Letter to S

Dear S,

I am not writing to give you any arguments about the Ra Material so clear your mind of that misconception immediately. I will, of course, address the topic since that is what makes the letter and there’s not much else I can talk about, but I will tell you quite honestly that the reason that I write people has to do with my interest in those people.

About one letter out of a thousand has the mark of a person who is living a conscious life whose intellect is working, whose intuition may or may not be working to full strength but who is very firmly on the spiritual path. I believe that other than meditation itself, the most useful tools a person on that path has is the mirror which an honest and conscious seeker holds up to you, but corresponding with you and offering his or her notes from the road as you offer your notes from the road to him or her.

I correspond in this manner in a metaphysically based correspondence which from time to time falls into nothing more than “hi, how are you” simply because that is what is happening in both lives and we’re both sitting by the side of the road and we both mirror back.

I don’t mind what we mirror—it is simply that I am living a life dedicated to the love of the one infinite Creator and to serving others. I have no attachment to the outcome of my work except that my efforts be as pure and as sanctified and as genuine and as lyrical and as poetic and as rich as I can make it.

I am impatient with people who live lives of prose; I am not even fond of blank verse. I truly wish my life to be a poem and I feel very passionately about that.

So I find coming upon a person who feels passionately enough about what he’s reading to respond and to respond straight from the heart and without regard to how it is to be received by another—in other words, no sucking up to the spiritual brass, refreshing.

Okay, now you know why I’m writing you. I will use your letter and what you said about things as a springboard to talk from. Please understand I am not attempting to defend anything in the Ra Material—it either speaks or it doesn’t—if it doesn’t leave it and go to something else. It doesn’t matter a bit to me. I produced the stuff—it’s not mine—it’s everybody’s who needs it, who wants it. I wasn’t there. I did the best I could preparing myself for a good and pure a contact as I could, there it is, that’s it, okay.

“Number one—I don’t buy it.” Fine. No comment there.

(Carla reads) You’re interested in the paranormal and you want to know why. You have “good logic circuitry.” Okay, so do I.

I investigated (you couldn’t know this because you hadn’t read Secrets of the UFO which was put out in 1976—I ghost-wrote what Don thought actually—there was enough difference between what Don thought and what I thought, that I wrote the thing “By Don Elkins with Carla Rueckert,” in spite of the fact that I had written the whole book, researched it and so forth—because Don came to some conclusions that I was unwilling to come to, some emphasis that I was unwilling to emphasize, and so forth, so I was not willing to be an equal partner in that venture, but it is, right off hand, I would say one of the best introductions to the amazingly rich field of phenomena that surrounds the UFO phenomenon.

I did not find any answers in the phenomenon. I found that they led always towards a mystery underlying the phenomenon. I was interested in the mystery. I still am.

There is nothing wrong with my logic circuitry, but my logic circuitry tells me that in the end one can know nothing—nothing basic. We do not even know if there is mass. We have seen energy traces left in a dense medium by electrons. We have not seen masses of electrons. Many calculations have been made as to the mass of various electrons. There could also be differences in quantized rotations of energy which create differences in action at a distance—effects within fields which seem to indicate mass differences.

We just don’t know anything. Ours is an empirical universe—it is built on …

[The telephone rings and Carla pauses for a moment to take the call.]

And the beat goes on … I’ll tell you about that later, no big deal.“

Okay, I think I’ve covered that. (Reads) “The book is written,” you say, “for people who are familiar with all your work, past and present.” No. The book wasn’t written—it was channeled, and I don’t know how Don did it—I really don’t—I was asleep. I had never done that before in a session but I flat went to sleep and I wasn’t aware of a lot of what had been done even in the first session. I was about one question into the thing and I simply fell asleep as far as my own personal senses were concerned.

And so all I can tell you is that Don Elkins, who was 14 years older than I, let’s see, how old was he in 1981—he was 51 years old. He had been working in the paranormal field since the middle 1950’s. He had been through an awful lot of material—he recognized something that was worth something faster than most people would because the man was a genius. He was also possessed of a very deep intuition.

It was not written—that’s important to realize—it was not written. We received all these things, as a matter of fact, they would not let me listen to the doggone tapes for the first twenty-three sessions because they were afraid that—Jim and Don, that is—that if the channel heard the material, it might pollute the information that was coming through the contact. So they would come to me and say, “Does your mind/body/spirit complex have a distortion toward hunger/fullness?” And I would look at them blankly, process the information slowly, and say “I could use something to eat, but why are you talking to me like this.” (Laughs)

Finally, I got them to ask Ra if it was okay if I read this stuff so I would know what the heck they were all about, and became aware of Ra’s desire to use the English language as accurately as possible, and I think if you stick with the material through the four books, you will form an appreciation of Ra’s stubbornly accurate use of words to create not only meanings, but nuances of meaning. I did. Of course, he sent me to the dictionary a lot and I’d been working with Don since 1962—not since the early 50’s since I was in my teens at the time—he was 14 years my senior. But I did jump on board when I was 19 and have been working with him in one way or another ever since.

I found the language difficult also, but I came to appreciate the careful use of language and the intimations and almost subliminal nuances that go with the way that Ra uses words.

I did realize that it was an awfully big jump, so I tried in a very extended introduction to recapitulate the material that was in Secrets of the UFO, the book we had written in 1976 about various phenomena, which I thought basically was the stuff that led up to where we were when we got the Ra contact, and as you can read in the introduction, we didn’t get the Ra contact on purpose, it just happened. Somebody socks you with a two by four and you go down. You don’t plan the thing—you just react. (Laughs).

It happened, luckily, I had learned to keep the tape recorder rolling when I was doing any kind of teaching because a lot of times a student needs to hear two and three and four times the things that are said in the teaching session and so I was teaching somebody how to channel at that time and I had the tape recorder rolling, so we did not lose even the first session of The Law of One, even though we thought it was going to be an advanced or intensive session with L who was learning to channel at that time.

[Telephone rings.]

I got a new phone answering machine—freedom! Our old one went kaput and Bell Tel just delivered us a “Freedom Phone”—well-named. People think machines don’t have souls—silly people.

I went through Secrets of the UFO (hereafter referred to as Secrets). I took each chapter and sort of reprised in my own head basically what it was trying to get across and then I went into the files to look for material that was in addition to the Secrets and so people who had Secrets wouldn’t feel like they were being ripped off by having to read portions of it again in the introduction.

So it’s all new material except the part where Don is supposed to be talking about the new physics and Don gave me some notes and I wrote them up for Secrets and he said “Yeah, that’s the way I want it,” and when it came to the introduction he just circled the part in Secrets that he wanted copied so that’s the one thing that is exactly the same in Secrets and the introduction. There was nothing I could do about that. Don didn’t see any reason for saying it two different ways, and not being a scientist, there was no way I was going to try to fool with it.

We did try to get people to the point where they could kind of tilt or joust at the material—it was supposed to be called The Law of One—Book I and we put it out as The Law of One—Book I and then it was picked up by what we thought was a mass market publisher that was really going to do Don a lot of good. Don was a wonderful speaker—they promised him a fifteen city publicity tour and lots and lots of publicity, none of which they did. They changed the title to The Ra Material, they changed the authorship from “Ra, a humble messenger of the Law of One,” to us, which was ridiculous.

We do, however, have from the Library of Congress the original statement that it was written by an extraterrestrial entity (laughs)—not a citizen of the United States, but was, in Library of Congress terms, hired to do it, or something like that—it was really funny.

Anyway. (Reads) “Belief in psychic surgery …” The only reason I believe in psychic surgery is that I’ve had it done on me. Also, I felt I began to understand why you couldn’t test for it. I believe in psychic surgery and I will give you the two reasons I believe.

One, in 1975 I was in the Philippines—we went over there with no lead, no idea of whom to see or where to go. The taxi driver took us to the first person who—I tell a lie—the taxi driver told us about the second and third people we were to see. Meanwhile, we went to the hotel we were staying at which was out in the middle of nowhere because Don didn’t want to stay in the middle of Manila.

Lo and behold, we ran into a bunch of Louisvillians with whom we had made movies before. We had been involved in production and so forth—at one point we wanted to get into the movie business and save the planet by writing fantastic wonderful movies and having people act in them and getting people real excited about the concepts of metaphysical things.

We learned the business and we also learned that as the fellow on “Get Smart” said: at one point, 99, his girlfriend/wife is saying to him: “Max, I’m really concerned about this very dangerous business that you’re in”—firing and returning fire and so forth. “I just wish that you could just retire from this and join a business.” And he said: “99, I have been trained to be ruthless, severe, unforgiving, devily, and cruel—but not enough for business.” (Laughs) That was certainly true of show business.

We kept our word, we kept verbal agreements, we had handshake agreements—these things don’t work. Guess what? We even tried a couple of “you sign your name and I’ll sign mine” contracts. That didn’t work either. (Laughs) We ended up losing a pile of money and five different movies—all of which came out as absolutely horrendous abortions of what we had intended. I won’t even tell you the names except one—just for an example. You may have seen “Hangar 18.”

We had two people who were willing, for money, to give us affidavits of having seen the little green men pickled somewhere—Edwards or wherever—there have been several such reports.

When “Hangar 18” came out it was complete fiction. There was no attempt to use documentation, to be accurate in any way, shape or form, and there was never any pay back of the money that Don had used in preproduction expenses. The only satisfaction we got out of any of it was that we noticed that the people who were stealing from us were stolen from—and this apparently happened five or six times in Hollywood before we [inaudible]. It was just too rough a business for us.

At any rate, we met these movie people that were staying at this out-of-the-way place in the Philippines that we were in. They were making a movie to be shown in the Philippines and the Orient—you know, where the good guys wear white headbands and the bad guys wear black headbands? You’ve probably never seen one—I never have—but this is the kind of movie it was. They make a great deal of money and Billy Gerdler was involved in it, and we were good friends with Billy Gerdler and Leslie Nielsen, and Gary Lockwood, were the stars of it, so we hung out a lot in the bar of that hotel and really enjoyed one another’s company.

Well, one of the people in that company knew a psychic healer so that was another one. Then the person that checked us into the hotel had once upon a time been a tour leader of psychic surgery tours, so right there, without planning it or anything, we had three or four choices.

The most evidential source to me was a guy who did not speak any English—he had to be told through an interpreter what was wrong—I just said I had arthritis—my kidneys had failed when I was 13 and I had arthritis, and a whole lot of other things too, but why go into it, right?

So he moved his hands up and down my body—he said he was x-raying me. Would that our x-ray machines were as gentle. Then he plunged his hands into my belly—no joints in the belly. Squish, squish, squish—bellies are very liquid. He kept his left hand in place, I noticed, while he was fishing around with the other hand. Well, he pulled out three clumps and then closed me up by pulling out his left hand and wiping all the blood off.

There was no scar, there was no pain, but when I came home I had an x-ray and three cysts on my right ovary that only I, my mother, and gynecologist knew about, were gone on the x-ray—gone. When I asked him what he had done, he had said “You have three cysts on your right ovary.” Don didn’t know this—he could have picked it out of my mind somehow but that in itself is an interesting phenomenon.

It was my opinion then and now that it was not a scientifically verifiable experiment—it was a materialization phenomenon—that all the blood and the apparent opening of the skin was based upon the Filipino’s need and training of an extremely literal Christianity—very literal. That was why there was an opening in the body—because it was literal.

Just to give you an example, we were there during Holy Week and on Good Friday there was a fellow who had a nail driven through each hand and carried through the streets of Manila on a cross. This is carrying literalism a little too far for this American, but when taken down from the cross and on his way to emergency, his only comment, when asked, was that it was a very exhausting experience but that he hoped he would be asked to do it again next year.

A little extreme for me, but we’re talking literal. So, this fellow had been out in the desert for twelve and a half years asking for healing gifts—and had been given the healing gifts and was using the healing gifts—they showed up on the x-ray, okay, that was one experience.

The other part of his experience was a Christian Scientist member of the crew—very intelligent chap—one of the producers liked him a lot. He had the most horrendous sinus headache. Even in the Philippines where nothing should go wrong—a very happy place—they worked on him and they worked on him where you would expect them to work on him—near the nose and near the eyes and so forth. Then they turned him over and worked on the back of his neck.

Well, he wrote about a year later saying he had been back in the California [inaudible] for a year and he hadn’t had any sinus problems. I haven’t heard from him since. Movie business does not admit long, thoughtful letters. But this gentleman did both of those things.

The other experience I had was in 1978. Dr. Puharich wanted to investigate a Mexican healer named Conchita—she was 78 years old—she was blind—she had first discovered her abilities as a psychic healer when she was in the army fighting for Pancho Villa in 1915. Yes, they do take women in the Army everywhere but here. I think women will get into the war sooner or later, but … there’s still this funny feeling that women are somehow deficient in their ability to shoot guns which is not true. Women are very vicious.

Anyway, she was just drawn to this companion of hers that was downed by a belly wound. She took her knife, which at that time was sharp, a five-inch—Don said it looked like a Boy Scout hunting knife, if you know what that looks like. But at any rate, in 1915 it was sharp. She took it and slashed around on him and she said everybody wanted to know what she was doing, but he revived. He was healed and all the slashing around she did left only superficial scars like he’d been scratched on a fence or barbed wire.

So she started healing people right and left with this big hunting knife and after the war she kept doing it. At this point she was quite blind—there were doctors all over the place sending people to her—she took them as they came. She didn’t like most people—she liked me. She—well, you’d have to be the kind of person I am actually, I could feel that she wanted about two hours of just being with me. But everybody else was restless—running in and out, drinking water, and all this stuff. But I was very patiently and quietly sitting there and responding to the occasional question, being as sociable as I could be, and this is apparently a very strong Mexican and South American in general custom—you don’t get to business right away—you get to business when it feels right.

Anyway, she took a liking to me. The one thing I think she did to test me was to show me this hunting knife. It was so dull, you could not cut your thumb on it no matter how hard you pressed. This didn’t disturb me because I knew she was a psychic healer and that it was all a materialization thing anyway, and I did not know how the materialization phenomenon was done, but I knew that it wasn’t going to hurt in any lasting way.

Now the brooding, what can I say, feeling in Mexico is cruel. She supposedly was channeling [Katamak] the son of somebody else who was a big wig—something to do with Quetzalcoatl, feathered serpents, steep pyramids, human sacrifice, etc. We’re talking a fairly brutal, brooding, Indian influence. So her psychic surgery hurt.

What she did was—all I said again, was that I had arthritis. This wasn’t that I wanted to keep all the rest—the kidney disease, da-ta da-ta da-ta—I had a long and complicated history—from her it was just that it was the arthritis that was limiting me, and it was that that would be most evidential if it could be healed.

No psychic healer of any reputation whatsoever has attempted to heal my arthritis. It apparently, according to them, and according to my feelings, was placed on a very rambunctious and activistic soul who would, at this point, be living with AIDS people so that they could bond with me and have some reason to live because they were loved. That would be the kind of work I would be doing—I would be pouring myself out physically. I am unable to do that because I am unable to sit up straight.

She ignored the diagnosis completely—she went right for the kidneys which had been half-way destroyed by two bouts of what used to be called “Bright’s disease,” which is in fact, a multi-syllabic horror called glomerular nephritis.

I died at one point during the experience and was actually given the choice of coming back or staying and I was told that I had not done what I came to do but it was a hard enough job that if I wanted to I could stay. But I’ve always been a responsible soul—besides I was really glad that there was something I could do—the whole reason I prayed to die in the first place about two months before my kidneys failed—was that I didn’t think I could be of service any more.

I had two dysfunctional alcoholic parents—they were functional in their jobs they just weren’t functional as parents. I babysat, I kept the house—I was their parent. But I never pleased them because of course they were very self-involved and anything short of perfection was unacceptable so I never felt that I was adequate to their needs and the kind of person I was as a kid, having an IQ that couldn’t be tested because it went off the scale at 200—made it very difficult for me to talk to other kids, because they were reading “See Dick Run” and I was reading “Little Women” in the first grade. By third grade they were reading “Little Women” or whatever and I was reading in the adult section.

So I just didn’t seem to be able to do any good to anybody. Okay. So my kidneys were half shot and I had about half of each left after the two attacks of glomerular nephritis—one when I was 13, one when I was 15.

She slashed through my spine twice—only one inch of the blade showed, Don looked real green when he came out of the room—I’d lied and said he was my spouse—he wasn’t, except of course that he was, in a more metaphysical way, but we were never married during our 16 years of chaste but most adoring partnership. We worked very well together. To his credit, he went right back into the room and got operated on himself. Didn’t do him any good at all.

However, I, who had been having infections of the urinary tract constantly all my life since I was 13, began to experience none—zero. And up until recent problems began occurring, I was healed. I believe I am still healed in my mental body—in the form maker body, but that the fix is just kind of wearing out—I’m approaching the half century mark and, coming back to a dead body has given me a lot of heart and a lot of strength, I expect to live a long life. I expect to get through this one too, because I know and I affirm that my form maker body is still healed and that will be, but meanwhile the doctors will have their fun.

At any rate, those two things—the fact that I did not mention the kidney problem but that it was taken care of, and that there was verifiable evidence of cysts being removed and staying removed, gave me the impression that this was a materialization phenomenon that was very real—it was not something that could be tested physically because it was an illusion. A materialization illusion. Very real looking—terribly real looking—but an illusion. A kind of jog of the mind to make the mind part of the body, which is so often the part of the body that makes you well or sick, believe that you were being healed.

I did feel some pain with the knife, but it was pain I could tolerate and I had scars roughly equivalent to scraping myself along a fence with a barbed wire—very superficial and the scars were gone in about two years—the evidence gone fairly quickly—as opposed to no scars and no pain in the much more loving experience in the Philippines. That’s why I believe.

You don’t have to believe it because I believe—you haven’t had these experiences. I wouldn’t expect you to believe. But that’s why we never went for scientific proof because we didn’t think it was a scientifically provable phenomenon. We felt it was a paranormal phenomenon which could come out any old way. I did save the bandage of my second operation that I had with Conchita—I did a lot of bleeding in that one—so I saved the bloody cloth because Kit Pedler wanted to test it in England, but before I had a chance to send it to him, he died, and nobody else had been present in that room or was interested in testing a piece of lamb’s wool to see if it had blood on it.

The attitude of the person that tested it would have been all important in getting the results. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s all right. But that seems to be the way it is with paranormal phenomenon—the scientist is pretty much part of the experiment. I tossed the evidence away from the Conchita incident only when I ran out of people to ask to analyze it for me. I admit perfectly well that I am not a scientist—the scientific portion of L/L Research died in 1984. I have been trained as a teacher, a writer, and a librarian. Jim has been trained as a business person, a teacher and an anthropologist or sociologist, I get them mixed up. These are not scientific fields and we don’t pretend to it, so the nature of L/L since 1984 has changed and there is nothing I can do about it.

I don’t care anything about my own credibility—this is just all out there for you to take in to see how you feel about it. I address the part “How the heck do you know it’s enough for a book?”

Don just recognized that it was a good quality transmission and believed it or not, on those tapes, or in the book—I’ve read the book, I haven’t heard much of the tapes—apologizing for anything or saying anything about asking stupid questions—Don is a very checked out entity.

I don’t know anything about the history of Ancient Egypt so anything that you can be suspicious of you are undoubtedly right on.

As to the morality of Ra’s message, that has to sink in over a long period of time.

How does Ra know about God? He doesn’t. He says that is a mystery.

Do indeed be suspicious. I really respect people who put everything to the most discrimination that they can muster. I do suggest to people that they use their minds as pack animals—not let their minds hag ride them as if they were robots. I understand the mind as a choice making bio computer. It comes up with yes, no, yes, no choices. That is its glory and its defect. It is trained to filter out about 99% of what it perceives from the incredible array of things we get in every second that we live and our senses are open, and it focuses on those things that are going to keep it alive—that are going to keep us in the way we have our program set up …

[Side one of tape ends.]

…the brain keeps us oriented towards ourselves the way we wish, towards each other and towards society in the way we have deemed appropriate. The nature of meditation, as I see it, being that of loosening the incredibly dictatorial power of that choice making closed book mindset so that it is more open to dumping programs that may not be taking fully into account new information, and bringing up metaprograms that add to a database that allows in different orders of data for the basic choice making. But that’s good for another tape all in itself.

I have a feeling that you’re [inaudible] me to sign, so, that’s the way I feel about the mind—I think that we should use our discrimination to the highest and I think we should be open minded and listen and be discriminating afterwards.

I’ve noticed that skeptics, in any kind of paranormal situation, change the situation so that perhaps nothing will happen. Open mindedness, otherwise known as foolish gullibility is a tremendous helpful factor in studying paranormal events, or actually in realizing the paranormal nature of a lot of scientific events that are occurring at this time and are attempting to give us information about an area of space and kinds of fields and particles and so forth, that don’t make any sense given the old empirical models of the universe. We need new instrumentation, we need new models, we need a lot of things, and it will happen.

I leave the validity of this contact completely in your hands. It’s been a lot of fun to play with your mind the way you played with mine. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for letting me get to know you a little bit. If you enjoy this kind of discussion—if you enjoy sharing your notes from the road, I don’t mind how critical you are or anything you are—I am always interested in listening to somebody who is an authentic person who’s really in there who’s attempting to live consciously and to learn the truth, and you sound like one of those people, and by golly, so do I.

I have a terrible sense of humor, by the way. Very briefly, I’m at a point in my life where things are going vastly wrong with my body and at this point I am in a very good spiritual place so I realize that either the body’s wearing out or it wants to be given more space and time to do a different kind of work than I’d been doing.

I am a mystical Christian and I had chosen to do a fairly active pseudo-orthodox ministry within the Church. Feel kind of like a secret agent there because I don’t believe anything (laughs), I just find that it’s a lot easier to work a path that people have already gotten going because getting your own path going gets a lot of energy and besides I love to sing the kind of music that Episcopalians have available—Bach, Brahms, Mendelson, it makes my day.

We’re doing Mozart’s Requiem, Bach’s Magnificat and Mass in B Minor, Brahms’ Requiem, all of that this fall in the Bach Society and I’m sure it will spill over a lot into the church because people that are in the Bach Society, which I’ve been singing in for twenty-three years, also run the church music program at the Episcopal Church that I belong to, so it’s just a delight to be there, and of course, I’m a very ritualistic person and love the wonderful organ playing and the wonderful everything—it’s a very beautiful church.

But it may well be that it’s time to turn into myself even further and be rather than do, and I look at this as clearing out some time—I don’t feel that it’s my time to die, but if is my time, you know, for nature to say “checks please” I’m perfectly willing to go once my job has been done.

If I die naturally, then I know my job has been done, and all I ask is that Jim McCarthy, who has been kind enough to work with us since 1980 and whose masculinity I finally noticed about two years after Don died, so we’re married now, he’s promised that if I do die to go through the enormous backlog of stuff that I’ve channeled or written to people and thought interestingly enough for him to keep a copy of and edit out all of my “ifs” and “blurps” and “glubs” and incomplete sentences and split infinitives and all that stuff.

So that’s what’s happening to me today. I was just laughing because at the doctor’s office I went to for a test—I have to go next week, and then I have to go—oh, it’s just a riot right now—so many things that are wrong with this physical body that has done me so well for so long. I’m going to jazzercise tonight—fuck everybody. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke. That was what the phone call was about—I’m supposed to take another prescription—I swear I get all my calories from prescriptions.

Time for me to say bye-bye. Thanks a lot—I really appreciated your letter—I really enjoyed talking to you. If you want to have a spiritually based communication, based on what you’re thinking—it doesn’t have to be “spiritual”—it just has to be what you’re thinking as you seek the truth. Notes from the road I call it. I’ll listen and enjoy it, and respond as I’m feeling at the moment. It may be two months—it may be right away, depending on how backed up I am. I’m backed up right now, but your letter really interested me so I grabbed it off the top.

I do an awful lot of work with people who are “needy” and I need to prepare for tapes like that with some sort of inner process whereby I become able to channel a portion of myself that is able to answer questions that I could not answer without the extra guidance. I have a bunch of those tapes, but this one is just an off the top of the head kind of thing—I knew it would be easier and I was kind of lazy today.

So, God bless. Write me if you feel like it. For God’s sake write me on paper, don’t send me a tape. I am really backed up and it takes a long time to listen to a tape and I know I’m being really rude to send one to you, but my hand is kaput and no one can read my handwriting but me. So I have no choice but to flap my gums.

But it is incredibly easier for me to read a letter from somebody—I can take a highlighter and just mark places I want and also I get a good feel of somebody off paper and tape, for some reason, doesn’t transmit that. I guess it’s because the person doesn’t handle it.

You’ve got my address and you know what I think and you know what I’m like and if you feel like keeping it up, do, and if you don’t, don’t. God bless anyway.

Love and light,

Carla