It’s been a little longer than usual, unavoidably. Sorry about that. Been in the hospital a couple of times and just about bought the farm. Had a bowel obstruction. I’ve been in the hospital for a long week’s stay twice while they did various indescribable things to my body complex, but so far they’ve just been noting that the entire G.I. tract is unusually inflamed and they don’t know what to do. They were going to have me high cortisone for just a few days until I got back to normal and it has been more than just a few days and I’m not back to normal.
It’s been a very odd way of feeling. Needless to say, I’m not wishing to leave here. I have a wonderful life here and I love it. Being able to help people, being with Jim, being in a really good, pulling-together kind of marriage is really unusual in this society, but Jim and I do have similar strengths. It’s a wonderful universe and if I have to pay some dues by being uncomfortable well that’s nothing more than anyone else has to do. We all pay our dues, it’s just important some times to know what for.
And I do know what for and the reasons I want to live are certainly worth any attempts that I could possibly make, but it has cut down on my productivity lately because I’ve had tubes in my nose and down my stomach and various unpardonable things so I just have not been at work like I usually am and I’m very glad to be starting to get back to it. I went from May 27 to June 26, that’s not too bad, so obviously I’m a month behind.
I just wish you the best of luck with your decision as to whether to stay with [inaudible] or come to U of L. It certainly does seem to me to be irrational or unreasonable to warrant a good computer science department if they don’t believe in computer sciences. I don’t know why they would be willing to pay you the big bucks to come in when all you would be doing is creating a curriculum which you and one other person would have to teach. That’s a little crazy.
I think you’re right in waiting for your own guidance to come to you because there’s certainly no way of positing this one out intellectually so I will simply wish you the very best of guidance and I can promise you definitely that if you keep asking for that you will one day find peace with whatever the decision is.
I think a guiding philosophy in my life too is just as simple as you put it—I wanted to help. I remember interviewing for probably the second best job I ever had which was librarian for a 13 grade private school here in Louisville. I had gone to boarding school myself so there were things in my favor that would not normally be so for a person off the street. I remember Mrs. Bullitt asking me why I wanted the job. And I just told her I wanted to help people. I don’t feel that my soul is encased in a library somewhere, it’s just that in whatever I do I like to help people and in this kind of work you get to help the teachers, you get to help the students. It was my own shop, it was wonderful.
So I have gone through life with that general attitude and it seems to come about. People do seem to be helped in some way by what we might have done. But you can’t plan ahead on these kinds of things.
My father, by the way, went to the University of Ohio for awhile. I don’t know if he graduated from there, I think World War II kind of roughed up his study schedule somewhat.
As to living in Anchorage, you were wondering if you could afford it. I assume your combined salaries to be say, half again as much as your salary, and the rule that there used to be was that it was appropriate to spend a two year salary on a house. Most of the houses here in anchorage lie easily within those guidelines. The land is remarkably expensive but what keeps the cost of many houses down from the stratosphere in Anchorage is that they are old. They need to be done unto.
You can’t move in and have every floor and every wall and every ceiling completely exactly as you like it. That has to be an allocation of money and/or labor to keep the houses running. They’re wonderful old houses. This old bungalow that I’m in is very modest compared to a lot of the fancy houses in Anchorage, but extremely comfortable with all the mature trees and so forth.
So it’s a little on the dumpy side. That works for me because I’m not the kind of person that goes out and buys brand new furniture. If I had a house that was absolutely spankingly wonderful I know I’d put up my stuff that I’ve had forever and I know that would be incongruous so I’m very comfortable living in a kind of a modest house. It’s got plenty of room and we’re thinking seriously about getting plans together to add on to the house here rather than going out to the country.
Every year Jim does so many beautiful things with rocks—the garden has never looked so beautiful. It’s just breathtaking. The trellis vines are starting to matt up completely with the trumpet vine leaves. That soon should be just a glory. He’s done a lot of planting of waves of grass and waves of tulips and perennials, waves of ground cover so eventually the idea is there won’t be a lot of grass to cut, it will just be a matter of keeping the garden weeded.
I don’t expect him to be even halfway interested in looking at the inside of the house with the same kind of fastidious care that he has given the outside because it’s just not an interest of his as to whether the walls are white or dirty or pealing or cracked so the house may continue for some time to be in a state of continuous repair. Everything we have works but it will never be really fancy.
Anyway, the thing about Anchorage is that you pay a lot for the land and then it just depends on what you’re looking for in the way of a house. Most are old; our house was built around 1920. It is still very sound. We got our house for $90,000 and the ground around it is now worth more than that.
As to prejudice, you are absolutely right. I can’t say anything to even ameliorate your judgment of Louisville. Louisville, in its own way, is tolerant of blacks or other foreigner types, Asiatic and so forth, but deep down, the prejudice is so bad that it is unthinkable for a couple of the clubs in town to even think of a Jewish person as a member.
Now we’re talking about getting down to some serious prejudice here. I have not any doubt that a black person attempting to join any of the clubs, even on the invitation of a member, would be blackballed. However, what has started to happen here in town is that some of the leaders are responsible enough to say “Nope, that won’t do,” and resigned their membership in those clubs.
I know there is one priest who is attempting to stay in and to get the club to change its policies—that’s the Episcopal Bishop.
The shameful fact of it is we have a black community in Anchorage, it’s just not acknowledged, except by people asking the black guys as well as the white guys to help man the volunteer fire department. The only time I see the black members of our community—they lie just outside the Anchorage School District. But that’s just a technicality, they should be going to the Anchorage school.
I don’t think that the people here in Anchorage are intrinsically prejudiced as much as they wish not to have their safe insulated lives disturbed by the possibility of dealing with people that are different from them. So, you know, one house or two outside of the Anchorage city limits in Berrytown, which is where the servants lived that came to work in the old days for the people here in Anchorage, and a lot of them still do that. They are, however, I’m happy to say, sitting on a gold mine. Mark my words, there are going to be some wealthy black people who have got some nice pieces of land and an old shack. There’s a lot of money moving out this way so they should get some very good prices.
The cost of living here is low, also, quite a bit lower than either coast. I’m told that my house here is worth $450,000 on the coast, and it’s not even an acre of land. It’s a four-bedroom, kinda of a banged up bungalow, but it doesn’t matter. AARP picked Kentucky as one of the best places to live in the country.
Now I’m on to your June 3rd letter. As to the speaking about metaphysical studies, you may have hit on something that doesn’t sound like much fun but actually it is a kindness, in a way. If Sandy is uncomfortable with the investigation you are doing, I have to assume that it isn’t that she doesn’t trust you, it’s that she doesn’t grasp what you are wanting, and feels sort of left out.
The probability is that no matter what her capabilities are in every other way, she may well not have the kind of thinking mechanism that spits out the sort of thoughts about thoughts that abstract people come up with all the time. I’m certainly very abstract in my thinking and I think you are also.
I said it in the channeling handbook and I’ll say it again, it is not that bad to be misunderstood. It is not that dreadful. It’s not something that you have to prove to anybody that you’re looking into questions of this nature. It’s a private concern, it’s a way of working with your own consciousness to find a deeper truth, a wider truth, and it just may not do anything whatsoever for Sandy to be thinking about this. She probably thinks about the things that she cares about, none of which may be abstract enough for her to be able to tune in to your frequency when you’re doing this pondering.
I think that there’s an automatic irritation in most people because of the fact that nothing can be known about these questions and if there are no answers, then why study it? All we have is the questions, we don’t have the answers. The one big answer we know is that we don’t have the answers in this density.
I think it creates in most people who are not voyagers in this particular way, a sense that this is pretty silly and not worth much. And that’s okay because who wants to be a stumbling block on somebody else’s path? I don’t. I don’t have to impress anybody with what I personally have faith in. I feel that my job is much more urging people to live a life in faith and then do it regardless of the way they choose to manifest that faith or to nourish it.
So, as I’ve said before, Jim straightened me up quite quickly on the ethics of writing and speaking about these things with you if Sandy wasn’t that pleased. I don’t have any proper reason to refuse to work with you. I enjoy speaking about these concepts very much and if all she needs is that you be silent about it, that may work because it really cannot be expected that everybody is going to be interested in this stuff. There are not that many people whose cross-grained minds slip over into these various mysteries, so you may, indeed, write me whenever you get inspired and I will be glad to answer you insofar as I have anything to say.
Your first question was wondering if there were any parts of the Ra Material that we had difficulty understanding and if so is it possible to quote and help clarify these points.
We don’t have any outstanding questions on the Ra Material. The Law of One material seems to be pretty self-consistent. There are things in it that I personally do not grasp because I don’t grasp mathematical principles so the first part of Volume II is sort of gone on me though I think I grasp the tune if not the words.
I think, and I think Jim feels this too, is that when the last contact was made with Ra, Ra had put down the basis for the study of the archetypes, the archetypical mind, the tarot images, it is quite possible to ask Q’uo anything that one wants to ask. You never know what you’re going to get for an answer but you can ask. So if you have some points you want clarified by all means write in with the questions and we’ll put them to Q’uo.
Number two is a little bit the cart before the horse so I’ll have to read it to you to show you what I mean. You said: “It seems that all the entities which speak to us through channels to so according to certain unspecified rules or laws. For example, they are not permitted to duplicate the material given through other channels or to comment on the validity or value of the material of other channels. They are also not allow to convey information which would interfere with our free will. Can you elaborate on the rules by which these entities convey information to us?”
Yes, I can. But it’s backwards. There are all sort of entities, single, group, societal complexes, in all shades of positive and negative that have an influence that sort of falls like rain on the whole planet, the good and the bad. So everything is always in the air. There is never a problem as far as getting this sort of information as opposed to that. It’s a very crowded universe and if you want to get a contact that has certain specific qualities then you must tune yourself just like a radio to that frequency.
So that instead of the Confederation having laws of what it will or will not do, basically it’s my choice to pick someone who is a good contact who agrees with my estimation of service to others information. And that is that it not be leading, that it not be bossy, that it not make people feel special, that it not criticize other beings, all those things that you mentioned—they are my preferences. As a channel I am responsible for hooking up to the contact that fulfills these preferences so that I can feel good about being the channel for the love and the light of this particular entity.
Once I have declared myself as to my convictions, my life in faith, my love of Jesus and the love of self, and so forth (the way I personally tune—no two people do it alike) I challenge in the name of Christ and ask for information that I can give and that there be no impurity in it and so forth. I do some fairly intense inner work before I come to the channeling so it’s not really in the hands of “them” out there, because they’re out there all of the time and in all sorts of conditions of positivity and negativity. It is simply something that I learned was my style. I did not like being used as a sensor to indicate what that dream meant last night or when the next earthquake was going to occur. So I simply started tuning myself passed the point where I would get that kind of information.
The rules of positive communication are that free will is paramount and nothing can be proven. But persuasion is fine and angelic help will do just fine, and just the feelings of living a life in faith. On the negative side the rules are completely opposite. They don’t have any. They play dirty. They come to conquer. They want to enslave.
So the rule basically is that the channeler is responsible for the type of contact, the nature of the information and its accuracy and purity as opposed to being a mishmash of one’s own thoughts and opinions and a few high flown words. Ask me more about that if I haven’t said enough.
Now you ask: “What is a thought?” I’m going to go through these questions here. “Where does a thought originate?” Now let’s look at this process. You’re sitting in your office and you’re reading, you’re focusing on something that you need to get into your head for the next class or the next meeting. During the time that you sit and look at this bunch of paper that you’re going to have to be talking about in a half an hour there have been a hundred birds singing outside your window, three train whistles, six lawnmowers and dogs yapping, none of which you heard. You’re not paying attention to it, you didn’t know it happened, you were engrossed.
I think that’s where things originate that we end up calling thoughts. It’s in sense consciousness, I guess you’d say. If you hypnotize someone you can take that person back and he’ll see things that he cannot possibly remember if he weren’t hypnotized, and I think we do pick up an enormous amount of information every second but we file it on varying priorities, depending on what we think we need to pay attention to for survival and so forth.
So there’s this sense consciousness, and if we decide to perceive a part of this sense information we will then have a perception. It is not yet a thought, it is a general concept. Acting on this general concept is a variably long list of biases—opinions that you have held before and have found useful. We get a full blast from the bias section of our mind before we’re really aware that we’re doing it. For instance, people that like cold weather are going to react to a cold day with a bias that will change everything about the information they receive during the day because they like it. Somebody that is just yearning for warmth and is feeling the cold in his bones is going to react to the exact same day as just being awful, something to just get through. Our biases are really strong. To be objective is truly a challenge in lucidity.
But once one gets to the point where one has expressed that there is a perception that they chose to perceive and that the bias has worked on it, I think that at that point you get a kind of formation or a validation, a solidifying, of some kind of mental formation concerning the original sense consciousness that was picked up as a concept.
So before you are even aware of a mental formation, I think before one is at that point one has been through quite a bit of processing of the various data which are prey to our senses. As I said before the great difference between a thought and a concept is a quality. Whereas a thought can be quantized. When you have a concept, it is a universe of one thing, it’s infinite and yet somehow it can be shifted in such a way as to shed light on our inner workings.
Gradually, at the end of the process of noting a concept and allowing it to become solidified into some mental formation, some attitude, some opinion, you’ve lost the purity of the concept in order to be able to talk about it with language. The limit on thought is wordiness. That is the basic problem with communication done outside the mind itself because the problem of vocabulary being so variable in terms of what words have power to offend one or please one is so great that you really don’t have a lot of chance to get your thoughts through to anybody because there are reasons people have of defending themselves from all kinds of strange things.
[Side one of tape ends.]
…in terms of what challenges to the spirit; what might be the goal of this particular experience that one is in and so forth. So basically, the first place that thought goes is right to work in your own head trying to give you more information about your actual situation.
Needless to say, the second thing that a thought does is basically broadcast. You’ll find time after time where in various portions of the world, far flung from each other and with no possibility of rapid communication through the ages people have had the same ideas at the same time. We have to realize that thought is not just something we produce with our minds. Our nature is of beingness which is a thought and that thought is love.
So when we’re talking about our thoughts, we are talking about some manifestation of love, no matter how twisted and it can get twisted.
“Do thoughts have strength or intensity?” Very much so. The thought has the strength of consciousness of the field which is generating that thought. I urge people over and over again not to chose my path, but to chose a path. To find out who they are, to find out what moves them ever closer to a peaceful opening up of the heart and a healing of all the pains of incarnation, day by day.
I see that as being something that can be encouraged equally to anyone without fear of saying, “Well, no, you can’t take part in this because you don’t believe such and such.” The powerful thoughts are the simple, humble straightforward thoughts of a well-lived life, I think. The determination to keep one’s word, the loyalty toward one’s principles and one’s friends, the treasuring of the great priorities in our lives, the relationships, the families, the friends, the learning, all of the good things.
All of these things that you partake in give you the opportunity to make choices, based on principles that are being vouchsafed of being good, by a church or a philosophy or some sort of way of looking at ourselves, the diety and the universe. So we need to realize that we are not looking at our earthly lives from the standpoint of an earthly life altogether. That is the illusion. The truth of it is there is a portion of us that is observing the incarnation and attempting to learn as much as possible from it while being of maximum service.
Insofar as the seeker is aware that that is what he’s doing, he’ll be stronger and stronger, and more and more powerful because he will have that continuing request of himself to know who he is—who is he? He’ll say “Well, I am so-and-so and this is what I believe, and I give thanks to the Creator as I understand this Creator and I give praise to this Creator and his love and …” just basically tune yourself into a place where you can experience more purified, deep, poignancy of emotion.
The human condition is one of the cross—that is why I like the story of Jesus. We are born into a world that is in the “valley of the shadow of death.” We have a death sentence from the first instance the scream escapes our infant mouth. It’s inexorable, it will happen.
So our reality as fields of consciousness is part of love itself. It does not have especially much to do with our apparent personalities, our characters, and so forth. Our status as democratic equals in the universe with all other portions of consciousness, is always perfect, and not seen to be imperfect in the sense of the judge, but in the sense of the person looking at his own progress, or trying to take his spiritual temperature, which isn’t a good idea anyway, you can see that if you’ve had to practice making tough choices because of a spiritual that you’re going to be getting better and better at making choices.
So making bad choices is part of it, you just do the best that you can. But what you’re trying for is to become more and more that radiant person that does have a very strong intensity to the consciousness, that is able to be running a lot of love energy through the open heart and then people will say “Isn’t that a nice person.” Well that person is a good channel. You have to give credit for people’s goodnesses to the Creator. Just as you give credit for their illnesses to the Creator. He doesn’t get one part and not the other.
But when you’re looking at good and bad, you’re not looking at thought itself, because thoughts are neither good nor bad—thoughts are thoughts. The polarity of the person thinking the thoughts and that person’s intention creates the strength of that personality in a metaphysical or eternal way, I think. So that the more that we know who we are and why we’re paying these dues to live on this earth, then the more that we will be able to rest in the present moment and not to be thrown off by the many seemingly very petty decisions one has to make over and over again.
Now as to thoughts being sequential, there’s more than one answer there. In some people thoughts are definitely very linear. Thought A goes to Thought B goes to Thought C, there are no holes, the logic is fine, everything works. Some people’s minds work like that.
Mine doesn’t. I’m wrong a lot but I can come up with probably a hundred thoughts to another person’s one that works. And in those hundred thoughts there might be ten that work. It’s just choosing what you want to go for.
But you can see that some people obviously are not working in a linear manner. They’re not crazy either. They’re just very intuitional and sympathetic and I call it “thinking sideways” because that’s what my grandmother called it. She also called it “letting your mind bend in the middle,” a liquid sort of quality that she thought of that her brain had. Whatever it was I knew exactly what she meant. I have the same mystical quality to my mind.
So my thoughts are often completely out of sequence and I would have to be very rigorous to go back and look very carefully to see how my train of thought got from point A to point G because there was no intervening material. So in other people, and I suppose I would call myself creative or intuitive, thought is not necessarily at all linear.
Now you put me in front of a checkbook to balance and I’m as linear a person as you’d ever want to know, to the penny. But it is not my preference. I always found cataloging library books a very peaceful occupation because there was this sense false security. You’ve done something—you’ve gotten it just right and you’ve gotten the cards in the card catalog and people could find that book if they wanted to with the title or the author. But life isn’t like that. You can’t catalog a life. A life just kind of grows.
So as the mind jumps from one thing to another I think you can see an enormously wide range of techniques of using the mind. Over half of them, I’m sure, are quite not only ineffectual but just self sabotaging. So many people mistake beating on themselves for being modest. It’s okay to be modest but when it gets to the point of bashing yourself or criticizing yourself all the time I hardly see where that helps much, and I definitely wish people would relax a little bit about trying to make so much sense because the things that make the most sense are the things that you hear the words but it’s the stuff in between the words that makes your skin prickle.
The truth is always between the lines and not in the words so the truth is that words are more than words if we can relax into a trust of a life in faith.
What does it mean to hold a thought? Well my ex-mother-in-law, pardon the hominess of this would have said “shit in one hand and a dream in the other, and look what you’ve got.” That’s one way of answering how to hold a thought. She was a good ol’ gal and I love her dearly.
Basically, the holding of a thought is a discipline that is relatively rare. It’s a technique used by mystics, especially the western Christian mystics for a long time, and before them, the mystical Jewish Kabala also. Basically, the idea was to hold an image in the mind and simply keep looking at that image in the mind—a red rectangle, a black triangle, whatever—you just hold this in the mind and what it would do, hopefully, make you able to have a deeper level of concentration when you were invoking love and peace and so forth in your white magical ritual.
Now the white magical ritual that is the most famous today, is the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist or holy communion wherein many believe, including myself, that the body and the blood of Jesus is given to us in a mystical kind of way, not a literal way, and that it is given to us with every chance of transformation. The priest invokes beautiful beautiful words and the congregation with hymns and songs of praise to the all powerful deity, whom we all love and who loves all of us, and then invites us to come and remember.
“Do this in remembrance of me.” Hold this thought. “When you drink this cup this is the blood of my new covenant, drink this in remembrance of me.” “Take this bread.” Jesus took the bread. He broke it and he blessed it and he gave it away. And it’s been feeding people on those little pieces for 2,000 years, and that’s just one story about how to get from humanhood to eternityhood, which is our true self.
So holding a thought simply means to be able to realize, to remember, to abide in the presence of the most high. And if there’s another thought that’s just mundane and you want to hold the thought because you don’t want to forget something, it’s the same thing. It’s a mental discipline. There has to be some way to get a seeker’s head under this control or else he’s going to be going around bumping into the furniture and just in general fumbling around without light.
So holding the thought is holding that remembrance of what it means to be alive here, to be broken and wounded, which we all are, and to wish very very much to love the Creator, to love other people, to help other people. Moving through a holy communion you can really feel the abiding peace of holding that thought in remembrance. “This is my body—when you eat it do so in remembrance of me. This is the blood of the new testament—when you drink this do so in remembrance of the blood shed for you.
Now this doesn’t mean that you have to believe in Jesus Christ. I’m just giving you the example because it’s the most common one, the most well-known white magical ritual and the most well-known example of the reason why it’s good to hold thoughts. You hold that thought because that thought is redemptive. That thought is a freeing, liberating thought. That thought is a pass cue to this wonderful inner world where the courting of the truth can be done gently and slowly and with great respect and great respect also for your young spiritual self that has been born in you as you have turned to the remembrance of the one Creator and begin attempting to be more responsible, spiritually speaking, in your life experience, which is where I think you are sitting just now in your attitude.
You very much want to do the best that you can for everybody, for yourself included and you’re really looking. As always, it’s a real privilege to talk to you about these things and I certainly do enjoy it.
So the last question you asked about thoughts was “It appears whatever thoughts are, they can be controlled by the conscious mind.” No, not entirely. You can’t keep your deep mind from having it’s own biases. For instance, I’m pretty loose about whether or not I’m going to live through this or not. I don’t know. My body isn’t working yet. If I do, great. But if I don’t, well my job must be done. That’s my conscious mind.
My subconscious mind has been giving me nightmares for weeks. I’m in a situation I can’t get out of, someplace trying to help, or trying to do something, always being chased, or having some fairly nightmarish thing happening to me and waking up being very glad to be awake and not to be in my dreams, so my subconscious is not at all happy with what is going on. I don’t have any control over that and I don’t think I should. I don’t think it’s the place for the body to go “Hey, this is okay, I don’t mind dying.”
I never knew a body to do that in my life. I’ve never even known a governmental body, or a social body, like a company, willingly to cease existing. This body is going to be fighting and I’m very, very glad it’s fighting and I hope it wins, but I don’t know enough about what my strength really is or what the situation really is (no diagnosis after studying it since April). The doctors are watching me gain one half to one pound a day without eating very much at all. There you are, I just don’t know.
So, yes, I have pretty good control over my thoughts as far as meditation. But there are some thoughts that are not so much thoughts as feelings and those are usually where the true wisdom lies. I am hoping very much that my true wisdom does lie in remaining for a good long while because, as I said, this is a very beautiful time in my incarnation and I would be glad to have it go on for just as long as it could.
So, I look forward to talking with you again. Just keep remembering that the truth will come to you if you really want it and if you keep asking that question inside. It will come from you, not that there’s something that’s inside you that is better than what’s inside everybody else, it’s just that we are all parts of love. That’s our substance, that’s our beingness. So you have the universe within you—the same one you look at from the outside is also within you.
As a matter of fact, I know this doesn’t make any sense, but it’s much more my position that the entire universe is subjective and there’s nothing that exists outside of my senses, than to suggest that the objective world is the real one and what I think about it is incorrect and only objective things are real. I think it’s completely the other way around—very subjective universe and the best we can do is pretty well work with crayons when it comes to vocabulary and just try to live the kind of life that we feel we should.
It’s a marvelous feeling to embrace a life of intended virtue. It is a very freeing kind of a feeling, a recognition that this is the path that you want to be on, and so forth, and these are your boundaries. But of course, you’re constantly learning new truths and improving on your definition of a spacious viewpoint as you go through life and as you begin to get more skillful in your observations. And the accuracy of watching your own processes of coming to a thought from the first little inkling of a sense.
Well, God bless you and your family, S, and whistle when you’ve got the time and inspiration and do take care of your sweet self.
Love and light to you brother,
Carla