We all have personal myths, which are more or less true. More to the point, they are the stories of our lives we tell ourselves which give to our incarnations on Planet Earth subjective meaning. In my personal myth, my mission includes two lifetimes in one incarnation. I learned this when I died at age thirteen of kidney failure.

Immediately upon the cessation of my heartbeat, I was in a totally different environment, with no interruption of consciousness. A voice said to me that I had a choice. I could live out the incarnation I had chosen in this body I have now, although it was felt that I had chosen a very crowded plan for service. Alternately, I could relinquish this body and reincarnate again, twice, breaking up my plan for service into two more reasonably planned lifetimes.

I had not had an easy childhood. I thought of having two more childhoods to live through, and quailed. I chose to come back here instead, in this body, and finish the incarnation I had already begun.

In the fullness of time, I met and joined with Donald T. Elkins. Then we were joined by Jim McCarty. We three were able to serve as the research group which channeled The Law of One, by Ra, “an humble messenger of the Law of One.” When my beloved companion Don, or as I called him, B.C., died in 1984, I was aware that one of my two lifetimes had been completed. I had served as part of the group which brought the Ra Material through to the people of Earth.

I still had one lifetime to accomplish in this incarnation, and I dedicated the rest of my life to fulfilling the second part of my mission. It was not hard to know what that mission was. In Session 1, Don asked Ra, “If an individual makes efforts to act as a catalyst in general to increase the awareness of planetary consciousness, is he of any aid in that direction, or is he doing nothing but acting upon himself?”

The Ra group replied, “To learn is the same as to teach unless you are not teaching what you are learning; in which case you have done you/them little good. … Each of those in this group is striving to use, digest, and diversify the information which we are sending this instrument into the channels of the mind/body/spirit complex without distortion. The few whom you will illuminate by sharing your light are far more than enough reason for the greatest possible effort. “To serve one is to serve all. Therefore, we offer the question back to you to state that indeed it is the only activity worth doing: to learn/teach or teach/learn. There is nothing else which is of aid in demonstrating the original Thought except your very being, and the distortions that come from the unexplained, inarticulate, or mystery-clad being are many. “Thus, to attempt to discern and weave your way through as many group mind/body/spirit distortions as possible among your peoples in the course of your teaching is a very good effort to make. We can speak no more valiantly of your desire to serve.”

Since that time, from 1984 until this present moment, I have tried to live the Law of One, to teach/learn what I learn/taught from the Ra group’s information.

I have continued to channel, consciously rather than in trance, and after 25 years, I am happy to say that these Confederation channelings, which now total over 1,500, offer a large and continuing source of resources for seekers. Jim and I have spoken to any number of groups, large and small, since then, carrying to them the message of the Law of One. In interviews and counseling sessions and in articles like this one, I have added to that store of materials for the seeker, hoping each time I create a new effort in service that it will hit the mark for someone.

With the help of an army of transcribers, other volunteers and two distinguished webmasters who have created our L/L Research archive (www.llresearch.org) and our L/L Research spiritual community (www.bring4th.org), and thanks to the worldwide web, we have gotten the message out there globally.

However, I have long felt that this intellectual content, this collection of words, valuable as the words are to seekers, is far from the whole of what it means to live the Law of One. For Ra’s message is that all is one. And that means that we are part and parcel of the Earth upon which we live.

Question to myself: am I expressing the Law of One here in exurbia by how I live?

Answer to myself: Not entirely.

My beautiful husband, Jim McCarty, has made of our gardens a veritable Eden. We compost. We feed our wildlife, even the critters. If we had to do so, we could try to express the Law of One in its entirety here. But we have less than an acre of land here, and this makes it more difficult to treat the land with full respect.

Fortunately, my husband owns 93 acres of wilderness land upriver from Louisville, which he now leases to L/L Research. There on Avalon Farm, with the help of a dedicated caretaker, we are in the beginning stages of creating a bio-dynamic farm. This is a fuller expression of living the Law of One with relation to the Earth upon which we dwell. As Q’uo said during a channeling collected on February 3, 2009,

“Farming bio-dynamically means seeing all of the farm as a universe, of which the farmer is an integral part. This theory envisions such a farm as a little universe, unique unto itself. It has its own grasses and herbs, its own fruit trees and other crops. And the animals upon the farm are moved from one pasture to another, spreading the seeds of the herbs and the grasses, so that in a very short number of years that farm is distinctive in its plants and its animals. And because the animals and the crops are rotated, the biota becomes richer and richer. Products from the animals together with the farmer’s envisioning and various processes create manures that are specific to this particular little creation, so that the land is always being enriched, always developed to be fuller of life, always more able to receive the sunshine and the rain.

“The one known as Rudolph [Steiner, who created the principles of bio-dynamic farming,] always saw all of nature and all of humankind as one, so that it was not the human doing things to the Earth according to his will, but the farmer as an agent of the Creator, making beautiful and fruitful that of which he was a part.”

Unlike organic farming, which is a method of farming demanding a ban on the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, bio-dynamic farming is a spiritually based enterprise, an authentic expression of the awareness that we are one with the land we farm. In this day of technical expertise, it feels very right to go beyond organic farming principles to that model wherein we create our own heaven on earth, a true Garden of Eden where we produce the food we eat in an atmosphere of love.

I was very pleased to come across the Oriental equivalent of Rudolph Steiner and his bio-dynamic farming theory in the person of Mokichi Okada, whom his disciples called Meishu-sama. The title literally translates as “Lord of Light”. Meishu-sama died in 1955, leaving a rich legacy behind, with his poetry and drawings, and most of all, his vision, which, according to the website, www.johreifoundation.org, was “to create a world of peace, health, and prosperity for us all — a paradise on earth.”

About Natural Farming, which was part of his teachings, he said, “Everything that occurs in the physical world is a reflection of what has already occurred in the spiritual or in our consciousness. Modern material science has made great progress in the study of the visible and tangible, but it has left out the vital, inner element of matter which is invisible to the five senses. This is spirit, the primary component which is the very substance of all matter.”

He and Steiner, then, share, for the most part, a vision of farming as a spiritual expression and enterprise. However, the difference between the West and the East is apparent in a subtle but important way. In bio-dynamic farming, the work is slow because everything is required to be done in order. One prepares the fields. One prepares the water supply. One creates a stock of bio-dynamic preparations. The age of science is part of the gestalt of bio-dynamics.

In Meishu-sama’s Natural Farming, however there is specific acknowledgement of the “duality of purity and compromise.” It is enough, he feels, in pursuing the goal of creating heaven on earth, to strive towards purity. A writer on the above-mentioned website spoke of being confused at first by this. If one is trying to farm the land using only what nature provides, what about the black plastic cover holding back the weeds, and the other non-natural items seen on a member’s farm? The answer – an Oriental shrug and a nod towards doing what one can.

And unlike Steiner’s emphasis on proper procedure and a vision of the farmer as steward, Meishu-sama’s attitude, put into words by him in 1950, is this: “The basic requirement for establishing paradise on earth– the goal of this movement – is the spiritual growth of individuals. Since the world is a collection of individuals, paradise on earth will become a reality when the number of such qualified individuals increases sufficiently.” His organization, Shumei, which means “divine light”, now has well over 300,000 members, mostly in Japan. Certainly this seems like a sufficient increase! Are we there yet?

A modern-day disciple of Shumei is Susumu Hashimoto. He became inspired to be a Natural Farming farmer when he was only seventeen. He is now forty. Hashimoto saved the money he made working as a deliveryman and in time was able to rent a collection of fields near Osaka, Japan. On the website www.orionmagazine.org, he says, “What I do is more than farming. It’s learning how to care for life and improve society,” he told me. “I believe the farmer is the closest servant to God.”

Most of us are not going to have the opportunity to be farmers. Here in America especially, the small farmer is a beleaguered species, gravely threatened by the gigantic juggernaut of corporate agriculture. Using seeds which are genetically altered to resist disease – never mind the food value lost, or the insidious effect such genetic diddling has on the human body when the seeds are harvested and ingested as food – and copious amounts of chemicals to fertilize crops and to destroy weeds, such sources of food can easily undercut the prices which organic, bio-dynamic and natural farmers must ask.

Yet we can do the next best thing: we can support local farmers who are growing heritage seeds in fields clear of chemicals. Most communities these days have programs where you can buy weekly collections of naturally grown foods throughout the growing season. Most neighborhoods now have farmers’ markets for those who wish to pick and choose. I encourage you to patronize them and support community farming!

Avalon Farm is still preparing its fields. We have barely begun our journey towards being a bio-dynamic farm. But how wonderful it feels to be part of this movement towards expressing the Law of One by the way we live. One day, perhaps you shall be able to buy our products. Right now, those products consist only of eggs from naturally grown chickens and firewood from the removal of unwanted trees from our forests and fields.

It’s a start!

I open my arms and embrace your spirit! Let us find ever more ways to live the Law of One and to express our hopes to create heaven on earth!