Dear D,

It’s 2:00 in the afternoon, the sun is shining brightly, I hear James out in the yard taking his aerobic basketball moment which usually lasts about 45 minutes. It keeps him in good shape and takes care of his frustrations for the day. He uses his big muscles for a while and feels a whole lot better. He is in the process of getting out the newsletter.

We took our fairly dim copy of the Sunday meditation that you were here for and sent it to the shop. G is the one who is about the best here locally and we don’t know from anything but local. I have a feeling that there are probably better people in this world but not on the inland planes of Kentucky—the foothills, knobs. They are pretty knobby actually compared to the very young, sharp Rocky Mountains. The Appalachian are really rounded and old, very old formation as compared to the new Rockies.

There’s a whole lot more greenery of all kinds, wild flowers, wildlife, and lots of different kinds of soil on top of the bare rock, which makes it to my eyes, a whole lot more like home. I’ve always had trouble experiencing the Rocky Mountains, the plains or the desert as home because Kentucky is so hilly and extremely treed compared to the Midwest where it’s still pretty green.

It’s just gorgeous, especially when the sun is shining. It’s very golden out today, you can see the lichen and the moss just as green as ever and finally we’ve gotten enough hard freezes that the grass isn’t very green any more. Good day, good way to begin the New Year.

As to my story, you don’t want to know, but in short, I just about croaked after you left. It was amazing. My body went to sleep completely inside and they wouldn’t take me in the hospital because I’d had three hospitalizations this year, the last one from the 3rd to the 10th of December and even though I sprained myself on December 10, the day I got home, in a completely different and unrelated problem but it was related because the problem was that I wasn’t able to take the medicine. I’d had all my medicine pulled out for me that affected the muscle spasms and I went into nerve spasms and nerve spasms went into sincere and scary convulsions.

Luckily, death doesn’t scare me but the thing that was really scaring me was the concern that the doctor had that I would be paralyzed rather than die. Death is easy, paralysis would tear up Jim’s back terribly because if I were paralyzed the paralysis would mean I couldn’t pick myself up off the couch and that’s the one thing I can do—it would break his back if he had to lift me up off the couch. Not that I’m that heavy, but he’s not that tall and he has a bad back.

He’s very strong, I’ve seen him lift 350 lbs when he was pumping iron and he keeps that up, not that he pumps any more but he’s always doing big things, stone work, digging in the earth, and that sort of thing. That helps his back but I’m afraid that leaning over consistently and picking me up would soon deliver him to a difficult situation himself.

Yes, Jim is very gallant, he does an incredible job of being courteous and polite and making it look effortless. It isn’t effortless and he deserves all the credit he can get. He really likes to be very solitary and this whole service that he gives to L&L Research is Jim working as much against as for his own nature and I’m impressed.

I’m just sitting here going through your letter and I don’t have news except for that so I’ll just see what you’re saying here.

This chap that you’re talking about, one of your customers that you got the books to—he saw a beam of light, that’s nice. (Reading) He has two priests and only one of them beams.

Sorry about the old employer, but I think helping your friend get started is so much more important, as long as you’ve got enough money to live on. If you don’t help your friends, you won’t keep them long. “Be a friend, make a friend…” actually the whole thing goes “Make a friend, be a friend, lead a friend to Christ.” That’s a “Crysio” byword. Crysio being a short course in Christianity which I really enjoyed through the Episcopal church. It was started by the Catholics and it’s a really nifty short three days to have a moment of inspiration and beauty. People loving each other unconditionally all over the place. That was one of their mottos.

I’ve always thought, except for the word “Christ” it’s very close to what we are doing here—make a friend and be a friend and give the best light and love that you can to the friend. You don’t have to call it Christ. You can call it George or the bedpost if that’s what people are comfortable with. As long as they grasp the fact that there is a higher power. It doesn’t really matter what they call it.

It sounds very nice compared to when you got here that Mike must be responding to your own peace and quiet because you report that he was being much better at taking care of the bird, and things like that, and I’m just so glad that you are continuing to experience what you started to experience here, that’s saying a lot about the kind of person you are. You don’t have a fear of new things the way a lot of people do and I commend you for that. It’s very central I think to the process of learning.

I’m so glad you made it through the Cherry Hill number. I’m very lucky, my two brothers and their wives and Jim and I get along just like a family would, you’d think, but I am absolutely stupendously surprised every time I hear another horror story like yours. I guess it’s because I was the oldest and I have a naturally nurturing personality and because I was pressed into service as a babysitter when I was just seven. I never expect to forget that. It was one of the terrified moments of my young life. The first time I was left alone with a kid who could have convulsed at any time and I didn’t even have the strength to pick the child up.

I can see how people grow to hate Christmas. Because it’s all a bunch of hooey. Nobody truly believes any of it. They’re just getting through it the best way they can.

I think that the light has an ineffable meaning, not just a sense of wonder or awe or love or any one thing, I think that it is a primal manifestation of love, the original building block of everything.

That’s what the photon is according to the physics that Elkins favored once he had the Law of One under his belt. He became even more convinced of Dewey Larsen’s physics, which was called the “reciprocal system” which posited that there are three dimensions of space and three dimensions of time and that’s within this illusion mind you, that’s not talking about cosmic time, it’s just talking about physical space/time and metaphysical time/space where time is the field and space goes by like a river so you can just get in the river and step out at any particular time that you want.

Very handy for getting around and helping people at various points in their infinite circle back to the Creator, which, of course, is what the higher self is all about. It is able to be with you in any present moment.

Thank you for your prayers.

[A personal conversation about a bird called “Tweetie.”]

Jim’s birthday is May 10, twenty days before our anniversary which is May 30. He’s a Taurus (the Bull). He named himself once in some program of study that he went through for three weeks in the summer one year and he came back and was kind of a counselor. It was a school of survival and one of the things that the old mountain man, T. Delingo, believed in, (I understand this was a fine experience for Jim because he went back for three or four years as a counselor) as teaching survival which included everything from washing your hands before you ate to making your own shelter and knowing the food in the wild to working through your memories and your resistances and your blocked places in your mind to what he called “circuit into the frontal lobes” where people channel from supposedly and one of the things about metaphysical survival, the part about the brain survival, is to give yourself a name that is far more indicative of yourself than your personal name. Jim named himself “Dancing Bull.”

It’s a fairly apt thing because he’s extremely graceful and he’s very, very strong.

(Reads) “Voltage had her face redone and she needs spoon feeding.” I encourage you in your gift giving—I have found that people who have it all and who are rich and so forth, appreciate not the expensive things, they can get expensive things just by spending the money, but by something that is entirely personal and some sort of inspiration, whether it is a piece of knitting or a book that you’ve enjoyed and want to share. You’d be surprised, that’s not boring unless a person is still in love and swooning with the love of their money.

Once the money has sat around for a generation or so it’s pretty boring and if it’s third generation, all they want to do is get on with things, usually. There are people that like to be rich and lazy and that’s it, but normally people want what they don’t have and the thing that rich people so seldom have is the kind of friendship that makes it through hard times, and remains faithful regarding of what’s going on and what’s happened in the past.

So you’d be surprised. The gifts you give her may mean a lot more than you give yourself credit for. One word on spoon feeding people, don’t think of it that way. You’re fine if you want to give her books, you’re not fine if you make her read them. (laughs) You might talk about it once, wait two or three months, talk about it again, but you don’t want to get into the position of being a spiritual nag. At least I wouldn’t want to.

I saw a real irritating guy on a channel I don’t remember, but Bonnie Raitt was the hostess, it was in New Orleans, and there was a lot of good singing, but the MC was a standup comic that I’ve seen before. He either was or was playing because he thinks it’s funny, and I imagine it’s both, a very irritating, abrasive, harsh kind of a character that did not work at all with the audience, but against them. All the audience wanted was for the next act to come on and he insisted on telling every joke that he’d prepared.

I don’t respect that. That’s not good show business. Either you prepare a bunch of material for recalcitrant audiences and trot it out when they’re recalcitrant, or you simply allow the folks a certain amount of hooting time and say “You don’t want to hear me, do you, you want to hear the other folks, don’t you?” He didn’t do any of that, it was as if he wasn’t working with an audience at all. He was just shouting above the noise of distant traffic. Really irritating.

Right now we’re out of transcribers. We’re sending tapes to two or three new people, one of which I think is you. We’ve had to kind of scoot around a little bit because there’s this one woman that very much wants to come see me but she’s like a vampire on my energy. She doesn’t ask questions, then listen to the answers, then say something back. She doesn’t pick up her share of any conversation. She sits there like a little puppy with her mouth open and her eyes very dull and stupid looking, and waits for my next word of genius and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s that kind of mindless affection or adoration, or whatever it is, it’s just what she’s eating and I just feel it tugging on me and it’s very unpleasant.

She’s very loud, and to be realistic about it she is a walking disaster as far as I’m concerned. Not in and of herself but in terms of me. And selfish? My Lord, she’s got a five-year-old or six-year-old kid and all she wants to do is get rid of the kid so she can be free. She doesn’t want any commitment. She’s not a pretty woman and she’s got a guy that’s absolutely totally in love with her and all she can think of is getting rid of the guy because he’s too demanding and all he wants to do is cook her supper. Give me an adjusted break here.

Gee I’m sorry about Mike’s house. He ought to sit down sometime and check you out for your opinion on things before he does anything or somebody’s opinion besides his own and the person that had the impulse. It doesn’t mean that it’s Mike’s fault that the house is so bad, it just means that he could perhaps have taken more time and saved himself money and grief.

On the other hand, I suppose it wouldn’t occur to him because of being in the building business. He probably sat there and looked at the structure and thought “Well, the structure is okay.” But he didn’t know so much about the ground. He didn’t have it checked. Probably someone else does that before a builder gets to a site, but as an owner of land, it would be intelligent for him to check any land that he got and take soils samples, whatever they do to test the integrity of the earth and the bedrock under it before building.

The south of Louisville is a swamp too, it used to be part of the Great Falls of the Ohio and they put big dams up to hold the water back of the lowland and they pumped the water out and there’s probably a good million population living in that area now and every time it rains, everything floods because the ground underneath the houses is just clay and it won’t take the water in, so it just stands in the low places and rots everything, basements, everything.

Since Mike is in that situation it would be a strong recommendation on his part to get a good educated look at the land from somebody—consult somebody. It sounds to me like it would be worth $200-$300 at least just to have it checked out and perhaps the insurance would be less. He’ll pull it out, I’m sure. But whatever kind of thing that he does, or that you do, I just really feel that there can be too many cooks and the broth can be spoiled. But when he’s just going and talking to his wife or to somebody he trusts it’s easier to think of yourself in his eyes, I imagine, as an associate and a friend rather than a wife, because wives have such a prejudiced meaning to an Italian macho type guy and he’s dealing with that on top of the usual.

I wouldn’t call it this on purpose, but one of my favorite people in the world in talking about himself, addressed himself to his male macho bullshit and we have female macho bullshit too, so it’s not that I think there’s something terribly wrong with men, there’s something wrong with all of us in that we aren’t objective. We’re very prejudiced and in favor of what we understand already, but if we reach across the sexual line and ask for a good opinion from somebody of the opposite sex, we are almost guaranteed to hear something new, whatever our sex is.

If men ask a woman’s opinion, women are about as good at feeling as they are at thinking but their upbringing, and so the feelings are pretty important, and if he’d asked you perhaps you could have said “Gee, doesn’t look just right to me, is that square?”

With your artist’s eye I would think that things like that would be a little more evident to you than to somebody who has more of a linear mind. At any rate, I will expect that he will pull it out, and hopefully learn from his past mistakes.

No, nothing lasts forever, peace included. I don’t think that the peace that you’d say people mean when they say “peaceful” is a very good working definition of spiritual peace. It’s a lot like being dead. I was very peaceful laying there during Christmas, I was also just about dead and I can’t really recommend it. I think spiritual peace is something that stirs you and moves you, but does so in a way that makes it all make sense. It delivers you to a higher understanding which is a peaceful understanding in that you are no longer fighting the implications of bare time and space.

You’re accepting the fact that the implication of things are worth a whole lot more than the face of things and you’re paying attention not to what things seem, but what they might be like under the skin. Give it a good shot—take a look.

So I wouldn’t want to resign you to the kind of peace people call peace on this planet because it’s very stultifying. I think that a moving, living peace that has a foundation of love and joy and a knowledge of what you’re doing here, that you’re trying to ask the questions better and better is very helpful in life because you don’t yearn for peace that’s really unrealistic and not very much fun when you have it. It would be sort of like the peace of the Christian heaven, the traditional heaven where you’re plucking a harp and singing six services a day, which would suit me for a while but I’m not sure eternity would be just the thing for that state.

We have to keep learning.

As to you getting along with Mike and so forth—it occurred to me after you left—and reading this letter I was thinking about you and Mike and people in general, I find a lot of times that people will remove themselves from perfectly good fun because they don’t feel that it’s just the thing to do. They don’t feel that they deserve that much fun if everything isn’t the way it should be.

What I’m talking about is the sexual and sensual stagnation of a marriage where there has been the male macho bullshit plus Italian of making love with other woman who are not put up on the pedestal in any way, who have not given up their virginity for you, who are not slated to be the “mother of my children.” For some reason, this kind of thinking makes a wife revered and honored but less sexy all the time, whereas a woman that will simply make love and you can say hello and goodbye and that’s it, is very attractive until, of course, that woman begins acting like a wife and then she’s dropped like a hot potato for someone else who is willing to play that sexual tease game of the non-wife.

I refused to allow my sexual self to marry because I wanted to preserve the ability to be sexy. I knew I could make a husband out of a lover but I didn’t really think I could make a lover out of a husband.

I like pleasure. Life gives me a lot of pain and if life can give me something pleasurable, I’m all for it. I vote yes. But what I have learned to do is separate my personae. The separation is really pretty simple but it doesn’t occur to very many people and I don’t even know if it’s wise, but it’s instinctive with me. If I am going to make love, Jim and I still make dates for that. We don’t fall into bed and somewhere between the dark and the dawn somebody gets fucked and somebody fucks. That’s not either our idea of fun.

Fun to both of us is a complete and total participation, but we don’t ask the sex and the lovemaking to carry all the grief of the day or the week or the basic situation. If Jim and I tried to make love as husband and wife, we would be carrying all kinds of problems into the bedroom. We’re different in so many ways.

We have a very dynamic relationship. I’m a small muscled person, he’s a big muscled person and we can both do the opposite, but it’s not our nature. I have a very non-linear thinking mechanism and his is almost entirely logical and affected only by his desire for grace and gallantry and courage and that kind of thing—very high ideals.

He’s a pleasure to watch, actually. And he’s a pleasure to watch as a second density animal as hopefully am I, so we try to separate those two kinds of being together so that the sexuality doesn’t have to be carried along with all of the burden of understanding each other and being in each other’s corner.

Basically, we’re making dates with our bodies and letting our bodies have a little freedom and fun, pleasurable fun. We both know that that’s the score and it works. But if you tried to do that by yourself without Mike’s being on board, he’d probably be terminally confused. So that’s one thing. I don’t know if Mike is the kind of person that can listen and get an idea and go with it. That’s not easy but it would be worth it, I think, in terms of effort if you ever get into a really mellow place where you could talk to Mike and Mike could talk back rather than him listening and you talking all the time.

To break that pattern you have to stop talking and see what he has to say which is a very hard thing to do in the middle of a marriage. You’ve been together, five or six years before you were married, I don’t remember, but it was a significant period that you were together and you thought that it was just you and he, the good old days.

And then too, there are lots of people, especially women, but both sexes, who simply do not enjoy sex as much as I do. Or get the pleasure out of it that I do. I’ve always been pretty uncomplicated about that, because I really appreciate what it does for me, and I definitely have a strong sexual drive. I think that goes with being an intense person with an intense nature.

I don’t know, I know a lot of women, my friends, have said that they have very little interest, they just do it for their husbands as a favor pretty much. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never done a favor like that, except by choosing to help the reluctant virgin, or the person who’s having trouble with function.

About the time I ran out of over aged virgins I started encountering, in my good friends, occasions which took the sex drive and just squashed it flat and coming back from that is rough. There’s nothing wrong with the man, there’s just something wrong with the head, where sex has been compromised.

The roughest time I ever had with a guy, trying to help him, was the case of situational impotence, where his wife had been dying for about six years, and the last three of those years it got to where it hurt so badly he couldn’t touch her any more, and every time he thought about sex and got an erection, he would remember that it hurt his wife terribly and he would lose the erection, which was good thinking, in a way, in terms of getting him through the illness.

But after she died, he still couldn’t do anything and he came to me and it took a good five or six times of just leaving the pressure off and letting him give me pleasure, which men can do all kinds of ways instead of the missionary position, and get back into feeling that he wasn’t going to hurt somebody because he had a hard-on.

In terms of expressing things, I don’t feel I’ve never done anybody that kind of supposed favor. If I didn’t feel it, I didn’t express it. And if I didn’t want the guy in the first place I wouldn’t start it. I’m kind of loyal, instinctively monogamous and I think most women are. It’s just too doggone much trouble trying to understand more than one guy at a time. So these have been incidents in my life, they haven’t lasted a great length of time. I’ve always aimed on either being alone or being with one person. I don’t think you can do anything else with the same kind of care and attention that you give one relationships, at least I have found that to be true for myself.

So if you lighten up on sex and you think of it as letting your body have some freedom and fun then I think it would be easier to do for both.

I’m glad that you got started on Star Trek. If you like science fiction, it is excellent science fiction and it won’t insult your intelligence. They play around a lot with time and right and wrong and all of the things that people write science fiction for. They’re not just writing about a possible future or a probable future, they’re usually working on the archetypical questions of life in an allegorical sense, telling stories which have a moral, fables, archetype sort of—I guess it’s sort of a high tech folk story which is always pointed at some moral.

I really love science fiction for that and going into fantasy even, depending on how well it’s done. For instance, I love “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever,” wonderful theme. It’s been a long time since I read that series, but it’s full of insight into the human condition and into right and wrong and so forth.

I think the thing about this series as opposed to the original one is that Pickard was chosen with an eye to an entirely different relationship …

[Side one of tape ends.]

No, my headaches were not caused by having to entertain you. I didn’t actually try to entertain you, we just chatted and for what it was worth. I’m not a very pretentious person, I don’t think, who knows, maybe I am. I’ll have to get someone to tell me. You know, you can’t really see yourself at all. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but there’s no way. If you think you’re doing something, you’re probably not. If you think you’re not doing something, you probably are. It’s that strange.

It’s better to trust what you hear persistently throughout a number of years in different situations with different people. Not to trust one person and think he has the goods on who I am, but just to listen to all of it and notice what recurs. What are the themes that are persistent in the way people describe you to you. Very educational, because then, you know how you’re actually coming across as opposed to intended and it can really be a good source of information. I certainly always learn a lot.

I think I’m going to go out and exercise after I say goodbye to you. I’m walking about a half a mile a day all together now, before I let myself rest for the day and I’ve done about two-thirds of that now. If I can just get ten laps in around the back yard I’ll be more than satisfied. The loop around the yard is just really essential and I’m so pleased that Jim is just about finished with it now. It gives me a great way to walk. I don’t have to get out on the street.

I hope that all is just bursting with good news for you this year and that you are able to get your tape, your double demo done in good spirits and with an ungrudging amount of time given to it. I think you’re right about yourself when you say “I really don’t want to give myself the limitation of doing it by six months, or three months, or tomorrow.” I think it’s more inspiring and I think healthier psychologically to give yourself very short term goals. Work for as long as you feel good about it or as long as you have, whichever comes first. Just work on it genuinely and with pleasure whenever you have that feeling and try to be fairly daily about it.

I’m really pleased that you’re able to do that. I feel, and I have felt since before you came, but certainly since you came my feeling about you has proven quite true that you are a genuine talent. You’re not pushing, you’re not trying, you are talented, you are gifted and that kind of gift is hard to keep down if you just go with it, stay with it, keep putting it out there. With joy, though, not with a feeling of bald and blind ambition. Let a little hair grow on that puppy’s head. Let there be a softness to the ambition I always feel.

If there’s going to be ambition it’s all right to be relatively single minded about it but not to the extent that you mess up your life, that you drive yourself crazy trying to get it done by your self-made deadline. Things like that really yield much more to the inspiration of the several moments that it will take, whether it’s hundreds or thousands of moments where you really feel that you’re working from your strength, not because you’re afraid you’re not going to finish. If you do it like that you start pushing, you start rushing, you start settling for what you can do today.

If you’re able to be patient with yourself you can still get the thing done, maybe not precisely to a time but maybe before the time you thought you’d be able to do it simply because you’ve allowed yourself to be freer with your time. You’ve got to see that the nature of what you’re doing is in the wind, in the breeze, and that breeze, called inspiration blows when the muse says it blows, not when your logical mind says, “Okay, everybody pay attention it is now time to be brilliant and use your gift and your talent.” No that’s not going to work.

You have to say “Please muse, speak to me today, give me the best of myself at this moment that I can give this gift to the Creator.” And the Creator gets two gifts that way. You’re remembering him while doing it, not just after you do it, to give thanks that you got it done, but you feel inspired in the doing of it. It takes all the pressure off if you work from at least the goal of feeling some inspiration and needless to say, you’re never going to dust the house with the same kind of inspiration.

At any rate, enjoy the inspiration of the moment because you are rich in that and I think you always will be. Don’t stop dreaming, keep your princess, keep the fairy tale, just lose the feeling that fairy tales have to come true. They don’t have to come true for your life to be better for them, you just have to know that they are vehicles for the maintenance of a lively and useful faith. As I always say to Jim “Faith is the final frontier.”

Hope you liked the newsletter this time. And meanwhile lots and lots of love. I’m so glad we made contact. I don’t know about next summer or any particular time but when it’s good, it’ll feel good and you’ll have the money and you won’t have anything that you’ll absolutely have to do and that will be a good time and we’ll get together again.

I expect to live a long, if uncomfortable life. If I don’t, it’s okay with me. It’s very pleasant to die, it’s not very pleasant to be in the process but it’s pleasant when you manage to achieve it. There’s a lot of pain that comes first and that’s the part I’m not particularly fond of. But I’d much rather, if I have to be living in pain or dying in pain, I’d much rather be living in pain. So I look forward to a long life and if death overtakes me on the way then so be it.

Having died once, I know it’s about the easiest and most pleasant thing to experience, but that’s certainly no reason to commit suicide I might add. It’s very much against that. When I did die when I was 13 there was an element there of just giving up because I was very intense, more intense than I am now at that time about serving the Creator. To me the Creator wears the face of Christ. That doesn’t have to be true of anybody else. It was the Creator and not simply Jesus that I was looking at. I really wanted to serve the Lord that Jesus loved and that I love and worship also.

And I really felt, in spite of enormous efforts on my part with my brother, I didn’t have another brother until after that operation. I think maybe when I came back I got the brother because I had such a yearning to be a mother and I have never in my life had the opportunity to become a mother except when I was married to my first husband who never did get that first fulltime job. He wanted to have children but he did not have the ability or the inclination to working a steady job.

So I had a little brother at 14. It was something to experience and I did enjoy that and love that. At any rate, when I did get through the dying process and experience death, itself, it was wonderful, it was beautiful but then this big voice over said “If you want to finish what you came to do then you have to go back. It’s up to you, you picked a real hard incarnation but you picked it and if you want to do it then go back. Otherwise, we’ll make a special exception in your case and you can choose a new goal for your incarnation, but do it and get on back there.”

So who wants to go through all the karmic responsibility of a suicide only to find out that you’re going to have to come back and do the doggone thing all over again. Just because death is pleasant does not mean it’s a good idea. I have learned to value my incarnational time highly because it is limited naturally. That means I can spend myself without feeling that I’ve been foolish because we’re going to have to spend ourselves to the last drop anyway. There is nobody who can say “Well, I’ve figured this out—we don’t have to die.”

And when you hear somebody say that kind of thing to you you really need to step back and say “Darlin’ wake up.” I’m ticked off terminally at the Course in Miracles. I haven’t ever read the thing—the more people try to force me to read it, the more resistance I find that I have because the people that are telling me I must read “A Course in Miracles” have gotten their lives really messed up.

People can get messed up reading “The Law of One” material if they have that reaction. But there isn’t any encouragement from the home office. If somebody writes L&L Research and says “Well, I’m going to have to leave my husband, I’m going to have to change jobs, I’m going to have to start my life all over again because now I have the Law of One material and I know what’s really important and my husband (or wife) is holding me back.”

You always hear that. It doesn’t matter what sex. They say “I’m going to have to break with this guy/gal because they’re just not learning/changing/growing and I need someone who is alert and alive and interested in the same things I am.” No, no, that’s not it.

Well, people that think that way are going to think that way but they’re not going to do it on my time. They’re not going to hear from me that it’s a good idea because it’s not a good idea. We’re not here to learn in a vacuum. We’re not here to learn things that we can learn when we’re not alive to the third planet from the sun in this particular extremely valuable incarnational time.

While we’re alive—while we’re able to move this body around, while we’re able to make dents in solid objects, while we’re able to pick up and use physical tools, it’s not the time to practice skills while discarnate. It’s the time to engage yourself in the human race. To be a person among people. To have relationships; to suffer; have good times and bad, cry and laugh and feel. These are indeed the times that try men’s souls, incarnational time.

On the other hand, compared to the millions of years that you’re going to be without this kind of a body this is kind of like a recess or a treat. Certainly it’s got a crazy plot, it’s hard as hell, harder than chess, a lot more risky than poker, but it’s the best game on the planet. People say to me sometimes, “The best game on the planet is … war, or football, or some gift, profession or calling…” but they’re looking too hard. The best game on the planet is being alive. And being. Realizing that you are able to act in a way that you are not going to be able to act most all of your millions of millions of years of other kinds of consciousness.

We were doing that before we came here and we’ll be doing that after we leave here. While we’re here we should practice what this earth has to offer, which is being a third density human being, fallible, cranky and wrong a lot, but loving and giving in blind and total faith that what you’re doing is truly worth something. Why would I want to make Jim over so that he would be easier to live with. Why would I want that? I don’t want easy, I want interesting.

And I would consider myself a real goose if I ever gave in to that “Oh, I wish I had somebody that would tell me nice things all the time, and romantic, and stroke my ego, and all that stuff.”

No, that’s not it, we’re here to be active and loving and giving and to experience whatever that brings us, whether it’s extremely, inordinately painful emotionally or whether you’ve gone over great tonight and you’ve got a good house. If you’ve got a tough house it’s still something that you’re doing that’s good to attempt to make a livable breathable peace. Not the dead peace, but the alive kind where you really are actively supporting each other.

I say that to people and they really look at me like I was a nitwit. Really, they do. Because I’m saying, okay, your old man (or old lady) is not at all like you. Good, that’s what you’re here for, you’re here to learn. People don’t want to hear that because it’s so hard. They want to have things in a better place. They think maybe a different cast of characters would make a difference. It won’t make a difference because the things to which we are sensitive remain fixed and that includes the very human desire to find the grass greener on the other side of the fence.

That’s why I don’t waste any time whatsoever saying I wish I didn’t have this pain. Because if I were delivered out of that kind of pain, I would get another kind of pain. Whatever we experience is going to be in some part painful. That’s part of the point of it all, is to learn how to be gallant, and courageous and noble and fine and live up to the ideals that we have for ourselves and not be dependent on whether the person next to us agrees with everything we say or even has the same kind of temperament or character.

Jim and I are such different people and I thought at first that we would never ever make a real intimate contact and a level of trust that we both felt inspired by. But it took us seven or eight years and then we had that. It was worth everything. If it had never come clear, if it had never resolved, it still would have been worth everything because we’re not responsible for how we’re seen as going over, we’re responsible for the attempt and if people are telling us “Well, that was a poor attempt,” we can see that that’s what they think but we have to evaluate that in light of what we actually and genuinely did inside, what our intentions were.

And if we hear “Well, that just didn’t work, it was terrible,” then we don’t make the mistake that I made when I was 12-1/2 years old and thought to myself “I am never going to be able to have anybody, take me home, Lord.” I remember, I was 12-1/2 and I thought “I’m going to remember this.” It’s a very whole feeling, it’s an entirety, it’s a totality, and it feels right at the time but you just have to have that blind faith that at some level you are achieving what you set out to achieve, in the intention at least, and in the perseverance, and the less you’re encouraged, then the stronger the effort is likely to be.

So working against God is a very human thing. So if you shorten the odds in one part of your life your liable to start experiencing very puzzling effects. If you’re striving consciously for a goal that is not simply giving you the best shot. But you think, “Well, I’m a failure unless I achieve a certain amount of harmony and have nothing but kind words between me and thee.” Nah. You’re just responsible for your part of it. And you’re responsible for paying attention to what the other person says, but also for keeping yourself out of the tendency to let other people give you a guilt trip and to give yourself guilt trips “Oh, I failed at that because the person didn’t get it.” That’s just double thinking.

You fail when you give up. When you stop trying. If you don’t stop trying then you haven’t failed. You’re just not coming over well and maybe you can learn something about that and modify what you’re doing to get the effect, but that doesn’t mean that all of your efforts before that have been failures, it means you’re going through a process of learning, and that’s what we’re here for, to learn the stuff we didn’t know yet, or have forgotten.

Okay, I think that’s about it. Love and Light to you D. Enjoy yourself driving around in your car. I hope that you manage to get yourself into a vehicle that works a little bit better but then who am I to talk? My physical vehicle doesn’t work that well and I’m still on the positive side about life. Name your car and talk to it and I swear it’ll treat you a lot better. If Ra says the stones are alive why shouldn’t all the elements be alive, they’re certainly all in motion.

That’s it for a while. Take care. Give me a whistle when you get the inspiration. You’re always in my heart.

Carla