 years when I was upset, after I’d gotten what I had to say out, and he would be able to share what he could of himself which was basically his belief system—his viewpoint—that we’re all little tiny things standing on the outside of a ball in space—he sort of put things into perspective, so I accepted that as the closest I could get to communication with him and just simply trusted after he’d been through so much with my eleven operations or so and that kind of thing when I was having trouble the last time with my hands.

I feel I’m again having the same kind of trouble with them and may well have to succumb and have a couple of wrist fusions because they’ve done the wrist operation three times called a “Darrach” procedure (some doctor who made it up) and what they do is truncate (amputate) the wrist bone, which has drifted too far toward the outside of the little finger and is threatening the tendons—it’s an arthritic drift that’s very common when you have what I have—they just amputate that a bit and make a groove in the bone in which you can then wrap a tendon so the tendons hold the bone in place and the bone is not going to cut the tendons because the tendons are wrapped into the bone and it’s been done on me three times on each hand and I just don’t have any wrist bone left, so they told me that the next time I would have a wrist fusion so I shouldn’t do anything with my hands—but that’s like telling a human being not to walk. Jim tries to spare me but he can’t do everything for me.

Okay, you’re talking about the seasons of the spirit and this other book by Hilarion—this is not a truth personal to me—I do not feel that this is a truth that I find fits into my particular puzzle. In other words I do not feel that people in third density would follow laws to the exclusion of having feelings, since we have been given them, so if they come from other star systems they may well have another way of developing and if you’re a fifth density wanderer of which there are a good many, you may find that people’s foolish compassion is just not wise and so we rather shrink from these messy feelings, especially since the content of the feelings seem to be so shallow.

Of course, I have always been a theoretical person so I don’t pay a lot of attention to TV, Radio, movies, politics, etc. etc. except just to notice where they’re blocking yellow ray, where they’re trying to control people, noticing how injustice and justice alike are unpredictable because of the relativity which is absolutely constant, if such a thing could be said (it sounds like an oxymoron) in this illusion. Things will always be relative and they will not always be relative to the same thing.

(Carla reads.) “How do I talk to intellectual professors who justify their existence almost entirely because of their intellects?”

I think I would ask them if they feel they were in balance with the universe. And they would say “what do you mean—in balance with the universe?” And I would say “well, are you trying to tell me that everything that is worthwhile in this life can be intellectually explained?” And they would say “well, of course, why not?” So I would say “have you ever loved someone (everybody’s loved someone) or something?” And I’d find out where they had moved into an absolute emotion that cannot grow in quantity, only in quality—it can deepen, it can intensify, but you’re not going to move it from blue to green—that energy is that energy—love can be light blue, or medium blue, or French blue, or dark blue, or navy blue or midnight blue—but it’s blue.

It’s not quantitatively different from other loves—it is qualitatively different.

Okay, now you can say “you’re saying this about color—comparing color to love and it’s not a correct analogy.” No, it’s not—it has its limitations because you can measure tone and vividness and tint and so forth—various different qualities of color mathematically, using the instrumentation of Hand, I’m aware of that, so it’s a limited analogy.

But, for instance, Laura Niro, the singer, I read years ago, asked a violinist to please play this blue, and he said “light blue or dark blue” and she said “light blue” and he nodded—they were speaking, communicating quite fully, but it’s not simply a language that can be used by someone who is not an artist because how would you play light blue as opposed to dark blue—how would you indeed play blue. Well, you just have to be there.

So basically, what you have to find is that part of yourself that is an artist. Everyone has the artist in them. It may be the passionate appreciation, one may be an artist at the second hand, far better at appreciating the good thing rather than being able to do these things, but what a wonderful thing to be, an “appreciator,” and an advocate for the enhanced life, the enhanced quality of life—given by one who appreciates everything from the rising of the sun to the going down of the sun, and everything under heaven.

Okay, I won’t comment on the ones you didn’t ask about. You did say “men seldom realize that there is a way to pay attention,” and this is a slightly puzzling statement but I concur with the sentiment. I’m not sure what the context was—I do know that any man will tune out a woman if she talks about non-substantive matters because men, for the most part, are fairly closed mouthed about personal matters. They don’t go on about the cut of the shirt or if they should have the Browns or the Joneses over for dinner and things like this.

So basically, instead of tuning that woman out, what you have to do is to keep one ear on what she’s saying so that if she slides into something substantive, you’re there for her, because what she’s doing is breaking one of those societal molds and actually speaking as a person, so I think that it needs to be encouraged, certainly in both sexes, but I think that woman are by far, the more boring and constant speakers with far less to say, but you see, what is happening is that women understand the language of caring and the language of love which is conceptual and infinite and absolute.

So when they’re together, or even when they’re trying to relate to you, they don’t care what they’re talking about—they could be talking about cosmetics, or Iceland, or the plight of seals, or the difficulty of getting a good printer, it doesn’t matter—it’s whatever is happening and words become a thread that is woven and one is the woof and the other the warp and together there is a tapestry of conversation that grows under the touch of a caring finger, that is almost a lost art, just as correspondence is, and I am certainly doing terrible things, both to the art of conversation and letter writing by writing on tape to people because I find when I listen or read back a transcript of a letter I’ve written it has a good many run-on sentences and other linguistic solecisms that I would, of course, have edited out, if I’d seen it on paper if I was doing it by hand.

(Carla reads.) “How do spiritually realized people die?” I take it this is your sense of humor here—I thank you for that—I suspect they die however they choose to—yes, I suspect they do—har, har. I’m afraid to dust we shall return and we don’t have much to say about that but we have a say about how we’re going to live until that happens, but thank you for the humor.

Oh yes, this is where you said “what would I die for? And the only thing that comes to mind is to save another human being.” Well, what are you living for, Steve, look at that? Are you ready to save one other human being from anything. How are you going to be of service today? That’s in front of your face. Take it from there. That’s where you bring passion into your life, by paying attention. You have opportunities you can’t even believe yet, because you just haven’t hung yourself out there and paid attention yet.

It’s an intensity—a caring about life—a joy that you’re here and whatever is happening—it’s coffee in your cup, it’s a murky sky with the trees noble and naked and fruitful in their leaflessness—anything you notice that’s been there—you’re there with it—you’re there with what is and you are and when you’re in that state of mind a spirit far greater than any will hit you up ‘side of the head with opportunities for service because you’re paying attention and have ears to hear and a heart to understand and there you go.

Open your ears—open your heart because you really do need to answer that question: what are you living for? When you find the answer to that you have your passion, you’ll have your finger on the pulse and you’ll go and live for that every minute—and not only will your life be renewed, you’ll be a different creature and things happen around creatures that are paying attention—not because of them but because of something they’re allowing to come through them like sunshine.

Here’s something you’re not following: “Were we able to overcome the distortion, of course, we would not need third density.” Okay, that was why I was singing that song and talking to you about how much better telepathy is—we could speak to Russians, we could speak to Germans, we could speak to Swedes, Poles—if telepathy were universal we could probably speak to higher animal forms. I think it would help a great deal and it would help us to orchestrate our thinking on many matters that are of common interest to us. This is a global village now—anything that happens, happens to us.

That’s always been true but it’s never been so obvious so perhaps you’ll let me know if you still aren’t following me, because you didn’t before.

Okay, the 180 degree rule: It’s simpler than it sounds. We think certain things are good for us, like having enough money, having our health, having a good romantic partner, living where we want to live—doing a job that we like to do, having a pleasant life—you can take it from there, all the things that conventional wisdom says are good.

Now let’s turn 180 degrees and look at the opposite. You don’t have a good marriage, you don’t have enough money, you’re not good at the sport you like to play, you can’t do the job you trained for because something happens, all these things, they’re bad for you, they’re uncomfortable.

But wait! When do you learn the most? Because as you look back on your life, in what portion of your life have you been the most uncomfortable? Bring yourself back to that point, whenever it was, and ask yourself what was your rate of learning at that point? Did you or did you not develop a tremendous amount compared to when your times are very good and you’re pretty much not thinking about stuff?

We love beauty and we love beautiful people. But look what happens to the poor beauty who finally starts to get old? There is a famous painting by John Singer Sargent who painted this woman in a black dress and it almost looked as though she were on the point of losing the dress, it was so feeling, and she was perfectly beautiful in her form—beyond perfection I would say—she must have been incredibly stunning if it is an accurate picture, which I’m sure it is. She had an unusual face, not a beautiful face, it was too pointed and too long and mouth too small for the kind of generous good looks that were considered beautiful in those days, but she was the celebrated wife of, I believe, a French banker and ran society in Paris for quite a while.

And then one day, I think she was all of 29 years old, and she overheard someone say “I believe Madam So-and-so is looking rather tired, don’t you? Perhaps she is beginning to lose her bloom.” This woman went into seclusion and never came out again. She lived well into her 80’s but never came out in public again. Obviously she did not make lemonade out of those lemons, but think of what would happen if she were to face up to the fact that she would lose her pretty face and she would have to figure out what else she was.

People that aren’t pretty faces have to do that thinking early on and I’ve always avoided good-looking men for that very reason. Ending up with Jim was a mere fluke. He runs totally against type—he’s attractive and he’s very athletic but he has nothing in him of that mentality, which is good for both of us, because people that are attractive find it easy to form loose relationships and easier to ditch them because another two or three are right around the corner who look even better. They’re not going to learn how to be compassionate and caring or good.

They don’t have to unless it’s part of biases with which they incarnated and unless those biases were encouraged in childhood—those two things are important and often neither of them happen with really beautiful children that turn into beautiful adults. They haven’t had to grow up at all so one is dealing with a mature body and the mind of a pre-adolescent that is basically waiting until the next compliment—the sooner the better, thank you very much, and isn’t really thinking about what he can do or she can do for the other person, so the 180 degree rule works for beauty as opposed to plainness.

It’s been my experience as a plain person that it is an advantage to be plain because I have had wonderful relationships all my life with people who had to get past the fact that I was not a raving beauty before they could become at all interested in me.

Oh, you’re very welcome about the “Law of One, Reader’s Group News Letter”. I made the suggestion but I didn’t remember it.

So, there’s the 180 degree rule. Hopefully this begins to make more sense to you when you follow it through in your own life. Anything that you can claim that people will say “Oh, I’m so sorry about that,” isn’t there some part of that experience in which you honestly could say, well, now wait a minute. There was an upside to this—I learned this and this and it has stood me in good stead ever since. I have compassion now, I know what it is to fail—I know what it is to have this particular kind of pain. I no longer think that it’s the other guy’s fault because he has that pain. I am aware at this point that things do happen.

Anyway, it’s a good rule and it has helped a lot in making lemonade out of lemons. It has helped me a lot in life because I have seen that everything that I have ever felt was a real tragedy for me in one way or another, has evolved for me into the next blessing that I was to receive.

[Side two of tape ends.]

Good and bad, as you pointed out, are stupid words in the first place, but they do indicate in the easiest possible way the polarity of preference—“I prefer this, I don’t prefer that.” We have our preferences and we don’t always get what we prefer, but the 180 degree rule can be invoked when you’re looking at something that you did not prefer at all, to happen, and then it’s happened. Then, you use that rule faithfully to examine the situation and if you can’t discover anything that seems positive about it, then you simply have to abide in faith until you have enough distance on the situation because of time having passed, that you can take along with you and see the fruits of that particular situation.

I think the thing that convinced me of this truth was when Don died, it was a terrible struggle for me. But I did join the human race at that point. I had not done anything that I could not handle up until then. When Don died it was because I could not convince him to live, basically. I just failed to convince him to live. He couldn’t listen to anybody. Don never listened to anybody and in that failure, I basically felt (this was wrong, of course) that it was my fault—he was my responsibility and I had failed him. But from this remove of time, I can see very clearly that probably a good half of the unmitigated compassion I feel for those with difficulties in this life that they cannot deal with comes from my experience of utter and absolute failure—seen subjectively.

It was not seen by others as my failure—nobody gave me a hard time about it really—a couple of his friends just didn’t come around anymore and I took that hard, but really nobody said “you should have tried harder,” because there wasn’t any question about it that I had tried with every bone in my body—everything I could put out and more—and I had failed, and that terrible lesson was also a wonderful lesson because I learned about failure and I needed to learn about failure. I didn’t have enough humility.

People would ask me “well, what should I do,” and I would tell them, as if they could do it. Not poking around sharing with them, trying to get their range and see what they could do in terms of themselves, but what I would do as if what was good for me was good for everybody.

Failing taught me that there are situations that people can’t give you very good advice about if they’re just talking off the top of their heads. It made me listen more and made me pay more attention.

It is exhilarating to see those colors and it is often a gift of meditation after a few years of it. Don had the experience. On the other hand you could meditate for years and not have that experience. I’ve never figured out how to do that so naturally it’s only happened to me once, but it certainly does linger in the memory as a valued thing.

I always tend to go light on karma. You’re asking here about the Kuwaitis. I like to go fairly light on karma because I think it’s given a kind of energy that it doesn’t have by nature. It’s not an active energy—it’s not something you have to do—it’s something that you’re going to have to go through to balance something that wasn’t balanced and you’ve chosen it yourself, so basically, it’s a matter of balancing the books, and stopping a momentum that has become useless. It’s inertia, it’s meaningless and stopping that and moving it into a more meaningful rhythm in your life, so I don’t know about the karma involved—it seems to me that the old testament and the Koran are very similar documents and they’re both documents of people who lived in the land between the two rivers—the Euphrates and the Nile, the cradle of civilization.

They’re very old, patriarchal structural societies. Women are, especially in the Muslim and in the old Jewish ways of being, a different species. They’re simply not considered human. They’re considered a kind of chattel. It is not possible for women, for the most part, to rebel because of the pain of being an outcast and the probability of actual starvation. It’s a hard, harsh part of the world. Water is not that plentiful and like the desert, the thinking becomes fairly primitive, I think. It’s a clean mental environment, and it can be a wonderful spiritual environment, but it is not seen as that by the inhabitants of that region. It is seen as an endless shifting bunch of tribes, nomadic, actually, a lot of them in their beginnings, who more or less kind of squatted down and moved from watering place to watering place or went ahead and stayed and became more agrarian, and then here came the 19th and 20th centuries and probably before that, and people started making nations out of Arabia and Turkey and Persia. They were just a bunch of tribes, you see, and the nature of any territorial tribe is it’s going to protect its territory.

So the politics of that region are not only situational, but they’re honest, and this is what gets people’s attention. We put people in our society on lists and blacklist them—we do atrocities all the time—ask George Bush, he was president of the CIA when they poisoned Fidel Castro’s cigars. I’m wondering why he doesn’t spike the CNN pickup or something.

So basically you try to talk to people about justice or humanity of the people in that region and all you get is a shrug and they say “well, it’s the Middle East.” It’s an entirely different culture, it’s a culture based on fear, on survival, and it has become very materialistic without the sophistication of “old money” clout. The leaders of these are people have always had absolute power and as you know, absolute power is going to do it’s little number with the corruption bit.

The same folks have been stealing their people blind for the last 250 years I heard on TV, but he’s their leader and that’s the way it is and it’s necessary for people to know the way things are—the more primitive they are the more they need to know the rules.

I think that they, probably, are very disenchanted at this point but the question is what do you do if you are disenchanted, but the people that are fighting the person with whom you are disenchanted are infidels. These people, part of what their structure is, part of what they’re holding onto to make it in this desert land where a tree is enough to be a home for a whole tribe, because it means there is water there if you dig deep enough, is that they’re between a rock and a hard place, if you will. How are they going to turn their back on Saddam and on the U.S. and have any say whatsoever in the outcome?

Diplomacy and statesmanship failed repeatedly in this situation and now that the war has been joined, and make no mistake about it, I believe they have dumped more stuff on that desert than they’ve ever dumped on anything anywhere in any war already, and they’re planning on doing it for a few more weeks.

Of course the archeologists are having fits and the paleontologists, too, I would image, I haven’t heard from them, but they’re bombing prehistoric stuff, and early historic ruins that can be identified and things can be learned from, but of course if they bomb them out of their context, blast them so that there are shards here and there and everywhere, you’re not going to learn anything from stuff that’s taken out of context—you’re not going to learn as much, so basically, we’re not just bombing the people, we’re bombing history, which in a way is a more heinous crime. Of course, in another way, not. To bomb at all is the greatest, but when you get into relativity then you know you’re talking in a worldly manner—to say well, this is worse than that, but you see, it’s such a gray world.

I think karma is not national, but personal, in its expression and in individual’s lives. Perhaps we all have karma, for instance, because America dropped a bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that wiped out a lot of people. Japan, on the other hand, dropped a bomb on the Missouri and a bunch of other ships and sent as many people as they could to the happy hunting ground also.

So it looked pretty balanced, especially in terms of the attitudes of the people that were doing it. In other words, Mr. Truman was attempting to use a scary weapon once and then use it again just to show he could in the hopes that that much destruction with only two bombs dropped would convince the Japanese to surrender, they who had this thing about honor so that rather than surrender they would kill themselves. It was a very difficult decision. I don’t know if it was the right decision, but it did end the war and it did save a couple of million lives on the allies side and I don’t know how many it would have saved on the Japanese side. But it would have been a nasty war and a lot of people, I think more than were killed would have been killed.

So when I look at the Kuwaitis I don’t know what their karma is, but if you look at each individual Kuwaiti, the people, then I suspect they would have their stories to tell, if the truth be known.

I don’t like much the idea of karma because I think that it is a vain search to look for the answers to the questions in one’s present life by looking backwards to previous lives or forward to some goal that you wish to attain theoretically which is not in your heart yet—it’s still up in your head.

To me, life is a matter of internalizing the present moment so that it resounds and echoes within the present self—the beginner’s mind. I try to keep as little as possible in that mind so that I have a beginner’s mind so that I pay attention. I sometimes turn the television on and turn the sound off and study the images because I know I haven’t been stimulated because of being where I am. Jim’s gone and he’ll go for a couple of days every week and that’s real good for both of us. We can’t just spend 24 hours a day together for the rest of our lives without scratching a bit, so I think it’s a good move to make before we have to and while we still can because if this gets a whole lot worse he won’t be able to do that.

So I simply do it so that I can have the opportunity to think about “feel” things, to experience the present moment. I don’t always need the TV to do that, but right now I can’t read, my hands are not good enough, so instead of reading I watch these random images and since I don’t lip read I can look at the images and get the kind of stimulation I’m looking for which is a deeper kind and it gives me things to think about.

No, I don’t know much about Alexander’s Journal. We get it once in a while from Suzie in its entirety and she thinks it’s a really good journal and it certainly seemed that that article was right on target, but at any rate, to finish up about the Kuwaitis—I think in the end whatever is occurring to a person is not pre-destined, but destined. In other words, they put themselves, by incarnating into a certain place at a certain time, into a pattern where the probability is that this experience is going to happen and this is the experience they want, and it’s always a negative experience—seemingly negative. You put yourself in a family where you’re going to be miserable as a kid, or you put yourself in a situation where you’re always going to be poor.

But the lessons in love, you see, come not from the fat of life, but from the bones.

(Carla reads.) “Social Memory Complexes—how are they organized.” They are not precisely organized except the way a computer would be organized I would guess. It’s a situation where all the people in a society have become telepathic and have opened their minds to the mind of the social memory so that their memories are in the social memory and everyone else’s memory is in the social memory so all the experience that anyone in that society has had is available to everyone. It’s a kind of incredibly enhanced way of being wiser than you really are because you’re listening to such good advice.

They do not seem to have leaders, they seem to be organized along the lines of preference. People within the social memory complex that feel that there is something that they wish to do to serve others live together as a kind of clan or a tribe and everyone in that social memory complex knows who his mother and father are but they also know that every person there is a mother and a father to him so each individual has his own sense of family ties but they are not in any way different than the ties that he has for everyone else in the clan.

It’s an extended kind of communal family and there is no need for leaders because if everyone is sharing the thinking of everyone else there will be a consensus—there won’t be lasting disagreements—there will be harmonizations which will contain what is obviously, given that you can read everyone’s thoughts, the best that can be done with that situation in any social memory complex.

Now, of course as a social memory complex matures, and that takes millions of years to get to the point, like Ra, that the whole social memory complex comes and tries to do this one thing—it’s a lot of people, but it doesn’t start out that way. It starts out simply with people dividing into the birds of a feather, flock together mode, of living, which is, of course, much more harmonious. Ask me about that more if you would like to know.

There is a council connected with doing service to people in other densities, but that council is made up of those people, from those people, and it is simply that somebody who is familiar with that particular social memory complex, that particular situation and the planet that the people want to help, and so forth, they have to guess whether or not it could possibly work, and if it didn’t work, what would be the side effect, that kind of thing.

Other than that I would not say that you were looking at any kind of an organization that we know about, because organization in our illusion is always hierarchical and almost always pyramidal, in other words, the power is at the top and the weight is carried by the people at the bottom, which is many, many more than those at the top or near the top. I think that a social memory complex nurtures all the people in a society and is not hampered by the difficulties of providing for one’s own supply.

One thing that a lot of people thinking together can do is multiply loaves and fishes or create any kind of food that is needed. Want and penury are not things that you hear social memory complexes talking about—they’ve just not experienced it lately—it’s irrelevant.

(Carla reads.) “Our spirit is completely illogical—could you put this another way? Okay, you said the gist of it basically. There would seem to be a certain order of things which is highly logical and certainly spirit must know this and be subsequently ordered and rational to a certain degree, but if by highly illogical you mean it defies logic to explain it, then I could understand.”

Actually, I can explain it logically, but it’s not logical. It’s not logical to believe anything. It’s not logical to have faith in anything. It might be logical if one were to go by inference but inference is not a safe form of logic. It’s sort of philosophy without a condom.

When you’re talking about spirit, you’re talking about an infinite invisible treasure that contains all the intelligence and love and reality that there is and contains it in such a way that truth and beauty come through even in the middle of this illusion so that from the inside out we know and hunger for spirit. We’re hungering for what is deepest inside of ourselves but we always reach outside until we have made the connection within. That’s why I try to get people to start the reaching process because it’s going to end up internalized.

But you can’t talk about it because words are the tools with which we approach choices made in the illusion. They are not designed to express what seems foolish to the mind. If you heard that some Buddhist guy was going to set himself on fire like they did during the Viet Nam war, you’d say “that’s not logical.” And I would say “that’s right.” It certain is not a bit logical and it’s not going to do anything for the war and he’s going to get burn up—a nasty death. But his love just got too great and he couldn’t take it anymore and he expressed his grief.

Is that logical—no. It didn’t help, it didn’t even hurt, it just was. But he did say what he had to say, which is “I object.” He objected absolutely to the point where he was willing to die before he would accept the world in which this could happen—this anonymous monk.

When was love ever logical? When was it ever wise to love? It always brings pain, it always brings loss, whether it was a kitten or a child, or your best friend or your mate—somebody’s going to go first. Your children are going to get old—they won’t come and sit on your lap anymore and give you hugs and think you’re wonderful. They will in the end, but they’ll go through this thing in the middle where they don’t. They get smarter as they get older.

None of it is logical—it is ordered, but it’s not ordered the way logic is ordered. It’s ordered in terms of how much to you care. How much do you love. How pure is that love and it’s tested again and again and again. And why people would want to be on the spiritual path is completely a mystery to anyone who is logical because I will guarantee you that people that are not on the spiritual path and who justify their existence by the use of an intellect are happier, and smug and self-satisfied more so by far than the people who have undertaken a spiritual journey which will teach them their ignominy, their inequity, and their beauty.

The spirit will humble you. It will make you realize we are earthen vessels—we are dust. It’s just that we are dust that part of which is having a conversation with God, with the Creator. I don’t know why intellectuals have always stuck at devaluing that which is not logical when there is no inherent logic in our being here, the sun coming up, things being in balance, or anything that can be described or measured by any instrumentation of which I know.

Who created this thing? Somebody makes things. You look at a typewriter and you say “this did not occur by happenstance, somebody made this. I don’t know what it’s for but look at all these moving parts here. Somebody made it. Well, you look at the creation—somebody made it. You don’t know who and you don’t know why. There isn’t any logic because there isn’t any foundation for logic.

The central relationship of our lives is with our own higher self which is expressed ultimately in the infinite divine—in the holy, immortal, invisible, that is us that surrounds us, that connects us, that makes all things one. He didn’t create two creations, he created creation (he/she/it).

So I think you were on the right track when you say it defies logic to explain it. Yes, it’s deeper than that, but that’s the direction in which I was going. It defies logic even to conceive of it. Spirit, in itself, in essence, has no logic. Why would fire come out of nowhere and strike the heart of a simple person and cause that person to change his life—spirit does that to a ripe and ready heart. That’s what’s so important about meditating and holding on to that meditative experience—feeling the resonance of every moment and paying attention. Caring, really caring about this precious time we have between hello and goodbye, because we are going to get checked out of this hotel—we know that.

Yes, I agree with you—that which is qualitative in any field is generally considered to be a devalued part of that field. However, I believe that a good deal of judgment is based on quality or qualities. In other words, when you are choosing someone to do a job, or when you are listening to see if that person may be guilty or innocent of this or that and it’s your responsibility as a jurist you don’t just listen to the facts because facts can be interpreted in so many ways. You’ll just get terribly confused.

But if there is that something about a witness or an argument presented in defense or against a defendant that rings of a certain quality of justice or in the case of someone applying for a job, a simple quality of this person—this person has integrity—this person has made choices professionally in the past—this person has done this and this creatively and someone has written a letter and said so, you see you don’t just measure the degrees when you’re hiring somebody, you’re also looking for that sparkle in the eyes and that something special, that quality or those qualities that will make a good teacher or a good researcher or a good scholar, whatever you’re looking for.

I never know any more what colleges are looking for because they don’t seem any more to support great teachers. I think all teachers should teach freshman because there isn’t any other way that freshman are going to become sophomores. If you don’t get smacked in the face with some really impressive people your first year in college, you’re going to think, oh, what is this? This is just school.

But it’s more than that, and so is school, so teachers are like ministers—people that are not appreciated and they are some of the most important people we have. I used to be one and I felt it was a really important job—I was teaching people, well, as a kindergarten teacher then as a librarian in a general way, but always I knew that the main thing I was teaching was how to live, how to be, how to think. I was teaching them how to treasure, how to evaluate, to value, to choose, to estimate, to be successful at living a life in society, dealing with society in a realistic way so that you don’t go crazy.

That is the main thing that any teacher teaches—yes, we can teach them the facts and encourage people to learn the facts, but we have to teach them that the mind, when it’s furnished is a wonderful place to live. That’s what we have to teach them when we get to college and then they’ll want to furnish their minds, you see, because someone will set them on fire and they’ll think wow, this is exciting. They’ll stop thinking what good is this going to do me in my job? I would like to kill people that say that, I’ve heard it too often.

I’m saying don’t go to the university if you want to get a job. Get a job Get some degree that will get you a job and then get a job. We need plumbers, you know, let people who really enjoy themselves frolic in the groves of academia.

But I do think we value quality more than any one will admit. I really do think that. I’m not as successful as I have been at getting a job every single time I ever applied for one because I’m intelligent. I have a certain quality—when I tell somebody I can do it, I can do it and somehow that comes through and there’s nothing measurable about it, I don’t think.

I’m glad you liked my sense of humor—it ‘s pitiful but it’s very universal. I am very tickled also to learn that you pun because I love punning—it’s just so much more fun than speaking English. Mother has said of me from time to time that I don’t speak English, I speak “Anguish” because I twist the language around so much, but that’s fun—it’s like playing.

I think that my favorite pun that was made up on the spot was that—I think Don had heard this somewhere but he brought it in as if it were actually happening in a conversation that we were having at the table and he gave me this long story about—he wanted to get some bread but the lady had said it was going to take her too long to cut it up and she could only cut it up one loaf at a time and she wasn’t going to have time to do it and he was going to have to leave and I was saying “no, we can wait for that” totally suckered me in. He wanted four loaves and he said “you know, what she really needs is a ‘four-loaf cleaver,’” and as was my wont with Don I did not smile because he was a real deadpan comic and I can really enjoy deadpan comedy, in fact I throw people all the time because they don’t know I’m joking.

So I took it in—he was waiting and waiting—and I waited a while before I said, “listen, could you ask the waitress if there are any cloves,” and he said “yeah, I’d be glad to.” And he asked her—he actually got a handful of cloves, and I put four of them on my plate and he fell for it and ask what I was doing that for. “Well, Don, I just decided that I’d like to leave a little behind—I’m going to become a four-clove leaver.”

That was very satisfying of course because the poor man didn’t know that I had gotten his joke.

A friend of his one time had messed up his bumper and he had an Avante and Don said “what you need is a new “avante guard”. But that’s okay, it was still funny.

Another question: “Concept of praise…” Well now, when we praise the Lord we are praising something that is infinite and can never run out. When we praise each other, that’s a different story. We relate to that relative to our own self esteem and our own subjective opinion of ourselves. People that are sufficiently narcissistic enjoy constant praise and are starved without it, because that’s been the way that they’ve enjoyed themselves for a long time and if they don’t get that constant praise then they feel abandoned.

Other people can’t stand anybody complimenting them at all because they are so full of their own iniquity—in between there is a vast range where one can feel really embarrassed because of a lack of self-esteem or really irritated because one has enough self-esteem to know that while what you did was good, relative to other people, compared to what you could have done if you’d worked on it, it was really a lazy, less than perfect effort, and consequently even though you have a perfectly good ego and you’re not belittling yourself or causing low self esteem within yourself, still you know that that person is off base and it does make you uncomfortable.

I have had a lot of experience with being praised too much. I have been called St. Carla, for instance, which is funny, but not accurate. The first reaction I had to it was extreme discomfort because my self esteem was pretty low, actually, and I really did not feel that I was worthy of this praise, and I have always simply gotten rid of people around me who gave me nothing but praise, because I consider that to be a disaster, just the way I grew up, I know that everything I do is not equally good and I don’t want somebody around who is going to tell me that everything I do is brilliant because sometimes I do things that are fairly good, sometimes I do things that aren’t good at all. I need somebody who can tell the difference.

So in my life I have surrounded myself with people who are just as likely to call me on something as they are to compliment me, but I can trust them to be kind, for the most part—my Mother is an exception.

[Side three of tape ends.]

Praise from people is not something that it has been really easy for me to take either, but I realize, well, I don’t need it but that person has need of some kind of a role model so I’ve seen that enough now, because of the books being out and all, so I just figure I’ve always tried to live as well as I can, as beautifully as I can, as lovingly as I can, and I’ll just keep on trying and be the best role model I can be, it’s just a matter of seeing that you are in some kind of an authoritative position, whether or not you have genuine authority is not yours really to decide. But the substance of what a person that is complimenting you is saying is often just simply “I need you to be better than me so that I can try to be more like that.”

And that is a very impersonal thing and I just accept that as an honor and a duty and try to lead the kind of life that would back up the kinds of things that I say so that I am in no way a hypocrite, although I think life makes hypocrites of us all and that’s just the way life is. We are dust and to dust we shall return and I feel very badly about the intellectuals because the intellect is one of the things that will turn to dust. It does not survive any particular incarnation. It is a measure of how fast our computer works. I’m sure of it because I go off the scale on tests but I do not live with genius—I live sort of semi-competently, is the best I can say.

I talk about maximizing my opportunities for service but do I? Not always. I talk about a lot of things but do I do any of them faithfully forever? No, none of them. I’m a human being. So when we praise each other, we praise each others’ good points and we see them blossoming into an infinite quality that’s been brought into space and time by this whatness, this person that is carrying this energy, this goodness, this quality, and we compliment that.

We are complimenting something that is completely out of space and time—a quality, purity, intelligence (real intelligence, not intellectualism), but I think it behooves us to study the things that are visible and the things that are invisible. The things that are measurable and the things that are immeasurable because the one thing we know for sure is that the Creator is not in the computer, in measuring devices, in things that can be measured. Or we would have found the Creator and we haven’t.

Paul says “therefore, we do not lose heart but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day, for momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at things which are seen but the things which are not seen, for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” 2nd Corinthians, 4th Chapter. I don’t remember the verse but I’ve memorized it because it has a great deal to do with my present situation. It’s a touchstone right now.

So, what I’m saying is yes, we can try to praise people, but the best we can do is praise the qualities that we see in them that inspire us and in that we are praising equality and qualities are part of the creator, not quantities—qualities. And they’re all qualities concerning love in one aspect or another. I think the important thing in praising the Creator is to realize that he’s not far away—he’s here, he’s now, he’s within, so our journey as prodigals has been out into the world and we walk through the world losing as we go—that’s life. Life is lost Joseph Campbell said. And we hunger more and more for our father’s house—our true father, not our earthly father.

We yearn to come home and people know what I mean by that even though they can’t express it. We all yearn to come home. There’s a wonderful song that goes:

(Singing)

Twilight is stealing over the Sea, Shadows are Falling dark on the lea; Borne on the night winds, Voices of yore, Come from the far-off shore. Voices of loved ones! Songs of the past! Still linger round me, While life shall last Sadly I wander Lonely I roam, Seeking that far-off home. Far away beyond the starlit skies, Where the love-light never, never dies, Gleameth a mansion filled with delight, Sweet happy home so bright!

That’s the home we yearn for—that’s where we want to come home and we won’t do it completely in this life but sometimes when we come into a loving situation, when we come home for Christmas, when our children come home or our brothers and sisters re-united or friends from way, way back or a wedding pulls everyone together—we haven’t seen each other in 10-20 years, it feels like we’re coming home because of all of the love, and sometimes at weddings it’s just so touching you feel like you’ve come home (even though you don’t know anybody there except the bride’s mother or father) because of all of the love that it represents.

So that’s what we praise. We praise a quality, we praise an emotion, we don’t praise logically or intellectually. No it isn’t necessary that we praise him it’s just something that I would think it would be urgent on our list of things to do. Praise and thanksgiving roll off my tongue very, very often because there’s so much beauty.

It always shocks me when I haven’t noticed something—I remember I wrote on particular song because it was a cold winter day and I was out from my walk (that was back when I was better) and I almost didn’t see this one bird clinging to an icy telephone wire—he was silent, he wasn’t singing, he was just there, his beautiful little form against a blue grey sky. He represented all of the beauty in the world in that moment standing on that wire, holding his own, and I almost missed it. It disturbed me so much I wrote a song about it—I don’t think it’s ever been put to music.

I send you a couple of my more recent ones—you’ve heard the ones that are put to music. They’re not really that good until the music is added so unless you ask for them I won’t send them.

God is love—God doesn’t ask for anything, God just loves us. But what can we give back? Thanks and praise is a start. A life? That’s more than a start. Once we make that decision the praise and the thanksgiving just roll off your mind into the ethers because when you’re trying to be of service the Creator just keeps bailing you out and you have nowhere to go and the Creator says oh, over here, nudges you this way and that and you say, “thank you—thank you very much” and the more you thank the more you get and the more you praise the more you have things to praise. It’s a part of faith. It’s a positive radiant expression of what is. It’s a praiseworthy creation. Think about it. Look at this creation. It doesn’t suck! In Arthur’s famous words, I should say Dudley Moore’s character Arthur—it doesn’t suck!

Look at the lilies of the field—think about that. Look at the trees, look at the skies, look at the stars, think about the way we make children. Is that a genius at work or what? You don’t see any wasted motion anywhere and everything is helping everything else. By their lives, by their deaths, it’s not “gory and red in tooth and claw” as that idiot said in the 19th Century—I won’t mention him—don’t like him. It’s a balance kept by a loving, loving force that we so flippantly call “Mother Nature” and make commercials about. It was put in place by a very loving Creator—how can we help but give thanks and praise for that. Just to put my feet on the earth to me is to give praise. The energy just flows into me from that earth, that wonderful healing energy of the earth.

You might try some Tai Chi if you don’t have bad knees. You might find a way into that flowing that allows praise in a quiet and ordered way. No belief system required, just doing a series of movements. I have seen one person find most of what he was able to find of spontaneous emotion in the Tai Chi. It isn’t that you don’t have it within you, it’s simply that you’re not used to thinking of the creative personally, but you see, there’s nothing more intimate or personal than the Creator. The Creator is the third partner in any relationship, most especially the mating relationship. There’s a you, there’s a her and there’s an us, which is created of you, her and the Creator. It is a holy relationship. All relationships are holy. The mating one I think perhaps most of all. And the Creator is a full partner in your life.

You will praise the Creator once you feel the Creator. Again, this goes back to meditating and allowing silence to be silence. If you’re concerned about the fact that you keep thinking of things, don’t be. There’s nothing to be afraid of in those thoughts—there they are, if all you do is accept your thoughts, then you’ve had a great meditation. Just do it every day. Don’t worry about how good it seems to yourself or to somebody else. No matter how you meditate, as long as you’re trying to meditate, trying to follow your breath, that’s what I tell people—just follow your breath.

Just breath in and breath out—breath slowly and deeply and follow your breath and if something comes into your mind and, of course, it will, note it, but don’t hold it. It’s not solid—you’re not solid. You know you’re not solid, you just don’t think about it. Quick, remember your physics—have they ever found mass, no, they’ve found energy. You’re a field, a field of consciousness. All this computer stuff and this physical body stuff, it’s illusion—you know this. As a scientist you know this—use it, because when you know what isn’t then you’re one step closer to knowing what is and what is is invisible and definitely praiseworthy.

Please ask further on this—this is an enormously important point and I would very much like to help and I only know where I have failed to help with all of your questions. So please help me out.

I’m glad that I’m helping you to learn a little about women. I think it’s not wasted, I think the more that you understand something, the less you’ll fear it. For instances, if you know that women don’t cry just to control people but they cry because they have fits, their hormones go up and down and if your woman is sensitive you may know that you can’t mention that but you also know that you don’t have to fear it—it’s a fit, it’s going to go away, and all you have to do is listen to her talk and hold her until she’s finished crying and then put her to bed. Give her some whiskey and a nice pain pill (laughs) or something for cramps or PMS or whatever and she’ll be all right in the morning. You just have to know that women are capable of some fits because of the fact that they have a biochemistry that can put them into the deeper circles of hell in about 30 seconds and it’s real hard to deal with.

Also, by the fact that woman carry life within them I believe that they really are connected to the womb of the earth and their feet are always on the earth and not those high heels that women still wear sometimes. They may seem to be airheads but when push comes to shove they’re the ones that will stay five nights in a row with their child in the hospital and be with the child when it dies, where men have been unable to do that, because they carry that kind of emotion all that time—they’re very intense. Unless, of course, they’re not typical. I can’t, of course, speak for every woman but for the most part we are a nurturing and intense bunch of people who have learned to be ladies, especially in the South—Steel Magnolias.

That was a script that was near to perfect in my opinion—it was not played perfectly, if I were in my critic mode I could make mincemeat out of some of the players who attempted to act southern and who were not but that doesn’t matter. Life tends towards the stereotypical and Steel Magnolias was a wonderful discussion of Southern women. There’s a book called “Womenfolks” (I believe) that talks about Southern women that I recommend to anybody that wants to know just how much steel there is under that soft magnolia petal-like surface—plenty, we have to be, we have to endure, we have an instinct to take care of our own that refuses any other alternative unless it is forced upon us.

Thanks for your compliment about being a free spirit. I’m a very disciplined free spirit, sir. It takes energy to refrain from shameful things sometimes.

Yes, I would love to give something important like New York back to the Indians just for the gesture of it. I think that would be a good karmic thing to do. I am, however, not an elected official nor would I ever be because I won’t say that I never smoked pot. It’s quite a comment, isn’t it, on wisdom as opposed to politics? Don always wanted me to run for President (laughs). I love Jimmy Carter, he’s my favorite president since Kennedy. Jimmy Carter is a wonderful man and an inspiration.

Do you know that he spends his time volunteering—building houses for the poor—he does it several weeks out of the year. He makes chairs. It’s something he knows how to do. He gives them to people to raise money for causes. A chair built by Jimmy Carter. Well, it’s not a special chair, it’s just a good chair and it gets a lot of money because it’s made by Jimmy Carter. He is absolutely without pride. He is humble enough to be a wonderful person. He always was. He never did say anything he didn’t mean. I always believed that about him. He’s a good person. He called 1983 exactly what 1983 was—he said there was a malaise over the whole nation—well, it was true. Nobody wanted to hear it and he didn’t go for another term, but it was true. I dearly love Jimmy Carter.

Okay, the second quote about losers benefiting the most—that follows the 180 degree rule so now I’ve finished with everything.

What’s happening right now? The sun, as far as I can tell through the gray mist, is settling and it’s time for supper. I’m pretty well down the tubes physically at this point. I don’t know where it will end up. I really can’t make any projections into the future, but basically I’m just trying to keep up. I’m really happy that we’re going to be able to go to West Virginia, the guy that wants us to come is sending somebody for us with a van so that I can lie down on a mattress in the back—two mattresses, in fact—and then getting me there and putting Jim and me up and getting us whatever we need to eat and stuff like that.

It’s an interfaith conference sponsored by a group of people who used to be Hare Krishnas and in their private worship they’re Hare Krishnas, but the leader of the group has a vision of all the religions on the planet being able to worship their one God, which is all the same God, no matter what name, together. And, of course, that’s very dear to Jim’s and my heart this particular idea.

They want me to talk about my experiences as a Christian and as a channeler and there’s real hostility and fear there in a Hare Krishna community and the Buddhist community about people that channel because it is not within the usual guru/chela relationship—the student/teacher and the student becomes enlightened because of the enlightenment of the teacher and then passes it on to his students and so on.

I’m introducing a third party so who’s the guru—the person that you’re seeing or the person that’s talking through the person that you’re seeing. With me it’s not a problem because I never asked for or received a teacher in my life. I have met and rejoiced in many colleagues, but I never met anybody that had a …

So we’re going to get to go to West Virginia and I will be looking at the top of her van and hopefully be very comfortable on the journey. I can listen to my Walkman or talk or just sleep. It should be very comfortable getting there and very comfortable being there. I think I’ll enjoy it a lot. I have a chance to try out the wheelchair that I got from Medicare and I’m looking forward to seeing how it does.

It could be a real bad mistake to go but Jim and I both had a very strong heart feeling about it and we decided to go—we don’t mind being foolish and making mistakes. We feel more that life is kind of a currency and you spend it and just as you’re a steward of the money that you have, you’re also a steward of yourselves, your time, your abilities, whatever they are, your gifts. It’s not something that you have, it’s something that you’ve been given—it’s your job to be a steward of what you’ve been given so we feel that spending this part of my energy going to West Virginia and speaking to 200 or so people of all faiths about the kind of cosmology that allows all the different paths to one Creator to co-exist with no problems whatsoever, this is a good expenditure of whatever energy I have left in this life.

This is something I’ve been working on for this past week—I haven’t held or read a book or a magazine or anything and the only sitting up I’ve done has been to assist peristalsis—I can’t really get along without that. Other than that, I’ve really “vegged out” as they say in California, and watched what TV I could find that’s worth the watching, and done a lot of thinking, took a few naps—written a few letters like this one and that’s about it. Not nearly as much as I usually do by a long shot, but it does seem to have effected a measure of comfort to my very tricky wrists and at least I’ve stopped getting worse in the shoulders and neck.

I don’t know how much worse I could get and still live, actually, because I can’t sit up. But I don’t have to sit up, you see, because that wheelchair tilts back as far as I want it to go even all the way down to horizontal and it’s bigger than my shoulders and it’s taller than my head so whatever it takes to get me in a position where I’ve got the gravity effect off my shoulders and neck to the extent that I need it, I can have that with the wheelchair.

So walking is not the problem, sitting is the problem, I just can’t sit up so with this wheelchair it should make me as close to sitting up as I can deal with and still be able to be out in public. At some point I’ll have to be fed at which point I’ll probably struggle with being in public and doing that, it doesn’t sound like a great idea right now but at least with the wheelchair even though it does mark me out to be somebody that’s noticed because I’m different, which I dislike and have been avoiding for years, I think it’s time to embrace it and just flow with it. It seems to be my destiny so I might as well cooperate. I don’t have a lot of options that are positive except for that one and I do like a positive option.

So we’re really looking forward to West Virginia. Barbara Brodsky, a colleague of mine who channels a wonderful entity called “Aaron” is going to visit and if you ever wanted to come for a fascinating weekend, you should come the last weekend in February. She’s going to come on February the 28th and leave on the next Monday, which is in March, obviously, and over that weekend, she and whoever comes through me, probably Q’uo, will be channeling to each other and speaking with each other and as much as they want to we’ll let them do whatever they want to. Her guide is a Buddhist and she is able to give answers to specific questions far better than I because Aaron is of this earth and is helping her out as a friend—he’s just discarnate and she’s able to hear him. She can’t hear anything else, she’s deaf to this world, but she’s able to hear Aaron.

We all pay a price, don’t we, when we have special gifts. Her channeling is just wonderful, wonderful. Aaron is just so dear and so wise and has such a sense of humor. This isn’t the book writing, this hasn’t happened yet. Pat Rodegast is still beleaguered—she’s got a daughter and a granddaughter in some difficulty plus she has this year’s list of places she said she be two years ago and made the dates and now she’s got to keep them and that’s the way she makes money besides, so she’d just be doing this on speculation at this point. There might be a book in it. She’s a really good lady—she liked the idea and said “yes, I want to do it,” it’s just that the time she had set aside for it was wiped out by a daughter having a baby and having all kinds of trouble having the baby—almost dying, etc. So I don’t know when that will happen.

It still feels like it’s a good possibility—I never have thought it would happen when everybody said it would but I still feel that it will whereas Barbara thought it would and now she thinks maybe it won’t. I still think there’s a good chance that it will happen. I just can’t say the time. When you’re moving from the heart and spirit, you don’t have any control over the time—you’re just going to have to be patient, or as Heinlein’s character Michael said “make haste slowly.” Actually that was an old Latin proverb—Festina lente—which means the same thing. (O awake quickly).

I’m learning a lot of “Festina Lente” lessons lately finding out what I can’t do and finding out how I can’t do it and how maybe I can do it better, or maybe can’t do it, but if I can’t do it then I can’t do it and haven’t hurt myself.

So I think life has never been more fascinating or interesting—it’s never been more challenging, I don’t think, but I welcome it. I have such a beautiful relationship with Jim and great work to do. So many blessings I can’t count them and I treasure his relationship and I swear I have more beloved friends than most and life is really a treasure and I am treasuring it and savoring it.

So I toast you and welcome your thoughts whenever you have them. I hope that you begin to make first hand acquaintance with the glory that is within you and you will know much more then about passion and praise and thanksgiving.

Love and light, Steve. Give me a holler when you’ve got the inspiration to do so.

Cheerio, Carla