Hi K, how be you? I thank you very much for your extremely fascinating letter and must apologize for my answering it probably without the thoroughness I would be able to answer it were I at home—I’m in the hospital right now. My insides are protesting greatly against 20-some years of taking anti-inflammatories for this arthritis. I think my body has done tremendously well considering how much it has had to carry for how long and I’m very, very grateful that it’s just a good animal. It has a lot of heart and it just does the best it can for me but right now it’s having difficulty moving things through the plumbing.

So having been in the hospital last month for a week and after being sent home having repeated the same down spiral that almost killed me a month ago I decided to halt the down spiral before it got to the point where I had to have tubes in me to relieve my stomach’s complete blockage and I was very glad that I did. It was pretty close and I was in a much better situation coming in and not having to get a stomach tube in and being without eating anything which can be a real drag.

However, I certainly wouldn’t say I’m not thankful for this because I have learned a great deal from the whole experience and embrace it very much and here I am again and it will probably take the week—I came in on Tuesday and this is Saturday—and so far there hasn’t been any sign of real improvement. But instead of throwing more harsh medication at it they’re throwing a lot of cortisone at it hoping that since it’s a chemical system, a chemical will affect it; I really have no idea what’s going on but I checked with my body and it says it’s willing to do whatever it needs to do and has a lot of heart so I am cheered and I know that things will occur as they should.

If I am through and the waiter says “check please” I am happy to go because as I examine the relationships in my life I cannot find any in which I have not attempted to balance karma as far as one person can. In other words, I’ve forgiven myself and other people for any imagined difficulties that may have arisen between us. Not always, rarely (there are always exceptions) there are people who simply will not come back into harmony with you because they’re just not interested but that’s their problem once I have done the absolute most that I can and I am in that situation simply because I was born a little more honest that most, I think, and don’t have much choice in the matter. A very great gift given to me in this lifetime. It makes things very simple.

So here I am. It’s very funny really. I’m here in the same room I was in last month which is wonderful because this particular hall in the hospital has a pilot program and people are working 12 hour days and getting much, much more time off than people that work 9 to 5 or eight hours a day for five days a week and it’s a real happy camp so I’m a happy camper because everyone from the head nurse to the housekeeper is pleasant and having fun and really enjoying life so it’s just a marvelous atmosphere for something as usually impersonal as a hospital.

However, as I look out my one window I’m looking at a concrete wall. This apparently is the first room of a wing that was added to the hospital at some unknown date in the past so all I can see is concrete and light (laughs) and I think that sort of says something about what the hospital experience is. It is being rather in a cave and not that pleasant a place on the surface of it but tremendously open to learning experiences, especially of giving praise and thanksgiving, so I really do embrace this experience and am very grateful for it.

So your mother was an alcoholic too. That is tough. Mine was too. And you went through the blitz. Isn’t that interesting. Do you know I dreamt just last night that I was a man trying to protect a small person, I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl in the middle of a bombing raid and I was trying to get out into a yard and then out of the yard because the house was burning all around us and people were running around and bombs were falling. I’ve been having dreams like that for almost a week now.

I expect it’s because Lisbeth (which I named my body, my middle name so I could talk to it better) is not as cool as I am in the face of a possible extinction because Lisbeth, the animal, will indeed die, and the personality and the intellect and so forth, and only the field of consciousness will go on, so I expect my body really truly does wish to live. I have a wonderful life. Yes, the pain is a little bit of a bother but at any rate I expect that’s why I’m having those nightmares.

And, like you, I agree, a cozy family life would have been the end of me. The life that I had as a child was one in which I learned what not to do by example from my parents. So I was looking at positive options from a very early age. I, too, loved nature and was infinitely curious. I can remember living on a farm when I was a child and watching with absolute fascination the gradual disintegration of a dog that had been torn apart by some animal.

In the Kentucky woods you might even have a small cat, a Puma or something like that. Kentucky is quite wild. The dog had been killed, at any rate, by some animal and it lay just as it was, undisturbed, while I watched everything happen. The eyes fill up with maggots, then other predators eating away and the fur being eaten away and finally, there being a skeleton. But all of it in peace, not red in tooth and claw (except for the killing) but the way it was moved back into nature did not move one single part of the skeleton of that dog, which eventually lay open and bleached in the indirect sunlight of the woods. Fascinating.

I had a special willow tree (you mentioned a willow tree) that I could climb up into and nobody ever knew that that was my hiding place. It was wonderful. It had a very fat place on the trunk where I could rest back; it had a place for each foot and it had a place where I could put a hook on a third branch that came up just as if it were meant to hold a book and I would read up there for hours and, of course, nobody could find me.

It was wonderful but it unfortunately got blown over in a storm, but we moved soon after that anyway. I’m afraid willows don’t have very deep roots but they are wonderful trees, aren’t they?

Sounds like your job, though relatively simple for you, is much in demand.

(Reads) Okay, now you’re going to clear up some misconceptions. Thank you for the information about yourself. I died when I was a kid and in those few seconds was told that I could choose either to stay or to come back. Apparently I hadn’t been terribly wise in my appetite for experience and had pretty well loaded my plate up. But when I found out that I really did have something to do here, of course I came back and all I want to do is just get it done and do it with as much love and chutzpa as possible.

Okay, this was about S.H., okay, it’s just that he does have a first-class mind. This is a seriously checked out chap. He’s a scientist. He is working on a gargantuan correspondence with me. Sometimes it will take three tapes, one time even four tapes to him because the number of questions that he asks and the pith that was in them. There was so much material in them to move through it would not be moved through in a glib or surface way so it was simply necessary to speak for a long period of time, and yet he was and is hungry enough for it that that’s what he works on when he’s going to work, when he’s coming home.

He’s a PhD in, I believe, mathematics rather than physics and has done a lot of theoretical work that has gotten a lot of respect and my impression of him is that he is a very intensely focused person and would be a good person with whom to collaborate because he takes very well to people who are as intelligent as he is. It is a relief to him to be able to ask questions of someone who may have some vague idea of what the question means. I find him to be a most excellent entity, ethical, thoughtful, observant, accurate and so forth.

Should you at any time want to talk to him I’d be glad to give you his address again.

Yes, I agree with you about getting that new science network going and I wish you joy in it no matter how many people you are able to get together for that, you will have done the work and the intention is really so much of what we take with us when we leave this incarnation, it isn’t what we think we’ve accomplished, it’s our motives, our intentions, the keenness of our desire to serve, and obviously you are just working completely to the best of your ability and I am humble before you, sir.

And no, we don’t want to do any sensational things. I suppose it is possible that you may get something tangible to show scientists, and I truly hope you do. It would surprise me because this is moving towards an infringement of freewill where if one proves something spiritual to people then an authority is now saying that they have to believe this because QED, look at this, step one, step two, step three, step four, hey, QED, that might be difficult. However, carry on old chap.

I believe I grasp what you are trying to say about cause and really don’t have anything more to say about it.

The upward spiraling energy is interesting to me. It sort of mimics the spirals within the great pyramid as they’re described as coming to one point and then another point and then another point within the pyramid. Needless to say, I do not have the vocabulary or the knowledge to estimate it any further than that, but I think that it’s a very interesting way of looking at matter with gravity or traction on one side and radiation or giving radiance, outwardness, on the other.

That’s a choice we all have to make metaphysically and the fact that it includes gravity and probably magnetism, given that there are vortices, looks possible. It looks very interesting to me and I don’t know what I’m talking about, really, it’s just that I’ve heard the words; I’ve looked at the concepts and I have a hunch, and that looks like a pretty good model to work from.

I imagine you do think of it in three dimensions but simply cannot draw it in three dimensions, is that so? So it’s not a pyramid with flat sides but more of a cone and another cone upside down upon it.

I believe you are right, even if you cannot resolve the problem, as long as you are seeking the truth and hence the cause, to the absolute best of your capability, you are attempting to expand beyond the lobe of knowledge and there isn’t anything more that you can do except attempt that.

As Oscar Wilde put it: “All of us are drunk in the gutter but some of us are looking up at the stars.”

A meeting between Frank, yourself and myself. Now wouldn’t that be interesting? Haven’t seen Frank since somewhere in the late 70’s I suppose. I used to work with Frank as de-facto copy editor and format editor. As you know, scientists are often almost illiterate and I did a lot of work sort of pulling together organizational ones, and Greek ones, or Arabic numeral ones, and A’s and B’s and C’s of capital then small letter and that sort of thing, which they start using one system and then you go to another, using run-on sentences and that sort of thing.

When our books began coming out I resigned because I did not want to be on a board of directors of such a reputable and scientific group since I had no credentials whatsoever and was working in what would be considered by scientists to be a completely unacceptable fringe area of research, it would not probably even be recognized. But he and I are old friends and I love him a lot.

Frank is quite an unusual man, quite unexpected. He has a high tenor voice, is very round, and he is thoughtful and kind and insightful to a great degree. Very intuitive, very supportive in his feeling tone, if you know what I mean. He radiates support. He’s a very comfortable person to be with and he has a keen mind and an open mind. It’s too bad about Solomon’s not doing a reading for you, but of course there are always those roads not gone down which you discover later it was perhaps a good thing that that was the road not taken.

As Don used to say when he was alive, “You didn’t make a mistake, didn’t go the wrong way; it’s just that down that highway there was a [inaudible] attack. We missed out on that—that was very good, now let’s get where we’re going.

I’ll tell you, there is nothing that wipes out a spiritual ministry like the attempt to raise money. Nothing will do it faster, as far as I know. So if he’s trying to build a mystery school, you might just write him off for a while until he gets over it. This “Save the World syndrome” is a real sickness, I tell you. It doesn’t work, guys. We save ourselves and if we ourselves are renewed then basically the earth will be changed, but it will not be changed by us, it will be changed because we have become something that can channel energies through.

If people could only surrender instead of trying to build more buildings for the truth to fit in. Then the truth would have its freedom and it would be all around us. I’m not criticizing the man, I’m sure he’ll do a great deal of good that way, but it is very hard on the ministry to get involved with money or fame. I am grateful indeed for my obscurity and my relative poverty. Certainly not poverty in the African sense, or many South Americans or many people in my own country.

I eat and have a nice home and I have insurance which means I’m not sitting in the hospital being concerned about where in the world the money is going to come from.

Let’s see, now you’re talking about the information gotten from the senses. (Reads) “The physical senses are left behind when you’re out of the body and you don’t hear sound in that state but you do see.” Hmmm. In my oneness experiences I didn’t even do that. I was just part of everything. I didn’t have any boundaries at all. I was just the light, however, I was also aware of the light, but it was not a solidified consciousness at all. It was a field of consciousness that was the light but was also aware of the light but it was impossible to talk about, of course. When you can’t tell the inside of yourself from the outside of yourself, well, there you go. You say it was like floating in the middle of a stream, well, I was the stream.

That is pretty much the way it is for me when I am in that situation. As a matter of fact, I was in it for several minutes today in the hospital which is interesting because I am having a very odd experience in the hospital. I’m being given massive doses of cortisone to get my G.I. tract into shape, which isn’t happening. And I began having a flare up of my arthritis yesterday and I normally take 10 milligrams of prednisone every other day. I’m getting 60 milligrams every day.

Now, I’m not taking any anti-inflammatory medication so perhaps it’s not entirely weird, and if that’s the case, I believe that I can predict, as my body is fairly predictable in and of itself, although in relation to other bodies it is often very anomalistic. There will be more permanent changes, more new places where the synovial tissue around new joints is going to begin going through the process of burning itself up and just letting the bones rub together.

So really, from a human standpoint, I don’t see a lot of comfort in the future because I will have to moderate the intake of harsh medication so that my plumbing will work and yet without that medication I will be even less able to exercise than I am now so I really feel that I am at this point quite comfortably cradled in the arms of destiny, in the arms of love, and what happens from now on is quite out of my hands except that I can rejoice in it.

(Reads) “Zeros and circles are not the same.” Right, did I say they were? Who knows? At any rate, my model of that which is, as far as we perceive it, is the “O”, the whole, the circle, rather than the zero with an exclamation point in it, which is the self, which is in the middle of the whole, going “ah ha.” And to me, the point is not to hang on to those exclamation points, because they won’t last. You only have a truth for a while and then there is a truth which overshadows that truth. If you hold on to it you don’t allow yourself to grow more.

Of course, the process of growth is often painful, so a lot of people really want to keep on that same exclamation point, but as for me, I would far rather take whatever changes come and just learn all I can. This is such a great illusion, isn’t it? Isn’t this fun? I’m really having a good time. Obviously, I haven’t quite come out of the euphoria yet and I’m not on bad pain medication or anything like that. These things of mine don’t have anything to do with space/time or whatever is going on in my body. It’s just a kind of rhythm, probably if I looked, I’d be on a high part of my spiritual biorhythm.

Your discussion about the cosmogony of the universe sounds good to me. Works for me. The Creator is experiencing itself and we are the ones who offer that possibility, yes, yes, I agree.

I don’t feel that we’re almost completely divorced from our higher self. I think that we have a lot more possible connection with our higher selves while in this incarnation than is normally thought possible, simply because people are, for the most part, very careful about their boundaries and collaboration is a much faster way because it’s the use of mirrors, you see. It’s the use of people who will tell you what you’re sounding like. What you look like. What you’re coming across as, as you go through your thinking processes and so forth.

So I value my friends as much when they call me on something as when they agree with me on something because it all makes me think. I think notes from the road between people that are serious about observing as well as living this wonderful life of consciousness in this illusion is just that the most effectual path of learning possible we really can give to each other so much more than we can give to ourselves. Because in the saying of something to someone else, it jells for us also. I’ve always said that the teacher learns twice as much as the student.

But I think that the higher self is within that female portion of the yin and the yang. The yin part. It can be courted and wooed, especially in the mated relationship, but in any relationship because we all have female and male energies. It needs to be courted like the very best lover and it’s slow work but if one is able to take it easy and take it as it comes, I think we can have access to a very enhanced process of perception. And perception is so much more of a process than we realize. We think that things just come to us but that’s not true. We have sense perceptions all the time that we don’t even see.

For instance, the television is on in this room because it’s cheaper for the hospital if I leave it on knowing that in an hour and 25 minutes, Jim is going to be here and he will want to watch something called “Star Trek—the Next Generation,” which is something we both love right now that is on television on Saturday nights. It’s cheaper to leave it on rather than turn it off and on and even though it’s not my money I just turned the sound down on it after I’d finished watching a half hour program because I know it’s cheaper.

I have absolutely no idea what’s going on on the screen; I don’t know who the people are; I don’t know what the story is, the sound is gone and I’m talking to you. So we have sense perceptions that are entered into the matrix of experience—they’re simply not used. I think we can go back under a really focused trance-like state and pull out the things we did not perceive; they’re there, we just didn’t perceive them so for us they’re not there.

And then there is the fact that our biases are so strong that if we see something to which we have had an aversion in the past or to which we have some fear of in the future, that will completely color our seeing of it.

I remember a friend of mine writing to me how terrified she was because she thought she saw a wasps nest and she ran back into the house to get a bunch of spray to take care of that awful wasps nest but when she looked more closely she saw it was a bird’s nest and she felt quite silly to have been so scared for nothing. But it really wasn’t nothing. It was an apparent wasps nest, so there is much more to perception that we generally realize.

I think there are so many stages to perception that probably only the eastern religions, especially Buddhism are very sophisticated in knowing that pains-taking process upon process upon process in those nanoseconds between sense perception, or sense consciousness and the mental formation and I think that it is something to be examined continually because we don’t want our biases to remove us from the ability to observe objectively, justly, and in a way which enhances our ability to engage ourselves in love, in intensity of passion, with this illusion in any way that is for us a right livelihood, shall we say, or a right action.

We all have our fortes and some even our fortissimos and we certainly have a good deal of the pianissimos as well, so it’s best not to go on the pianissimos and study rather those things which we are rather good at. Let people who are better at things which we are not so good at work on that.

I completely agree with you, yes, we do need to keep on exploring. There is no way to sit still in this life. Either we evolve or we begin to disintegrate and I am very keen on as much evolution as can be gained in this incarnation while being kind to my body and valuing the priorities of relationships and love first, and then things like work, right action and so forth, only after that.

Until our hearts are open we might as well not be doing work in consciousness because we’re not going to be having the right energy and we’ll probably blow our circuits.

I really tend to counsel most people to work on every relationship they have until they really feel just as clear as water about their relationship, then they’ve got energy in their hearts and they can do work in consciousness without causing themselves mental or emotional or even physical problems.

(Reading) “It is claimed that Paul Solomon was that Paul.” Hmmm, that’s interesting. I think Paul has been given a kind of bad rap by contemporary religious entities and I don’t really understand that because if one reads how the Jewish religion treated women at that time and in the culture, Paul let women into the church. He did ask them to cover their hair. He obviously was a misogynist by nature, for whatever reason, and I refuse to speculate on things like that, but he gave women credit in the church.

He said “Look at all the good work that so-and-so has done,” he mentions women as much as he mentions men. He values women, even if he has to put it in the terms of the time—women are chattel, women are property. He suggested that men treat that property as if it was his own body. Paul was way ahead of his time. It’s just that it’s not that time anymore and he’s way behind this time.

Well, 2,000 years have gone by, what do we expect? So I try to give Paul every benefit of every doubt and try to catch the spirit of what he says. But, of course, I’m a mystic and words don’t mean a lot to me anyway. The things that I see are always, if they’re worth anything, are completely beyond my ability to express in words in any satisfactory way.

(Reading) “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and Messianic legacy …” Are those all Russell books? I really must one day cover this material, it does sound fascinating though I must say people kept telling me to read the Seth Material (sometime back, it’s old material now) and do you know I could not read more than one-half page of that material without going to sleep. It was like a hypnotic device. And I finally decided that I wasn’t supposed to read that book, which was the first one. So I didn’t try any more.

I’m looking forward to the time when I can read these books and if you ever come into some books that you don’t need and want to just send me a gift I’d appreciate it and I’ll read them when I can, if that’s okay with you. I’m not at all closed to what you’re saying, not at all. It’s just that my faith and my way of life doesn’t really depend on any authority. I don’t even feel that I, myself, am an authority, although I trust myself more than any other source.

Things that come to me, come to me and through me and that I trust because I know that is the spirit of love working through me and it gives me strength that I would not have as a human being—patience, love, compassion, and all sorts of things.

Not that I don’t have my dark side. I insist on having one day a month that I can bitch and moan and feel very sorry for myself and be cranky. I tell my husband, “It’s a PMS fit. Women are entitled to one of these crazy fits every month.” Then he and I laugh about it and realize that I really am in kind of a rough situation and I can use the time to vent it so he really gets into the spirit of it and so we go around saying “doggone, now isn’t that something, what in the world is this going on for,” and then we get all that out and have another month of feeling really good about everything and having just a ball.

Jim is a really wonderful mirror for me and a wonderful, wonderful person.

God bless you, that’s your letter and since I expect my husband at just about any time I think it is a timely ending to the letter. It sure is a pleasure to speak with you and I look forward to your next inspiration whenever it may be. A day, a year or a decade, I will not forget you, you are safe in my heart. God bless your ministry and in all that you hope to do and may your path be just chuck full of light and joy and peace.

Lots of love and light to you,

Carla