Dear A,

Please tell Barbara that I am never going to get her answered if people like you keep needing me more (laughs). I have to write her by hand and you I can answer in a little easier way so when I got your letter I have to admit I dropped hers—I will confess it to her—which I was working on. She has to have it written and my arthritis…(Carla goes on to give her medical history and near death experience)

I was given until about the age of 25 to live because the poisons that had collected in my system that I’d not been able to eliminate for the two weeks before I died, and then came back and started getting better, had pretty much sensitized all my organs and settled finally in my joints, so basically, I was, from the beginning, involved from head to toe, but because of the fact that it was a pre-incarnative decision, it did not kick in until I had the opportunity to do some work in consciousness.

I accepted a job with Don Elkins, who was doing research into the paranormal—he paid me all of $300 a month which was exactly what I was getting as a librarian, and it sounded interesting and I’d known the man for many years, so I began working with him and I never looked back.

He died in 1984—he was fourteen years older than I was, but I had moved a very very long way in many ways. I had become completely disabled, I had begun the cautious, but very persistent analysis of my own channeling to see what I could do to learn how to do it safely, stably, and well, not implying that there is a best, but simply saying that we all have the ability to push our own limits, and that is a very very important point when we come to talking about healing.

I will tell you next what I did and what luck I had.

The first thing I tried was denial—that’s not real helpful on any level. No, no, this is only a little minor cut on all my knuckles at once for some strange reason, I must have banged it on a table—then it spread to the other hand and then it spread all over my body. By the time I’d gotten it together to go to a doctor to get the diagnosis confirmed, I had become truly toxic.

So, at this point, I was almost 30—it started to come on me when I was about 26, but my health really broke when I was about 29 or 30. And I found myself less and less able to sit up with my hands in front of me which was the exact position I needed to be in to do any typing, any cooking, any driving, needlework—just about anything. I tried and tried and tried and failed and failed and failed so I started to work on the diet.

For a year and one-half I faithfully ate macrobiotically, and if you want to lose weight, that’s the way to do it. That’s the only change that happened for me because you can’t eat enough of the stuff to make any difference and I just kept losing weight down to around a 100 (and I started at 130). They say 129 is an ideal weight for a woman 5’4-1/2“ but one has only to look at one at that weight and that height to know that the medical definition of well nourished and the stylish definition of svelte are not all the same thing. I didn’t mind at all that I was looking svelte but I continued to hurt.

So I continued to take more medicine which included steroids, then I tried wheatgrass juice (these are all tries here—I was deadly serious, I wanted some relief), sprouts, I tried the Edgar Cayce diet—the one thing I found helpful in that diet was the purchasing of Pepsi or Coke syrup and adding water so that it’s flat—it seems to be a very good diuretic and cleanser and since I had had kidney problems at a younger age, I thought it was really good to keep my self from holding water in the renal system or the urinary tract system, either one, so I did find that portion of the Edgar Cayce diet to be singularly helpful—nothing else.

All the rubs and packs were just messy (Edgar Cayce’s)—they didn’t help me. There’s more—cider vinegar, lime juice in my orange juice, that’s real bad, don’t try that, you name it, I tried it. My diet was not the reason I was ill nor was it going to be the reason I got better. So, I thought to myself, what now? I couldn’t climb stairs, I couldn’t close my hand around the door—you know what that feels like.

So I talked to my brother who was a jock—only 5’7“—people in my family are short and wiry—but a really good long-distance runner and had been running in marathons since college, as a matter of fact, he and his wife, Marion, and their brand new baby, Christiana Rose, made the national papers at the Charleston, North Carolina run, a mini-marathon. You know how most couples are about the kids—finding someone to watch them—well my brother is not like that. He put the baby in the stroller, took Marion by the hand, (Marion is a runner too, although she’s never placed, but keeps in awfully good shape) and they ran that whole thing with Christiana in the stroller—up and down hills—can you imagine what it was like for a 2-month old baby?

The cute thing was the judges hastily created a new age division, in which, of course, she took first place, being the only new born to be in the Charleston mini-marathon.

I talked with him about running and jogging and so forth and he said absolutely not—he said do not do this. But my feet and legs were okay, I had them checked out, x-rays taken, and at that time they were fine—they hurt, but nothing had swollen into anything else and the synovial tissue was pretty well intact. So I was okay for walking on the street which is a fairly hard shock, so I would get the very softest, cushiest shoes I could.

Well, the first day—and this is how possible it is if it’s for you—the first day I got down the stairs from my second floor apartment, down the sidewalk of my house to the sidewalk on the street and I walked past my own yard of the apartment and then past the next house, and I had to turn around and stagger back—that was all I could do.

It took me six months to be able to walk a quarter of a mile. It took about two more years to get up to three miles an hour. In five years I was walking a five-mile an hour course, and feeling great.

Then, my feet started to become deformed and I was no longer able to walk on pavement regardless of what I wore. I had to start wearing orthopedic shoes, and they’re really all right, perfectly satisfactory, but not any good for walking long distances on a hard surface. It would be all right for walking on a nice golf course, but most wild country is not level, so walking in country places like a nice meadow, unless somebody is keeping it as a lawn, there’s no such thing as a nice even meadow—falling into chuckholes all the time, so I had to switch my exercising around.

I went over to jazzercise. Jazzercise wasn’t nearly as good for one’s stamina, however, it did work the major muscle groups and what I couldn’t do I made up—mainly, I simply couldn’t bounce so I did zero impact aerobics instead of low impact aerobics. I had had twelve years of dancing so I could look at the choreography, which, of course, was simple anyway compared to professional choreography, so that students can get it without training, and so I was doing six hours a week of that for a long time.

I did that up until about four months ago. Now in November of 1988 I had had an accident—a truck rear-ended us and I was in the shotgun seat—I was thrown back and against the side of the car, which saved my life, because I didn’t have anywhere to go with a whiplash, but unfortunately it created a trauma that is permanent and has put me down for good. So I did jazzercise six hours a week until this accident. My body was just a mass of muscle spasms and it would have been a joke if I’d tried to jazzercise for about two months after the accident.

But as soon as I could I got back to it because I knew that the longer I stayed away, the harder I would have to work. But I’d done a lot of building up over the years and hadn’t lost much—there was just one thing—my neck just kept getting worse and worse and worse. I just didn’t seem to be able to strengthen the neck muscles no matter what I did. Of course, I was wearing a cervical collar, but apparently the accident had so injured the undetectable muscle tendon that goes between each cervical vertebra I no longer could strengthen my own neck or my own spine, nor could I do any work from the waist up with my arms or anything.

I don’t give up easily, in fact I’m almost idiotically stubborn, but I know what’s at stake—it’s either exercise or a wheelchair. I’m not saying this is true for you, but it is true of my own experience.

And it’s still very slow going because after paying about $700 for the setup of a good aqua therapy and floor therapy exercise program I still am injuring myself and I don’t know why, so I have to go back to the beginning again and start with one, and if I don’t get injured then go on to two. I’m still coming off of an injury I got two weeks ago, so it again could take me a decade to get this under control or I could simply fail to be able to do it because the body has gotten too far away from factory specs to get back.

So in my case, diet was the least of my problems—exercise helped a lot but there was one thing that I haven’t read a lot about but lately I’ve been reading books that talk about healing as a state of mind rather than a state of body. You’re healed and whole if you feel that you are exactly as you should be. You’re healed and whole if you feel that this is an opportunity. You’re healed and whole if the end of the healing is moving to larger life and that is what the body has benignly intended.

Because I think a lot of people in the New Age give you more guilt about being ill than the people from the old Christian schools who are under the impression that if you’re sick, you’re guilty—of something—God knows what, but something—and either is poison if you take it in, so don’t take it in. It’s not your fault, you’ve just got a situation that’s all.

But let’s not think about fault here—let’s think about opportunity. What have you been not doing in your life because you were too busy that maybe is one of your gifts. What have you been doing in your life that you, in a non-judgmental way, feel may have been less than profitable that you could only do before you got hurting with these diseases.

See, I don’t think the Creator takes away with one hand without giving back a hundred times with the other because I don’t think I would be like this and in a very important way I and the Creator are one. I wouldn’t be that kind of a boss—it’s not my understanding of the way the Creator is either.

I believe in blind faith, I don’t believe a system of tenants, that together create a doctrine and a dogma that I follow literally. I’m a Christian but I am a Christian mystic. I would still be a Christian were Christ never to have been born or never died or risen. The story is of such compelling magnitude and poignancy that it is my way and I try to understand the mind of Christ all the time.

I also have a terrible but very universal sense of humor. Everything to me is like a cartoon in a way. I don’t take everything this lightly but I have the ability to—I have the tendency to but I don’t have to say what I’m thinking all the time. But I tend to see life’s little soap opera vignettes as cartoon things, you know, then you write a caption under it.

The human comedy is pretty black but it is awfully funny, so what I’m saying to you is for me the diet didn’t work but the exercise did work as long as my body had not degenerated beyond the point that I could use the exercise.

But I will keep on working until the day I pass into another experience—start on another adventure and another path of learning which I expect to be equally difficult knowing me and my greediness for learning. I practice faith, not in any belief system—faith that God is good, that God loves me, that it is only natural to love God, that he and I in a very central and important way are one as are we all—I am you, I am Barbara—“I am” is the consciousness of us all. “I am, I am” being the Hebrew depiction of God.

The Creator is basically consciousness—infinite, intelligent consciousness, and when you scrape all the stuff that doesn’t look like that away, that’s who we are—life.

I’m trying to remember whether Barbara said you were Christian or not. Well, I’ll give it to you in the Christian version and then you create a vocabulary that suits you, because this is not simply a Christian idea—it is a kind of idea. The example I’m giving is one example.

I have a morning offering in the morning—it is not a heavy-duty sitting that Barbara does, and then gets up and does for her family then sits for two hours again. I would have trouble with that. But I do meditate daily and read the scriptures daily, and other inspirational works also, not the least of which being our very own L&L Research Law of One books, which are very helpful for keeping up a certain attitude. Attitude—that’s the key for me—attitude. The glass is either half full or it’s half empty. The half loaf is either half here or half is gone already. Both, of course, are equally so, but in electing what alternative shapes our casual thoughts, we are giving signals to ourselves—you’re doing a good job—you’re okay—keep it simple—take it easy—that’s sort of “you’re okay” sort of message.

Whereas people who complain a lot are basically validating and worsening their condition because the signal goes right down into the ol’ subconscious, where it’s programmed into your mindset with which we look at ourselves.

See, I don’t claim this pain—I don’t need it. It fills me up and then I overflows. I always tell people around me “If you’re at all sensitive, don’t pick this up—it’s not yours, it’s mine.” But I do have a very toxic aura because I don’t hold on to it and I don’t push it away. It’s a houseguest that stays as long as it wants to—my house is open to any visitor.

There really isn’t time for us to feel sorry for ourselves. It’s just so unproductive. We have such a little tiny bit of time to express ourselves in before we, in this bodily form are dust, and we are in the presence of the Creator—we’re dust, but we’re in the presence of the Creator. We’re a spark of that Creator. Now what an opportunity, but what are we going to do about it?

Well we can do a lot more than a lot of people, because while you don’t say too much about whether you’re working a nine-to-five, but I know that your husband is very active, so you are undoubtedly working, whether you’re getting paid for it or not. That always gets me: “Are you working?” People with children have to grit their teeth. A friend of mine with four kids once answered that to someone who asked that incredibly thoughtless question: “Oh, yes, honey, I do work very much—I work all the time.”

To be able to see what’s happening, you have to back off. The sense of perspective is everything in this life. If you get too close, you don’t see anything. To use another figure of speech often used (and pardon the cliché’) in written language—you have to back off far enough to see the elephant—you can’t just go around feeling it like the blind men describing the elephant.

There is never any reason for fear—there’s never any reason to suffer. This is what I mean by attitude. As you begin to see the opportunities for quiet times, for the luxury of being able simply to contemplate, to learn about yourself, to learn where the center of your life is, who you really are and what you really want to do and how you really want to share your gifts, it’s a wonderful opportunity. It comes with some pain but almost everything that is helpful comes with some pain—I think we simply need to know why we are paying these dues and that’s the process that I apparently had a jump on, because of my particular nature, which was born, as far as I can remember, with faith as a gift of grace. I’ve always had an unforced and undeniable faith. I’ve many many times been dry as dust and felt totally despairing and suicidal. This is not an outrageous way to feel—this is a perfectly legitimate reaction to colossal bad luck or to a personal tragedy, if you want to put it another way.

In situations like that where you feel your joy is slipping away because of the pain, and it is biting you more than you can deal with in an upright position—I can’t be upright very long any more so I’m reclining on a hospital bed with a back up—that’s where I am these days. People in prison complain so much because they’re limited and it really gives me a hoot because they’ve got a lot more freedom than I do. But you see, they don’t really, because in their minds they don’t have this attitude that everything is right with the life that you’re living. That every day brings so much to be thankful for and so much to praise the Creator for—so much beauty, so much love, so many chances to love.

We didn’t really come to this earth to be loved. We have to face that. We didn’t come to this earth to be understood, we didn’t come to this earth to be consoled or treated well, or to have other people’s karma made up on our behalf—you know, people who have been mean to us in the past, strike that one out—we came to this earth for several reasons, the first of which is to lighten the burdensome, heavy miasma of negative emotion on this planet because of the situational ethics, which in my mind could best be described as “the ends justify the means”, and which constitutes in my mind an incorrectness that is absolute—we do not have much chance at all to experience deeply positive emotions, so we have to find out what gives us deeply positive emotions.

With me, it’s going to church and singing sacred music—I’ve got a little pennywhistle soprano and a fairly good alto and I can sing tenor if I have to. I love to sing sacred music—I’ve been doing it since I was four when I started my first Anglican choir—I was the shortest one, but I could read and I could read music.

At any rate, I knew what it took to feed me spiritually, and even though it now is pretty agonizing for me to sit up sometimes, I don’t miss a Sunday, nor do I miss singing in the Bach Society which is a two and one-half hour commitment every week, plus the amount of time it takes me to get in and out of town which is about an hour—we live on the hem of town, so I nourished myself in the end with what I knew would feed me because I had had the opportunity over a long period of time to think about who I was and to know what my center was and to have faith in that.

It’s very hard to have faith in yourself but one of the most marvelous tools in the world is something called persistence—it is a quality of will. This does not mean wanting to do exactly what you want to do at all times, what I’m talking about. I’m saying that on a day that you wake up and you know this day is a definite goner and you get up anyway. Get yourself a nice kaftan on, something that you’ll be comfortable in and if you don’t feel like going out, don’t make yourself go out—be nice to yourself and remember how you would feel if you were the boss and somebody else was an employee and came to you with this problem—what would you say? “No, you’ve got to stay at work and get this done?” No, you wouldn’t do that, you’re not a mean person. You’d say “well, honey, I’m sorry to hear that, why don’t you just take the afternoon off, we’re not that busy here, you can do it tomorrow or the next day, there’s no rush.”

There never is a real rush—it’s all programmed in by this crazy society. Take away the TVs and the VCRs and the absolutely crazy schedules that kids keep now. I don’t see how they manage to make it through highschool without experiencing burnout—hockey and soccer and piano lessons and dancing lessons, and whatever lessons, and mothers basically glued to their cars.

Just lighten up on yourself, take it easy and keep going. Now that’s one thing. There’s another way to approach this I’d like to give you.

Everyone in this world with very few exceptions has to deal with some form of low self-esteem, that’s another word for fear. It happens to us when we’re too young to defend ourselves, that’s why we’re scared. There’s part of us in there that didn’t give that up. I had a remarkably difficult situation as a kid—both my parents were functioning at work but were disfunctioning alcoholics as soon as they hit the door.

My father was a debating drunk—I will not say argumentative because it wasn’t just that he was mean, he was fascinated with logic, is the best way I can put it.

So, it’s very difficult to describe exactly what I’m trying to get you into the mind to think about, but if you think about what you react to, any spiritual seeker becomes aware fairly quickly that one is not reacting to the stimulus in an objective way. The catalyst has absolutely nothing to do with how you feel about it. What makes you suffer is the way you’ve programmed yourself to greet catalyst.

Now you can’t do work like this in consciousness if you’re all tangled up in some real basic places, because those places have to be free first. The least adorned and the ones that people call dirty is where you have to start. This is all just my opinion. It’s important to realize that if this isn’t true for you then drop it and go your way and keep looking because there is something there for you to—there really is, God doesn’t give us more than we can take. Just say the name that means the Creator that you adore—I don’t know what that would be—love? The Creator? God? Jesus? Christ? Christ consciousness? Logos? Take your pick. I have one acquaintance that I taught for a week in about 1985 who called him Papa; a fairly reasonable translation of ABBA.

At any rate, there is a personal relationship here between yourself and yourself. We’re talking about self-acceptance. Acceptance of the second density creature that gave us its very life in order that we could experience and learn things in this density, which is basically a density of choice—that’s important to remember. The choice is inherent in the very scheme of this illusion, which is much given to opposites—north/south, hot/cold, good/bad, hell/heaven—it’s difficult to name anything down to a plug in the wall that isn’t using polarity—the negative or positive, or alternately both, which doesn’t work for metaphysics, only electricity, to do this work, to creative this work.

Most men have claimed their passion because the society lets them—it encourages it. Even today, and probably for all times because of the biological imperative that women carry children. Men will have a basic no-lose situation—they can develop it without being gossiped about, if they’re manly (if they lisp they’re in trouble)—they can be monogamous or they can be polygamous.

Dorothy Parker said rather succinctly: “Higgimous, hogamous, girls are monogamous; hogomous, higgimous, men are polygamous.”

But I don’t think that’s true. Fear again. We are the ones that get pregnant. What do our mothers tell us? Say no. Like saying no to drugs; say no to sex. Doctors will tell you this. Your gynecologist will tell you “don’t give this away, you should be selling it for a good faith birth in life.” I’ve heard this lecture about three times in the process of finding a new gynecologist, which took me four tries to get one that wouldn’t lecture to me.

I can’t really blame them—here I was pushing 35 or so, and I’d been living unmarried to a man for a decade—so the doctors assumed I had a problem. I didn’t have a problem. I was just doing what I had to do to adapt to making it possible for a much-beloved entity to live with me and there were agreements made and honored faultlessly so that although our morals were alternative—he was chaste and asked me please to date (euphemistically, to take lovers if I wished.) He didn’t intend for me to be celibate but it was something he felt he needed to be doing and that’s the way it was for 16 years during which time I really felt that the Ra Material—The Law of One, Books 1 through 4 could never have been brought in with a group less harmonious than the three of us and the three of us consisted of the person I had begun dating, who was the first person that Don had ever approved of that I had dated—I’m a serial monogamist.

I love to be with a man, I do not enjoy more than one because it is too much effort to feel emotionally responsive to intimacy—to the degree of intimacy that lovers have—it gives you too many things to be concerned over and it’s always trouble—web tangle.

Don asked Jim immediately to join us and Jim and Don always had the greatest respect for each other although they were so entirely different I don’t believe Jim was ever as close to Don as I was, but it was three weeks after Jim came to work with us that the Law of One channelings began, so once again, I was getting worse, according to the x-rays and my own subjective feelings, but these were the golden years of my life, or at least some of them—I’m not at all convinced that that’s over—I’m still having a really good time.

None of this would have been possible without the opportunities that my arthritis has given me to be contemplative, to be inner, to be quiet, to reflect, to contemplate, to think, to read. Mostly to think. To consider, to ponder, to be slow. Working for oneself, which a person who is making zero dollars for what she is doing, has the great advantage of no boss, no one to tell you you’re not doing a very good thing over here and should be doing something over there.

So merely following something that was exactly in front of my nose I had watched the opportunity grow as my gift grew to stay quiet and to pay attention. What am I paying attention to? Well, certainly the outside world to some extent but not to very much of an extent because it is an illusion. What I try to pay attention to is how I react to catalyst because there isn’t any need to have any particular reaction to catalyst. We are old soldiers, we here working together—just because we’re soldiers of love and peace does not mean that there are not casualties and sacrifices.

I don’t know about you but I’ve been out here a long time—I’ll bet you have too, and I am more excited and optimistic and really intense about what I am doing. Not that it’s good or bad, I don’t try to take my own temperature—we can’t do that, not our spiritual temperatures.

Back to Red Ray. Women are not trained to claim their passion and sometimes there is a blockage of energy right there—right where it enters the body, or right where it begins to enter the parts of the body that have the opportunity to block it, which I don’t believe the legs do, I think it travels up into the body through the legs, but I really don’t know, I just assume and that’s the way I visualize it, but I certainly have never seen it and I’m not psychic so I could be completely wrong. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is the gist of what I’m saying and that is we have to claim who we are in this center, warts and all—we have to love ourselves unconditionally—we have to forgive ourselves unconditionally.

This is two sentences and about three years of work. The trick word is “unconditionally”. You don’t say “I forgive this and this and this, but THAT was too much.” No. We are all all that there is—All that there is is us. All are Us and I am you and you are I so we’re dealing with what seems to be individual and highly idiosyncratic problems, but in actuality, although each of us is unique we are each containers of all that there is. This means that under the correct circumstances I could kill—were I in a man’s body, I could rape, I could steal, I could defraud, I could—I’m trying to think of the worst thing I could do—under the right circumstances we are capable of almost anything, and the reason that I say that is that I’ve watched myself—it’s only happened twice in my life—once was a fat old cook that just came after me, he was huge and if he’d gotten started there would have been nothing I could do but just lie down and think of England and I was cutting up salad at the time and he almost became part of it, it was before I had any thought, total instinct—if you don’t want something to happen badly enough you don’t even know if you have a weapon in your hand—you will stop the person, you’re a lot stronger than you think you are when you’re really upset.

The other one was even more interesting (which was not very interesting at all) when I was about eight and my brother was about 4-1/2 (yes, I was already babysitting at that age) a 14 year old boy—my brother had been spastic all his life—not a birth defect but a forcep injury at birth and he was so spastic that mother had to feed him every 15 minutes around the clock because he could only get down two or three swallows—this went on for almost a year before he got any better. He slowly got to the point that he was symptom free except he couldn’t talk.

He understood what I said to him but he couldn’t talk back. He was the sweetest little boy and would do anything I suggested—he made me feel like a great heroine but it’s dangerous to feel like that because you start feeling like you can save the planet but you cannot—you can’t even save yourself unless you get rid of that idea that you’re up on some pedestal. I hate the sound of crashing and I keep falling off mine—we are not special, we are bozos—not to take yourself too seriously but to forgive yourself.

This is all red ray talk, believe it or not, as much as I’m rambling. I’m talking about accepting yourself even though you look like you’re imperfect in the extreme to yourself. You will be the hardest person on yourself that you ever knew. People are the hardest on themselves—you’ll forgive someone else ten times before you forgive yourself, so you have to work on that self image.

The next energy is the energy between individuals—normally in this culture that is blocked to some degree by anybody who is married or has had the experience with men or in the case of men, women, or in the case of gays, other women or men—it’s hard to be inclusive—whatever’s appropriate.

So we have these relationships and when they become intimate—not necessarily sexual—but when you reach a certain amount of trust level, then it is a lot easier to see how we really do function. The most common blockages are also the most common over extenders of this energy. It’s just as bad to have it working overtime as to have it not working, because what you want is balance and clarity, so it’s a living energy of light that moves up and can continue moving up—I guess you’d say the spine, although I think this is taking place at another level than the physical body, but it’s just a way of visualizing that helps me—I visualize the orange ray below the navel.

We are usually afraid either that we are going to be trapped, owned, possessed, or afraid of possessing the other person and having all that responsibility—not wanting to be responsible, or the opposite of refusing to be possessed, not wanting to be possessed or to possess. Either somebody wants it really badly and can’t have it, or doesn’t want what somebody else is doing to them. That’s what throws relationships.

People are almost never even in their expressions of love for each other, much less the reality of their love for each other, and there are many levels to that. People usually don’t know how much they love each other. It’s something that happens while you’re thinking that you’re busy within your life that you develop these feelings and you might be the last to know about some of them because you simply haven’t examined enough of the reactions that you had to the stimulus around you.

So if you are truly self-forgiven then it is so simple to forgive other people and to pray for them. And to pray for the whole situation, because it is a human comedy but it is a very black comedy sometimes and it’s a shame that you don’t find people more often able to find a love that is equal of their own, or find a love at all.

I think that’s where women can really help other women. Men are very competitive people, they’re brought up to be, they have to be, it’s one of those things like trying to preserve your virginity at least until you’re in love. This is the training—men get the stiff upper lip, don’t cry, do the best you can—good advice for girls and boys, but the little boys are the ones that get that training and little girls are the ones that are encouraged to be dainty and feminine and moody and flirty and irresponsible.

So every marriage has within it the dynamics for an adversarial relationship because there’s an attachment to the outcome of the two being together—both want something from it—if it’s the same thing then the pressure is a lot off and you’re experiencing much more pleasure in a relationship. If you want two different things you have to deal with making choices according to spiritual principles and that means you have to know what you believe—what you think is good for you. It also means you’ve got a lot of forgiving to do and that’s always starting with yourself.

Yellow ray is just a repeat of orange ray except that it has to do with groups of people—wanting to be high in the pecking order of some group or wanting to be the quarterback on the football team or the chief instead of the Indian, or visa versa, whatever you have an attachment to is going to get you, or as K would put it, you should downgrade your addictions to preferences. And you should become aware that nobody communicates properly, including you, and between men and women the communication is particularly difficult because women say many things to men that sound either like idle chatter or complaint to them. It isn’t, it’s just a woman’s way of sharing her day.

Women talk to each other—women support each other, this is endemic. I have never been in a locker room where one woman swatted another woman with a towel and made a welt. I understand that this is SOP in men’s locker rooms and it’s a very rough place to be because there’s a lot of jockeying for positions there.

Well, it’s exactly the opposite with women. So we can say to each other “we are the romance in our lives.” We, as women, have romantic relationships, we have heart sisters, we have a very high trust level going into a relationship with a woman compared to one that we would have going into a relationship with a man, because if she’s a good person and you’re a good person you’re going to be automatically supportive. I’ve been in plenty of women’s locker rooms and women support one another—it’s the love of an aesthetic person for another aesthetic person—it’s an artistic, I would say, unbreakable bond of womanhood and things held in common and women do hold things in common quite surely, at least within one society because of the requests/demands of that society. Or you can fly in the face of that society but you pay whatever price you must, but it’s a good idea to fly in the face of society rather than do something that you do not wish to do or do not feel it wise or morally correct to do, or do not feel it compassionate to do.

A thoughtful life, lived as slowly as possible so you can appreciate each present moment is a really good thing to shoot for.

Now once you’ve pulled all the bitterness out of yourself as if they were dregs from a coffee pot, leaves from a teabag or loose tea, and you’ve gotten all that muck out, you’re hollowed, and that hollow is like the treasure in earthen vessels that Jesus talks about. We do have an earthen vessel—it will become mud once again, but where all of these bothers and concerns were before, we may now allow to be empty and open to love, because we’ve stopped judging ourselves and others. We’ve been faithful even when we were dry as dust and could not possibly imagine getting through the next hour, we sat and meditated as much as we can possibly try to depending on how we feel—we have been faithful and we’ve come out of the desert and experienced the oasis of life, so that the next time that we hit the desert again, it’s not scary, it’s just a part of the trip that calls upon that wonderful trait of persistence.

Persistence is of more value to a spiritual seeker than intelligence or compassion because all of the good things will fail us, that’s why we’re in these bodies so we can’t see where we’re going or where we’re coming from or what we’re doing here. It all has to be free choice and all you have to make these choices is a bunch of things like getting a really painful disease that isn’t even going to kill you, which I think is rather rude if you want to know—I’m going to live to be 80 and I have to be uncomfortable all the time? Thanks.

But it was my opportunity to do what I really think I came here to do.

So realize that there isn’t a breath you take that isn’t useful if you’re living in the love of the one Creator. There isn’t anything you can’t do tomorrow, there isn’t any reason to be more upset one day than another that we all know that moves like weather and they come and they go and we can accept ourselves as perfect whether we’re nice or absolutely lousy one day, we accept ourselves, warts and all. That’s the foundation—accept and forgive.

The reason it has to start with us is really simple. When Jesus (I use Jesus, because this is my path—I don’t expect anybody else to have it, so please don’t think I’m preaching here because I’m not—but I do use a lot of Jesus stuff because it’s what I’m familiar with)…Jesus is reported to have wiped out the ten commandments when he said he gave us a new covenant—a bond between us and him and this is what we should do: “Love the Lord the God with all they heart, and all thy mind, with all thy soul and with all thy strength, and they neighbor as thyself.”

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets—Jesus cut right to the chase. But you see, we’re not supposed to love other people over God, no; they are God. We’re supposed to love them the way we love ourselves and we’re God.

“Well, I don’t feel like God.” Well, I can’t help that. I know it’s an illusion so take it on faith, baby, you are love made visible and you just begin to accept that about yourself that through all the comings and goings and ins and outs of life, all the pain and agony and anguish and happy moments and peaceful days, you are gradually, by doing this work in consciousness by opening the heart, by communicating sacred, that is, bearing witness to whatever truth is yours in a way that won’t be a stumbling block to another, of course.

Okay, so once we’re through into the heart chakra with full power we have the strength we need—it’s not physical probably, I’m tired all the time, how about you?—but mental and emotional and spiritual passion are just as possible to the person who doesn’t move around much as a person who is on the go all the time, as a matter of fact, it’s probably far easier to achieve an intensity of purified emotion if you are limited so you have the time to put in on that endless search for the mystery that will ever recede before us—we will never know—the Creator does not sign his name to his painting.

He gives them freewill and they jump out of the canvas and will find their own way back home—we’re all prodigals, prodigal daughters, you and I, and we’re headed for a big feast, so the first thing we can do for this planet is the thing that we can still do and that

is to keep our mind on what we’re doing and not spend a lot of useless time with “Why me?” or “It hurts worse than it did yesterday.” Or “Damn, I just got done with one knee hurting and now my elbow’s had it.” Minimize that sort of thinking—we have to tell somebody the facts—Stephen has to know so he can deal with it if something comes up, he has to know what’s been happening and has to have a report maybe once a day—he doesn’t need an hourly bulletin (laughs), and nobody else does either.

When people ask you how you are, they don’t really want to know, so don’t fall into that. And if people start pushing you on that, just say, “no, no, I have a happy heart, I’m fine.” And they’ll believe you if you believe it.

And that’s basically what I have to offer you, is that your path to the Creator has given you some really rough catalyst. You’re not alone and there’s no use being naïve about it—a lot of our suffering will stop the very first time we forgive ourselves for anything and it will go on being easier to hurt and accept it and be unmoved and ultimately not to even pay a lot of attention to it except just to tune in a couple of times a day to make sure you’re not dead (laughs)—really, I have such a will I’m a little concerned that I’ll keep going after I stop breathing.

But that’s what it takes is the will to be faithful—first you need to know what faith is which is why I so strongly suggest to people something that gives them the experience of adoration and I’ve suggested such things as jumping out of an airplane, going to a Sufi retreat and dancing your tail off, going to a dance weekend somewhere and going beyond your physical limitations. There are a lot of ways to put your mind in exalted planes and some of them are simply mechanical having to do with oxygen deprivation and things like that, but at least it gives people who otherwise would not be able to worship and have a concept of faith, that concept and that feeling that everything is okay and I am so full of joy. That is the best gift we can give—the way we live and the way we think, before we’ve done or said zip.

Our consciousness itself is the most important service we offer to this planet—I have strong opinions on this point. From there we move downwards. In other words, I honestly do believe that my consciousness is of more use for this planet than the four volumes of the Law of One. That was a manifestation—it took a lot of dedication, I was willing to die for it; I thought I would. I thought eventually I’d get surprised and be unable to do anything about it because I was under psychic greeting a lot of the time.

I wasn’t really fearful—I’m not a very fearful person—I think having died helps. The only thing I’m really afraid of is if I hear that voice over again telling me that I haven’t finished I am going to kick ass. (laughs). I am either going to finish or I’m going to go out trying, there is no thought in my mind at this time of leaving the world because I am not going to hear that voice over again, period.

To finish up the colors, the blue energy chakra in my particular system has to do with communication and healers work with that green open heart energy, not healing, but simply creating a catalytic situation where a person can chose healing for himself. We basically don’t do anything to each other, we bounce off each other, we become mirrors to each other or painted glass which is sometimes even more painful, but the only person we can work on is ourself and that work is going to have to do for saving the planet. That and whatever lies in front of our face.

We shouldn’t be overly content to rest on our laurels even though it might hurt some, we need to do those things that make us feel good.

I see that I’m almost at the end of this tape and I went back and listened to the last bit and I think that out of all that welter of talk, you’ve probably heard what I have to say one way or the other—I tried to go at it in different ways to give you something to hang on to—“okay I can do this today…” Sometimes that really helps because if I’d say, “Bottom line, just be love.” That’s like Ramtha or one of those doggerel types.

But we really do want to get somewhere and we know we won’t unless we use tools and endless persistence.

So I wish you the very best of luck.

[Tape ends.]