Dear J,
Thank you very much for your letter. I think what I’ll do is just go through your letter which might make it sound a little disjointed because I’ll be going from one of your topics to another and then at the end of the letter if I haven’t said everything I want to then I’ll do that, but I want to focus on the letter first.
It sounds like you’re having a great time; I get that off the paper. I’m glad that what I said about correspondence helps to put it more into focus as a tool for spiritual growth.
Back in medieval times before print was invented the only way scientists had (they didn’t call themselves scientists then, maybe alchemists) had to share information was to write letters. They couldn’t write books unless they wanted to send a handwritten book so people who were studying a certain subject and people that were at universities or private studies in the same field would communicate by letter. That art has been lost because of the ease of other media that can be used. It takes longer to write a letter and read a letter than it takes to get little bits and snatches of things by talking on the phone.
People’s attention span in our culture has gotten rather short, but if one is a thoughtful person and is serious about seeking the way to get the best mirror for yourself is to be in a high trust level relationship with other people who are interested in the same things you are so that they can mirror back to you what you’re feeling to them and you can mirror to them and as you tell each other about what is happening with you it really does help each person.
I think you’re the first person that started out being very concerned about my health who ever actually heard me. Most people who are of the feeling that if you are spiritually whole then healing should have taken place and you should have gotten rid of whatever distortions your body happened to have.
I really, really thank you and I appreciate the kind of character that it takes to listen and to grasp an idea that is very hard for people to grasp. I think in this age of materialism, people equate sickness with very scary things, like death. I think people have always had a tendency to attribute illness to a person’s interior health and often with good reason.
In this case, I think it was a pre-incarnative choice, as I’ve said. It’s one of those things, a condition of living that sometimes can get very frustrating. I have to sit in this bed in the living room pretty much all the time. However, I do disobey doctor’s orders and walk as much as I can without totally wiping out my shoulders and back. I try to get a half a mile in at least three times a week and ideally I’d like to work upwards from that but it may take several years.
But, I am nothing if not persistent, so… I’ve done this once, I was flat once in 1978 and I worked back from it. I’m told by the doctors that there’s no chance that I’ll be able to do that this time. I’d love to thumb my nose at the doctors again and if I can have the grace simply to go to church, sing in the choir and worship and stay in the Bach Society, which is an extension of my worship as we sing sacred music. We’re doing Mozart’s Requiem and Bach’s Magnificat this August. If I can do that I think I will feel that my nose thumbing is up to snuff.
I do think a lot of the time that healings can be achieved if the pain is not needed any more, one simply has to allow one’s lesson to have been learned and allow it to go away. I think a lot of times attitude is basically what heals. People so often dwell in a terrible state of self-unforgiveness—they haven’t forgiven themselves for anything. They can forgive anyone else, but they can’t forgive themselves and they hold all this inside and it’s very hard for them to feel the joy, the spontaneity and the freedom and the laughter that comes from a life of faith.
I can sit here on this bed and just have a ball and I see people walking around just so down all the time for no particular reason, just a bad attitude, an attitude that indicates the person has not yet understood that they have to be responsible for their own healing. I think healing is very much an inner thing that manifests on the outside sometimes, but in cases like mine where there is a reason for the disability, it doesn’t appear on the outside, but anybody that’s around me for any length of time just forgets that I’m ill.
I don’t feel ill, I don’t act ill, I don’t think ill, and I don’t talk about it. I’m interested in my friends and in what they’re doing. So I’ve never had to take that “Oh, you poor thing, you must feel so bad,” because I just don’t act like that. I hope I have the grace to be able to continue to do that.
(Reading) “Peace, Love, and Healing,” (let me write that down), I was thinking that somebody had written me about a book that sounded very good. I know the author’s work (Bernie Siegel). I’m reading a really good book when I get a chance, which surely isn’t often: Steven Levine—“Healing into Life and Death.” It has been a really good book so far and I recommend it to anybody that’s interested in the subject.
Isn’t that synchronistic that you picked up a book that talks about non-suffering? You’re going to have some pain, but you don’t suffer, you just go through it. You make it your friend, you realize that you are living in an illusion and that is part of the illusion and that the illusion itself is becoming transparent because of the spiritual work you are doing so there’s no reason for the pain not to become transparent.
And yes, I am a tough little cookie. I had a doctor for 35 years who’d seen me through everything from kidney failure on up and I just adored him. He retired about a year before he died and I didn’t know what I was going to do. He referred me to another doctor who had an extremely dry sense of humor, very English, and he said “She looks fragile, but she’s a tough broad.” I thought that was great.
You’re not a bit cornball, not at all. I don’t believe that anybody can be cornball too much.
(Reading) Yes, we’re still talking about being healed. That’s the important thing to realize is that healing is basically feeling whole, feeling entire, feeling comfortable with yourself, liking yourself, loving yourself and just letting that light shine on through you from the Creator.
This animal that carries me around, I’m really grateful to it. It’s a second density animal and it responds very well to my suggestions. If it starts hurting a lot on a walk I can visualize sending blood and energy to this body and it responds a little bit. It’s always had a lot of heart. Here’s a body that came back from the dead. It reminds me of one those clunkers that you don’t want to get rid of because it’s a lemon, but it always starts, and I’m real fond of my body.
It does spend a lot of time in the shop. My beloved companion of many years, Don Elkins, once described me as a Rolls Royce that was always in the shop. I thought that was very funny.
(Reading) “Once the lesson was learned the limitation could be released.” I think that’s absolutely true and I’ve seen that happen. I’m not sure I’m capable in this lifetime of learning the lesson that the limitation is here to teach me because I’m irrepressible to myself. I’m always enthusiastic about whatever is coming down the pike. When I hear something I immediately want to help, I want to go.
I heard about a hospice program for AIDS people here in town. Immediately I wanted to volunteer. I can’t sit up for 30 minutes and I want to go downtown and work with AIDS patients. I do believe that they’re the lepers of our time and that the healing that they truly need is love. I honestly think that if they could bond with somebody and find love and trust I think that the immune system would get back together. Maybe it wouldn’t happen every time, maybe only one in ten.
But I do believe it is a disease that is very transparent to love and to the bond of trust and love that people can make on an intimate level, not with sex, but simply by being there for each other. So I did a bit of grieving when I saw how impossible was my present situation as far as being able to volunteer. So I have a feeling that I’m not going to run through this lesson of accepting my limitations in any way in this incarnation; not if I keep being the same Carla that I’ve been since birth, which is irrepressibly interested in everything and always wanting to help in some way that involves doing, involves getting up and going and being there.
I have to say that the real reason that I don’t lose that is that I like it in myself. If it causes me to sit in the bed, it also causes me to be the person that I am and I like the person that I am. I like being enthusiastic about the metaphysical equivalent of Marine Boot Camp which I think we’re all experiencing on this third density level. The lessons of love are rough and we have a choice to make and not much time to make it, so we really get pretty intense incarnations and I don’t want to miss a moment.
So to stay on this bed I probably do need the limitation of this disability, but I take responsibility for that. If I would accept sitting here without the pain I think I probably could get healed, but the thought of it, I’ve thought of it carefully, and I can’t honestly say I would stay here. I would be out volunteering. That’s the person that I am. That’s who I am. You can fight just about anything but your own nature. One’s deep nature, that is.
I think from birth I was that kind of a person. I can’t ever remember responding to a situation as the one who was taking. I’m in a situation to try to figure out how to help. It’s nothing to be proud of, it’s just the way I was born. I haven’t improved any, but that just happens to be me and I like that in myself. It feels right and it makes it possible for me to do the work that I’m doing because if I were melancholy how could I channel? All my energy would be blocked in the lower energy centers.
I love to cook, I love to iron, I love to swim, I love to volunteer with street people. I’ve volunteered to teach in poor sections of town. I’ve tutored in those situations. I’ve been a counselor for free, I’ve read to the blind for free. I don’t need the money. We don’t have a big income but we do have our house paid for which helps a lot. It was paid for when Don died.
So Jim and I are both very focused on this life that we want to live and it’s involved in channeling and living a life that is as close as possible to the tuning that we want to achieve for the channeling, which means that basically we’re trying to live a very consciously spiritual life and I couldn’t ask for a better partner in this venture than Jim. He’s wonderful.
He’d probably try to keep me out of the kitchen but I really love to cook. I used to read cookbooks. I don’t like to clean up, nobody likes to clean up, but I do like to cook. I was a pretty good country cook, nothing gourmet.
My parents were both drunks (to put it bluntly) so I started cooking at ten so I’ve had lots of experience. I also love to do stitchery, I used to make all my Christmas presents, but now my world is different and my service is different.
(Reading) “You’ve reached the point you were headed for so why not just let go of those old irritating physical problems?” This could be nothing but nonsense but I’ve really asked for vision and insight on what’s been happening to me and I’ve had it come to me a couple of times what this is all about. I have finished expressing the doing in a spiritual manner. Not that I will stop doing, I’m not going to stop answering letters, I’m not going to stop teaching, I’m not going to stop channeling, and I can always improve, but I’ve reached the minimum level for what I intended in this incarnation, so I think what this is is an initiation into being.
Sitting here, day after day, able to get my work done and having lots of time to pray, I can simply be here. It’s not something that I’ve ever done before, much, except in meditation. But now I can spend hours just thinking, being, and I think that’s the final lesson and I think it will probably take me the rest of my life.
I know that there are people in this world that are so hollowed out and so humble that they’re transparent and you can just see them radiating the love and the light of the father, or if you wish, the father and mother, and that is where I’m headed, I think. It’s not a lesson a lot of people need to learn in this density, but I found out a long time ago that I was a wanderer and Ra confirmed that and so I think that basically I think I just said, well, life is a college, so I took 21 hours, and this last one is rough. It’s going to take some doing. It’s not guided as much as it is being left to myself to do whatever I think needs to be done in order to become hollowed out; become the vessel that can be filled with something precious.
Not that there’s anything wrong with my personality, I have no intention of losing it, bad sense of humor and all, but if your personality can become transparent to you so that you are a no self at the same time that you’re a self, then I think you become transparent to the love and the light of the infinite one, and you don’t have to say anything in order for people to be helped by you.
All I’ve ever wanted to do in this incarnation is to help. Also, I think it’s the greatest help the planet can have is your simple moment-by-moment consciousness.
So these are reasons for feeling that I really have not reached the point I was headed for and that I do have a lesson to learn and this is the beginning of that lesson, it is setting me up so that I have the opportunity for it. I can duck it. I can turn on the TV, I can read a book, I can distract myself. I wonder how long it will take me to be. That’s my goal now. Just to be.
(Reading) So you’re talking about words—yes, words are very slippery and I think you’re talking about words as being unconscious signals to your own self, so that if you say “I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick,” you’ll be sick. If you just keep affirming that you’re well, you’ll be well, and I think that’s so true.
But along the same lines I will say that I think the gist of what I do when I’m working with a letter and answering correspondence, I could probably make a lot of money. I’m fairly good at sharing spiritual principles, giving advice, that psychic reading stuff that people pay so much for. I don’t charge for it. To me, it’s a labor of love and also when people don’t pay for something they don’t tend to value it. Subconsciously, if they pay a lot of money for it, then they feel they have to pay attention to it, whether they agree with it or not.
I like to protect our confidences in each other and your ability to say, “You’re full of shit, this isn’t for me, I’m not going to accept this.” By keeping it a simple correspondence, maybe there’s some teaching going on. I consider it a teaching because people tell me they learn from what I have to say and that’s fine, but they’re my colleagues. Everybody in the universe is equal. We are all children of the same Creator and specifically we are all made out of the Creator which is an absolute and free will, which is just what makes us seem to be various.
But our deepest self is the same as everybody else’s deepest self. We’re made of the same stuff. We’re God clones. Or as Ra called it, sub-sub logos. We are co-creators. There is that in all of us. So I never treated my teachers as teachers, I treated them as colleagues which indeed drive some of them bats. I’ve never treated anybody who would say that they were learning a lot from our correspondence as anything other than colleagues. Everybody is a colleague. We are all peers. We just have to look past this shell of physical flesh that seems to separate us all and make us all different. If you can get past that, we aren’t different.
Now by our freewill choice we are unique. No two people have the same piece of freewill. Freewill itself is absolutely various. So when I talk to people I try to use words the same way that the person who has written me is using words. It’s a matter of being sensitive to people’s vocabulary. It’s a very subtle thing sometimes, but whereas one group of words would turn somebody off, another vocabulary for the same thing gets through and doesn’t’ get stuck on somebody’s button.
It’s easy to push buttons through the use of words. Some words have power over people and they simply can’t cope with them. For the most part with unchurched Christians—I deal with so many people who are cultural Christians who’ve been brought up in the Church but can’t hack it now, well, you just don’t say “God,” you don’t say “Christ,” you don’t say “Jesus,” in the kind of way that you do to a practicing Christian. Those words create pain for people.
So you use a different vocabulary. You say “Creator,” you say “Ra,” you say “Christ Consciousness,” you use words that are emotionally neutral and in that way you can communicate with people that would otherwise shut you off.
Okay, the rest of this is from “Peace, Love and Healing,” and I appreciate that, I enjoyed reading that.
(Reading) You’re still talking about illness. You’re thinking a lot about illness at this time and I’ll tell you one thing that helps is not thinking about it—just trudging on through it; straight ahead. And if you’ve got some conditions that are there, well, that’s the condition you’re in and you’re content with it. You don’t strive to change it or fight against it, you just let it flow through you and out.
I think thanksgiving and praise are two wonderful tools to use in that way. You can always find something to be thankful for in any situation. You can give thanks for your life. You can give thanks if the Creator is kindly and that you are an imperishable being. If you’re in a cell in some deep dungeon you can still give thanks.
But we can see what we haven’t spoiled of this wonderful planet’s beauty. There are so many beautiful things. The artifacts that people have made, art and music. Really, there shouldn’t be a time ideally, when we’re not in the process of having kind of a running “thank you, Lord” kind of a feeling about us, because there’s so much to be thankful for. And along with that is praise for the Creator who made all this.
I think that means that you’re thankful, not just for the days when you’re pain free, it’s for the days when you’re in real pain, get your mind off that pain and look at something that you’re thankful for. Find some wonderful thing at your window or at the next desk or whatever your environment is, look at it with eyes of love. There’s thanks giving all over the place for you to pick up on, there is so much to be thankful for.
So I don’t think that thanksgiving stops because you have a painful day instead of a pain free day. Actually, I haven’t had a pain-free day in a lot of years, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I know cystitis is one of those things that really gets your attention and is really painful. I’m sure you’ve sat in a lot of warm baths to find some happy results from that. I’ve been through cystitis many times when I was younger and the kidney problem was still acting up and causing urinary tract infections all over the place. Cystitis really did respond to nice warm baths, so I took a lot of those.
Arthritis responds to nice warm baths and I’m still taking a lot of those, but I have to lubricate myself, or rather, there’s the custodial care that I’m talking about, Jim has to do this for me because my hands are up to it. Every time I get wet I have to repair the damage by putting some more oil in there and still I have very dry skin.
But the problem with being sensitive in general is that your body tends to express that. That’s not always the way it is, but that’s the way it is with me. My hair is as fine as baby hair which means I can’t keep it neat for more than five minutes at a time. My husband likes long hair so I wear it long for him so consequently it always looks a bit ragged. But I figure, who do you want to look good for? I want to look good for Jim.
I get a bikini mark every year regardless of the state of my figure which at this point is not wonderful since I’m going through so many things wrong with my belly. I’m bloated and I don’t look as good as I should in a bikini but he likes that mark so I get it.
If you haven’t tried simple water therapy do try it because it gives you a lot of relief. If you get one of those trays that sit across your bathtub you could sit in the tub and do your work.
…Christine Elizabeth, she wrote a wonderful book about AIDS lately and there was an article about her in a magazine (can’t remember which one) wherein she gave a marvelous discussion about AIDS. She’s really on the beam.
Jim’s birth date is May 10, 1947. He was born in Carney, Nebraska some time late in the day. I was born in Lake Forest, Illinois on the 16th of July, 1943 shortly before 7:00 a.m. I don’t know anything about astrology but the little snippets of things I’ve picked up from my friends that are drawn to that method of focusing psychic energy. It isn’t a way that appeals to me as a path to learn but I certainly consider it to be a viable path for people.
(Reading) “What I consider to be an outstanding concern of mine is ability or inability to reach altered states or meditate in a manner that is more fulfilling. Can you give me a reading that would focus this?”
Well, let’s see what I can do with this. Okay, meditation is not a western discipline. We, as occidental people are the work ethic culture and we are trained from childhood to be stimulated at all times, either by the television, by work that we are doing, by conversation with others. Have you ever noticed how few people can sit next to you and be quiet? There’s something in people in this culture that makes it necessary to have something stimulating you as often as possible—as much as possible.
This is not the culture in which silent meditation thrives. This means that we have to train our minds and bodies and sometimes it takes a lifetime to do that. So before I say anything more about meditation, let me share with you my opinion, which could, of course, be wrong.
The important thing about meditation is your intention, your desire. It’s written in the bible and I think it’s a fundamental truth. “Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened to you. Ask and he shall receive.”
So what you’re doing basically is sending …
[Tape ends.]