Hi, everyone. This is Jim McCarty welcoming you to the L/L Research Podcast, In the Now, Episode #35. 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 challenge us to articulate our own perspectives. 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 this show, please do so; our humble podcast relies on your questions. You may send them either in an email to , or go to www.LLResearch.org/podcast for further instructions. Again, I’m Jim McCarty and we are now embarking on a new episode of L/L Research’s weekly podcast, In the Now. Is everybody here and ready to go?

This entity is.

I am here and I am ready to go.

Okay. We have our first question from Ivan via email and he wants to know, “What can I do to ensure that my egoic desire is harmonious with the Universal Desire?” Austin, what do you think about that question?

Well, I think that the very fact that someone would be contemplating this question of whether their “egoic desire” is congruent with their higher path means that they already possess the self-awareness and care to help bring these two into alignment. In my experience, seekers and wanderers can tend to be filled with self-doubt and criticism. But when these are balanced and wielded in a positive way, I think this can be turned into a great tool for analyzing and becoming aware of ourselves and our higher desire. To wonder about our own intentions and desires is precisely the type of self-investigation that I think allows us to become clearer and more positive beings of service. But, as I suspect in Ivan’s case, the answers aren’t always so clear, and our self-investigation might sometimes seem to get stunted. And I think that the best advice I could give to somebody who is struggling with that is just to have patience when searching for those answers and trust that, through consistent meditation, contemplation, prayer, and self-work, we can be revealed to ourselves.

Also, I think that when we feel a persistent desire to do something, even if we aren’t sure if it’s congruent with our higher desires, it’s worth pursuing, keeping in mind that it may simply be a learning experience and that these desires may not necessarily be fulfilled in the way that we’re hoping. In my experience, if our desires are born from a place of so-called “ego,” then pursuing those desires will eventually deliver us catalyst that will be helpful in revealing these aspects of our ego that we may not have been able to identify at first. Acting on such a desire may deliver us to a transformation that then shifts our desires and helps us to get a clearer picture of that higher desire or that “universal desire” that we’re talking about. But the key, I think, is to just always be contemplating the desires, their fulfillments, where it’s leading us, and where our distortions might be in the situation. So long as these questions are asked of ourselves continually, I think pursuing desires is the best way to achieve spiritual growth. Even asking yourself this question means, I think, that you have the faculty to do so. That’s what I think.

Good job, Austin. Gary, how about you? What’s your take on the idea?

I have a less good answer, beginning with probably something Ivan has [said], that we’ve never said before at L/L Research, and that is to recommend meditation. That is, as Ra says, always an aid to knowing the self, and presuming Ivan is familiar with L/L Research, he will know that that is a repeated theme here. And also, my reply would follow some of the broad outline of Austin’s, wherein he encouraged working with that desire. It is unknown exactly what Ivan means by “egoic desire,” but I’m sure we could arrive at a general ballpark idea of what that is. But without examining what is and is not egoic desire—whether egoic desire is a term that applies, [but] just working with Ivan’s assertion that there is egoic desire—I would reply with the thought that you shouldn’t try to rid yourself of what you call egoic desire. Don’t try to control it or force it into something else. Rather, aim your intention upon truth, upon the Creator as you perceive It and sustain your seeking over the months and years. Seek discipline as you move through the cycles of time and energy and experience, and reorient your vision again and again upon the Creator as you go. Like Austin said, this requires patience. And as you engage that process by focusing and focusing and focusing again upon the Creator, the various splinters of small-self-oriented egoic desire, so-called, will gradually converge and disclose to you their actual nature. They will evolve and transform into a more unified and more purified and more universal or higher-chakra centered desire that expresses more and more of your actual and your deeper nature. That egoic desire contains energy that is fuel for your path, and in working with it, it will be released from those small containers of the ego. And that energy will become available to you and naturally of its own, so to speak, become as you say, harmonious with the universal desire. That’s about all I could think of in response to your great question, Ivan.

Good give, good job, Gary. I think both you and Austin have done a bang-up job here. Let’s see, we’ve got …

Thank you.

Universal desire: I think we could take that to be the desire of the Creator. And as we remember from the Ra contact, the basic desire of the Creator—the free will choice—was to make this creation in order that the Creator would have more ways of knowing Itself. Each of us has portions of the Creator, then—has a free will. We can exercise every wish. Now, Ivan’s asking how should he exercise his free will in order to help the Creator know more of Who the Creator is. And I think that, really, you can’t make any mistakes. Like Ra said, there really are no mistakes. But I know what you mean; you want to try to get to the heart of what the will of the Creator is for you and not just your will. It’s what Jesus said when He was contemplating the cross: “Not my will, but thy will be done.” And I think that each of us needs to remember that, as hard as it is to imagine, the Creator’s made this infinite universe with billions of planets and stars. I mean, beyond number; it’s infinite. Here we are, little specks of dust on this planet Earth, which itself is a speck of dust, and yet the Creator is within each one of us: closer than our breath, closer than our hands and our feet. [It] is there, has been there all our lives, will be for all eternity. And if we can listen to that little intuitive voice, that still small voice, that’s the Creator. So as you’re asking yourself what you should do when you come up with an idea, see what kind of response you get, what kind of a feeling comes. You know, you can call it intuition. You can call it the still small voice. Whatever you want to call it, It’s the Creator and the Creator has been guiding us all our lives through that still small voice, through our intuitions.

So continue to ask those questions and see what kind of response you get. You will get some kind of response, and I’m sure that a person as conscious as Ivan is, who asks this kind of question, has been in touch with that still small voice and has heard from it before. So continue to ask, and in an open-hearted and open-minded way, go through your day with as much love as you can. A fellow by the name of Aleister Crowley put the whole thing into a phrase. He said, “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.” Later I think he adjusted it some for the positive polarity. He said, “Do what thou wilt under love is the whole of the law.” So you can’t make a mistake. You can only get closer and closer to the desire of your soul and to the desire of the Creator. And I think the Creator is very much in sympathy in whatever your soul has decided before the life incarnation. I mean, all of us have made pre-incarnative choices and we’ve wanted to learn certain lessons here. And those are the lessons we decided, before the incarnation, would be most in congruency or harmonious with the Creator. So just keep doing what you’re doing and do it with as much love as you can and as consciously as you can. Any final thoughts from either of you, Austin or Gary?

Nope.

One thought; that was a very inspiring answer. And also, there’s a particular passage from The Law of One that I would like to read because I think it’s relevant here, talking about desire. And that is in 18.5; Ra is responding to a question that Jim asked about the proper role of the individual self in this density and Ra responded:

The proper role of the entity is in this density to experience all things desired, to then analyze, understand, and accept these experiences, distilling from them the love/light within them. Nothing shall be overcome. That which is not needed falls away.

The orientation develops due to analysis of desire. These desires become more and more distorted towards conscious application of love/light as the entity furnishes itself with distilled experience. We have found it to be inappropriate in the extreme to encourage the overcoming of any desires, except to suggest the imagination rather than the carrying out in the physical plane, as you call it, of those desires not consonant with the Law of One; this preserving the primal distortion of free will.

The reason it is unwise to overcome is that overcoming is an unbalanced action creating difficulties in balancing in the time/space continuum. Overcoming thus creates the further environment for holding onto that which apparently has been overcome.

All things are acceptable in the proper time for each entity, and in experiencing, in understanding, in accepting, [and] then sharing with other-selves, the appropriate description shall be moving away from the distortions of one kind to distortions of another which may be more consonant with the Law of One.

It is, shall we say, a shortcut to simply ignore or overcome any desire. It must instead be understood and accepted. This takes patience and experience which can be analyzed with care, with compassion for [the] self and for other-self.

Just wanted to put that one out there for Ivan.

Good one. Okay, Gary, anything more for you?

No; thanks for asking.

Okay, next question is from Michale, perhaps, or I think so. “Could you please explain personality transparency and how does this relate to an unblocked third chakra?” Gary, what have you to say about this?

It’s a really interesting question and I began by just trying to get my head around what it means to be a transparent or nontransparent personality. So I’ll start there: a transparent personality is a personality that still exists as a personality, but it is characterized by not obscuring the Creator’s love and light with an opaqueness of self. So, what makes a personality opaque? Eckhart Tolle might say that it is identification with past conditioning and mental patterns, and absence of witnessing awareness. In such a state, one is unconscious in one degree or another. One is blindly, knee-jerkedly, even mechanically following a great variety of conditioning from the past that’s kicked into gear by the catalyst of the moment. And in so far as that is happening, one is confined by the values and the internal logic of that conditioning. So for instance, those values and logic might demand: an enhancement of the separate self, or defense of the separate self, or obsession upon or clinging to the separate self, undervaluation or overvaluation of that separate self, seeking of gratification or ease or pleasure for the separate self, etc., etc. So as your awareness is identified with this separate entity (who most of us think that we are) and the attention is focused exclusively upon it, then one’s will and energies [are] reserved strictly for this separate being. Then, it is the separate self which is energized and made solid or opaque. It is the separate self that others will see and respond to and relate to. And then what is obscured, either partially or fully, is the subtle presence of the spacious and loving and accepting and witnessing awareness. It is the greater self that is operating in the higher chakras that is being obscured. The non-transparent personality—this opaqueness—cloaks the humble and authentic self that is, at heart, honest and service-oriented and radiant, that self which offers a clearer mirror reflecting love, light and unity and divinity to the onlooker.

So, that said (if that made any sense), how does removing the blockages of yellow-ray, or third energy center contribute to a transparent personality? So naturally, I conceived of this as in the terms that the Confederation describes the function of yellow ray. So first and foremost, by removing the blockages of yellow ray, the energy is rising to the heart chakra, granting the entity its first conscious awareness of love. In so doing, the entity has taken a very important step away from the illusion of the individual “I”—that opaque self—and into the authentic self, into a beginning awareness of the unity of all things due to the melting nature of love. And what happens when one unblocks the third ray and becomes more transparent? I believe that that necessarily involves releasing the need for dominance and control through personal will in social dynamics and groups—not only the self’s dominance and control of groups, but releasing the need for one’s particular group to dominate and control other groups. For instance, people in the USA may be experiencing a yellow-ray blockage to say, “Our country’s number one and we should rule the world,” as it were, or dominate in some way. I don’t know how far that goes actually. But also, unblocking the yellow ray would involve releasing the need for enhancement and status of the self in relationship to the group or the group in relationship to other groups. Which isn’t to say that to focus upon groups or ones relationship to the group is an activity of blocked energy. Rather, it is the particular type of orientation that one has to their group, or the orientation that one has regarding their group to other groups, that blocks third ray. So if you can untangle that mess, good luck and back to you, Jim.

Thank you, Gary.

You’re welcome.

A lot of effort went into that, I’m sure. Austin, what do you think about that question?

I think that Gary and I are on the same page, especially in regards to what exactly a transparent personality is. I have some slightly not incongruent thoughts about how yellow ray relates to that, but maybe supplementary. And my idea what yellow ray (I don’t know if it is a popular interpretation or not, but I’m not sure if you guys would agree), but the third chakra would be the yellow ray, in which Ra describes as concerning the entity in relation to groups, societies, or large numbers of mind/body/spirit complexes. And I’ve always viewed this ray as a sort of social identity ray—like our interface with society—where we place ourselves in society and how we relate to where society places us. As we grow up, we kind of struggle to learn exactly how we fit into society at large. This involves adopting various social norms that will help us to define ourselves as some part of a group. This might be seen in things like cliques and social circles in schools. I think that these start developing once children are first interacting with yellow ray. You can look at the typical tropes. Like we have jocks and nerds and band kids and skaters and Goths, and a wide array of many more types of social identities that kids can kind of try on and see how it feels, using that identity to relate to others. And they might relate in kinship with others of their own group or similar groups, or they might have some sort of rivalry with another group. Like there’s the classic sort of nerds versus jocks rivalry kind of thing. Outside of school this sort of identity might be seen in something like religion, pride for location, like patriotism (like Gary was talking about), career path, even a music taste, being a fan of a sports team, and even things like gender identity. These are all ways for us to identify ourselves within society. And with these things we become part of a larger group and we allow others in society to have some context for how we fit into that society. So what I think happens is that, as we grow up and go through the struggle of finding our place in society, we sort of pick and choose these things. We find out what fits or maybe some things are sort of thrust upon us like religion, and we interface with society through these identities and take on their qualities, which may include things like moral ideas or a framework of how we relate to others. Sometimes these identities are referred to as masks, as we put them on in order to present ourselves to those around us in a certain way.

But as one begins the spiritual path of evolution, we learn to contemplate these things about ourselves. We are introduced to a higher level of introspection that takes us deeper to the heart of our true selves. And once we do this, we can start to question whether or not these social identities are congruent with this higher nature. I believe this is where the idea of transparency of personality comes in. We start to examine these masks that we wear for society—our personalities—and we realize that we are holding onto some of them because of desires or ideas or biases that don’t serve us or others and so we can discard those masks. We might find some masks that seem to be a pretty good representation of how we see ourselves in our higher nature. And we can hold onto those and develop those more fully, allowing our personality to grow closer to our truer nature or become more transparent to it—this truer nature being the Creator Gary was talking about. We might find some masks that are kind of in between that we really want to retain because they make it easy for us to connect with those around us in society. But it still feels sort of off, so we have to do a lot of work to try to balance those masks and see if we can bring them closer into alignment with who we truly are while still identifying socially with those masks. So when our social identities no longer obscure that which they truly are, I think we have become crystalized in our yellow ray. I think this is why Ra says that, in order to completely unblock yellow ray, we have to love all which are in relationship to us and hope for our other-selves’ joy, peace, and comfort. Because this is the natural state of the Creator that we wish to become transparent to in ourselves when we polarize positively. We no longer allow our social identities to impose upon us how we feel about those around us, nor how we feel about ourselves. The social identity we have retained and crystallized is in alignment with our higher path and it allows us to feel love for all those who are in relationship to us. So that’s how I see the yellow ray relating to transparent identity. How about you, Jim?

Good job, Austin. Well, there’s personal transparency. I think we have to make an assumption here that what Michale is talking about is the removal of various distortions that we each have as we move through our incarnations [and] that those are the reasons we are here and we’re trying to balance them. I’d say probably personality, transparency, or a balanced personality is what she’s talking about (or he, I’m not sure). And then we also have to make an assumption about the unblocked third chakra, and that is that also the orange and the red are probably unblocked, or it won’t work really to get any energy through to the heart chakra. So what happens then, when we have a basically balanced personality that is able to get into the heart chakra? I think what we’re all trying to do here in the third density is to reach this situation where we can find a way to balance our distortions and get into our heart and begin to share the love and light of the Creator with all of those around us—begin to serve others more than we serve ourselves. And hopefully, if we have an actual transparent personality or a balanced personality, that percentage would be much greater than the 51% that is necessary for graduation into fourth density. So the personality transparency relates to the unblocked third chakra, I do believe, in unlocking the unconditional love and the compassion that rests in the heart chakra so that we begin to more purely reflect the nature of the Creator at that level of our being. And that’s really the whole purpose of the 75,000 years we spend here on planet earth in the third density. Any other thoughts on that idea, question?

75,000 years sounds like such a long time in light of how intensive these years are. Yeah, I do have a reply. And both of your responses were excellent per usual, but Austin, yours was especially smokin’ today. I realize that I had defined blockage of the yellow ray far too narrowly in terms of dominance and control, which is certainly one aspect of blockage. And it’s probably that through which the negative polarity maximizes in order to exclude the heart completely and do their thing, reach intelligent infinity through the primary chakras and so forth. I really liked what you said regarding how the yellow ray is a ray of social identity through which we interface with our society and through which we explore how we fit into groups [and] how those groups relate to us. And you likened them to masks, and I realized then that— Or rather, I guess I should ask you; are you then saying that the more we identify with those masks and the more that they interfere with our ability to love and appreciate all others, then the more that that mask serves as a blockage?

Yeah, I think that is pretty much close to what I’m saying. I think that, especially in terms of accessing higher energy centers, I think that some masks can be congruent with higher energy centers so long as there is a conscious realization of how that mask operates within society and then how it also relates to our higher natures or the Creator in that way. But otherwise, yeah, if somebody identifies so strongly with the social identity that it completely blocks their ability to love a certain group of other people—let’s say, some social group you belong to—one of the things that really defines that group is that they do not associate with this other group of people. Then I think that that is identifying so strongly with the mask that it’s a blockage.

Wow, that’s brilliant and that leads me to think of Ra describing how (I don’t know if they used the word “base,” but that’s the word that comes to my mind; that’s a concept that comes to my mind) how all—even the most base desires, [which] are aspects or the gross aspects of the physical body, so forth—can be uplifted, transmuted, transformed. I think they said this in the context of sexuality. So likewise, the mask that we wear (you mention them becoming congruent and in alignment with our higher natures), through the process of spiritual evolution, it’s not so much that we rip the mask off, but rather, that energy at that level is lifted up and transmuted. And the mask, likewise, changes to be more congruent and in alignment with our higher nature. And then the more that that happens, the more that it becomes see-through, becomes transparent, and it stops obscuring the higher nature. Would you …

Yeah, yeah, in this analogy, I guess. Analogies only go so far.

Mm-hmm.

But the— I completely lost what I was going to say.

Transmuting the mask into …

Right. The mask [is] one thing that I liken, in yellow ray, to Carl Jung’s “persona,“ which is essentially the same thing. Our persona is the masks that we put on to relate to society. And Carl Jung says that, at a certain point, once we individuate (which I relate to polarizing and accessing higher energy centers), the persona dissolves. But when I hear that word “dissolves,” I don’t think that it disappears. I think that it becomes sort of flexible and molds to that higher nature because I think the mask is still necessary for us to interface with society. If we want to effect change in the world, if we want to serve others, we have to be able to connect with others in some way. And connecting with others on a societal level is crucial because that is the density that we’re in. We’re in the third density, the third-ray density, and so we are in the density of social interaction. And so it’s crucial for us to have the masks to interface at all, but those masks can sort of conform to that which is higher that we are attempting to polarize towards.

Hmm. And in that regard, then, even physical clothing itself, the material that we wear, can be an expression of our group membership, our tribal identity as it were, and can be kind of a physical manifestation of the analogy of the mask, in a way. And some people wear clothing to really say who they are. And like you were saying about groups being exclusive, some people wear clothing in order to say, “I am a member of this exclusive group and I reject this other group.“ Whereas, some people can wear clothing simply for the utility of it and not pay too much attention (and you know, with so many infinite variety of shades between). But for some reason my mind made an association and thought of how clothing relates to social identity.

Yeah. I think clothing is probably one of the most obvious and direct aspects of social identity. I don’t really think about clothing too much nowadays. I mean, I buy things that I like to wear, and I like the look of. And just doing so is a choice to present to others what I like to look at and what I like to present myself as. But think about being in high school: how much stress there is trying to pick the type of clothing that will properly identify you as the social group that you want to be in, especially with the more drastic social groups. Like I mentioned Goths; you see a Goth person on the street and you know what social group they belong to and they want to show you what social group they belong to. They’re trying to tell you something about themselves without you knowing them on an individual level.

Yeah, I realized that not long ago when I was thinking about people that try to dress and look tough or toughly like bikers, for instance (and I’m not saying this is true of all bikers or gang members), where they put a lot of effort into their costume, so to speak. And that’s what it is; it’s a costume that has certain characteristics or markers that identify them as being one of that particular group. And regarding the pressures of high school, that is certainly true as a little carryover that hasn’t completely left my brain. And so far as we’re on the topic of clothing, recently my wife and I got our first home and it’s created some small shifts in my own attitude towards myself. And I think one of those may be some little tweaking of yellow ray in that I feel the need to dress a little bit more properly—collared shirts a little bit more, button-up (and I don’t know if I am conforming to my perception of what the neighborhood is like or so forth), but I just felt this need to kind of stand a little bit taller and look a little bit more that way. And it also occurred to me (Jeremy and I were having this conversation) that in so doing, I’m also making it easier for me to integrate and flow within society so that people see, hopefully, less of my appearance and can more readily hear what it is I have to say or more readily feel my energetic vibration, as it were, versus being caught up on what I may be wearing that thus impedes whatever message may be communicated from me vocally or energetically.

Interesting point.

All right, guys, you all are hot!

Sorry about the tangent.

No; you guys are really doing well. I think that takes us to the end of the show.

I think so.

Does indeed.

Next week we’ll start off with Jeremy’s questions, which will probably be an entire show by themselves. So, you’ve been listening to the L/L Research weekly podcast, In the Now. If you’ve enjoyed the show … and how could you not! … 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. The episodes are published to the archive website every Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern. We love you all; please know that every day, and have a wonderful week.

Thanks to Mary A. for transcribing this episode, and Nancye G. for editing!