Letter to SH

Dear S,

Greetings and love and blessings to you and yours S. It’s always a pleasure to get your letters—I enjoy the company. The conversation may seem slow but on the other hand I believe it was Thoreau that said that sometimes conversations got so large in his cabin that he was forced to go outside with the person he was talking substantive thoughts with and speak them in the more spacious woods. I believe he went on to say at some point that he really thought that communication was perfected by having a neighbor that he had to shout all the way across Walden Pond to and then that had to be shouted back. And he thought that perhaps shouting across the pond was an awfully good idea.

So these tapes are simply slow conversation.

It isn’t the complete service to others oriented thing that you may think it to be because I enjoy talking about things of substance and I do not have always the opportunity to do so. It is especially helpful at this point because I am not able to move right now. The injury to my neck seems to be progressively worse and I will be getting some tests done soon, but right now it’s pretty much a question of whether I want to watch television, make a tape, sing, or read, as long as the book is cut up so that I don’t have to hold the pages. I have a little stand that can hold the pages and I can just flick them out of the way. The hardest part is turning overleaf and sometimes I get so tired in my shoulders that I have to stop that because the discomfort kicks up.

So there is a very interesting way of keeping me right in the moment right now and it is challenging—making friends with Sister Pain is one of my more challenging methods of entertaining angels unaware. I know it is to the glory of the Creator that this occurs in my life it’s just that I don’t always have the capacity to deal with … the doorbell is ringing.

Yes, this was a good day to be focusing on such interesting questions as you bring up. I am on pain medication so I warn you ahead of time that if I don’t seem to be straight in my thinking processes that is because Demerol has this tendency to make one muzzy. Usually it doesn’t affect me too much because when I have to use it, it goes to the pain, but every once in a while I lose thoughts—even more than usual.

Anyway, the attention being put on things that I am genuinely interested in discussing is attention take away from noticing the things that are uncomfortable around me and I think that’s a very good way to spend time in this situation.

Actually, the letters and channeling are about all I do now. I’ve just about given everything else up. I don’t want to give the letters up because they are my company. People who do not know me first as a vigorous person on paper but who have been used to seeing me vigorous on the outside, very healthy looking, which I was until this accident in 1988, are pretty crushed to see the change. It’s not a change on the inside, but it is a change to them of considerable magnitude due to the mistaken belief that your animal is you, and my animal is in quite pitiful shape right now.

Too bad, but true. But it isn’t I, however, when people write me and then visit me they know what the deal is. They’re not expecting somebody to come down into the door and the letters themselves actually, for someone like me are like visits. So I’m glad your letter came today. It was a day even slower on television than in my (giggles) rag and bone shop of the heart. Okay, to your letter. This is fun, S, I really do enjoy the questions that you ask.

The more precise instruments for communicating that I have in mind actually, are the concepts that I experience. They are endlessly subtle, completely without translatability in any finite sense. You can cobble up a fence real quick to kind of indicate the area within which that concept lives but you can never bring out all the nuances of it any more than you can look at a jewel from all sides at once. Concepts are very precise and at the same time very detailed so that it’s not just a multiplicity or a complexity but also a simplicity, just like a jewel. That’s a concept.

And that’s where we’re headed actually. It’s easier for us if we realize that we have two different kinds of brains—we have the computer brain that runs our body, this second density animal, and we have an intelligence that is infinite into which we can tap if we are very, very careful.

(Reading) “In fourth density can I still keep some private thoughts of my own?”

Yes, in fourth density what is more obvious than the thoughts is basically the feelings, I think. The tenor of a person’s mood would be far more difficult to falsify in any way because your aura would be showing the colors of your feelings. That body is more real in fourth density. One where people now say, “Yes, I can see her aura and her aura is this color and that color.” That’s the electrical body I suppose and I expect that that’s our next one.

Anyway, it’s not so much knowing precise thoughts as matching harmonious vibrations, or to put it in more concrete terms—euphonious, esthetically pleasing colors or groups of colors together—you can see compatibility much better. As far as the deep thoughts held in common, this is done, of course, insofar as the people are able to do it. Obviously it takes a long time to do it well, it’s a very long density.

I can imagine what it is like to some extent because I do link into people and actually that can cause me problems, I cannot watch a game show—I get too embarrassed for the contestants. I have a lot of difficulties that are really strange because they are artifacts of that kind of linkage. If I’m going into a restaurant sometimes there’s a seat I can’t sit at because the person that sat there was really mad and that’s painful to me. I could be crazy, but that’s what it feels like.

As far as the love between a woman and a man, my guess is, and this is only a guess, that in the first place that there is some polarity between any two people that meet—obviously much more between the sexes and that that is just like a handshake exchanged with no more than simple courtesy. That gets that random thing out of the way.

I think the rest of it has to do with very private things—a much more realistic view of sexuality and it’s linkage to sanctification of all that there is—everything is holy and we don’t really respect that beautiful part of ourselves as we might, I think.

I think the great thing about love in the fourth density is that there is hardly any temptation to mistrust another person because the feeling tones are right there to see as part of the perceptions of the body to be able to see that vibratory rate or complexity rate of other bodies.

Yes, I agree with you that men are trained from a very early age not to cry. The tender feelings that they have that they have to deny are really not usually for other people. The first person they have to deny is themselves. When you’re a little boy and circumstances are completely beyond your control and life is just plain difficult and you just want to say “This isn’t easy!” and you’re too young to say that so you just cry, and then Mom and Dad come up and say “Now, now, little boys don’t cry, now be a big man now and stop crying.” So you stop feeling sorry for yourself and bingo, you’ve blocked your passion. You’ve blocked that free expression.

So yes, of course, men have to bury all of that much deeper if they’re going to survive in a world where men’s idea of a real “pal-ish” thing to do is to punch you in the arm hard enough to hurt you or slap you on the back until your teeth rattle, or play a practical joke on you, or even box together, I’ve seen that among men—a much different energy and it’s not very tender. The taking of the joke, I think, is primary in men’s relationship to men, and you’re just supposed to be able to grit your teeth and tough everything out and laugh it off as if it didn’t mean anything.

I can’t think of a better way to kill your feelings than that and it works pretty well. I’ve watched a lot of guys go through a lot of terribly hard things and one of the hardest things they ever do is cry it all out.

You ask me about wanting to feel deeper sorrows. Let me read what you said: “What is there to be sorry about, after all, God’s plan for all of us is divine, is it not? We are all very well cared for both by the Creator and his many guides. All experiences are presented to us as learning opportunities, everything is holy, every encounter with another human being is a holy encounter. Am I being too emotionless here?”

I wouldn’t say that it was a lack of emotion. I would say that you feel the vision was narrow. The fact that everything is perfect doesn’t mean that it’s not involved very much in the experience of the cross, the suffering that we all go through. We are both into a death sentence—our bodies are going to die, we just don’t know when. So we spend our life, more or less, in the valley of the shadow of death.

We first lose our innocence and then we lose our youth. As we gain in wisdom we become in many cases, far less able to use that wisdom as we would like to. We were not born into this world to practice discarnate skills. Yes, it is wonderful to love and praise the Creator and it is wonderful to be here, but we did not come here in order to ignore the place. We came here to feel compassion and to do what we could to engage ourselves as advocates for the spiritual harvest that is always in progress, I think.

I don’t think of the New Age so much as an “age” literally, as I do simply the fact that all of us die and do begin again, not from the standpoint of consciousness but from the standpoint of the body that is left—it does have to be left behind at some point. So for all of us there will be a “new age”—there will be a larger life and the concern here to me is not literally when is the New Age going to begin because whenever that New Age begins it will not be subjectively nearly as important to me as my death and my entrance into the larger life.

While I am here, I want to use the time as intensely as possible. I am perfect aware that life is a series of ordeals and losses. This does not have to make me unhappy but unless I see how people are overwhelmed and thrust into much catalyst by these forces, I really can’t express any kind of decent compassion to them. In order to love them, I need to grasp the suffering, just as people who love me need to grasp the suffering and say that it’s okay. That’s there’s a wholeness that goes beyond whatever wounds we have—that we are here to love each other, to cherish each other and to be comrades along the way as well as on our journey home.

This is a journey on the king’s highway, but it is a journey that is walked by many a sore foot, by many a heavily-laden back and many are the times that we sit by the side of that road completely overwhelmed by our previous lack of insight.

It is a wonderful idea to experience and remind oneself constantly of the joy and the peace of living an infinite life within this parenthesis in eternity. It is also important for us to live this life—to take what is before us and be a steward of it and an advocate for it—whatever it is.

As we do this, as we try our best, we always fail one way or another to ourselves subjectively and as far as we have failed we suffer. The suffering is simply an artifact of our judgment of ourselves, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not real. It’s just as real as me sitting here on this couch because I can’t move my neck. I don’t have to look at that and say “Woe is me.” I have my choices—I have all kinds of options as to how to perceive this. But if I do not engage myself in perceiving this then I am wasting the most precious money, the most undervalued currency in the world and that is time and attention.

A lot of people find me—I’ve heard words used like “regal”—one boyfriend insisted on calling me “the princess.” I think it’s just that if I am not actively engaged in experiencing something as funny, or talking to somebody (I always enjoy talking with people) and I’m just watching, and there’s nothing happening around me that I feel the need to contribute to, I’m just observing, I’ll just sit there and observe, and people take that as some kind of “regal” quality. It isn’t—I’m just watching.

I’ve always been quite amazed at the tribal rituals here—it doesn’t feel real to me, it never has. Most things don’t jibe with the way I feel inside.

At any rate, what I do feel I’m correct about is that we all suffer perhaps in spite of our fine knowledge and wisdom, perhaps because of it, but we suffer and when we suffer we then learn compassion from the inside out because we understand that we did try our best and we did, subjectively, at least, fail. And that is to be reckoned with. And if we can do it under dire circumstances, we can do just about anything. I don’t know of a single soul that has never had a momentary urge to kill somebody. There are too many aggravating people in the world.

Or wanted to steal something—not as a particularly conscious thought but just “Oh, I’d like to have that.” Of course, thoughts are things, but not in this world. So we can fool ourselves into thinking that because we are behaving in a certain way, our lives are a certain way, but it’s not true, we all have a completely whole person in us, our animal is capable of surviving under just about any circumstances and the only thing that modifies our behavior is that awareness that the choices that we make as fields of consciousness which are quite ethical in nature can indeed curb the less fortunate characteristics of the human animal.

That situation in and of itself, I think, is enough to rouse me to great compassion. Here we all are experiencing life and basically beating the heck out of these second density animals who would be perfectly happy sort of romping around and collecting enough food for the next year, but now we have to put them through all sorts of things because our consciousness is there.

So sorrow isn’t something that I feel sorry about. I’m not sorry that the illusion causes sorrow. I accept that—I accept that that is one of the things that we come here to do. Specifically, we come here to experience difficult catalysts and to find positive options and the harder that we work on our spiritual journey the more stiff the catalyst and the more challenging.

We didn’t come here to transcend this illusion by ignoring it or becoming it, we came here to transcend it by seeing it and perceiving it correctly—it is a question of perception and as far as I’m concerned in my perception of myself I do not have enough sorrow for all the broken spirits and hearts and all the hungry bellies and empty minds and all the feelings of hopelessness for those that are alone, those who suffer in so many ways; the wife who wishes the husband would just say “I love you” once, the husband who wishes the wife would just smile like she used to, because simply little things sometimes can cause such sorrow.

And because we do, I think, indeed all intend to love each other and treat each other well, it is especially sorrowful when looked at in mass because here we all are as a species, looking so hard with the catalyst and to our own eyes failing constantly. It is an endlessly funny illusion, but it is also endlessly sad and it is divine, yes, but that doesn’t mean I have distance from it if I want to use this time and pay attention.

I have never thought about anything in order to dismiss it unless it dismissed itself. Paying attention to something that has never dismissed itself from my mind as something to do. So you can see I don’t feel that you are being too emotionless, I feel that you’re not looking at the experience with respect. A Buddhist teacher has said “respect the incarnation” and I think that’s really true—we should respect this incarnation, we should take it seriously. Yes, it is an illusion but why would we put ourselves through it if we weren’t supposed to be paying attention. Yes, there will be a quiz. (Laughs)

Women talking … not all women talk, you’re quite right. You apparently have married one who thinks for a living—that must be a great refreshment for you. Woman talk with each other because they have excess mental and emotional energy which they are burning off by nurturing each other. The tone of the talking is what’s important—not what’s being talked about.

I can talk with my friend Sonja, who is my closest friend here in Louisville, except for maybe one other person, for an hour and talk about nothing but her kids and what’s going on with the day and how she hates the weather and things like that and feel immensely refreshed because she’s simply been sharing breath with me—she’s spent time with me and just in doing that I feel that nurturing. Women nurture each other by being interested in each other—it’s a gift. It’s not consciously given, it’s simply a lot of women’s basic nature to want to reach out to comfort, to support. Again, you see woman have a tendency to nurture, or if they’re upset, be upset and get revenge in very devious ways, whereas men express their little irritations at each other through constant competition of various kinds, and sometimes not so subtle practice jokes.

Men don’t talk unless they have an item about which to talk. Woman talk to share care and affection, it’s an artifact of the culture. In other cultures women are capable and men are capable of any other sort of training. It’s just that in this culture it is the training. Also I think woman have more respect for their own feelings and there are reasons for that which come up later in your questions.

I think people, men and women, are unpredictably afraid of silence and I think that it is a, I suppose you’d say a “feather in the cap,” it’s certainly a sigh of relief when people become friends enough that they can lapse into silence together and spend time together without feeling the need to speak, but I don’t think that’s more one way than another. Men and women given that they feel insecure in a situation will be reassured by some snappy patter.

I’ve always admired people who have that capacity. I have endless capacity for talking on substantive topics, but almost no small talk whatsoever. I really feel like a social retard.

Okay, let’s tangle with passion here because I am not being able to express myself to you yet in a way that is easy for you to take in.

You were looking at what is your passion the way I would look at what is your hobby. To me passion is not a thing. Passion is first and foremost something that you feel. It is an absolute and infinite feeling—it cannot be mistaken for non-passion. When you feel it, you know that you felt it—you know it’s absolute. Then you trace back to what put you in the altered state of consciousness that was pure emotion, cleansed of any sludge or imperfection. And when you see what it was that put you where you wanted to be, then you have found the road or the story that leads to your passion. You have found what awakens that in you and you can talk about the story but you cannot talk about the passion because it’s different for everybody.

I’m afraid that in the old question about the chicken and the egg—it’s the chicken that has to come first and not the egg. Now that is a particularly painful point when gazed at from the standpoint of looking at an incarnational experience because before the Creator can create us anew we must first create ourselves. We must come to an understanding of our own natures.

And if we want to live an engaged, vital, rich tapestried life we are going to have to pay attention. And the only reason to pay attention is because there is something driving us, some passion that we have found.

When I say “What is your passion?” I’m not talking about enjoying singing. My passion, for instance, is Jesus. There are stories about special people that are said to lead the spiritual seeker to the immediate experience of practicing the presence of the one infinite Creator. That experience is absolute and not to be confused with any other experience. There’s just nothing like it.

Often people call it worship, but what they don’t say, when they say worship, is how active it is. Worship is sort of bowing down and sort of being still because that’s the posture of worship that has seized our culture for these two millennia. That story is a biography but unlike all the other biographies or autobiographies I have ever read, that one continues to hold my attention in such a way that I have repeatedly experienced the presence of the one infinite Creator. And that experience feeds back into me the joy of feeling passion. It’s the most vital feeling on earth.

Passion is not to be identified with nouns. It is an adjectival word. One is a passionate being insofar as one is a living being. Many people are not willing to live at such a temperature, shall we say; at such a “refining fire” as it might say in the Old Testament. But I’m ready for that. I’m ready to go full tilt because I really do appreciate this incarnation. I’ve had people telling me I was going to die within five years ever since I was fifteen which adds a certain tang to life. (Laughs)

But really I was born with it—it is just a gift. I have been absolutely absorbed with observing everything since the day I got here, I think, since before I can remember.

But what I am observing is not just the things around me. If I could be said to have something which most fascinated me, which is the way you were taking the word passion, it would be the processes of apperception. The more intelligent that you are, if you don’t drive yourself crazy first, if you are able to sort of live with it and let it be but don’t take it too seriously, you can see the incredible endless ramifications of perception and ways of perception and ways of paying attention, and ways of taking things and ways of making connections.

I think I told you once before that just to test myself once I was asked to do an essay about something or other, it was a modern novel, “The Lime Twig,” and it was my belief that anything could be related to anything, which was one of the reasons I left the groves of academia. So I was reading Haslet at the time and of course he writes and writes and writes so I just plucked a unknown volume of his essays off of the library stacks, opened it to an essay on agates—rocks—and related it to “The Lime Twig” which was a very nihilist, modern, stark, punk British novel of no particular virtue in my eyes, whereas Haslet, of course, is a delight, at least for me.

So after that I became certain that there were infinite ways to perceive and there were so many more options than people knew and there were so many more levels of pre-perception that could be studied and examined. That probably fascinates me more than anything else.

But it’s never known where the next piece of information will come—sometimes it comes from the thought processes that are going on inside my head, sometimes it will come because of the catalyst that somebody has given me from the outside, which sort of clicks everything into place in my mind as I’m trying to find a way to communicate to that person—you do that to me a lot. I will be able to express an opinion better after answering one of your questions because you ask good central questions and give me a chance to clarify for myself in order to communicate with you. This goes on at a fairly rapid rate since it’s spontaneous, but my mind works very quickly so it’s really a lot of fun and I really do have a fascination, not with my perceptions, not with your perceptions, but with perceptions.

How do we begin to choose this and that and not that and this. And in this process before we ever become consciously aware of what choices of perception you do have. Of course it all comes into simplicity at the end—Occam’s Razor, as always. But not before a great deal has been learned and savored and tasted and relished about giving, about living a life in faith.

The more you pay attention, the more interesting things are. Even as I sit here I have never been quite this still. Not being able to move one’s neck has a lot of ramifications. Talk about bad puns (laughs), but my arms and legs, them branches don’t move because my spine at my neck is saying “No, uh-huh, not today.”

So I find that there is no lack of stimulus—I would have had different stimulus had your letter not come, and I much prefer primary stimulus not just associating things within my own mind but having the joy of actually communicating to someone else the thoughts that I may be having, not that they are particularly worthy but that communication is just a lot of fun and when you’re talking with somebody else who also gets a good deal of fun out of considerations of things, it’s really a lot more rewarding to me than watching television although I feel that I work very hard at perceptions when I’m watching something on television or when someone comes to see me or when I’m reading a book.

There’s a lot of me that’s observing various things. It’s not one of those things where I’m watching the watcher that watches the watcher that watches … it’s not like that—an endless series of mirrors, I just have a lot of different ways of watching perception itself. That act—it sets everything in motion or blocks it, and most people don’t have a clue that they have any control whatsoever, any choices to make whatsoever about what they perceive.

The difference between an unskillful perception and a skillful one can sometimes be critical in a situation where, for instance, you choose between saying something that must be said and keep quiet because you don’t want to deal with it, or just the opposite, seeing that that which you really wish you could say would be wounding a person who is already down. There are choices like that that people don’t even know they can make, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to perceptions and how to react.

Basically I believe not in reacting but in acting. We are co-creators.

So when I ask you to look for your passion, I’m not asking you to look for something that makes you happy. But rather that which will not let you go. If you don’t have anything which will not let you go, and you’re drifting and you’re wasting time, which is precious, to be a citizen of eternity we need to find the part of us that is gemlike, faceted, and focused—above all, focused. I suspect that the truth captivates you. You see instinctively, as well as literally that at least, as yet, there is no way to determine the truth. Everything is empirical and I would guess that this passion, this thing that absorbs you and enraptures you is a colder passion, but not less demanding for that.

You see, there are different passions and each kind of passion has an upside and a downside. If one’s nature is such that one has a passion for more wisdom—one is working more on the wisdom than the love aspect of things, then one may well seem fairly cold to the world.

I have gotten a lot of letters from you and it’s unusual for someone to be picking my brains for this long—you have a passion for the truth—say for wisdom (I wouldn’t know which one you would feel comfortable using—probably truth). The downside of that, as I said, is that you may appear to be less than passionate, but it drives you—it is what you live for—just the seeking of truth in situations, the feeling of authenticity, that ring that says “Yes, this is a whole experience.”

Any mathematician has a passion—the absolute. Numbers are very comforting that way. (Reads) “I am fascinated by [inaudible]”—you’re telling me all this stuff you love. Yeah, I could go on and on to but if you’ll see what I’m driving at you’ll see that it’s not the story but the thing in itself that is the passion—you are simply a worshiper. When you get to the point of having a passion to see the truth and feeling the experience of the truth, you are in a certain state which is unlike any state which can be measured—it’s a quality rather than a quantity of emotion and it is purified. You can call it worship, you can call it adoration, or you can call it love or passion.

I choose the word “passion” because I think that is an experience that is more available to more people in its literal sense of sexual passion, than just about anything else. So rather than try for your ideal or something like that which is a lot of times like asking a third grader “What do you want to be when you grow up.” Well, they don’t know—they haven’t thought of that yet.

So the question “What is your passion?” is one people can relate to. Everyone, just about, I would say, in the act of orgasm is overwhelmed and is not doing anything at that moment but experiencing that moment. It takes one out of oneself. It is absolute. One is no longer a quantity.

So it is an easily experienced, immediate perception of the creative energy which made all that there is, not to say we are making all that there is, but to say we are, we become in our experience of worship that which does create the chicken. We are our own egg, we are born out of ourselves, and as I said, this is somewhat painful.

(Reads) Oh, yes this is part of things that you love. I would be surprised if you had a disagreeable divorce the first time, it doesn’t seem consistent with your character as I know it—it wouldn’t be worth it.

[Carla was talking about Barbara.]

…I think it’s going to be a good vehicle for beginners because there’s a constant triangulation between the western line of thinking, the western story which is very active, the pilgrimage, the doing of things, and the eastern way of looking at things which is a progressive emptying out of attachments and desires, so it’s always being triangulated on in such a way that I think it does illuminate that precious concept that is the real jewel of communication and cannot be had in words.

Poets twist them about in such ways as to evoke greater things than the parts would suggest alone, and so does music.

(Reads) “Is there any metaphysical symbolism …” Oh yes. One has to look at this in several different levels. First of all the process of being fertile is such that an environment needs to be made which is capable of sustaining life. A woman cannot be gravid all of the time—the female of any species is not going to be gravid all of the time—is not going to be able to conceive all of the time. Consequently, it is a cyclical process and what controls the process is the production of various hormones are produced when secretions of various kinds occur. I think ovulation is one of the biggies.

So strictly from the standpoint of observing other animals and then expecting the human animal to have some of the same characteristics—we do indeed go into heat and go out of heat and experience the various messinesses of life having to do with being fertile—that’s just the way that that is. When you have hormones that are necessary in order to create a friendly environment to create a new being, those hormones are going to come and they’re going to go and the animal is going to be distressed during those changing times because it will be experiencing inexorable emotions—that’s what the hormones do.

If you think back to your puberty when your hormones were changing you can kind of see a constant PMS that comes over teenagers at the point of puberty that is with them until they have worked out their anguish at this enormous change, to some extent, to where they see they are growing up.

Well, women have to deal with this change every month while they are fertile, and that’s the animal answer. Then I would say if we were looking at our harmonious relationships in an archetypical way, we can see that women, as archetypical receptacles of divine impulse and creative impulse, will be swayed. That is the entire nature of the warmth and tenderness of a woman’s archetypical self. The female archetype is the mother, the lover, all things mysterious and beautiful—the inspiration.

And that has a good deal to do with impersonal and cosmic energies, most notably, that of the moon. The moon sways all of the water on earth, including the water in our blood, and it is not for nothing that “lunacy” is a synonym of madness. It is a well-known fact that things go crazy in any hospital during the full moon. Old and primitive tides pull us and we don’t even recognize it or respect it, but women have to respect it.

The reason I link up the menses with the moon is that I have noticed when I am living with another woman, we will have fallen into the same rhythm, so it is as if we are both listening to those lunar cycles. The menstrual cycle is a lunar cycle—28 days, ideally.

And then you look at it in terms of what the spiritual principles involved are in living. The spiritual principle most involved in living is learning how to give of oneself selflessly and sacrificially, not simply because we want to live sacrificial lives, but because we care enough to do what needs to be done to honor that particular love that we feel. Woman are willing, quite literally, to put their bodies, their lives, their youth in the hands of a force that is greater than themselves and they do it and the result is that there is life on this earth.

But like any tree that bears fruit, there is some distress involved in being able to give birth, whether you do it or not, and then there is the very real and added distress of once having given birth and having participated in that suffering, then there is that costly affection of the parent for the children that lasts and lasts and lasts and is probably as close as any of us will come to knowing what selfless love is. Not that I have any children, but I didn’t really need the lesson in love either.

I personally would find it just as aggravating to be a man, to tell you the truth. I went through a number of months during adolescence when I was constantly looking at everything sexually and had I been a guy I sure would have been holding my notebooks down a little bit lower and I understand that that is not a comfortable way to feel, it hurts, and then too you’ve got to protect yourself when you’re playing sports and unless women are generously blessed by nature that isn’t a problem and if they are generously blessed by nature then there you go, another sex related thing.

It’s awkward to be either sex. For a woman everything is hidden inside, consequently all the aggravations are inside, having to do basically with trying to put large things through small tubes, basically that’s what cramps are. There’s not a very large amount of blood at all but sometimes it will clot and cause an enormous amount of difficulty as it is attempting to get out of the passage way. It just depends on the person and how much the person is sensitive to the hormonal swings, just exactly what kind of discomfort a person has.

To tell you the truth, I would rather be a woman. It seems to me that woman’s libbers have it so backward that it’s laughable. Woman have always had freedom to do pretty much what they want to in this culture—I’m not talking about in Iraq. But even in places where women seem to be slaves they effect tremendous amounts of history by their influence on men.

Meanwhile, women do not have to, unless they wish to, do hard work for the most part. They may work themselves very hard in the making of a good home and there’s a lot of payback in that one because it’s not just your family that loves you if you’re a good homemaker and you’re home all the time. Your kids bring in other kids and kids bring their parents and you can end up being a very popular place.

I like being a woman and I like being able to stay at home if I want to. I have always loved working and I always am working—I’m completely enraptured by life, I’m always fascinated and enthralled. I really live in a state of constant rapture. I’m so engrossed in what’s occurring, the richness of it all and I know I’m just seeing the tip of the iceberg. I’m just intelligent enough to see how much there is to see that I can’t see, and how much I want to keep pushing that envelope and enlarging my point of view.

Yes, I will leave being a man to folks like you who would prefer being a man (laughs)—I enjoy them but wouldn’t want to be one.

(Reads) “… Q’uo has good and bad days …” Now why would you say that was a silly question? It’s not a silly question if you wanted to ask it.

I think Q’uo would not talk in terms of good and bad, as you so rightly pointed out. Q’uo would be examining, as I examine my own perceptions, the entire range of perceptions of that social memory complex and if there seemed to be a need to gain more experience here or there I think there would indeed be regression. I don’t think it would be called “good days and bad days” but I think it might be called “days of gifts and days of learning.”

The days of gifts are the days when you can just give and that is a gift in itself and the days of learning are the days when you’re learning how to give better and the two usually operate side by side.

(Reads) “Is learning difficult for Q’uo?” Not a stupid question, I don’t know why you’d put yourself down for this question. I think it is a good deal harder in Q’uo’s density to learn than it is in this density because we’re dealing with a very thick illusion, a funhouse, crazy mirrors everywhere, lots and lots of distortions and our strokes are made boldly and with bravado, certainly with care and passion but also with a kind of chutzpah or they won’t work. We make our choice, you know that (sings) “Once forever man and nation comes the moment to decide.” If you know that hymn. They took it out of the new Episcopalian hymnbook which was a real cheat—it’s a wonderful hymn. But, we do have these choices to make is what I’m trying to say.

And we refine them in the densities above our own and as you know, as you approach getting everything right, you continue to have half lives and half lives of half lives. I think Ra used that word, it was like “asymptotically” approaching a true awareness or a true knowing“ but never getting there, so it becomes just as hard to get half of the remaining way there as it was to get half of the way before that, and we’re making, basically, the first step.

And it is half of everything, right now. That’s what this density is all about. It’s the density of choice. Half our grade depends on the decisions we make in this lifetime, or in this series of lifetimes, whichever way you want to look at it, it doesn’t matter. The point is to do your doggondest for every single moment of every single day you’re here to be here while you’re here because, by golly, you’re not going to be here when you’re not.

So, of course, learning is more difficult for Q’uo. Not any more difficult than it is here, but more painstaking, by far, endlessly more painstaking.

(Reads) “Q’uo says we do indeed aid in that principle’s learning by serving us. They learn by teaching.” And as a teacher I’m sure you would heartily agree that if you are teaching well, you are learning at least twice as much as you are teaching. If you’re there—if you’re there and you’re paying attention there is just so much to learn from everybody everywhere. People are marvels everywhere. Some people are marvelous bad examples. (Laughs)

(Reads) “Can Q’uo describe his learning processes?” Well, I put that one up to him—I wouldn’t want to speak for him. I think that’s a good question. I’ll just leave that one alone—I’d just be guessing so I’ll put that in the book.

(Reads) “My treasury is my relationships.” You quote me and then you say “What a marvelous statement, that must be your passion.” No, my passion is the love of a man called Jesus who of his life made a story that has seized my imagination ever since I could remember. I don’t know if you know the hymn, but it is really the hymn of my life and the chorus goes (sings) “I love to tell the story, t’will be my theme and glory, to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.” That’s my passion. That’s why I do what I do. If necessary, I would gladly die in Christ’s name—it would be an honor.

But I see in everyone around me the Christ within them. I have worded and worked my life around this story, entwined it so much so that it has become my story, my private myth, and part of me looks at even this mundane illness of mine as the spiritual experience of being on the cross, and I look out over that cross and of course the first thing that occurs to me is that awful joke where Jesus calls over Peter and says: “Peter, it’s amazing up here.” And Peter says, “Yes, Lord, what is it like?” and Jesus says “Peter, I can see your house from here.” (Laughs)

But after you get beyond that (there is a certain amount of shock to hurting) you start experiencing the tremendous undercurrents of sorrow of the whole planet and you start experiencing some of the things that are locked up in the story that cannot be opened from the outside in and cannot be learned by rote that come from a persistent and increasingly mature process of availing oneself of the opportunity to feel intense purified emotion.

Love, devotion, a desire to be better, to run the straight race, to do your best, and all for love’s sake, only for the glory of God, until finally your life is completely lost in that wonderful hope of doing the creator’s will by knowing the mind of Christ—that’s in my story—or knowing the mind that you wish to know in your story.

So you see, what I’m trying to get people to do is just pick a story. (Laughs) Just focus on this particular part of the incarnational experience that can only be approached within the incarnational experience but within the incarnational experience which cannot be in any way proven even to exist. Not even to exist. You cannot prove or disprove any article of faith. Freewill—through freewill we chose in this murky fog (and it’s no mistake that moonlight is the light that lights the spiritual path) you can’t see very well and you can make mistakes very easily, but what a journey, what a journey.

My treasury is in my relationships and I feel that the love from me and to me will be part of me forever. I think that is in truth, a quality and not a quantity. I do indeed treasure my friends very much.

You’re still a candidate at U of L—well gosh, why are you waiting for them to call you? What am I talking about? You know what you’re doing. I’m sorry. If I were you, let me put it this way, if I were you, I would call up and say “I’d really like to make some plans here. Are you going to tell me to forget about it or do you want another interview, let’s do something because I’ve got a family, I’ve got plans to make, summer’s coming up, if I move I’d want to move in the summer,” you know, just lay it out and say “Give me a break and tell me what’s happening.” Make them think about it.

University of Louisville used to be a haven for good people. I have absolutely no idea what goes on now but I do know that when the Dean I so adored went off, retired, the new Dean was not a man of humane letters in the civilized and noble sense of that word. He did not have the vision of a university as being a wonderful, universal and catholic wheel of knowledge which was delicious to sample just anywhere, and all of which was to be valued as furnishings for a mind that would be a good environment to think the thoughts of a lifetime.

I think that now is not so much the vision at the University of Louisville and it has become different but I do know that the bureaucracy has become outrageous everywhere, so shoot, you’re good, and you know they probably want you and if they don’t it would be handy to know it.

So were I you I would probably, at this point, become assertive and say “I do have this time problem, I would find it extremely attractive to be able to give very long term notice, I would like to get my family moved during a vacation period so the kids can start school in the place we will be staying; these are simply mundane concerns and it would help me a great deal if you could tell me about this position because I am respecting it by keeping that option open and if it’s not an option I would like to know, and if it is something you want me for, I would like to have the privilege of deciding whether or not I will accept it with ample time for giving notice and helping find a successor and do all that is consistent with being a professional and as a provider for my family.”

But what do I know? I ain’t you. (An old contraction of “am not.”)

Now let’s see, what’s been happening? Probably not much. We’ve just been enjoying life—Jim goes to Avalon once every couple of weeks and stays for two days and cools out and really enjoys himself and comes back and hits it again. He just has an awful lot to do. It’s a real experience for both of us dealing with the degree of bodily limitation I’m now experiencing. A lot of extra work for Jim and a lot of extra discipline for me in controlling my somewhat unruly level of irritation because of the aggravation of the pain I haven’t gotten used to yet.

I will accommodate myself to this, it’s just that for a long period of months now it has continued getting worse more quickly than I have the ability to accommodate it, so that I have had it to notice for quite some time now, so I’ve been working a lot with that sort of perception, and studying that.

Part of me sees it—most of me sees it as this series of incredible opportunities, as it appears to Jim, but needless to say both of us also feel the difficulty of it, the challenges and I think everybody should take one day out of every month and just feel real sorry for themselves (laughs) and get it all over with. Look at all the downsides and say “Yeah, it’s a bummer” and get it over with, because in any life, as they say, some catalyst will fall. Or as Don used to say, with a finger in his throat, “There will be confusion.”

This is a beautiful spring day. Thanks an awful lot for the questions and I appreciate the opportunity. As I always point out I am a somewhat fey and very obscure person who could well have bats in her belfry so don’t take anything I say as if it had any authority. I will not stand up to that sort of test—I’m very fallible. But that also, is something I like, the vulnerability of life. It’s very yeasty and gives us much growing to do.

So may you grow like this flowers in spring, give my love to your family and when you get the next inspiration give me a fascinating letter and I will thank you very much. Meanwhile, just take care and be sweet, and have a ball.

Happy spring, cheerio,

Carla