Dear S,
Good to hear from you. Sorry to hear about the job falling through but I had a sinking feeling about it as soon as I discovered that S hadn’t yet made up its mind about what it wanted in the way of a computer research facility as opposed to something that was incidental to engineering. If they don’t know what they want I don’t see how in the world they can give you the backing, financially or otherwise, to give you a chance to make something work and that’s what you’re good at, so I certainly am glad that it did work out one way or the other.
I’m sure that the agony of the indecision was the worst part of it, much worse than either going or staying, at least it would have been for me. I hate the time during which you don’t know whether you’re going to have to pack up and move or if you can be comfortable and stay where you are.
From what you said about C. it seems to me that you’re happy there, even though your wife’s family is here and it’s a nice place here and so forth. Still, if you’re happy where you are then you can’t usually find that without a great deal of luck, and when you have the luck to find that place that you really do enjoy then why move unless the reason is very, very good.
As to my being the only person that you know who will share metaphysical ideas, that really is a mind-boggling idea in and of itself, is it not? Since that is how I spend most of my waking life, I can’t swear what happens in my dream life, in the abstract, as opposed to the concrete, and people have to deal with me in terms of “Earth calling Carla.” I cannot imagine being in such an isolated sort of situation where you stand upon a mountain alone thinking but does anyone hear you.
It’s lucky for both of us that someone is hearing you and I am very grateful that you are willing to work with someone who is as unschooled as I am in formal knowledge of the physical sciences and many of the things that seem fundamentally simple to you are actually unknown territories to me only gotten at sideways, shall we say, through intuition, but I really appreciate the opportunity to share with you also.
I am absolutely fascinated with the simplest questions of all. I don’t understand why people stop asking them: Why are we here? Who are we? What do we want to do? Where are we going? So many people say that life is really just about working and eating and sleeping and getting old and going on diets and dying. Okay, maybe that’s what life is for them, but not for me.
Fear not, as long as I have breath, this channel will definitely be open to anyone who wants to work on metaphysical ideas. I really think it’s more than just that. I think we are metaphysical entities rather than physical entities and that our reality is this portion of us that so few of us seem to be interested in. So I think of it as pilgrims who write each other notes from the road and the notes go from pilgrim to pilgrim and little by little each pilgrim learns just a little bit more about the road but no two roads are exactly the same, they just have many of the same characteristics.
It sounds like your summer vacation was typically hectic. Why is that? I’ve often wondered about that. The tendency of the American vacationer to have such a crowded vacation time that you almost need a vacation to recover from your vacation and I had to grin at the kids sleeping in your word processor room while their bedroom is being repainted. It’s so typical of the delights and the aggravations of raising children and you think at times that you’ll never ever be delighted with them again because they are so aggravating at times.
I can see that you are continuing to do a lot of reading in this area and I congratulate you on your scholarship. You might find that it is a continuing frustration to attempt to put the puzzle pieces together from one channeling to another. About the best advice I can give you on that is to look for the spirit rather than the letter of the information. Usually, if it is positively oriented information regardless of the details of dates, times and places, the metaphysical principles hold very steady throughout the contact of any claimed spiritual discipline—Buddhist and so forth.
Certainly I have found that to be true in the work of Barbara and me and we are gearing up for another weekend either late this year or early next year. I love to work with Barbara—she’s deaf, which means we can’t speak well because I can’t sign for very long without completely destroying my body. It sounds ridiculous but the muscles used for signing move back up into the shoulder and neck. I found that out the hard way last time and so this time we agreed to smile and nod and if necessary, write to each other on the computer.
I dearly hope that L/L will be able to afford a laptop computer for me that is IBM compatible because my handwriting has gotten so bad. I’ve been asked by a relative to tape rather than write because they couldn’t read my writing. It makes me feel better about sending taped letters which I’ve always felt was a bit gauche because it makes people listen to me in real time whereas I can read what they have to say in much quicker time, so it is to my advantage and not theirs.
However, if they can’t read what I write anyway then it probably is to their advantage even if it is a lengthy process.
I’m very glad that you are enjoying Emmanuel’s book. Pat has a special gift, a charming gentle, sweet spirit that is able to reflect much simplicity of love and that’s a very rare gift. She doesn’t use a lot of words, but the things that she comes through with seem to me to be very inspirational and uplifting. As to the Course in Miracles, I swear that one day I will read that.
Studying the tarot is a lifetime’s work so don’t expect to much of yourself there. It is one way of looking at the archetypical mind, of course, and it’s very important but I think the basic ideas of spiritual ethics are so simple that they tend to pass people by and there’s not much study necessary to be able to look at a given situation and say, “How can I be of service here—where is the love here, how can I show love by doing something or not doing something, by walking away from it, by engaging myself in it …” Always that choice is before us, the think the ethics of it are very clear.
I understand completely about S2. I’m sorry that my efforts to cause her to feel more comfortable about our correspondence failed. Obviously they did to a large extend, but it was worth trying because I truly wish to include anybody, especially people mated to people who are studying in this area, because when you study in this area you do go through a process of fairly accelerated changing as far as your point of view and it’s much easier for a mate to move with you if that mate is going through the same kind of transformation experience.
It isn’t that you’re trying to transform yourself; it’s that when you sit in silence to meditate when you read or contemplate books that have spiritual content if you are the kind of person who brings that into the life experience, it will change you. It is not a comfortable process necessarily at all. But I am perfectly happy to work with you on these ideas whenever the rhythm of things seems accurate.
I do think that from her point of view she is being a good sport about it. Obviously, for some reason, although why she married a theoretical mathematician if she really isn’t into abstract thinking, I guess she just thought you were cute or something. Which I’m sure you are. But at any rate you sometimes wonder how people get together because they really often are quite dynamically different.
At any rate, I guess she may not ever understand the way you approach the desire to know the truth, and I suppose in the same way she has to face the fact that you will never understand her way. So it works both ways really and it’s not just that you’re studying and she’s being lazy, I don’t think, I imagine she’s working hard in her own way to find her own path, whatever she may call it, whether it’s an orthodox church or whatever. Since I think all paths are equally potentially good as far as efficiently being able to bring us to the point at which we may contemplate eternity without qualifying that perception, we simply need to support each other in our various paths and have faith that the paths the persons we love have picked are the ones that are good for them.
Sometimes faith does not flourish in someone in an abstract way, and I think that’s when the fundamentalist religions come in handy. They give you a structure—kind of four walls and a ceiling and a floor, and you know what’s right and what’s wrong, and it’s there in the bible and you feel safer somehow. The kind of work that I do in my ministry with discerning spirits, the kind of work you do in your seeking, these are risky businesses and they ask a lot of one. They ask mostly that one be able to live what one has learned, as any path does. But the learning involved in this kind of study usually happens pretty rapidly, it’s a very efficient method regardless of the kind of spiritually that is at the center of the seeking because it is a daily thing, it’s not just something that happens on Sunday.
I imagine it is threatening to her, not because she thinks, well, she may think that you’re a little bit bonkers, I don’t know, I doubt it. It would seem to me very hard to picture you as being perceived as being bent in some way because you’re an extremely rational, sensible person to talk to. And that’s usually the dead giveaway, when somebody is not making sense, you figure perhaps they’re not altogether tightly wrapped, and you do seem to be well wrapped, thank you very much.
But it’s threatening simply because you might be right and she might be wrong, but the truth of it is that you are right for you and she is right for her, and there’s no problem.
But it’s her catalyst if there is a problem. And it may be spiritual and it may simply be a kind of jealousy of the intellect or whatever, I don’t know. But at any rate, do the best you can to support her in her path and I think that will be the most service you can give to her, is simply to accept and support her way without criticizing it or judging it. And don’t defend your own. Just say, “Well, this is something I’m interested in and I really want to pursue it and I appreciate your concern, and pray for me.”
Just don’t defend yourself. There’s no point to it. There’s no proof involved in either direction. The reasons for religious debate elude me completely since nothing can be known. It doesn’t stop people from discussing things of that sort in an argumentative way, but I think that in truth, as we become more aware of the universal spiritual principles and see that each path has certain strengths to offer certain personalities, that we become more and more compassionate and charitable and loving about people on other paths and we trust them more to be doing the work that they need to be doing the way they need to be doing it so that it doesn’t scare you that she’s doing that work.
The trouble with a more fundamentalist approach to an orthodox religion of any kind is the fear, and it’s a very real fear, that the loved one will not make it into heaven some way because the loved one has gone astray. There’s pretty much nothing to do about that except to say, “Please pray for me because this is not something that I perceive as being detrimental to my spiritual progress but rather a broadening and widening of it.
Thomas Merton, for instance, traveled extensively working with Zen Buddhists and all sorts of different religions. He lived right here in Kentucky for a large part of his life at Gethsemane, he was a monk, but he did a lot of interfaith work and I recommend his works because of that because he is a devout Christian, yet also a keen and open mind with a very articulate pen.
Actually, I did almost die not too long after I talked to you. And then I almost died again the next month. It was kind of goofy. I had been told for so long that everything was in my head. “Nervous people like you just have stomach problems.” Well, I don’t see myself as being a nervous person but I am aware that I am intense and I do deal with pain all the time and I do not choose to medicate it to the point where I do not hurt. I suppose that is a stressful situation.
Anyway they popped me into the hospital in May, got me going again and sent me home and didn’t do anything else, that was it. And sure enough, the problem started again so they put me back in and this time they took a longer time to make sure the infection was gone and so forth. Sent me home and unfortunately, although it has taken longer it does seem as though the situation is worsening again, and although I don’t look forward to it, I suspect that it may be necessary for me to go in for another series of test, because I’m just this middle-aged woman with this sort of mass of air that mimics pregnancy, all the water and fluid I don’t seem to be able to rid myself of. There’s some kind of blockage.
As it gets bigger and I know that I’m not eating very much at all I realize that I just as soon stay alive even though I don’t like the thoughts of what might have to be done, it would behoove me to face them at some point. Hopefully, that point has not yet come. I’m trying to stretch it out as long as possible figuring perhaps it will clear up by itself.
It really wasn’t scary for me. The one thing it did help me do was to get a lot more straight with my Mom, who all her life, had hurt my feelings a great deal by certain things she’d done and I’d never told her because she’d gone through so much and I didn’t want to burden her but I also didn’t want to go to my grave disliking someone and not asking forgiveness for it.
So we wrote to each other on paper so she wouldn’t have to face me when she was reading it because confrontations are hard. And it worked out really well. We wrote back and forth about four times and I began to understand the real situation that she was in.
And so now at this point, as far as having people that I haven’t said I was sorry to as far as I know I’ve made my peace with all the people that I can.
The joy of doing this work is sometimes difficult to see on the surface of it because there is some effort involved, especially to me. That was always made very clear by the context that there was, to a contact, some weariness that was going to occur if one was going to use oneself in that way, which never seemed to me to be a particularly strong argument against doing this, since we all become weary when we work, no matter what sort of work we do.
So if we become weary doing spiritual work which might be of service to other people, that sounds like a fair trade and I do appreciate your kind words about that. It’s the resonance of this particular material—I feel it too. I also realize that people are going to hear what they want to hear and not be able to hear what they cannot hear and that’s the way it should be. It sort of protects people from their own information if they can’t deal with it yet. It sort of goes over their heads.
I remember when I was a kid—I started reading when I was about three—so by the time I was eight I’d read all the kids’ books I wanted to and I was just really wanting to get into the adult book section of the library. Mom took me once a week and the librarian knew me and she gave me an adult card and I could check out any book I wanted, and I checked out a book that had a bunch of sexually explicit scenes in it, and you know, I didn’t know what they were talking about. It went right over my head. It was quite harmless because I didn’t understand. And years later, ten years later, when I found out what was in the book, then I understood.
I wish that people could see that children are not harmed if they read things that they don’t understand because it will sort slide off of them. What really is harmful is putting the stuff up on the television or movies, especially the violence, so that people think you can slug and punch and shoot and do various other indignities to people and they’ll get up and walk away, which is what often happens in movies.
And in real life if you slug somebody or kick somebody they go down and they stay down and they’re really, really hurt. That does concern me because I think kids just get more and more aggressive because they see it on TV and think, “Well, that’s okay.”
Now to your questions. “Why would Christ say, upon healing someone, to tell no one?”
I think Christ wanted to be obscure. I think he wanted his ministry to be one that was free and there were two problems he was facing, one political and one religious. Religiously speaking he was preaching some orthodoxy. Of course, he was himself a Rabbi, at the age of thirteen. But other parts of what he was preaching had to do with the coming of the savior and so forth, and this was pretty dicey. This was not orthodox. Jews are still supposedly waiting for the Messiah.
Now there are some Jews that have decided that Jesus was the Messiah, who still call themselves Jews and worship in that manner. But for the most part, there was a real problem with the scholars, the Pharisees in the Jewish community who definitely thought that he should not be teaching.
Also, there was a faction of political people in rebellion against the Roman Empire that very much wanted Jesus to be an earthly king to replace the Roman lower echelon bosses that were sent to places like Galilee and they were hoping that Jesus could be an earthly king and bring the Jewish people back to their former glory. It would make very good sense on those two counts, practically, to say “Please don’t tell anybody about this.”
Also, there may well have been this feeling in Jesus not to throw pearls before swine. In other words, if a person said, “He healed me of my blindness,” to a people that does not believe that possible, it doesn’t do any good either to the person saying it or to the person who supposedly has done it.
(Reading) “To us there are no paradoxes.” At what density do paradoxes cease to exist?
I’m not sure there is a specifically oriented answer to that because that involves knowing about the space/time continua of other densities which we do not. But the sixth density is the density in which one studies how to combine compassion or love and wisdom and as you move through the sixth density at some point you realize that the paradoxes resolve themselves in the unity of which they are the two sides of the coin, or the substance and the shadow, and you see that one without the other is not complete.
A paradox cannot be absolute, if you think about it. The best way that I can say this, and this barely gets into English, is that if you had zero and it was a complete zero, if you had just one thing in that zero it would no longer be a pure zero. The same thing with absolute fullness. If you had one thing missing, it would be less than fullness. That isn’t the kind of paradox we’re looking at in this density. We’re looking at relativistic paradoxes in this density. Faster, slower, hotter, colder, more loving, less loving, more light and less light, and so forth.
I think that when we approach thoughts of the absolute we need to take into account that absolute emptiness and absolute fullness are congruent and like all infinite qualities are not capable of limitation, including paradox, so that when we’re dealing with paradox we know for certain that we have hit upon something that will help us to learn about this illusion and the lessons that it has to teach us about love.
The paradoxes are everywhere when you begin studying spiritually, and more and more you begin to see the paradoxes as a necessary part of one dynamic. They’re not absolute, they are local to our environment in this density and within this lifetime and that they are to be celebrated. We, ourselves, are tremendously paradoxical people. Our moods, our thoughts of consideration, many things about us differ, not just from year to year, but sometimes cyclically, over and over again, and we see ourselves moving in a relativistic way in reference to ourselves, also in reference to other people, this society and so forth.
So, paradox is not something you want to get rid of.
The sixth density understanding of unity, however, is not totally complete because people still see themselves as separate from other people, even though they are in various humongous social memory complexes. I think the time when we truly are aware that there are no paradoxes is when we lose our boundaries, and that’s probably seventh density. That’s probably the point at which we turn from our past, and future and present and embrace something that is all that there is, so that there is no longer any possibility of paradox because we are all that there is and we feel that.
It will undoubtedly take us a while to get there but then hopefully getting there will be at least half the fun. Ask me more about paradox if I haven’t said enough.
The dream state is an interesting state and it isn’t one about which people have a particularly strong handle. The approach that people take to dreams is largely pragmatic. In other words, this means this, that means that, this could mean this, and so forth. They’re trying to develop a language of dreams. It’s something akin I would imagine to having an engineering and a technical knowledge of the physics of how to build bridges, how to build roads, how to put buildings up without having any clear understanding of the physical principles underlying the reasons that these structures will stand, but simply assume that people have done that work and what they say is true and the building will stand.
In the dream state (and this is just my opinion) I believe that we have access, in a fairly controlled manner if we work at it, to much of our subconscious material. When we do not work at what we are going to do in the dream, we still have a great deal of information that comes through if we can remember those dreams. What we are doing in those dreams is chewing over the things that we have not been able to understand, accept or deal with on a conscious level, so it’s all been working under the surface of the consciousness, subliminally.
In the dream state we get these somewhat distorted imagines coming up that are working very hard to try to talk to us about ourselves. Usually, in a dream, each entity in a dream has something to do with you, is part of yourself. So what you’re trying to do as you look at your dream is to look at each part of the dream as part of yourself and perhaps see what that might be a pattern towards.
It is certainly true that anything that is manifested is distorted because the only undistortion is absolute love. The first distortion is free will and that is before the free will has worked upon unpotentiated intelligent infinity to potentiate a small part of it that it may burst forth into a creation and learn about itself through an infinite number of fields of consciousness.
There’s certainly no judgment in Ra’s use of the word “distortion.” All they mean by “distortion” is that it is in some way unable to express the fullness of truth, and as you pointed out, there simply is no way to express anything or even think anything about this without distorting it.
So distortion is not a reproving term, it is simply an accurate term. Distortion of light, for instance, through a prism shows beautiful colors, and it also shows us a great deal more of which those distortions are symbols. That doesn’t mean they are bad—those symbols are very, very useful and light is not in any way made less whole because it has been distorted by refraction.
Okay, the discipline of the personality is a process, it’s not a thing, it isn’t an achievement, it’s an ongoing process. We come into this life and through what we fear when we’re so young and helpless that we can’t defend ourselves and through what we love, we develop a system of ways of defending ourselves against those things that we fear, and ways of embracing those things that we love, and we develop a character. We develop a recognizable personality that goes with the face we see in the mirror.
We consider ourselves in this role or that role. We see ourselves young, and middle aged, and getting old, we count the number of chins we have and the numbers of teeth, we see these changes happening to us. And we see continuing to solidify around ourselves a particular kind of personality. It is my opinion that in fact our personality has about as much to do with us as does the way we look. Very little, almost nothing. We are not our bodies, we are not our thoughts, we are not our personalities, we are not our emotions. There is something beyond these which we are.
But in order to be able to become a vessel which can hold that which we truly are, we need to allow slowly, very slowly, in a safe and careful manner, these fixed things about our personality that especially have to do with fear.
Let’s say we’re in a cave because it’s safe in that cave and the things outside of that cave seem to be threatening so every time something has happened to us we’ve sort of taken out a little filament and wrapped it across the opening to the cave and over a period of many years that protection has become practically solid and we’re in almost complete darkness in this position of very solidified fear and defense and no matter how much we want to help other people we are limited by the fact that we simply cannot do the violence to ourselves by saying “Well, I’m not afraid anymore.”
So I think the discipline of the personality is the process through which we examine those forces—we examine their usefulness in our lives and their present appropriateness and when things happen to us we not only go through them but we also look at them and perhaps one little filament can be taken away because we now see that we don’t need that armor anymore. That part of our personality is not needed.
It can take a lifetime just working with dissolving the solidity of our fears, our personal subjective ways of seeing ourselves as limited beings. In and of ourselves we are, of course, limited beings. However, there is within us a great beauty, a great light, a great love, and in order to carry this wonderful treasure, which is love, within us so that it may flow through us we must let ourselves become less solid in that personality.
Not that we don’t still have opinions, not that we still don’t make many errors, not that we don’t still have personalities, but we see that these things are artifacts of this one incarnation—they are not who we are, and so if we see anger, we say, “Oh, anger is arising, I wonder how long it will stay around.” It’s not that we back away from the experience, we go through the experience. We go through it with every cell of our senses; listening, watching, observing, because later after we’ve acted spontaneously and done what we were ready to do in that situation we can look back and say, “Hmmm, I needed to put that strand back because it made me afraid, but look here, I was able to leave this strand off.”
I don’t think we should push work in consciousness, I think we should simply encourage it by the contemplating of what we, as a personality, or as a character, or as a unique human being in third density have done on that particular day. It’s a lot easier to do this sort of thing once a day, than once a week or once a month, because we will forget, we forget a lot of things. So if we wish to learn about ourselves we have the tools to do it, it’s simply that it takes a lot of persistence.
Now one way to gain resources for the disciplining of the personality is through dreams, they are a good connection. The material we are getting from the subconscious in those dreams, if we keep a dream journal, may not make sense in terms of one dream, but if we are able to record dreams over a period of time we will see a pattern, and the pattern is telling us where we’re stuck. What in our past has us stuck, what fear of future has us stuck, what problem in the present has us stuck. Somewhere it’s blocking energy.
It’s very subjective work. You cannot buy a book on what dreams mean, and trust it, because everyone’s symbology is somewhat different, but as you begin to see the pattern, and I think you have the kind of mind that is a generalist mind, will look for an underlying pattern in what seems perhaps to others to be fairly complex chaotic circumstances you will begin to grasp the kind of lesson with which you may loosen yourself and open yourself up to being able to use more and more of the light that is the manifestation of love in this density.
I do recommend a dream journal for that reason. It is sometimes very time consuming. Once you get to the point where you can remember your dreams sometimes you can remember an awful lot of things and have to write an awful lot down, but it really is very rewarding work.
So what one is trying to do in indigo ray work, is take that person who has in childhood been wounded, and perhaps in adulthood been wounded, and has less than a full sense of self worth. To take that and see that as a fear that has been chosen by you to hold on to. “This is who I am. I am the person who did not do this, I’m the person who is no good at that,” etc. In day to day life it is not obviously relevant because in day to day life we do not exist, we behave. And we don’t behave in ways that we see as worthy or unworthy. We behave in ways we feel are appropriate.
But within ourselves, as we do this inner work, what we are trying to do is without any brutalization of ourselves, move slowly and carefully out of that haze of fear and limitation, so that within our minds, we live in a sunlit place, where the birds sing happily and information comes to us in a gentle way, and we are able to allow it to flow through us without our hindering it by our fear that we are not worthy enough to carry this sort of thought.
When the personality has begun to be disciplined I think I would use some sort of mathematical (I don’t know anything about mathematics, you understand)—if you can think of yourself as a field of consciousness, the normal person standing in line at the grocery store has got a field of consciousness that is strong enough to keep the person together, but it may not be particularly metaphysically strong, which means that as a being of light, this entity is not going to be able to use the kind of fullness of light that could be used by a field of energy that had more strength to it.
I think as we discipline our personality, as we simplify our thinking, as we release judgment, especially of ourselves and absolutely everybody else, as we begin to rely on the principle of faith and not of fear, as we begin learning to love the unlovable people that we know and accept the unacceptable things that happen to us, we begin to be citizens of the universe—light beings, fields of consciousness that have gained in strength, the strength of field, obviously they have not added mass, they’ve added strength and power.
Again, I would be glad to elaborate more on that.
You quoted, “Know yourself, accept yourself and become the Creator.” The ultimate strength of the field of a person is reached at a point at which it simply turns its back on the seeming multiplicity of fields of consciousness and embraces the one great field of consciousness that is real in that it loses its identity and gains all that there is.
Now your next question is kind of funny. You said that I said that I understood The Ra Material. Not word for word. As someone who is, I guess somewhat schooled in philosophy, I do feel that I understand the Law of One. It is the only self-consistent cosmology that I’ve ever read. Not that I’ve read them all. Not that I know whether or not this cosmology is true. I simply know that as I go through it and look at it from different aspects of the material, it remains self consistent.
Also to the point is that in this cosmology the very center of its description or its nature, is the sub sub logos that is the person, that is the co-creator, and what that person is doing here in third density is finding a way to chose its path of service, so that without preaching or being religious, which is very offensive to me, the Law of One manages to create a structure within which the central need of any one co-creator, or person, is to develop, shall we say, a personal myth that can lead it to the gates of eternity.
I chose the Christian path. It has worked for me. I’ve had extremely good luck in the people who have been my spiritual advisers over the years, and the theology of the Episcopal church, with its two things, so very important, one, that you don’t have to believe anything, you simply have to hope that one day you may, the other being that there is no original sin put on people.
It is a congenial theology to one who is humane. It is also a blissful place to be a mystic. Were I the same kind of person I am but I was going to a Baptist church, I hesitate even to think of what people would do to try to keep me from being who I am. Were I Catholic, since so many odd things have happened to me in my life, I would probably, by this time be hounded by the Vatican, and I ain’t ready to be a saint. (Laughs). I don’t care about these so-called miracles, of which I’ve had several, I just refuse to think about it, I don’t see myself as anything like that, I know I have clay feet, and I wish to remain very obscure.
So being an Episcopalian and being Christian means work, and basically what I try to do in my receiving of information is to cloak it in the most skillful vocabulary that I can that will avoid pushing the emotional buttons of the people with whom I am attempting to communicate. I don’t always do it very well, but I always do give it an honest try.
So it isn’t that I understand everything about The Ra Material, I certainly don’t, especially the physics and so forth that I’ve never studied, so there isn’t much that I can hang my understanding on. One would have to have a basis for it and my only basis is logic, and I suppose some ways logically I can grasp what is being said, but as far as being able, in a scholarly way, speak to specific parts of the Law of One, there are places to which I would not be able to speak, and in the greater sense I do not believe anyone can understand anything in this third density. I think we really live by faith alone and we keep asking the questions and that’s what we’re supposed to do.
The answers aren’t nearly as important as the questions, because the answers always boil down to love—something about love—that is the answer. But what is the question?
I think as we go through the examination of ourselves, who we are, where we’re going, we’re refining the questions as well as the answers. It may seem that we are focused around the answer, that some answer will give us a breakthrough, it may seem that way, but really what the breakthrough is to me is the beginning of the desire to ask the questions.
Because it says over and over again in the New Testament, “Seek and ye shall find. Ask, and the answer will be given. Knock and the door will be opened.” I think we first have to have a question, we have to have a desire, we have to open that door so that my understanding of the Law of One is general in that I see it as cosmology and in that I see it as putting us in the center of that cosmology, not just us in third density, but fields of consciousness everywhere, and it is explaining to us what the neighborhood is like, basically—what the game is, what it is that we are to do in order to move through this life. This “Valley of the shadow of death.” When we are born we have a death sentence hanging over us instantly. We will die. I marvel at the fact that people don’t think about this that often, but I guess it’s just because they don’t want to.
What I see in the Ra Material, is that without emotion, without fervor of a religious kind, without fanaticism, and without being evangelistic, the Law of One gives a person a great deal of worth and tells that person that this person is at this point in third density, and the game is “Let’s make a choice to serve other people.” How are we going to do that?
Well, many tools and resources are given for that in the Law of One. But the work remains to be done by the student, not a slavish devotion to the Law of One. Many, many beautiful quotes and so forth can come from the Law of One to inspire one. But it cannot come forth into your life until you choose to have it be so.
So I really rejoice that this material is available because it gives people who would not listen to an emotional appeal to have somebody save your life, or save your soul, a look at our neighborhood, where we are, our environment. Okay, this is our physical environment. We know beyond question that this physical environment is an illusion, so what is not an illusion?
Well, in the Law of One it talks about those things that are not entirely illusory and it becomes less and less illusory as we learn more and more and however we choose to do that is the right path for us, but I think Ra surely does encourage each of us to seek and find a path wherein we can thank the Creator for being here, thank the Creator for the opportunity for this to happen, ask the Creator to show forth whatever might be in store for us that we could help with, and simply affirm that we are ready to help.
Regardless of what path of service we are on, we can give thanksgiving for being here, praise to the Creator who made us in the first place, and a prayer that we may be given service to do and the ability to do it.
I certainly agree with you about not being able to understand the Ra Material concept by concept, although perhaps I understand more of it that some.
You ask if dreams take place in time/space. I think in a way they do. I think in a way all of that which is unseen in us is in time/space. But I don’t think that we can look at time/space and see time in a spiritual sense, in the normal geometrical sense, I think we are talking about time/space as a metaphysical or unseen world which shapes and underlies our manifested experience in the physical world so that when we are dreaming we are not in a different density, we’re not in a different illusion, we are in a different part of this illusion.
Naturally it being an illusion of paradox that would have the time/space and space/time, and all of that is still within this illusion and the time/space dreaming is especially helpful to us because of the fact that it is essentially timeless, you can dream a very very long dream in just a few seconds.
I’ve talked about the paradoxes and I don’t think I’ll say much more about them. In order to try to get you on it, I have little capacity because I have no training to deal with the concepts that have to do with numbers, but it seems fairly obvious to me that all paradoxes are relative, and that when you hit an absolute or constant, you can describe it as a void, as a fullness or as a constant, you can describe it in various ways as it would appear to us as relativistic beings, but we cannot see it face to face because we are not absolute beings ourselves.
I think we have to accept the fact that not only are there paradoxes, but there are paradoxes which will change from person to person depending on that person’s definition of good and bad, ethical and unethical, and things like that. It is almost impossible to be an idealist in the world of ethics, for instance, except insofar as you are able to conduct your own life in an ethical way.
If you pay attention to the way government works, the way taxes work, the way the various states in a culture work you see constantly situational ethics in justifying different things, you see morality mixed up with justice, you see patriotism mixed up with fascism. You see lots of things that you’d rather not see.
I especially love the latest situational ethics which is when anyone mentions something about the Middle East, you see this person do sort of a shrug and say “It’s the Middle East.” As if, well, that’s the answer to that one. It’s very, very situational and I think paradoxes are to be noticed and looked at but also it is well to realize that although we partake in our choices between the dynamics of these paradoxes, and that’s what we should do, we should give them full respect, but they are still not the stuff of eternity.
As to the white magician, every Sunday when I go to church I take part in a white magical ritual. There’s not nearly as much confusion, or occultism, or secrets, about Western white magic as has been pumped up, probably because of fear.
The goal of the white magician is to create more light and in the Eucharist which we have every Sunday, we sing praises, we listen to scripture, we confess our sins, we make ourselves ready to be a new being, and then we take some real stale cardboard type bread which has been cut down, and some watered down wine, and it has become the body and the blood of Jesus Christ.
Taken into us it engages us in the business of knowing the mind and the heart of Jesus Christ that we may shine his light into the world. That’s probably the most common white magic ritual practiced. I don’t think people like to think of it as white magical ritual, but all the elements are there. So there’s really not a lot of confusion about basically what what magic is.
Now if one tries to read in white magic, one becomes entangled in the various details of what the tree of life is, what it means, there are different ways of looking at that, there are different orders of white magic that do not agree with each other, it’s just like any other bunch of philosophers or ministers or church members, people aren’t going to agree. There will be confusion.
But when you get down to the basic principle that lies behind all the flashing colors and symbols and so forth, what you are attempting to do as a white magician is to service the world by letting whatever light you can carry shine through you and never hide it under a bushel basket. Because there’s no need to be modest. It’s not your light. It’s just coming through you. It’s coming through you because in blind faith you have taken on the nature of that heavenly food, and you are no longer hungry or thirsty spiritually, you’re ready to share it with other people.
Ask me more specifically, if I haven’t said enough.
You ask about the form maker. Jim is the scholar about the form maker and all sorts of things about the Law of One, but the form maker body is basically, the indigo ray body or even the violet ray body which has a very accurate assessment, not of the …
[Side two of tape ends.]
Hopefully it touches us in such a way that we don’t even know what we are doing to help other people. We would be surprised, hopefully, because I think when we try to help other people, when we get very solemn … if we go beyond the realization that we’re just people and we’re going to give it a good shot, but that’s about all we can do, then I think we make ourselves out to be more than we are.
And people are all too willing to accept the idea that somebody other than they knows more and understands more and has all the answers more than they do. A person such as this will cling to one and take every word as the gospel, the good word, and of course, it’s not. It simply is not.
I did not come into this world to be a messiah or a prophet or anybody special. I came to this world to be a servant. I’ve known it always. I’m here to help, that’s all.
The fields are ready for harvest but where are the harvesters? It always amazes me when I read supposedly service-to-others channelings talking about places of safety, of certain people being lifted off the planet so they won’t have to go through the cataclysmic changes of Armageddon, whatever it may be. I do not understand why anybody who truly wished to serve the Creator and to serve his children would want to be anywhere but where the Creator put him, to be completely open in whatever way his particular gifts or talents could be used best in that situation right then, right there.
If he is to die in the middle of some conflagration of whatever kind, in metaphysical terms this is simply part of a process. When you think about eternity, you’re thinking about it with a finite mind and you can think about foreverness, you can think about rounded shapes, but they all have their limits.
Infinity is not like that. It is not of an order of things which we can conceptually use. At least I feel that I must accept the fact that I will never understand infinity or eternity or complete nothingness or complete fullness although I have had immediate experience of complete light where I was not me, I was not observing, I was simply light. This occurs very randomly, I don’t know when it’s going to occur. I feel beyond a certain point it’s selfish, the mountaintop experience, because it does no one but me any good whatsoever. I can only babble about it—there are no words.
So when I get physically tired, if I’m not out of it, then I bring myself out of it because I wasn’t born to live up on the mountaintop and be light. I was born to be living and engaging myself with a full heart in the valley of the shadow of death, to be ready for whatever came in front of me, knowing that my batting average was not going to be anywhere near 1000.
The reason that I have the boldness to send out taped letters to people is that first of all, I always tell people that this is just my opinion, and second of all, I have heard from the people whom I have helped and I’ve had a long time of this now, I’ve been working with people since 1975. I do have a batting average of somewhere over 500 as far as people subjectively feeling that they’ve been helped.
This encourages me to go on giving my limited and probably often erroneous viewpoint because I know that perhaps my suggestions or opinions or advice is not accurate, it may at least offer some solace or a way to pursue something that may turn out to be helpful. In other words, I just feel that I perhaps can be helpful that way.
When one talks about bodies, one has a tendency to think of a body that is solid and I don’t think when entities such as Ra speak of bodies they are necessarily at all times speaking of solidified bodies, I think they’re speaking of bodies which reflect the balance of energy within one particular range of experience.
Volume II shows the range of experience pretty well, red being survival, orange being one’s association with oneself and with other entities, yellow being relationships with social groups, marriage, school, work, church, country, that sort of thing; green energy being the heart; blue being communication; indigo being work in consciousness or inner work; violet ray being unable to be changed much by us because it is simply a readout of the balance of all the other bodies.
So when we talk about what body we go into at death, we are not talking about a body of flesh and blood and vein, and if you prick me, I shall bleed. We are talking about a body which expresses the balance that we have become within this little life that is so brief and so precious, very precious. This readout is very objective. It’s not something that one can fudge. It’s not a kind of test that has answers. It is simply looking at how much light that balanced personality can safely use without harming itself.
So when the healing of the incarnation has taken place, we’re not talking about just what plane of existence we’re going to come back in, third or fourth density, but what part of that density and what kind of lesson that we want to learn. In other words, the shape of the poem that we will write or attempt to write this time around.
As to the interior of ectoplasmic activity, now there’s one for the books. This is not something that I know about although I have experienced it. My outward experience with ectoplasm was during my days of research with Don from about 1968 until he died in l984. He was interested in examining anything that was paranormal. He was a scientist. He wanted to find out why, why, why, and is it true, is it true, and so forth.
So I went to a lot of spiritualist séances, most of which were complete and utter frauds. I’m not saying this out of a meanness of spirit; I’m saying this as an observer. People were running around in sheets, as simple as that. No information was given that was not already known by a skillful questioning of the person that was talking to whoever it might be.
However, there was one person not now working, perhaps even deceased, I don’t know, but I think he’s still alive, named James Tingley, who was unique in my experience. I’ve written a little bit about him in some introduction or another. The spirits that I saw were spirits limited in their delineation by my lack of night vision. I could see no more than a basic shape and solidity to them that you couldn’t see through—opaqueness.
Don could actually see the hairs on their head. He had eyes like an eagle, and among other things his mother came to bless me and thank me for taking care of Don, and she used the name “Sister,” which had come into my head. I’d heard people in Don’s family call Elizabeth “Sister,” but it hadn’t sunk in because it’s not a nickname that’s common these days. It has long since faded into a charming antiquity.
She announced herself as “Sister,” and she blessed me and she blessed both of us and she told both of us how thrilled she was, and it was not until we were flying home that Don casually asked me if I knew who that “Sister,” was. He had known that I had not known. Another thing that was quite remarkable was they never called up people except in families and Don and I never married because he had a wish to be celibate, also a wish not to be married, and he was more important to me than my position in life.
All I asked from him was enough of a salary so I could declare something and be a working person and not some kind of an inamorata, my grandmother would have said. That I was not. Although if people were given the kind of credit that they deserved for doing things well, the Greeks had something called a Hetaera, something like that, which was sort of a woman with whom one could talk, one could be intimate, one could create poetry with, one could discuss philosophical questions. The emphasis was not on beauty or age, but sensitivity and the ability to help a man reach the degree of inspiration that he wished.
This type of woman for a short period in history was given a fairly high place. I would probably make a good one of those. This is just another way of saying I’d make a good housewife. But it didn’t have to have the paper involved.
At any rate I did see the ectoplasm. I don’t know how it was created. But I do know that the man simply sat down in a folding chair against a kind of block that you put together to make those concrete block garages and two shower curtains were pulled around and after a while some white stuff started coming out would speak to people. Don and I were called up together although we had not married, and the messages were always for both of us and they were not messages from relatives except “Sister,” they were messages from people who were encouraging us to go forth and teach.
So it does seem probable that there are many kinds of entities that are able, through a materialization medium, to make themselves known, however, the likelihood of getting someone who can tell you something that you don’t already know is about as likely as winning the lottery, because almost everyone who is still close enough to the earth plane even to connect with what is going on here is likely to be a personality shell capable of nothing much more than good humor, an expression of love and a delight in seeing a dear one.
When Ra said that I was interiorizing the ectoplasmic flow, the only way I had of believing it, and it certainly was a good way, was that I would lose between 2 and 3 pounds each session. I lost it in a physical way—I went to the bathroom, a lot, a whole lot. I went down to 84 lbs and I was eating more than I’d ever eaten in my life. I don’t understand it, so I cannot pass it on to you I just know that something was used in me in order to give voice to these concepts of which I had no knowledge, and it was a trance state that was stressful on the physical side.
Now I have lost weight sometimes after a session when there has been a great deal of need on the part of the people asking the question, and I’ve gone very deep, and Jim has said it sounded a good bit more like Ra than usual. Well, Q’uo is a principle made up of Latwii and Ra so there is every reason once in a while that Ra’s teachings would be paraphrased in a more unchanged manner by Q’uo.
[There is a problem with the recording for the next few paragraphs.]
I do not think Jim will ever let me go into trance again because he is too afraid to lose me. I find it extremely touching and extremely humbling that Jim says that if I were to [inaudible] hang on and all he could do was [inaudible] that he would be the happiest man in the world.
I find that very hard to believe but Jim tells the truth so every day I get up and I [inaudible] do the best that I can but please let me be with Jim [inaudible]. I’m a lot simpler in terms of the way I live than in the way I think, but when you’re asking me about the ectoplasmic activity I could go into all kinds of cerebral things about how it manifested but since I’ve never [inaudible] remotely [inaudible] true about it, [inaudible] the experience of losing [inaudible] from my body [inaudible] being used by a spirit [inaudible] there is a white [inaudible] haven’t [inaudible] any idea [inaudible] this is possible [inaudible] this is an event that can be tested if you accept my [inaudible] as real [inaudible] as real. [inaudible] ectoplasmic activity, and moreover I find that if one goes to a spiritualist camp or retreat or church, one is going to hit the 95% fraud. [inaudible] It takes a good deal of perseverance to find somebody that’s legit.
This is true about anything about which nothing can be proven because its [inaudible] so I accept that.
Now, what do I know about the Order of the Golden Dawn? First of all, there are two volumes of the Golden Dawn and the title is The Golden Dawn—an Account of the Teachings and Ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie. The copies that I have are the revised and enlarged editions, Volumes I and II. Llewellyn Publications, 1971.
To talk in general about the Order of the Golden Dawn is to talk about an explosion, romantic thinking, poetry, Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, even Alistair Crowley, but I wouldn’t depend too much on him.
At any rate, the Golden Dawn flourished in the end of the 19th Century and died out pretty much by the 30’s except for small lodges which still exist to this day but are secret. They are quite positive, and lovely, and they are based upon the principle that everything is us. They are trained in visualization, in holding one thing in front of their consciousness to the exclusion of all other things; they are trained to invoke personalities from the spirit world. They are trained to evoke quality of light from the spirit world. And they are trained then to give them back for the good of the consciousness of this planet.
There is a great deal of daily hard work involved in being a white magician. It is a wonderful life if one has the capacity for it, which I do not. I could sing six hours a day, but I could not contemplate six hours a day.
It was more and more defiled as more and more people got ahold of it and started making some money off of it, but if you want to look at that particular two volume set, surely someone somewhere has it that you could borrow it from.
Distortion is a good thing because it’s all we have to work with. It has to be a good thing. It’s enough, it’s what given us and I think to question the Creator about what he has given us is foolish. He’s given us what we need. The fears that we need, the armor that we need, the lessons that we need, the pain, the suffering, and all the good things too. He’s given us a place to learn. Is it distorted? Certainly. Does each of us distort our illusion somewhat differently? Of course we do, how could we help it?. We are unique. We don’t think alike.
As a matter of fact, talking to you who thinks in abstract terms but who think in terms I am not trained to think, mathematical and so forth. You broaden my perspective greatly by what you say. Hopefully, I do the same for you. The great joy is that each of our worlds is distorted slightly differently. Each of us has a different lesson to learn and so my ears are open to fellow travelers on the road, whoever they may be and I’d just as soon listen as talk.
I do think that in terms of minimizing distortion by working on the nuances Ra’s sometimes strung-together words, like mind/body/spirit complex nailed the concept down better than one word would have and that was the reason why he was using this somewhat odd language.
It’s really a language that is attempting to be more towards the absolute which, of course, it cannot be. I feel that my whole life is a distortion and distortions within that primary distortion that was me when I came into this world. I know that it’s my way of learning and I know that is who I am within this illusion.
But I also know that all of these distortions, all put together and moved around any way you like will not add up to me. That when my personality is gone, when my body is gone, when my intelligence is gone, when my song is gone, when all that I’ve ever done and been is gone, the love that has come from my life will remain, not because it’s immortal, but because it adds to the planetary lightness of consciousness.
That is who I am with relationship to this planet in the deepest sense. I am a servant, and if I can offer love and light to people and encourage them to become more filled with light, that’s really all I ask is to help and if my service was washing dishes, I think I’d be just as happy. Service is service, so I don’t worry about the distortion. I just go ahead and do what I do, and if it works, great, but if it doesn’t, I’m really sorry but that’s the best I could do.
Now as far as Ra saying that they could not make full reparations for the distortion of the law, I don’t feel that Ra was being harsh, I feel that Ra was being accurate. When there is a movement in consciousness so far toward the elite which we see in the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Koran, almost every world religion, we see that the best that can be hoped for is a balancing of these energies, because purity is not something that we or Ra can achieve.
There will always be a relative imperfection or erroneous condition of mind formation. We will never, I don’t think, while we draw breath, understand or be able to make any reparations for anything that we’ve done, we can just love and accept and persevere and to me that’s enough. That’s hard enough and it will take me a lifelong certainly just trying to learn to be that person in the middle of the cosmology of the Law of One that lives by faith, that walks in darkness, looks for the star of hope that we may one day all be one, and that is ready, my lamp well oiled and my match ready to light it for whatever time the Creator calls me back to him.
I have one foolish ambition and that is to hear my Lord say, “Servant, well done.” That is the extent of my ambition in this life besides doing his will. I certainly can’t make reparations for anything. Gosh, let me think. Oh yes, it was something real simple about feeding the cats. Feeding the cats is rough in our house because they’re on three different diets, and yesterday, Mick forgot to shut a door and what happened? Ol’ Bozo shoved the other cat aside, the one that’s on the diet, shoved the skinny one aside and started eating her food, and practically had it all eaten up by the time I found it.
Jim came in at that moment and I said, “Jim! Why did you do this, look at this?” I completely overreacted. Now, how in the world am I going to think charitably about myself for turning on my best friend, among other things, because he made a simple mistake. I can’t kid myself that I’m anywhere near perfect and I don’t’ think any of us can.
But despite our distortions we can love each other. We can have charity. And we can try to have a compassionate wisdom so that when we think about things, maybe it takes a little longer, maybe there’s more to consider, but when we finish considering it we will have used both our intuition and our intellect and will come up with some kind of a balance.
So no, I don’t think Ra is harsh, I just think we really can’t make reparations, we can only forgive and that is a reparation. I think the idea of a tit for tat, and eye for an eye, balancing karma and all that, to me the whole process is simply blown away like thistles in the wind by the concept of forgiveness. Forgive ourselves, forgive whoever else it was that aggravated you and forgive the whole situation. Forget it and start living a life that is new that doesn’t have that in it. Don’t hold grudges.
I think that’s about as close as we can come to making real reparations for the things that we did and we really have to be humble and be willing to give up the last word and the desire to be right, which is in all of us, there’s nothing wrong with it, and just try to express love and if it is not taken as love, then that’s the way that is.
Defending ourselves is a way of separating ourselves from other people. When I get somebody that’s really after me, I’ll try three times. After the third letter, Jim answers. I don’t mind the catalyst but I’m not going to drown in it. By that time I know I’ve given it my best shot.
(Reading) “Is it possible that the people who have or who are reading Ra today are those who were led astray by Ra?”
Ra said that they were communicating on behalf of wanderers. Some wanderers may well be sixth density; I think the majority of them are fourth density. But I think that it was a communication that was specialized to speak to people who knew in some way shape or form, subconsciously, consciously, whatever, that they were here to do a little bit more than live and die. They were here to be in a certain way that would help.
When we find out what those ways of being are that can help, it’s really wonderful and I think that the Law of One is that kind of information and I’m really glad that I was part of it. But as to Ra’s feeling that they led people astray and now they have to bring them back on the right path, I don’t think it’s a matter of that so much as it is an attempt to balance some of the energy, not person by person, but just within the whole.
Again please ask further if that doesn’t make any sense.
(Carla reads more of the letter: “were these … boundary …”) Within the bounds of time/space and space/time within this density, there is one constant that eludes relativity and that is the speed of light. My hunch is that space/time is a continuum. In this, time is like a river and the fastest that anyone could possibly go before becoming infinite in mass, would be the speed of light.
In the same way, logically speaking, the time/space continuum which is the other side of this particular coin of a dualistic universe, is that there is a field of time and a river of space, and that the furthest or the most we can go in that river is the equivalent of the speed of light, only it would be defined in terms of space.
The boundary between the two involves a change in manifestation and a change in vibration obviously, because vibratory rates that would hold faster than the speed of light would not be at all, I would not think, healthy in the space/time continuum and vice versa. Not precisely like matter and anti-matter, I don’t think, but simply in terms of there being inner planes and outer planes of existence; the seen and the unseen.
So when there is a call, I think the call is in simultaneous time and simultaneous space, but in order to come into a space/time continuum it would first be necessary to create the concept of that manifestation in time/space or metaphysical inner, unseen space, so that the manifestation would have organization.
This bell craft, for instance, would then have a reality within the illusion of time/space. It would also have a projected reality in the illusion of space/time. Neither of these two illusions is non-local, I don’t think. I think as we are able to move and our ability to see and grasp and understand and use the light that is given to us we will find a great deal more of that infinity than just knowing that it is a mystery that we can’t explain.
(Reading) “… each entity must seek its basic path …” You really do give me a chance to think about these things and I appreciate it very much.
Yes, I can elaborate more on that than most because it had to do with me. I have always had a problem of seeing myself as separate from other people. For some reason, I don’t. For the most part anyone’s problem is my problem and anyone’s happiness is my happiness. I just basically am a people lover. I like people and I like to know about them and if they need something my first impulse is just to give it. It doesn’t matter what it costs me just to give it.
So the questioning in this particular session had to do about why I was greeted psychically while I was singing the B Minor Mass, and the answer was very simple, I was exhausted. Also the music has an extremely strong meaning for me. I am, by my own reckoning a person with a strong tendency towards martyrdom because to me martyrdom is just another way of saying, “Well, she died trying to help people.”
We all die, and where I get stuck trying to figure out what’s wise and what’s just foolish compassion, is trying to figure out if it’s my time to go to Bethlehem, basically, and I’ve made some wrong decisions in my life and I’ve lost a lot of ability to move around because I’ve made these decision, but that’s okay. I can do that.
[Side three of tape ends.]
So this piece is such a rending, tearing piece to me because the people were throwing palms in Jesus’ way when he rode into Jerusalem, but then they executed him. My heart just goes out and so I was very vulnerable. If you’ve ever done any singing at all just try singing this song just once all the way through or try singing the B Minor all the way through and you’ll know what exhaustion is all about, no matter how healthy you are.
But the question for me is always, “Should I do this thing that is going to be really hard on me if do it and I know it, or should I take a rest and try to live a little bit longer than to give a little bit more. I have never completely solved that riddle because many a time I’ve gotten into a situation where I think something is really, really worthwhile, but in order to do it I know that I will pay for it physically, I’ll be in debt, I will have a headache, I will feel badly, but I really need to do it. It’s something I feel strongly about and so I do it.
Even going to church every Sunday. I can’t sing in the choir because I can’t sit up that long but I can go to the service and I can run my prayer group because I’ve been running it by mail anyway for the last eight years, for the church, separate from L/L. I don’t give the same opinions to my Christian friends, I work with them on the territory that they’re familiar with.
So I look at that and I say, “Okay, that’s wise, I’m still loving, I’m still learning, I’m still giving, I’m still channeling, I’m still helping with the prayers,” but then something comes up like last week, after a long illness, the best man at our wedding died of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He had put up a gallant six year fight. His wife was my matron of honor at our wedding and I’ve asked her to move in with us and to be our family and in order to do that I’ll have to at first not do too much, just get everybody in here.
But if she decides to stay then we’ll have to do some, shall we say, enlarging of our tent, if we wish to be biblical about it. I know the money will come from somewhere, I know that Ron’s father has some money that he would be glad to help with if there is a mortgage involved in an addition to the house. We were going to add on to the house anyway at some point in the future but we did not have the plans made up yet.
Jim was with Ron when he died. He didn’t die of the cancer; he died because of all the chemotherapy. And as fragile as I am I’m not fragile when it comes to protecting my friends. I may be little but you never saw a stronger person if someone is causing pain to someone I love. So when I saw Sonja and I knew what kind of love she had for this man. They were childhood sweethearts, fell in love when she was 13, married at 17, and they had 21 years of marriage.
She has a five-year-old child, a 12 year old, and a 15 year old and no money except for Social Security. I desperately needed to take some of this off of her so I took it upon myself, with her request, to plan a service, to get out all the thank you notes to all the people that sent sympathy cards and, of course, to offer her a place to live, and just in general to help her clean up. I called around, I got the details taken care of, they’re time consuming, they’re mind numbing and they’re degrading, talking about turning someone’s dead body into ashes.
I knew I’d pay for it and by golly I did. I haven’t felt well in days. Not even as well as usual. But I think that’s okay because I really needed to help Sonja and I was the person that was better than anybody else I knew at organization. And that’s what she needed, organization. There were relatives there but they were all involved in the grieving process plus she had three kids to take care of so I thought of the way to do everything and got everything set up and then Jim went and got stuff, manifested stuff, the way we usually work, and it did wipe me out.
I can’t say at this point how long I will live because the situation that happened twice in the hospital is continuing. You just do the best you can and if I’m a martyr, sue me. Sometimes you just have to be who you are.
(Reading) “What is a chink?” A chink is any kind of a hole. I think that the word comes from the period when chimneys and houses were made out of stone and it wasn’t necessarily always perfectly dressed. There were little holes and you took your mortar and mixed up some concrete and put some stone in there and chinked it in, or you put some kind of chinking material between the logs in a log cabin to insulate it.
We all have our personality chinks. We are none of us perfectly dressed as far as our stones fitting perfectly together. All of us are still under construction and we all have chinks. And it is those chinks that constitute the continuing possibility of the temptation to think in negative ways, elitist ways, in selfish ways, in power-seeking ways, in controlling ways and so forth.
(Answering a question she has just read.) I would probably say ‘will’ would be a good use of vocabulary for you because I think you understand and are less afraid of will than you are of power. I do not know you well, but I grasp that you are a powerful person; self-confident in the fact that you have special gifts and that you can use them.
This often can scare people; can make it difficult for them to communicate with you if they think they perhaps don’t have that kind of ability. But no matter how much ability you have to think, no matter how much ability we have to love, if we don’t have the will to persevere, we’re not going to get very far. We might be just wonderful people, but we’re not going to finish the race we started in life. Make no mistake about it, life is an ordeal from beginning to end and we are warriors here. We are learning. We are learning how to show love in a world that doesn’t have much love that is really obvious in it.
And more than any other one thing, persistence is what pays off. Certainly, if you do things out of duty and wisdom and you persist all your life, but you don’t have any love, it’s not going to help. If you have a whole lot of love but you don’t have much idea about what you want to do in life, then your will isn’t going to help much.
But it is part of a triad, you see. You have to have the intelligence and the wisdom to know that there is a mystery. You have to have the love in your heart to know what kind of mystery it is and what kind of being you are and how you wish to pursue this mystery. You also have to have the persistence, the sheer dogged persistence the will contains.
Without bitterness, without recriminating yourself for what you’ve done that you perceive subjectively incorrectly, without praising yourself for the things you think you’ve done well, but simply to walk on. Keep the mind as open as possible to the possibilities of the present moment. And when you see that the present moment offers you a chance to indicate that persistent faith and say “Well, I continue to feel hope.” That is a powerful thing to say.
It sometimes makes people feel and sound foolish. But I’m convinced that it’s the people who are persistent, and to those alone, that the doors of perception are gradually opened. If you associate a spiritual power with a worldly power, you’ve made only the same mistake that almost everybody else on this planet has made. The power of the spirit is the power to surrender to the infinite will of the one Creator. It is not an aggrandizement of self at all, it is a surrender. And it has to be as pure as you can make it so that you can hear as well as possible in that silence, in that very, very silent place, what it is that you are to do, and if you are able to get there, then the rest comes pretty easily.
So it really is a very important part of this incarnational experience and you have a great deal of it. I ask you not to be afraid of it, you have not misused it, you have not controlled people with it, you’ve only attempted to use it to learn things for yourself.
I can say to you honestly, there is no stairway to heaven. We will never get there because of the things that I or anyone else can possibly teach. There’s not enough wisdom in the universe to move us anywhere. What will move us are the changes and transformations that take place in us as we engage ourselves in the life we have been given to the best of our ability, to serve with the utmost of humility and the utmost courage and to let things go when it’s obvious that it’s not going to help.
I wish you much light on your path, S1. So long for now. It was delightful to get your letter.
Carla