Hi, everyone. This is Jim McCarty welcoming you to L/L Research’s Podcast, In the Now, Episode #26. L/L Research is a nonprofit organization dedicated to freely sharing spiritually-oriented information and fostering community, and towards this end has two websites: the archive website, LLResearch.org, and the community website, Bring4th.org.

During each episode, those of us at L/L Research form a panel to consider questions from spiritual seekers. Our panel consists of Gary Bean, director of L/L Research, and Austin Bridges, assistant director of L/L Research, along with myself, husband to the late Carla L. Rueckert, scribe for the Ra contact, and president of L/L Research; each of us a devoted seeker and student of the Law of One.

We will be discussing questions that are sent to us from spiritual seekers around the globe. Our replies to these questions are not final or authoritative; instead they are generally subjective interpretations stemming from our own studies and life experiences. We intend this podcast to be a platform of discussion as we consider questions that often challenging to us to articulate our own perspective. We always ask each who listens to exercise his own discernment and listen for her own resonance in determining what is true.

If you would like to submit a question for the show, please do so; our humble podcast relies on your questions. You may either send an email to or go to www.LLResearch.org/podcast for further instructions. Again, I’m Jim McCarty, and we are embarking on a new episode of L/L Research’s weekly podcast, In the Now. Everybody ready to roll?

I am ready.

I am here.

Okay. Our first question is from Rya, Ryan, via Facebook, or maybe it’s Rya Vian; I don’t know. We posted a Ra quote on Facebook that said, “Things come not to those positively oriented but through such beings” (from Session 55.7). Ryan asked if we could elaborate on the meaning of this principle, saying, “It seems important, yet simple, yet also somewhat evasive to my understanding.” So, Gary, would you like to take off with that one?

Sure. Important, simple, and evasive. That’s a really concise description that matches my own understanding or my own feeling on this one, too. The notion of things coming through positively oriented beings is evasive to me because if you consider that according to The Law of One [in 1.7], you are all things, every event, every situation, and every entity, then what is the source of the working if not yourself? Does not everything come from you in the ultimate sense?

If I try to dig into it, though, I believe that Ra refers here to the relative world of many-ness in which there seems to be individual separate selves. In that case, so far as I can make of it, the working comes not from the individual separate self or the incarnate self, but through the incarnate self.

I think this is most easily or rather clearly illustrated and demonstrated in the case of healing. There you have a dynamic between the one to be healed and the healer, whereby the healer is simply a purified, balanced, and opened channel through which the energies of healing move. Ra says [in 66.15] of the healer that it has no will. The healer, then, is a conduit of sorts, an open channel to intelligent infinity for the one to be healed to use or not use for the purpose of healing. I will tack that Ra quote on to the end. Actually…. I’m sorry for the pause there, fellows.

I think we can begin to make a further headway into this question by looking at 54.16. Don is asking Ra, “Let me make an analogy that I have just thought of. A seven-stringed musical instrument may be played by deflecting each string [a] full deflection and releasing it and getting a note. Or, once the strings are capable of being deflected through their full deflection (producing a note), instead of producing the notes this way taking the individual creative personality and deflecting each the proper amount in proper sequence to produce the music. Is this correct?” [Note: The paraphrased version in the podcast has been replaced with original question text.] Ra replies, “This is correct. In the balanced individual the energies lie waiting for the hand of the Creator to pluck harmony.”

In 74.11, Ra is describing the discipline of the personality, and they say, “The heart of the discipline of the personality is three-fold. One, know yourself. Two, accept yourself. Three, become the Creator.” Then they elaborate on the third step: “The third step is that step which, when accomplished, renders one the most humble servant of all, transparent in personality and completely able to know and accept other-selves.” They say about the adept, doing the disciplines of the personality, that “To become the Creator is to become all that there is. There is then no personality in the sense with which the adept begins its learn/teaching.”

So, the two quotes I read about the Creator plucking harmony from the instrument of the self and the disciplines of the personality rendering the personality transparent, I think are other ways to elaborate on the concepts of surrender and transparency. I think that the more work that the positively oriented entity does, the more that they surrender their own expectations of how the moment should be; they surrender their attachments to outcome. They surrender all their little self-centered needs in favor of service and in favor of seeking the One, and that helps to make what was formerly an opaque personality to become clear, transparent, like a window pane, through which the love and the light of the Creator or the Source shines so that things are coming not from the personality, but through the personality.

And to conclude, you could also try to tackle this question from the standpoint of the chakras. When we begin working in green ray or above, we are beginning to transcend the normal structure and identity of the personality shell which consists of the unique properties and blockages of the lower triad of chakras, so that when we do work in green ray or blue and especially indigo, we are more and more becoming channels for that which is greater than or deeper than or truer than the illusory personality self. That is to say that the work is moving through us.

This is about as much headway as I can make of it right now. Back to you.

Good job. Austin, how about you?

I agree with everything Gary said. I feel that it was all relevant to the question. But I did approach the question from a slightly different angle. Whereas Gary elaborated on how things come through us and not from us, I focused more on where Ra says they “come not to positively oriented beings but through such beings.”

So, in the passages leading up to this quote, Ra and Don are having a bit of a complex discussion talking about the differences between the interactions of negative higher density beings and positive higher density beings with the third density beings who call them. And when describing how a positive group like Ra may work with third density entities, they say, in the same question [55.7], “The calling group may have many distortions and be working with much catalyst, as may those of Ra. The overriding desire to serve others, bonded with the unique harmonics of this group’s vibratory complexes, gives us the opportunity to serve as one channel for the One Infinite Creator. Thing come not to those positively oriented, but through such beings.”

So, I think that there’s a chance, a chance that I took in approaching this question, that within the full context of this discussion, they are highlighting the differences between positive and negative behaviors, and this specific quote might be highlighting one of those differences. It could be that regarding the strength of the polarity and the desire of the individuals, a positively oriented being has a greater power to allow things to come through them in service to others, while a negatively oriented being has a greater power to bring things to itself in service to self.

To use Ra’s example of the Ra contact trio, the overriding desire to serve others enables a great work to be accomplished that is coming through the beings involved, and I don’t think this is referencing how those of Ra spoke through Carla, but rather Ra has included it in those beings that the work moved through. It was not a working where things came to the individuals involved. They were not doing the working to gain any sort of material good or comfort, but rather they simply had the strong desire to serve others, and so this thing came through them.

Conversely, if an entity or a group of entities had such a will to serve the self, things would rather come to them — power, material, whatever the entity desired — in order to be of more service to itself.

And I don’t think that this should be read to imply that positively oriented beings will not receive anything at all, and that we have to just trudge forward accepting the fact that nothing will ever come to us. As Ra said elsewhere in the material [in 8.1], “Each entity will receive the opportunity that each needs.” If a person desires to serve others, it will receive the opportunity it needs to do so.

This could perhaps even be something that seems material or transient, like Ra talks about [in 34.10] Albert Schweitzer being able to procure funds so that he could fulfill his own vision of serving others. In one sense, and not the sense that Ra was talking about, this money came to Schweitzer, but it was not out of his desire to serve himself: the money was not an attempt to gain power, but it was rather just a step in the process of his service to others. I think it was an opportunity he needed to have his service move through him. It’s a type of coming to him that Ra was not talking about in this passage.

And so, I don’t think it’s necessarily black and white situation, but rather an explanation of how positive beings work as opposed to negative beings. The work ultimately moves through positive beings rather than bringing things to them.

And that was my take on the quote. How do you feel about that, Jim?

I really like your take because that is what I was going to say. So besides saying “ditto,” I’ll elaborate just a little bit.

Ra also said [in 7.15] that service to others also results in service to self because you are part of the larger grouping that is being served. The credo of the white magician is that he or she seeks to know in order to serve. So, what they seek in the way of power or love or unity with the Creator is for the purpose of being able to serve others, especially to serve the Creator in everyone that they meet. It’s a whole lot like channeling: a positively oriented entity wishes to be of service to others; if they can offer themselves as a channel of one kind or another, that which they are able to offer comes through them quite literally as channeling, as the Ra contact did or as any channel that is seeking to be of service to others.

So, I think that what you had to say there, Austin, was quite on target. I think the crucial ingredient here is what they say of the positively oriented entity, so that’s kind of a clue that the positive entity is seeking, but what that entity is seeking is not just for the self; it is especially for others, and it will of necessity redound 1 to the self and affect the self and benefit the self as well.

Any other comments on this particular first question?

None from me.

Nope; not from me.

Okay. Well, we’ll move on to Lily via email: “In The Law of One, Book I, page 100, Ra says [in 7.16], ‘The progress through densities is sequential,’ meaning we evolve from lower densities to higher ones, but in The Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues, Session #23, Aaron says, ‘this whole process of evolution, these eight densities, is an ungraded classroom.’ Basically, the learning process can be reversed, and for some, the material was learned in whatever order one was ready to learn. (That’s from page 384.) So the question is: Is evolution sequential or not? We have Ra and Aaron seeming to have different points of view.”

Austin, what do you think?

I remember reading this passage and being just as confused as Lily because it seemed like what Aaron was saying was not compatible with everything else I’ve read from L/L Research channelings, and I think that this is ultimately an issue of how channeling is not necessarily a hard science. If you do a meta-analysis of many channeled works, you’re bound to find a lot of inconsistencies, and you’ll also find a lot of consistencies as well, which I believe [is] where the focus should ultimately be. But I also have a skeptical mind, I think like Lily, that will not necessarily ignore the inconsistencies.

So, I think for many who are drawn to the Ra material, one of the appealing aspects is how it seems to be done: the information seems to have minimal distortion contained in the words; whereas other channeling is done in a state where the instrument’s mind adds more color to the information, and it seems as though this is not a major factor in the Ra material, and I believe that to be basically true.

So, is this inconsistency the result of imprecise channeling? “Imprecise” might not be the right word to use. Being consciously channeled, Aaron necessarily has to be filtered through the so-called stained glass window of Barbara’s own mind, distortions, her preconceptions, and because of this I don’t necessarily think this statement from Aaron is outright false. But perhaps Aaron is discussing a slightly different idea and mechanic, but applying the same terminology, which could be the cause of confusion.

But ultimately, if we are to assume that Aaron and Ra are talking about the same process but giving conflicting accounts, I would agree with Ra, not just because I feel there is a special quality to the information in the Ra material, but because it also just makes more sense to me, at least from our third density perspective of linear time. It seems to me that evolution is macrocosmically a series of lessons for the soul. Ra describes the cosmology with a progression of sequential distortions, and the system of densities that we move through seem to be a sort of representation or an analog of these distortions.

So, we are, in a sense, making our way back to the Creator by recounting these distortions in our experiences and lessons. As these distortions are ultimately built off of — or as these distortions ultimately built off of themselves, it makes sense to me that our experiences and learnings of them would also be sequential, and it ultimately makes sense logically, similar to how we learn and evolve in the microcosm of our own lives. Attempting to skip to the most advanced lesson will simply not yield results: you could be a first-grader that decides to go to a calculus class in high school, and nothing is going to make sense there. But if you have the groundwork of going through all of the lessons up to calculus, then you might have a firm grasp of it. And so it ultimately makes sense logically, similarly to that learning process that we go through in school. Attempting to skip to the most advanced lessons will simply not yield results as a groundwork has not been laid for those lessons to take hold. I feel that each density lays a groundwork for the following densities for our soul where having learned the type of lesson necessary in one density, we are now more prepared to learn the lessons in the next density.

Ra ultimately describes the purpose or the effect of these lessons as accepting more light or moving closer to the unity of the Creator. With each lesson learned and step taken in evolution we can move closer to the light. But there is a point where the light is too much for us to accept or experience, and then we must have more experience in order to learn more lessons and then subsequently accept more light.

However, we know that Wanderers exist: entities from higher densities who incarnate, not just to serve, but also to learn lessons in lower densities, and I wouldn’t necessarily view this as their learning being out of sequence. In incarnating into third density, I think they’re going back, and — I don’t think they’re going back and relearning third density lessons, but using the environment of third density to help aid their learning of their higher lessons. I still view this as sort of sequential, despite having an incarnation being seemingly non-sequential in the densities. So, perhaps this is what Aaron was talking about with the Wanderers that can incarnate in the lower densities; but having read the fuller passage, I don’t think it is.

I think a more likely explanation is that the entire concept of sequential lessons relies on a linear view of time. And Ra does say that there is past, present, and future in third density, and they even go on to say in the same passage [16.22] where they say that that they’re still attempting to learn the understanding where time is seen as only present, rather than being sort of a linear sequence.

But perhaps at the heart of Aaron’s words is an attempt to communicate this ultimate reality of a non-linear nature of the Creator. At least I think Aaron is asking us sort of to consider an ultimate reality that is not bound by the sort of linear thinking that we normally have. And on the surface, it is at odds with Ra’s explanation of sequential evolution, but I think that it is still useful in spiritual contemplation.

That’s the most I could do with that.

That’s a great job, Austin. (Laughing) Well, Gary, how would you like to follow that?

Mine will be a little bit shorter. Yes, I agree with what Austin said and especially regarding how logically speaking it makes sense that anything will proceed in a sequence. I was thinking of aging while listening to Austin talk, in terms of, I mean, you move from 9 years old to 10 years old to 11 and so forth and any psychological development moves in a sequence, too, though not always evenly or uniformly. But there is in 16.38, Don says, “Then the Law of One is truly universal in creating the progression towards the eighth density or octave in all galaxies. Is this correct?” Ra says, “I am Ra. This is correct. There are infinite forms, infinite understandings, but the progression is one.”

There is definitely a lot to be said in terms of what Austin was covering in the first part of his answer when comparing different channeled sources and performing a meta-analysis of different sources, and there are multiple things that could account for that discrepancy. On my personal path, while I definitely take in multiple sources of information, Ra or The Law of One — the Confederation message in general, but especially The Law of One — is my personal standard bearer, and so far as I can tell from Ra, that all learning and evolution does happen in terms of the manifest world in a sequence.

I don’t think Austin touched on the possibility that Aaron may have also, one potential point that Aaron may have been trying to communicate was the need to remove judgment in evaluating the self. I don’t know; I’m only speculating. I haven’t read the full Aaron reply there.

But, that’s my shorter answer, and Austin’s is definitely most excellent. Jim?

Thank you. Well, I think that there’s a chance that both could be true to some degree. I think that what Ra says about the progression through the density being sequential is absolutely correct. If you look at it in a conscious, coherent fashion, where we’re studying the lessons with intention and purity, we’re setting out to do what Austin said: get the basics for calculus before we get there. We can do a little bit of arithmetic and some math and some algebra first, so I think that is really true.

But if you look at the third density, for example, we’re supposedly attempting to learn how to open our hearts in love, at least 51 percent of the time so that we can achieve graduation. But along the line there, you know, since we’re not totally zeroed in consciously on what exactly we’re doing — we’re just sort of in a lot of cases doing it without knowing that we’re doing it, we tend to look at other things, too. We tend to try to be wiser in some of our choices. We try to think about what we’re doing more than just going with an impulse or a wild idea. So we engage in a little bit of wisdom here and there. Now and then if we able to open our hearts some and be of more service to others because we have more compassion for people about us, maybe after a while we think, well, maybe I could refine this a little bit, and I could try to be a little wiser with what I’m doing with my energy here and try to be more helpful in that regard. So, in that way, we’re blending a little bit of wisdom and a little bit of compassion, which is sixth density work, you know, trying to become more efficient or powerful as Ra would say, in our service.

So, I think that we can engage in other lessons in the third density or in any of the densities. We can try to refine what we’ve learned before. If we’re in the fifth density and seeking very passionately and powerfully for wisdom and inspiration and clear communication, we may want to do a little bit of work on our compassion as well. We might see where that would be helpful. So I think that we can engage in other lessons in all the densities, but I think the major focus in each density is on the lessons of the density in order for us to learn what we need to learn to be graduated from the density. We can’t graduate from seventh density in third density, but we can, you know, maybe now and then feel a bit of a timeless feeling about us because in our meditations we are more successful in doing that. So, my answer is sort of both, but mostly what Ra had to say. (Laughing)

Any final comments on the question?

Yes, I had a thought about the doing advance work. I forgot that it had popped into my head while Austin was giving his answer.

And in 76.4, Ra talks about the group using the Banishing Ritual and its efficacy. And they say, “The efficacy of this ritual is only beginning to be, shall we say, at the lower limits of the truly magical. In doing the working those aspiring to adepthood have done the equivalent of beginning the schoolwork, many grades ahead.” So, I think it is possible to jump ahead to do advanced work or work that is not precisely at our level.

Ra goes on to say, “For the intelligent student this is not to be discouraged; rather to be encouraged is the homework, the reading, the writing, the arithmetic, as you might metaphorically call the elementary steps towards the study of being.” I gather that it’s possible to jump ahead, so to speak, but nevertheless, what you’re jumping ahead to is a level, a lesson, a layer that has been laid out sequentially.

Ra says [in 3.8] that the entire infinite universe is laid out hierarchically, or its energies are arranged hierarchically. So, there is a ladder; there is a progression; there is a movement. Of course, the entire time there is no ladder; there is no progression; there is no movement, because all is whole, complete, and perfect already, and all is already infinite in nature. But in so far as we are in this stream of upward spiraling light and this stream of evolution, things, according to Ra, are laid out in that sequence.

Lily mentions in her email, she says, “Basically the learning process can be reversed,” and I don’t recall anywhere in The Law of One Ra talking about any sort of retrograde movement in or going backwards in sequence. Ra was also talking about Wanderers and how that might fit in to some extent, in that the Wanderer is of fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-density origin, and then incarnates in a third density experience.

But beyond that example, my take from The Law of One is that progress can certainly be stalled, you might say, or slowed or retarded, or an entity can be asleep and not engaging the gears of spiritual evolution, or they can accelerate their journey. But so far as I understand, we are on a boat moving on a river, and that boat only goes forward, and it goes forward through sequences of learning and lessons and experiences and incarnations, one following the other and so forth, in cycles, too, as well, but nevertheless, sequential within those cycles or a sequence of cycles.

That wraps it up for me.

Good job. Austin, any final comments?

Yes. In listening to both of your answers — particularly Gary mentioned the idea of psychological development — it triggered a thought for me that would reference one of my favorite writers, reference him a lot. In Ken Wilbur and his integral theory — and integral theory, essentially what it is is, or at least part of it is, is this amalgamation of developmental psychology where Ken took as much developmental psychological studies as possible and sort of wrapped them up into a unified theory of development. And I think that this theory is a good microcosmic view of the ultimate progress through the densities. And even Ra talked about [in 16.51, 17.34] sub-densities and how we progress through densities by going through the sub-densities.

And essentially, what Ken Wilbur believes through his studies is that we basically progress developmentally along a sequential path, just like this, but there are aspects of our personality, types of learning, types of development that can progress independently of the others, and so a person might, for a very simplified example, be very emotionally intelligent, but lack logical intelligence or vice versa. Somebody might be incredibly book smart but lack complete emotional intelligence. And there are many different types and different distortions that this can apply to, but essentially these things develop in an independent way, but they are propelled by a sort of center of gravity, is what he would call it, where a person’s collection of their being sort of centers upon a certain point in this spectrum, and it slowly rises as the person develops on all levels. And having aspects of their personality reaching up can help the lower aspects be pulled up by those higher aspects.

So, that might be part of what Aaron was talking about: perhaps there are. This can apply to the process of reincarnation where maybe in a certain incarnation, we’ve learned some really great lessons in a certain area, but we’ve neglected to learn other lessons, and so we choose another incarnation which might seem to be sort of going backwards and trying to bring those aspects of our self up to our center of gravity and help to elevate the levels that we failed to develop in the first place. So, perhaps that is touching on what Aaron was talking about.

I also think that Gary had a point in perhaps Aaron was expressing in a way to remove judgment from the evaluation process. I think that is an important part of this development process in a whole, in that at a point we view hierarchies and linear thinking as judgmental in a way, and that saying something is more advanced or higher than something else can seem like a judgment that is condemning the lower, where Aaron might be attempting to dispel that so that people can remove the judgment. But ultimately, after the judgment is removed from the hierarchy of process — which Ken Wilbur tries to do by changing the name, the word “hierarchy” to “holarchy” instead — that might have been what Aaron was trying to do: just remove that judgment so that we can then evaluate without the judgment. I think that is also a pretty good likely source of the inconsistency there.

I think a quick nuance to add about holarchy is that from my reading, part of the reason he used that term was also to indicate that hierarchy consisted of what he called holons, and each holon was simultaneously a part and a whole. It was a whole that contained parts, and it was a part of a greater whole, and that sequence, according to his understanding, went up and down the chain infinitely with no end.

Right, yeah. And another big reason is because one of the points he reiterates the most is that when you’re going up this spectrum, this sequential spectrum, you are not elevating and leaving behind those previous lessons and leaving behind the previous levels; you are transcending and including them, rather than transcending and expelling them. So, instead of it being sort of straight line hierarchy, it’s more a growing outward and growing up, instead of just advancing forward.

Well, you guys did a great job on that. Our time’s pretty much up. We’ve got one more question. Do you want to save it for next time or try it now?

I vote that we skip it, but it’s up to you guys.

Yes, we can save it for next time.

Okay. We shall save it for next time. Well, you’ve been listening to L/L Research’s weekly podcast, In the Now. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please visit our websites: LLResearch.org and Bring4th.org. Thanks so much for listening, and a special thank you to those who submitted questions. If you’d like to send us a question for use before the next show, please read the instructions on our page at www.LLResearch.org/podcast. We want you to know we love you very much. We hope your New Year started off great and that you have a lot of love and joy and new learnings in the New Year. New episodes are published weekly to the archive website, Wednesdays at 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Have a wonderful week.

Thanks to Mary A. for transcribing this episode, and Kristin Y. for editing!

  1. redound (verb): to come back or reflect upon a person ↩