Good Morning, everyone! Namaste! The soul in me greets the soul in you! Thank you very much for rising so early and coming to listen to me speak about the ET channeling experiment which has been going on at L/L Research ever since 1962. I hope you find this story worth your while!

This book, A Book of Days; Channelings from the Holy Spirit, was published earlier this year. Why would I come to a UFO convention to speak about such a book? It seems like a long stretch! And yet the production of this little book of thoughts for the day is part and parcel of the story of L/L Research’s experiment in ET channeling. I will discuss this book later. Included in it is a substantial Appendix in which I report on my findings about the art of channeling so far. I will share my thinking with you. But first, let me start at our beginning! Once upon a time …

…There was born a son to Tully and Elizabeth Elkins. They named him Donald Tully. He created an ET channeling experiment which is unique, I believe, in UFO contactee literature. This experiment came out of his studies of the paranormal.

Elkins was born in 1930, a native Kentuckian who graduated from Speed Scientific School, the engineering college of the University of Louisville, in mechanical engineering. He went on to take his M.E. master’s degree there and also received a master’s degree in general engineering. For ten years, he taught at Speed School, offering half a generation of students their training in physics and mechanical engineering.

He had two interruptions during his tenure at Speed School. Firstly, his educational years spanned the Korean War, and Elkins’ National Guard unit was activated while he was an undergraduate. Don rapidly became a Master Sergeant, at that time the youngest man holding that rank in the Army, having been installed, bending regulations, before he was 21. He was a born teacher, used to strenuous activity in the woods and rivers of Kentucky, and a crack shot. He led a unit of light artillery. Fortunately for his longevity, his unit was sent to Germany! He stayed in the National Guard for 13 years after returning from Germany and retired from the Guard with the rank of Captain.

His second interruption occurred during his professorship at U of L, when he went to Alaska to establish the mechanical engineering program at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. He loved the wildness of the country there, but the arctic cold was too much for him and he left after a year to return to Kentucky and continue teaching at U of L. The year he came back from Alaska he ran across the information which prompted him to begin the experiment in ET channeling.

In 1965, Elkins retired from teaching and went to work as a pilot for Eastern Air Lines, where he rose to the rank of 727 Captain several years before his death in 1984. He made the career move from teaching to flying in order to fund his research. Pilots make a good deal more per hour than professors.

Don was a solid person, firmly grounded in consensus reality. He was an original and creative thinker, a fascinating lecturer and an accomplished and charming storyteller.

He was also a thoroughgoing scientist. His activities were always aimed, very practically, at putting together what he called the puzzle pieces of “What’s really going on?” He was not a dabbler or an amateur. His interest in the truth was profound and from the age of 26 he dedicated his life, outside of making a living, to searching for that truth.

I wish you all could have met him! He was a pleasure to know. Ask Leo Sprinkle to relate to you the tale of our making of a movie in 1975 called The Force Beyond. We wrote many screenplays, hoping to make a film about the metaphysical aspects of UFOs, but Hollywood is a tough room! We were unsuccessful there.

Being a pilot, Don was able to pursue his research by flying to meet many of the contactees of the fifties, such as Orfeo Angelucci, George Van Tassel, George Hunt Williamson and George Adamski. He found all of these men to be very interesting and valid experiencers.

We wrote a novel in 1969 called The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater. We did not find a publisher, but published the book later. Remarkably, the novel was an accurate account of our relationship with Andrija Puharich, which transpired from 1974 to 1978. We had no idea we were being psychic! It is a parable about polarity and ET contact which is worth reading even today.

One continuing relationship was with Gray Barker. He described the experience of fearing for his life when Barker picked him up at the local airport and careened at high speed along winding mountain roads while talking over his shoulder to Don, who was in the back seat, while Elkins looked with concern at the abyss opening up three inches past the near wheel.

The Gray Barker connection continues. Barker supplied the front cover for the first edition of Don’s and my first published book, Secrets of the UFO. It boasted a cartoon-like drawing of a space needle, which was a structure described in Chapter 8 of that book. Barker arranged for it to be drawn and also led us to Palmer Publications, publisher of many early UFO books. Ray Palmer Jr., printed the book for us as well as A Channeling Handbook.

The material which started Don’s mind working on conducting a channeling experiment was that which was offered by both Dan Fry and Walt Rogers, both of whom had independently begun receiving telepathic messages shortly after their UFO contacts.

The specific data from which Don created the ET-channeling experiment was a collection of telepathically received messages which Walt Rogers of Detroit, Michigan, shared with Don. Rogers had a psychic UFO contactee experience. Shortly thereafter, he began receiving what he felt were contacts from the entities he had met in the UFO experience.

The collection of these channeled messages from the UFO occupants was called The Brown Notebook. I assume that the original notebook in which Rogers had written down these channeled messages was a brown one. Our copy is typewritten and collected in a black binder. We have this material up on our archive site, www.llresearch.org, if you would like to check it out.

A sample of the messages that gave Don the idea of starting the channeling experiment is this one, from page 18 of the Notebook, received by Rogers on October 26, 1958:

“You spoke of starting a group, my friend. That is good. There cannot be too many working in the service of the Father. These groups are needed. We will help when the time comes. Start as soon as possible in the service of the people of this planet. It can never be too soon.” 1

As to how one would form such a group, there were several instances in The Brown Notebook material where the source suggested to Rogers that he, or his mate, meditate and in this way they would develop naturally as channels.

So Don decided to form a group that would test this hypothesis. He asked twelve of his best physics students if they would be interested in performing an experiment. He explained that the experiment would consist of meditating together as a group once a week. I was a friend of one of these physics students and asked if I could join as well. I was accepted, and the Louisville Group began meeting at the home of Hal Price, an executive detailing checker for the Ford truck plant here in Louisville. Hal had been a member of Walt Rogers’ group in Detroit.

At first the experiment remained scientifically clean, but null. Then, about six months into the experiment, Rogers visited the Louisville Group and channeled his Confederation contact to the group. The gist of the message was, “Why aren’t you speaking our words? You are receiving them, but you are not saying them.”

This channeling by Rogers permanently tainted the scientific nature of the experiment while at the same time breaking a logjam in the meditators of the Louisville Group. All of them except for me began channeling and produced the standard ET message.

I refrained from learning to channel because I did not like the idea. I enjoyed hearing the “cosmic sermonettes”, as Brad Steiger has called them, but I had no desire to channel. I did not begin to channel until Elkins asked me to learn in 1974, a full twelve years later. At that time, the original channels had graduated from engineering school and were gradually scattered to the four winds, taking jobs all over the country. In order to carry on this experiment, new channels were needed. I agreed to learn to channel and Don began to record my channeling sessions. Thus began the channeling archives of L/L Research. The type of channeling I have done all along is conscious channeling. It was only in the case of our contact with those of Ra that I channeled from trance.

Don and I had formed a creative partnership in 1969, and I went to work full time for him in 1971. I was trained as a librarian, with degrees in English Literature and Library Service, and he hired me to create a special library of his collected materials, to do research for him in the fields of UFOs, UFO contactees and the paranormal in general and to write reports about our research.

I enjoyed being Elkins’ research partner. Don and I did a good deal of UFO field research throughout the seventies. Our field reports from that period are included in contemporary issues of Flying Saucer Review, The APRO Newsletter and The MUFON Newsletter. We dropped this type of physical UFO research when the channeling experiment proved to be a far richer source of data. As Don wrote in 1984,

“It seems to me that the presently accepted scientific paradigm is less than adequate. It is my opinion that our present natural philosophy is a very special case of a much more general case yet to be unveiled. It is my hope that our research is in the direction of this discovery. After assimilating several million words of alleged extraterrestrial communication, it is also my opinion that this book and the subsequent volumes of the Ra material contain the most useful information that I have discovered.” 2

Again, in 1983, writing about this new paradigm in an unfinished manuscript intended to be a commentary on the principles of the Confederation information, he wrote,

“All of the puzzle parts fit together to make an understandable picture of the way things work and a new and workable paradigm for natural philosophy emerges. Practical applications in many fields become obvious, but the one salient objective of our extraterrestrial communicant overshadows all of these. We are told how to accelerate our personal mental development, how to become an active participant in our own evolutionary process. Perhaps we are being offered priceless information that can only be appreciated if we accept and then use it.

“It seems that the technological advances that we hold in such great esteem at our present state of evolution are in no way comparable to what can be achieved with the mind. In this book is the foundation knowledge of the nature of mental evolution, a knowledge that may be of greater value than any technological advance.“ 3

Later in that manuscript, he summed up his position:

“The matrix underlying all phenomena seems to be consciousness. The material worlds and beings are a product of consciousness.” 4

Thirty years ago, then, Elkins was talking about the “new paradigm” which is only now becoming a cliché of current research into the nature of the universe and the nature of consciousness. He was amazingly ahead of his time in his thinking.

The ET channelings speak of there being various densities of existence, including many which are unseen by us. To investigate this, Don and I attended many séances. We found mostly fakes, so-called psychics running around in sheets and pretending to be deceased relatives. We also found one excellent materialization medium, James Tingley, whose remarkable sessions validated Don’s theories of other, non-physical realms of existence.

Another way to explore unseen realms was to study psychic surgery, and Don and I also researched that area. We traveled to the Philippines in 1975 and visited five psychic surgeons there. In 1978, we traveled to Mexico to investigate Pachita, a “surgeon of the rusty knife” who did psychic surgery there.

We also spent considerable time researching cattle mutilations, which offer data concerning the way unseen realms can manifest in our time/space

Another issue raised by the UFO channeling information is reincarnation. The ET message states that this is the way things work. To investigate the truth of reincarnation, Don became skilled at conducting hypnotic regressions, and eventually regressed over 200 people to a point before their birth. In answer to his questions these people described their experiences of living other lives before this present one.

In 1976, Don and I wrote a book entitled Secrets of the UFO 5, which was a report of our research up until that point. I recommend this book to any UFO researcher. It is not at all out of date! The audience for what Don had to say is only now becoming ready to listen to him.

In Secrets of the UFO, he describes a ufologist as

“A detective who is exploring the single largest mystery of our time. As he wends his way through the elaborate maze of red herrings, misinformation, cover-ups, fanatics, skeptics, true believers and nonbelievers, he may well find that his most valuable ally in his search is a good sense of humor. Or, as Groucho Marx said, “Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped!” 6

Here is how he described the genesis of the ET channeling experiment in 1976:

“My own interest in the possibility of telepathic contact with UFO sources stemmed from my original study of the UFO literature of the 1950s. Most of the people who claimed contact with UFOs were considered charlatans or crackpots by the scientific community in general. It seemed to me, however, that this was the historically classic attitude of men of science toward genuinely new ideas.

“This is true to this day, and was emphatically true then. The numerous contactees of the ‘50s, as well as many of the more recent contactees, seemed to have a common denominator: most of them claimed direct, mind-to-mind contact with the aliens, rather than verbal communication. It was not hard to see why the scientific community would be sorely tempted to classify all UFO contacts in a lump under cultist claims because of the metaphysical or religious orientation of most of the messages. On the surface, such contacts seemed like highly imaginative science fiction stories, or like the creations of fanatic cultist groups seeking frantically for their new Messiah.

“What the scientific community chose to overlook was the independence of many of the claims from other claims of contact, and the extreme degree of consistency in the content of the messages. This independence was a fact in several of my own contact experiments: the participants did not know when they started what their goal was or what they should expect to happen to them. The messages which they eventually produced were extremely consistent in content with other alleged UFO messages.

“I have found increasing numbers of functioning contact groups around the country, in Canada and England, and elsewhere in the world. And in addition to the growing number of voluntary contacts, one can come across many sincerely told stories of involuntary contact.” 7

He revisited the subject in a lecture given at Jefferson Community College in 1981 by saying,

“In the early 60’s we started an experiment, here in Louisville, which had the objective of training people to get in the proper mental configuration so that, with certain catalysts added, you might say, they could receive telepathic information from UFO operatives.

“We started an experiment using what I called “the gullibility factor.” I made the assumption that it was going to be necessary to be gullible in order to be successful, because the experiment seemed so naïve that no one who was oriented toward orthodox scientific approaches to things would make such an attempt to create a channeled communication.

“There was a necessity for this gullibility. What we had to do was to produce data with no attempt to analyze that data or to fit it into any preconceptions. We had to eradicate all preconceptions of what things should be.

“So what we did, regardless of how ridiculous the instructions might sound about how to do this thing, how ridiculous the information we got out of it might sound, we went ahead and did it. We proceeded to accumulate as much information as possible. We have accumulated a mountain of it. We have continued the experiment, and it continues to today” 8

And writing in his unfinished manuscript in 1983, he added,

“I use a carefully tuned human brain in place of the electronic circuitry of a radio transceiver. The ears replace a microphone and the vocal mechanism replaces the speaker. The inhabiting mind is temporarily removed by a precise method and communication with a resonant external system is possible. The tuning process is quite complex and took about twelve years to perfect. Since January 15, 1981, our research group has been using this form of communication to question a sixth density social memory complex.

“Please keep in mind that we didn’t pull these techniques out of a hat and achieve instant success, but, through years of research and the process of trial and error, achieved the quality that helped in producing our current level of communication.” 9

On the issue of whether this experiment was scientific, he said in 1976,

“I have chosen not to abide within the approved scientific method of verification of accepted data within the boundaries of currently accepted scientific opinion because this method has proven a tool ineffectual in dealing with this phenomenon. I make the assumption that the reason for this lack is that the system is set up to investigate the present level of reality within our technological and scientific nexus of thought. I make the further assumption that the nexus of thinking or technology which underlies the UFO manifestations may not have any close connection to our present Earthman’s philosophy of reality. History is replete with examples of the events in which reality itself proved unconformable with the current scientific or philosophical thinking. I think it is happening again.” 10

Eight years later, in the Introduction to The Law of One, Book I 11 Don further noted,

“I consider my point of view to be purely scientific. Many readers of this material have used as a basis for its evaluation a previously assumed philosophical bias which has ranged from what I would call objectively scientific to subjectively theological. It is not the purpose of our research group to attempt to do anything other than make experimental data available. Each reader will undoubtedly reach his own unique conclusion about the meaning of this body of data.” 12

On the issue of the reliability of this data, he said,

“It seemed to me to be rather an exaggeration of scientific caution to declare, as so many did, that all of the people who claimed this telepathic communication were suffering from identical forms of mental aberration. The more appropriate response seemed to me to be to attempt to check this common denominator out.

“For this reason, I set up a control group of people whose sanity and habitual veracity I could vouch for, and proceeded to expose them to conditions which allegedly would produce UFO contact. The instructions, of course, had come from an alleged UFO source which I had come across several times in my research.

“Since 1962, I have worked with over 100 of these human guinea pigs who were successful in mentally receiving what I believe to be messages from UFOs. The data collected through these telepathic receivers created a problem in evaluation. I had originally hoped to be able to extract material of a scientifically evidential nature from these experiments, but soon after the start of the experiment, I realized that rigorous analytical control was not possible. Telepathy itself is still proving extremely difficult to investigate scientifically, when the receiver and the sender both can be monitored exhaustively. And, needless to say, if we could put our hands on the UFO senders to test them, we would have our experiment’s end.

“Yet it was possible to produce an unending supply of data. So I simply chose to generate a great deal of data, figuring that it was a mistake to expect material of this nature to fit any preconceived notion that I might have had. After carrying on this experiment for over 13 years, I now feel that I can make the following statement: The information claimed to be received by numerous UFO contactees can be duplicated in a controlled situation.” 13

Parenthetically, I have just concluded the first Channeling Intensive Gathering at L/L Research since the mid-eighties. Again, the reason is that I am the only remaining channel. I shall attempt to create more instruments as time goes on.

As always when this technique is taught, people were able to pick up this type of information telepathically. The information produced was, as in every previous instance, consistent with the content of other channeled material.

Don wrote, in 1976:

“The obvious weakness of this contactee information is that evidential proof of its validity is not obtainable. Its strength lies in its sheer bulk and in the similarity of messages produced by sources widely scattered around the world. The last 25 years have produced millions of words of these communications allegedly originating within the UFOs.” 14

Speaking in 2008, I think this point can be underlined: this experiment is now 45 years old. We now have over 1,500 channeling sessions in our archives and, thanks to a small army of volunteer transcribers, the transcripts of these sessions are all available on our archive site, in the on-line Library.

Here are Don’s conclusions, writing in 1976, on the research into ET communications:

  1. “People who have had face-to-face encounters with UFOnauts report telepathic communication more often than any other form.”
  2. “Those who claim communication at a distance with a UFO source report that telepathic contact was used in an overwhelming majority of cases.”
  3. “The same general message permeates over 90% of the millions of words received by thousands of people around the world.”
  4. “I have been able experimentally to fabricate contactees who, with no prior background in UFO literature, produced the general UFO “doctrine” in detail.”
  5. “Most of my fabricated contactees who have seen a UFO have done so shortly after becoming contactees.”
  6. “There are over 100 contactees which have been fabricated in my group. Their backgrounds represent a general sampling of our society with educational levels ranging from grade-school to post-doctoral.”
  7. “Over 90% of these fabricated contactees experienced identical physical symptoms during the time of the contact.”
  8. “A single message would sometimes be delivered through a dozen contactees, a part through each one. Though the contactees were of different backgrounds and educational levels, the message would be uniform, of coherent continuity, and largely free from normal errors and hesitations of speech.”
  9. “Two of my fabricated contactees were given only one day of training before returning to their home some 600 miles away. Their progress was monitored by mail, and the result was still the same.”
  10. “I have found that some people can achieve the contact phenomenon simply by being hypnotized. No preparation or training is necessary for this type of contact. The content of messages received is the same as the great majority of all other contacts.”
  11. “It is not necessary for the fabricated contactees to believe in UFOs or the reality of the contact phenomenon to produce the communications. One of my best hypnotic contactees has never believed, and still refuses to countenance, any part of the phenomenon, although her communications have in all cases been excellent and have matched in exact detail the bulk of other contactee material.”
  12. “Several of the contactees, particularly those with extensive training in the physical sciences, maintained a highly objective and somewhat skeptical attitude throughout the experiment and still produced excellent communications, precisely analogous to the bulk of material received.” 15

Don tackles the issue of the consistently metaphysical character of all of this channeling material by saying, in 1976,

“My personal bias, at least during the initial stages of my investigation, was wholly on the side of the scientific disciplines. As the investigation continued, however, I kept finding what seemed to be a religious or spiritual factor in the contact phenomenon. My determined bias towards open-minded and impartial observation led me finally to acknowledge this factor as a genuine part of ufology. At present, I no longer regard this factor as separate from a scientific understanding of the phenomenon. The seemingly religious content of the communications is seen as such because of our own cultural conditioning: we interpret these messages as religious. It is my belief that the foundation of a much more nearly absolute and true philosophy of natural phenomena is being made available through the UFO contacts.” 16

He sums up the content of some of this metaphysical content in Secrets of the UFO, by writing:

“The stuff of which the universe is made is consciousness, a single, infinite consciousness. This by definition is the Creator. This consciousness created vibrations through infinite space. This basic vibration is identified in our physical science as the photon, the basic particle-wave called light. This light vibration is the raw material used to make everything that there is within the creation.

“The vibrations which were fashioned from light exist over a large range of frequencies, only a small portion of which is apparent within our present physical reality. All atoms, whether within or outside of our physical reality are simply more complex rotations and vibrations of the basic photon. We are then, a highly complex, vibrational, single, infinite, entity. Presently we are experiencing the illusion of individualization as separate entities, but still we have been created by the one consciousness, and our basic essence resides within the Creator’s one consciousness.” 17

The ET channeling message is at heart very simple: All is one, and that one thing is love. Here is a quotation from Walt Rogers’ Brown Notebook:

“Countless time you have heard, “Why do these people contact us?” Our reason, my son, is very simple: love. Love is the reason we are here. Love is the reason we have been here before. Love is the reason we will come here again if need be. Love, understanding and wisdom await from the Father. You know what awaits from man. People of Earth, make your choice. The time of decision is near.” 18

Fast-forward from 1959 to 1981, to Elkins’ selection of the most central message from the Ra group. It is this:

“In truth there is no right or wrong. There is no polarity, for all will be, as you would say, reconciled at some point in your dance through the mind/body/spirit complex which you amuse yourself by distorting in various ways at this time. This distortion is not in any case necessary. It is chosen by each of you as an alternative to understanding the complete unity of thought which binds all things. You are not speaking of similar or somewhat like entities or things. You are every thing, every being, every emotion, every event, every situation. You are unity. You are infinity. You are love/light; light/love. You are. This is the Law of One.” 19

I’d like to share one last quote from Don Elkins before I go on. It catches the detachment and scientific objectivity that characterized Don’s approach as a scientist looking at data concerning an area of research which he knew was considered to be fringe. Bill Tush was interviewing Don and me in January of 1978, when we were on our way back from Mexico, researching Pachita’s psychic surgery. Tush asked Don,

“What do you say to somebody that just comes up and says ‘I don’t believe in any of that?’ What’s your first argument?”

Don laughed and said,

“That’s all right. I don’t have an argument. If you don’t want to believe in UFOs, fine. If you’re interested in it I’ll tell you anything that I know.” 20

For the remainder of my talk, the PowerPoint presentation running behind my words will be a slide show rather than being geared to my discussion of channeling. We chose to do this rather than offer you an endless series of quotations! So don’t try to put the images together with what I am saying, but enjoy photographs of Don, Jim and me and images of some of our book covers!

In November of 1984, Don died and Jim McCarty, who had joined L/L Research in 1980, and I were left with Don’s legacy—the ET channeling experiment and everything that had stemmed from that. We continued to collect the “conscious channeling” data at our weekly study and meditation meetings. Indeed, we still offer these channeling meditations twice a month through the school year of September through May.

However, I ended the Ra contact. I was following the Ra group’s suggestion that I do so if either Jim or Don was unavailable. This particular contact was different from all my other channeling in that it was done in trance. I have never been trained as a trance channel and the trance state was an involuntary occurrence. In my case, trance work was extremely hard on my physical body. I lost two to three pounds after every Ra session and weighed no more than 85 pounds for the three years the contact was ongoing. So I heeded the Ra group’s advice and did not attempt to contact Ra directly again.

I continued doing the conscious channeling which I had learned in 1974. At first, of course, I was overwhelmed simply trying to learn how to channel. Gradually, however, as the time went by, I began to see into the process enough to realize that by setting certain parameters I could improve the quality of the material offered.

My first question, when I began to channel, was whether the source was some part of my personality or a source outside of myself. As I wrote in the Appendix to A Book of Days,

“The foundation hypothesis created from my prior experience with channeling was that the sources I was able to contact via the channeling process are stable and independent of me. The variation in the quality of the material produced, I further hypothesized, is due to three factors having to do with the questioning process and two factors having to do with preparing myself for the channeling by ‘tuning’ and ‘challenging.’” 21

In channeling sessions, there is generally a circle of people who create the group for that particular session. The format is usually question and answer; indeed, it is always the format for our group. So the first of the three factors in questioning that affect the material’s excellence is the make-up of the sitting circle. It has become clearer to me as time has passed and our sessions have accumulated that while a bigger group has the potential to be a more powerful group, usually a larger circle is less focused and less able to pull in excellent material than a smaller, unified and well focused circle.

I found that the best circle I could create for the gathering of helpful yet emotionally neutral information on spiritual principles was a group of three or more people where every person in the circle was focused upon spiritual principles and not upon phenomena. This group of three or more is the pre-requisite for obtaining a “universal contact” rather than an “inner guidance” contact. Indeed, the best channeling which our research group has ever produced, called The Law of One, had a sitting group of three people only: Don Elkins, Jim McCarty and I.

The advantage of universal contacts is that they produce universally applicable and helpful material. The advantage of inner-planes contacts is that they are able to offer more specific information and advice. Our research group has worked almost entirely with universal contacts, desiring the philosophical and non-dogmatic point of view which such material offers.

The second of the three factors in the questioning which affect the excellence of the material channeled has to do with the kinds of questions asked and the attitude with which they are asked. I have observed that when specific questions are asked without also requesting information on what spiritual principles apply to working with these questions, the quality of the information received almost always goes down and in many cases there is no useful answer received at all.

Where specific information is concerned, I find that if I ask in terms of spiritual

principles, even a specific question will at times receive an excellent response from the channeled source. At other times, when there is apparently no way for the source to respond without infringement on free will, no answer is forthcoming.

Unlike inner planes guides, our universal contacts state that they have no right to interfere with people’s free-will decisions. That is a limitation of universal contacts. Consequently, when someone comes to us at L/L Research with a request for a personal channeling session and I see that the questions are specific questions like advice on where to move or what process to go through to get a new job, I encourage the person to go to a psychic whose source has no trouble giving specific information and advice.

The third factor in questioning which affects the excellence of the channeled material produced is the “fear factor.” It has to do with the attitude the questioner has in asking the questions. If the same question is asked in two different sessions, once by a questioner whose attitude is curious but not fearful and at another time by a questioner who is fearful in attitude, the non-fear-based questioner receives a good response. The questioner with a fear-based attitude generally does not receive a satisfactory response. The fear-based attitude seems seriously to diminish or even eradicate the value of the information received.

Consequently, I started to filter the questions that were asked when we at L/L Research had a channeling session. As time went on I became ever surer that declining to accept fear-based and specific questioning was a dependable means of avoiding “junk” channeling.

When people desire to have a personal channeling session with our group now, I always make sure that their questions fit within those parameters:

  1. No fear-based questions
  2. No specific requests for worldly advice
  3. Keep the focus at all times on spiritual principles, no matter what the topic is.

The remaining two factors I have identified as being useful in creating the best possible environment for a channeling session have to do with how the instrument, medium or “channel” prepares for the session. These are the considerations I was pursuing in doing the research which created the material for this book.

The first of these factors has to do with the state of mind of the “channel” through which the source of the contact transmits information. This state of mind is a kind of tuning. I hypothesized that I, as well as other channels, am a kind of crystal or instrument capable of receiving signals, just as would the crystal in a radio set, and then passing them on, “broadcasting” them, by expressing the concepts received in words.

The type of information which I receive as a channel is not received in words as far as I can tell. Except for a six-month period early in my training by the channeling sources themselves, during which I received painstaking, word by word messages, the material I channel comes to me in clusters or “balls” of concept. My work is that of an interpreter or a translator rather than that of a messenger who reports the words he had heard.

I translate concepts into words. I do not hear any voice in my head. I receive impressions. If I express one ball of impression or concept by translating the concept into words and speaking the words aloud, I then receive another concept-ball. If I question that concept or for any reason stop translating the concepts, the transmission of the concepts stops at the source.

I feel that this channeled material is of a kind usually experienced by people within their subconscious minds, as in dreams, prayers or visions. In my case, as a channel, I have found a way to access this subconscious material in a conscious manner.

Since I do the translation work of channeling spontaneously, I hypothesized that I had a chance to improve my channeling work by improving my readiness or “tuning” as an instrument.

A radio receiver can be tuned to reach a wide variety of radio stations. I hypothesized that when I “tune” my instrument—my consciousness—by prayer, chanting, meditation and other spiritual techniques, I am tuning my “receiver” to reach the highest-vibration “station” which I am capable of receiving. There are many messages “out there.” It is important to me to access only my own personal highest and best source of transmission.

I found that my own best methods of tuning include singing sacred music, praying and meditating in silence. I also use protective techniques such as calling the archangels, visualizing protection for my energy body and “counting” down to focus my attention from my age to zero. And I ask directly for the highest and best contact of the Christ-consciousness which I can carry in a stable and conscious manner, thusly further defining the contact for which I am looking.

I found that it helps me to create a kind of inner work room and set that room up so that I have clear access to my guidance as I prepare to ask for a universal contact.

The other factor I have identified as capable of improving the channeled material I produce is the process of “challenging the spirit.” I have found through the years that it is essential to challenge spirits before accepting their contact. By challenging spirits in the name of that highest and best principle or person which I personally follow, those who do not transmit on my “station” go away. The challenge is like a solid wall. Unwanted sources are stopped cold.

Because I am a mystical Christian, I personally challenge in the principle of unconditional love and the person of Jesus the Christ. I ask any spirit who wants to speak through me to state that “Jesus is Lord,” before I accept the contact. I repeat this process of challenging three times, just in case my concentration is not the best the first time around. It is crucial to the collection of good material that contact is accepted only with a source that has passed this challenge.

By the mid-1980s I had satisfied myself that these twin techniques of tuning and challenging have a high probability of being effective in improving the quality of channeled material. I was still desirous of researching with more care, however, before I shared my research conclusions with others. After talking about this with my research partner, Jim McCarty, we set up a protocol for working more intensively on my tuning and challenging process.

Jim and I start our days with a Morning Offering. It is something I was already doing when Jim and I met in 1978. Jim joined Don Elkins and me to form the L/L Research community in 1980. When Jim and I married in 1987, Elkins having died in 1984, Jim began to join in my morning prayers with me.

We continue to share Morning Offerings to this day, as well as Evening Offerings which we call Gaia Meditations, as our focus then is on the planet’s needs. We have found that stopping before the day begins to spend time with the Creator really gives the rest of the day a boost of inspiration. Stopping before the descent into sleep to give thanks and affirm our hopes and dreams for Gaia and for our own spiritual growth gives the time of sleep a similar boost. And we find the dailyness of the ritual keeps us in touch with the sacredness of life itself and of ourselves as spiritual beings.

Jim and I decided that at the end of each Morning Offering, after the Lord’s Prayer with which we always end it, I would go into my tuning and challenging process, seeking not a universal contact, since Jim and I are only two people and three people are needed to form a circle for a universal contact, but rather my own personal guidance, which is the Holy Spirit.

I tuned in various ways and challenged in various ways, experimenting with various techniques, until I had found what I felt was the very best way for me, personally to prepare my instrument—my consciousness—for good reception.

Naturally, at the end of the tuning and challenging process, I would accept the contact which was offered and would ask the Holy Spirit for a thought for the day. Jim recorded my channeling on tape each time we went through this process together.

It is to be noted that any channeling is the product of the group, not the individual. These “thoughts for the day” are a product not only of my work but also of Jim’s essential state of mind and biases. If you become fond of these little readings, you may thank Jim as much as me and the contacted source for their being brought into existence.

This procedure was repeated a total of 470 times over about a three-year period. At that point, I decided I had learned all that I could from this process and I ended the experiment.

To report on what I had found, I wrote A Channeling Handbook, which is available from L/L Research.

The short channelings or readings which had been collected during this research project were transcribed by Jim and the transcripts and original audiocassette tapes were archived in our Library. Almost a decade passed before we created A Book of Days from the 366 best of these 470 readings. Thanks to a generous contribution from Morris Hoagland, this handsome volume is finally in print!

I have said before in this discussion that the Confederation philosophy is fundamentally very simple. However it is not simplistic or shallow. The material creates a view of how things work—a philosophy or cosmology, if you will—that is internally consistent and has proven to be helpful for many thousands of seekers.

This large extraterrestrial group of planetary consciousnesses calls itself The Confederation of Planets in the Service of the Infinite Creator. My first contact from this Confederation was Hatonn. Through the seventies, I added contacts such as Yaum, Yada, Oxal and Latui. I even received a contact, called Nona, who seldom spoke. She preferred to intone. We had many sessions in which her melodies can be heard.

When I first encountered Ra, I was doing conscious channeling. I was able to challenge Ra as I normally do, and the Ra group passed the challenge. After that first contact, I was not able to challenge, since I was in trance before the contact began. So I was glad I had the chance to challenge them that first time.

After three years of channeling the Ra group, I had become rather spoiled as a channel. I knew that I cold not contact the Ra group, after Don’s death, but I hungered for the highest and best contact I could carry of the Christ consciousness in a stable, conscious manner. I began to ask for the highest and best. And at that point, the Q’uo group appeared.

When we asked who Q’uo was, they said that they were a principle made up of three social memory complexes—planetary consciousnesses—Hatonn, Latui and Ra. When Q’uo receives a question, all three of its groups are involved in forming the answer. Latui is the energy which generally communicates their answer to me, although upon occasion Hatonn will be the speaker for the Q’uo principle.

I have worked exclusively with the Q’uo group for over twenty years now. In these last few years, our group has received many questions about 2012. According to the Confederation, there are two things going on at the winter solstice of 2012. One is physical. One is metaphysical. I’d like to look at what the Ra group said about this time and also what the Q’uo principle has to say.

If what I am going to say to you now, about the shift into fourth density about which the ET contacts of the Confederation speak at some length, interests you, and you would like to read further on this timely topic in our archives, we have a Google search feature on our site. Using key words, you can probe further. That address is www.llresearch.org. Click on Library on the home page menu to open up our channeling transcript archives.

You can also find the transcripts of two speeches I gave on the inner and outer shifts of 2012 last summer at Mackinac Island if you wish. Click on Carla’s Niche and then on Speeches on the home page menu to navigate there. These speeches were broadcast on BBS Radio and are also in their archives in the audio version.

Firstly, the outer shift: the physical planet, Earth itself, is shifting into fourth density as its active density. Some Confederation sources offer the year 2011 and some, 2012, for this shift. Don Elkins asked the Ra group,

“How does a third-density planet become a fourth density planet?”

Ra responded,

“The fourth density is, as we have said, as regularized in its approach as the striking of a clock upon the hour. The space/time of your solar system has enabled this planetary sphere to spiral into space/time of a different vibrational configuration.” 22

The term, density, needs explanation, since the Confederation uses this term differently than its close synonym, dimension. In the Confederation cosmology, our present creation, while unified and interactive, has a flow of evolution which they call an octave of creation. The creation goes on forever, one octave becoming the next, just as on the piano, the eighth note of one octave is the first note of the next.

Each octave is composed of seven densities, with the eighth density being the “octave” density, serving both as the last density for this octave of creation and the first density for the next octave. Each density has a characteristic density of light.

The first or Foundation Density is composed of the elements and natural forces of our planet such as air, earth, fire and water. Its constituent elements do not have independence of will or movement.

The second density is the Density of Growth. This is the density of the plants and animals. In this density, the plants can turn towards the sun and the animals can move about. However, though they are aware of the creation around them, they do not have self-consciousness.

The third density is our density. Its inhabitants are self-aware human beings such as are you and I. The Confederation calls our density the Density of Choice. The choice to which they refer is our choice of polarity, for we evolve through the densities by increasing our polarity. This choice is made with faith and will alone, according to the ETs, because we have a veil which divides our thoughts from the thoughts of others and our conscious minds from our subconscious minds. This density could also be called the Density of Unknowing.

The fourth density is called the Density of Love. As we evolve in mind, body and spirit, in this density we study the lessons of love and understanding. In all of these higher densities, there is no veil between the conscious and subconscious mind, and no veil between our thoughts and the thoughts of others.

The fifth density is called the Density of Wisdom. When we have graduated from the Density of Love, we move into fifth density and study the lessons of wisdom.

The sixth density is called the Density of Unity. In this density, we work to merge our understandings of love and wisdom into a unified approach to living which could be called compassionate wisdom. As a point of interest, the Ra group is of sixth density, while the Q’uo Principle is made up of three groups, one of fourth density, one of fifth density and one of sixth density.

The seventh density is called the Density of Foreverness. In this density, we are involved in gathering spiritual mass and moving entirely back to the unmanifested Creator. Seventh density ends in timelessness as all of us complete our journeys of return to the One. When this eon of timelessness ends, the next octave of creation has begun and we are in the first density of the next creation.

This time of 2011 or 2012, then, according to Confederation sources, is a shift from third density to fourth density for this planet. But third-density Planet Earth as we know it is not going anywhere. Fourth-density Earth and third-density Earth occupy the same space by interpenetrating, just as various TV stations’ signals interpenetrate.

Third-density Earth does not have to have a man-made Armageddon or a natural cataclysm of planetary proportions, according to the Confederation. There will be a third-density wind-down, according to Ra, which will last some hundreds of years. We on third-density Earth will go right on doing our thing after 2012. However, new babies being born on Earth after 2012 will have the ability to run fourth-density energy as well as third-density energy. In fact, this is happening now, with the advent of the so-called Indigo Children.

That is the shape of the physical change, according to this large group of ETs, the Confederation.

Metaphysically, the Confederation suggests that we as a planetary population are also in the midst of a planet-wide Harvest of souls. Remember the message I quoted from The Brown Notebook:

“Love, understanding and wisdom await from the Father. You know what awaits from man. People of Earth, make your choice. The time of decision is near.” 23

In this Density of Choice, this Harvest is the time of choice for all of us. The ET message is that this choice is the choice of polarities. A soul such as you or I can graduate from the “school of souls” of third-density Earth in either the service-to-others polarity or the service to self polarity.

Those choosing the service-to-others polarity will reincarnate here, on fourth-density Planet Earth. Those choosing service to self as a path will begin their fourth-density experience on another planet which is wired to run fourth-density light energy. And those not choosing either polarity will repeat this Density of Choice on another third-density planet.

The Confederation message is that there is one thing that makes up all creation. That is love. We are all creatures of love. The Confederation suggests that we can express our love of the Creator either by loving others and serving them—the path of service to others—or by loving and serving ourselves, using all other people in our world to further our own agendas. That is the path of service to self.

We see a lot of the extremes of these two polarities right now on Planet Earth. On the service-to-others side, we see many people dedicating their lives and their fortunes to benefiting their fellow man, offering their time, talent and treasure to help others. On the service-to-self side, we see many people who are busy accumulating money and power at the expense of all except themselves and their followers. This split is to be expected as we approach graduation, since our third-density polarization process is almost complete now.

What represents a harvestable service-to-others polarity, according to the Confederation, is a grade of 51% service-to-others or more. This means that if you are thinking of others before yourself at least 51% of the time, you are ready to graduate.

A harvestable service-to-self polarity is a grade of 5% or less service-to-others. This means that in order to graduate, you need to be purely self-serving at least 95% of the time. They suggest that it is as difficult to polarize positively as it is negatively, since the standard polarity setting of people who have not yet awakened and started to work on polarizing is somewhere between 20% and 30% service to others. You can see that the Confederation is not expecting a large harvest this time around. They project that many of Earth’s people shall be taking this grade over. Naturally, they hope to increase the positive Harvest, which is why they say that they are speaking with us now.

The worst that can happen to us, as we go through this Harvest upon our death, is that we will soon reincarnate on another third-density planet to work with the lessons concerning our choice of polarity for another 75,000 years or so. If we want to avoid repeating third grade, suggests the Confederation, we now need to polarize sufficiently to graduate at Harvest time, in 2012 or so. And it is late days for waking up and making that choice.

The Confederation description of Harvest is benign. They do not see everything coming to a halt on Planet Earth in 2012. They suggest that immediately after our natural death, we will walk steps of light. Each step contains a denser light. At a certain step, the light becomes fourth-density light. After that, all the steps are in fourth density. We walk these steps until to go further would be to move into light that makes us uncomfortable. If we have stopped on the steps offering fourth-density light, we have graduated and can move on to fourth density. If we have stopped on the steps offering third-density light, we will move on to another third-density planet to repeat “third grade” in this refinery of souls which the Confederation cosmology predicates.

In no case is there anything to fear. The ET message is not about judgment, whether from a stern Creator or from ourselves. It is about the natural and inevitable evolution of mind, body and spirit and how to accelerate that evolution. The Q’uo group says, in a channeling session recorded on January 6, 2006,

“We have been pleased to see the degree to which your planet’s people as a whole are increasing in their level of awareness of the planetary situation. It is a very exciting time for your planet and for those of us who have watched your people through a great deal of difficult learning. We see better rates of awakening, shall we say, than the probability vortices of, say, thirty years in the past would have suggested. And we are humbly grateful to be a small part of that energy that has pressed towards the light, has called to the light, and has anchored that light in relatively undistorted form. We thank each heart that beats, “love, love, love.” Thank you for the unimaginable effort that it takes each of you to keep your mind, your thoughts, and your heart on the beam. It is easy to be distracted by very many things and we find ourselves applauding the efforts of each of you to stay awake and stay on task.

“We can say unequivocally that there is no reason to have fear while phasing out the stunning changes that are taking place on your planet at this time.

“This whole-hearted stretching and reaching for the light and this growing desire to learn the truth among so many of your people have greatly aided the situation as regards the strength of the field of third density at this time. It is very likely—and we are looking only at probability vortices, not actual predictions—that your people will not only be able to live out their current incarnations here but that there will be enough energy within third density to maintain third-density bodies and the energies of evolution, in terms of the spirit, for some of your time. However, the time of third density for doing third-density work is virtually over.

“That which remains to be done by entities living in third-density bodies on planet Earth has to do with the energy of so many among your people, which has a kind of group karma to it. This energy is that which those among your people who have destroyed parts of their planet or their entire planet in previous attempts at third-density evolution have carried with them to this point. There is a lot of healing that various entities for various reasons wish to accomplish. More and more entities, we feel, will find a connection between their own health, in terms of their spiritual health, and the health of the planet on which they live.” 24

I feel privileged to have been able to present this material to people such as you, who are already deeply involved in a search for the truth. As each of you has researched UFOs in your various ways, I feel sure that you have come across various channeled works which offer what Don Elkins called the standard UFO contactee message. Because the majority of channeled material is either wanting in content or is wrapped up in fear-based warnings of doom, it is quite understandable that you may well have disregarded these channeled messages.

However I invite you to examine any and all of our collected ET channeling materials, for I have come to feel that they possess a good deal of substance. Please feel free to surf around a bit on our site and develop your own intelligence and your own opinion.

I also invite you, if you this information has resonated to you, to consider making a conscious choice of polarities, and to spend this next few years becoming able to graduate from third density. Wake up, open your heart, and live as a creature of love—love of the infinite Creator, love of yourselves and love of each other. The ET contactee message is all about unconditional love, the unconditional love that is the nature of the Creator and the creation.

I would like to close this talk with two quotes from the Q’uo group. This first one was recorded on May 7, 2006:

“Let these next few years that remain before 2012 be a testament to your stability, your spiritual maturity, and your ability to persevere. Bloody-mindedness and sheer guts are sometimes part of what it takes to make the choice of love.

You have to look beyond your own feelings and your own first responses and ask, “Where is the love in this situation? Where is the light in this moment?” When you are prompted to ask this query of yourself, you may well find that you are the only source you can find in that situation of love and light.

Yes, my friends, you! You are only one being, but you have within you consciousness. That consciousness is what this instrument would call Christ-consciousness. It is the consciousness of unconditional love.” 25

And finally, on February 11, 2007, Q’uo said,

“Insofar as you have entered into this conscious development of yourself and your creation, you work not only for yourself but on the level of planetary energy. The situation is not that what you think becomes something others think. It is that the vibration which supports your work radiates as would the light of a lighthouse shining out across the dark and stormy sea.

“As you allow your light and your universe to shine, you are, in your beingness, fulfilling one of your deepest purposes: you are changing and shifting consciousness at the planetary level. We would emphasize that, at this level of perception, we are not speaking of those things which can be pointed to and spoken of in words. We are talking about the shift of a point of view. The work you do on yourself is sufficient and more than adequate in terms of how you may affect the consciousness of planet Earth. Change yourself and you change the world. That is how powerful you really are.

“The principles involved in service to others are implicit in all that is done in that when you meet the moment, you are meeting it as one who serves. That is a general standpoint and that basic viewpoint brings to you a wider point of view which is based upon the guidance that you are receiving which is activated by your desire to serve. When you ask for the truth, the truth is there before you. Ask and you truly shall receive.

“At every point that is now, there is a branching off into an infinite number of possibilities. The world you make is the world you choose at each of those moments of now. You have accumulated a good many of them in your lifetime but they are as nothing compared to the choices that you make once you become aware that choice is a very blessed and central way of embracing your truth, your progression, and the acceleration of your evolution, spiritually speaking.

“There is no cause, in our view, for any fear. This is simply what is happening upon your planet at this time. How it will play out in the Earth scene, in the manifested world, we do not know. Each and every one of you has the say in that. And we know that you are setting your intention; setting sail on this journey on the waters of spirituality and asking for the wind of the spirit to be behind you and to send you where you need to go.” 26

Thank you so much for your time and attention! My hour is up! As the Confederation messages always say when they end the contacts, I leave you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. Adonai! Adonai vasu borragus. Go with God, my brothers.

Please come and take a look at our table in the vendors’ section. We brought copies of all of our books and I will be around, there at our table, after the question and answer period, to sign books and talk further with you.

If you want to check out our work in the most efficient way, we have produced a collection of our first twenty-five years of Light/Lines Newsletters. Each of the newsletters contains one of our channeling session, so you can follow representative channelings through the quarter-century of our work. To complement the retrospective, we also have a DVD of the audio versions of all of our 2007 public channelings, which will give you a good idea of what we have done lately.

I would welcome questions now, if you have any.

[Tape ends.]


  1. Walt Rogers, The Brown Notebook, a typescript in the L/L Research Library, p. 18. This document is available for researchers on our archive site, www.llresearch.org/history/brown-notebook

  2. The Law of One, Book I, also called The Ra Material; An Ancient Astronaut Speaks, by Don Elkins, Carla Rueckert and James Allen McCarty, p. 4. 

  3. Donald T. Elkins, from an unfinished manuscript about The Law of One, written in 1983. 

  4. Idem. 

  5. Don Elkins with Carla L. Rueckert, Secrets of the UFO: Louisville, L/L Research, [c1977]. 

  6. Ibid, p. 8 

  7. Ibid., p. 29. 

  8. Donald T. Elkins, from a speech given in April, 1981, to students at Jefferson Community College, Louisville, Kentucky. 

  9. Donald T. Elkins, from an unfinished manuscript written in 1983, archived in the L/L Research Library. 

  10. Secrets., pp. 12-13 

  11. The Law of One, Book I, also called The Ra Material; An Ancient Astronaut Speaks, by Don Elkins, Carla Rueckert and James Allen McCarty. [c1984]. 

  12. Ibid, p. 2. 

  13. Ibid., pp. 30-31. 

  14. Ibid., p. 9. 

  15. Ibid., pp. 33-34. 

  16. Ibid., p. 36. 

  17. Ibid., pp. 200-201. 

  18. The Brown Notebook, p. 108. 

  19. The Ra Material, Session 1. 

  20. Open Up, a talk show on TBS which aired in January, 1978. The transcript of this interview may be found on www.llresearch.org 

  21. Carla L. Rueckert, A Book of Days; Channelings from the Holy Spirit: Louisville, KY, L/L Research, [c2007]. 

  22. Ra, channeled through L/L Research on January 29, 1981, labeled Session 13. 

  23. The Brown Notebook, p. 108. 

  24. Q’uo, channeled through L/L Research on January 6, 2006. 

  25. Q’uo, channeled through L/L Research on May 7, 2006. 

  26. Q’uo, channeled through L/L Research on February 11, 2007.