Hi everyone, this is Austin Bridges welcoming you to the L/L Research Podcast, In the Now, Episode #54. L/L Research is a nonprofit organization dedicated to freely sharing spiritually-oriented information and fostering community and towards this end has two websites: the archive website, LLResearch.org and the community website, Bring4th.org.

During each episode, those of us at L/L Research form a panel to consider questions from spiritual seekers. Our panel consists of Jim McCarty, husband to the late Carla Rueckert, scribe for the Ra contact and president of L/L Research, along with Gary Bean and myself, who are working hard to keep the mission of L/L Research alive and well. Each of us is a devoted seeker and student of the Law of One. We intend this podcast to be a platform of discussion as we consider questions from spiritual seekers that often challenge us to articulate our own perspective. Our replies to these questions are not final and authoritative. Instead, they are generally subjective interpretations stemming from our own studies and life experiences. We always ask each who listens to exercise their own discernment and listen for their own resonance in determining what is true for them.

If you would like to submit a question for this show, please do so. Our humble podcast relies on your questions. You may either send an email to or go to www.LLResearch.org/podcast for further instructions. Again, I’m Austin and we are embarking on a brand new episode of L/L Research’s podcast, In the Now.

Gary and Jim, are you ready for this amazing episode?

Well, I’m ready.

Gary is.

All righty. Well, our first question two questions come from Arnold, who sent them in via email. Arnold asks:

“Can Wanderers here on earth suffer from severe self-rejection or are they incarnated into this current time/space with a strong sense of self-acceptance?”

Let’s turn to Jim to tackle that one first.

Well, Ra mentioned that when wanderers incarnate on earth are completely the entity of third density. If they wish, they can have a certain tendency towards learning about spiritual principles because that’s pretty much the home density in which they survive and live. But other than that, depending upon what pre-incarnative choices they’ve made, wanderers can learn anything through any particular catalyst that you could mention.

So, they may or may not have a sense of self-acceptance or self-rejection. Ra said there are basically three reasons for wanderers coming to earth. Firstly, they come basically to help lighten the planetary vibration. Secondly, they are able to remember that they’re a wanderer from elsewhere and that they’re here to be of service. They learn that remembering this helps them to increase their personal polarization a great more rapidly than if they had not remembered. Thirdly, sometimes there’s a need to go through either more wisdom training or more compassionate training. Those are the two basic lessons after we get out of third density. The fourth density is the compassion and love and the fifth density is the wisdom. Then in sixth density we balance those two. So, we’re working with love and light, with wisdom and compassion.

When wanderers go through the end of fifth density and start going through sixth density need to recapitulate—either one or the other—wisdom or compassion to be sure they’re in balance. They’re going to need to be in balance in sixth density. So, there may be something in the way of compassion that they would need to learn that might look like self-rejection.

My own experience with that is that for most of my life I got angry at myself for making little mistakes. I’d get angry every time I broke a tool, sawed a line crookedly, or hammered a nail crookedly. I just broke all kinds of things throughout my life, which was a symbol of me getting angry at myself. Ra suggested that this was a program whereby I wanted to balance the wisdom that I had by increasing my compassion.

The way that that can be done is through what Dr. Michael Newton called ‘the opposites programming’. You program a lack of compassion if you’re trying to get more compassion. And for a positively-oriented entity, you program that for yourself. It wouldn’t be appropriate to program it for other people that would be of a negative orientation.

So, for 68 years of my life I had that quality where I would get angry at myself for making all kinds of goofy mistakes—dropping something, fumbling, you know, just anything. It finally ended for me in August of 2015 when I finally learned how to love myself.

So, I would say anything is possible for a wanderer. What would you say, Gary?

I’d say that was a great reply and like, you, I think the wanderer can learn any lesson that’s available. So, in my reply I dove into possible reasons that self-rejection may be developed. I think any third density being, especially on this planet regardless of where their soul came from, is very much subject to developing self-rejection at some point in their incarnation or in one of their incarnational cycles. I think that there are two reasons for this. First one is that rejection is unavoidable just by simply existing in this matrix where people are separated and are often at odds with one another. Here, energies of judgement or ridicule, scorn, hostility or other varieties of non-acceptance are or can be the norm. Simply put, where people are shitty to one another, can cause one to feel and develop a sense of self-rejection.

But regardless of how many external sources for self-rejection are identified, at the end of the day, those are only proximate causes. The first fundamental and ultimate cause of self-rejection is simply a lack of self-knowledge. When our identity is small and rests upon the opinions of others, or is measured against societal standards, then we are set up or practically guaranteed to find fault in ourselves. We analyze ways that we don’t seem to meet those standards and how we are less than. When we know who we truly are, we need no validation from the world. So whereas self-rejection is a contraction, an illusory “NO” forced upon the self, self-knowledge is a discovery and an acceptance of the final “YES” of self. It needs no justification. Beingness is a self-luminous rightness—if that makes sense. That is how I see it.

I’m still working on at chipping away at self-rejection. Much of my mentality used to be caught inside of that very small, constricted space of self-rejection. It’s only through many years of growth that I’ve incrementally come to say that I’m okay as I am.

But for the wanderer in particular, there are added reasons for feeling self-rejection including a subconscious sense of being different or other than. They can end up feeling, shall we say, alien. They might be able to sense the variance between the vibrations of home where everybody basically loved each other and the vibrations of this environment where love is not automatic. The wanderer could even develop a rejection of this environment itself that translates into a self-rejection.

The wanderer could, say, not be good in conversation and say really dumb things or be/feel that they are very white and wanting darker skin. They could be doing a podcast and wonder if they’re saying anything helpful at all and I may be getting personal here. [Laughs]

Who are you talking about? [Laughs]

But, yeah, there’s some thoughts on the development of self-rejection by Gary Bean. Back to you, Austin.

Thank you both—especially for sharing the personal aspect of this question for both of you. I think it is very helpful to hear how these sorts of things manifest in our own lives, and it’s useful to hear other people talk about their own issues with self-acceptance and self-rejection as well. I agree with both of you, and think that Gary and I especially were in the same vein when we were developing our thoughts and answers for this question.

I think that if you did take a poll of self-identifying wanderers, I would say that self-rejection is a lot more common than self-acceptance. So, the simple answer to Arnold’s question, I think, is that most wanderers do not incarnate with a strong sense of self-acceptance. There are probably exceptions, but by and large I think wanderers struggle with self-rejection maybe more than other third density entities, but I’m not 100% sure. But if they do struggle more, there are some factors that I see that would play into that. One of them that Gary touched on is this fundamental difference between the home environment of the wanderer and the third density environment that we are currently in.

Ra talked about this in #12.30 when they said:

“Due to the extreme variance between the vibratory distortions of third density and those of the more dense densities, if you will, wanderers have, as a general rule, some form of handicap, difficulty, or feeling of alienation which is severe. The most common of these difficulties are alienation, the reaction against the planetary vibration by personality disorders, as you would call them, and body complex ailments indicating difficulty in adjustment to the planetary vibrations such as allergies, as you would call them .”

So, as Gary was touching on, this can sometimes I think translate into a self-rejection when there is an outer rejection. I think that the nature of our psyches and how we perceive our environment is that they will typically reflect each other. Thus, if a wanderer does not feel at home in their environment, then they may not typically feel at home in their own veiled psyches. This is a generality that might be an unconscious dynamic that doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s happening on the surface, but I do think it’s true for most third density beings, including wanderers. And because of this, I think that the natural rejection of both environment and self within third density for wanderers exists.

For me, one of the greatest liberations of spiritual evolution is when I became more comfortable with myself and accepted myself more, which made me more comfortable within my environment in general. I felt oppressed by this world less and less. While it is still apparent that there is a lot about this environment that is not harmonious and can use a lot of love and service, it’s not something that feels like a wound to my psyche that causes me to reject my environment, and then reject myself because of it.

Another factor that I think is involved is just how abnormal the identity of a wanderer is in our society. It’s not exactly an acceptable thing within our society to identify as a human with an alien soul. At best I think most people would probably roll their eyes at this idea and, at worst, they would feel like such a person should be committed.

Discovering one’s Wanderer identity can be extremely liberating because it puts so much that is confusing about our life into a beautiful context. But because of how our society views such things, it can also make somebody feel crazy or rejected by society in general. That rejection can be pretty tough and it can lead to some self-rejection. I do think that in that dynamic there might be some projection on the side of the wanderer—their already present self-rejection that they’re having reflected back at them by society. In my case, in a lot of situations, my perceived rejection from society is very much elevated by my own insecurities. But I have to say that society doesn’t do a whole lot to help ease those insecurities. So, it can become sort of a cycle.

Those are the two primary factors I see that might cause a wanderer to have a stronger sense of self-rejection than normal. Any more thoughts from either of you?

Not from I.

When you talked about taking a poll of wanderers and supposed that most would have self-rejection rather than self-acceptance, I would say that rings true and accurate to me. I thought about their home environment as you were describing it and realized that in their home environment they don’t, so far as I’m aware, have to develop self-acceptance in the way that we have to here in this less than supportive environment. Back at home everybody loves you. Everybody. There’s no exception to that rule—everybody loves you. In contrast, that is categorically not the case here on our planet.

And then I thought about when Ra talked about the path of adept and the necessity of disassociation from the thoughts, bonds, opinions and constraints of others. Then I took a step back and imagined how every person born into this world without being given a rule book or standard as to how to behave, how to relate to others, or how to view what reality really is. There’s no universal standard here on this planet. So, if you don’t have a foundational bedrock of self-knowledge, you have to look to others for your cues. You have to look to society to identify its standards and then attempt to find your way through that means. Society, of course, has a lot of conflicting standards and a lot of judgmental standards.

I recall watching movies, which a lot of times conveys the worldview of the script writer, the director, and so forth. That worldview will often make fun of a certain type of person or an idea. The protagonist is the one generally being upheld as right, and the protagonist is in conflict with others who are wrong. Whenever I see something, some part of my own identity that was being made fun of in a movie, I feel a cringing inside as though I was personally being rejected, and I would internalize that standard. I guess seeing something that they identify with get rejected, then internalizing that is a process that a lot of people go through.

To wrap this back in to what Ra said about dissociation, I think that’s why it’s important that one not give that power to others per se. Not to say that one should reject others, but that one should not be at the mercy of or bound by the thoughts of others, such that one is dissociated from them. One can view others rejecting some principle that you believe in, but you know your own truth and as such, you’re not affected.

I think that that is actually a core aspect of being a wanderer and is part of the whole wanderer equation. It is a normal aspect of third density development and the development of our psyches that we be molded by our culture. I think Jung called this process an introjection, which is the opposite of projection where instead of projecting our values out in our perception of the world, we’re basically molded by the values of our environment initially. There’s only so much a kid can do to not be just completely molded by the society that we grow up in. In fact, it’s healthy to be molded by the society that we grow up in because that gives us a standard point from which we can relate to society.

The process of going through and evaluating the values that society has given you is an incredibly powerful thing. I think it’s something that wanderers are sort of here to do because they bring with them innate knowledge and innate truth of where they came from, which stands in stark contrast of the sorts of values that are introjected into them. Then they go through the process of feeling an intense urge and having an intense knowing that something about this is off and that it is fundamentally causing friction within them. They start to think that they need to do some seeking within to figure out what it is that feels off about this, which leads them down the spiritual path of coming up to those societal norms and values that maybe as wanderers are here to transform themselves.

And so, wanderers go through this process of, as you said, not necessarily rejecting the things that they don’t love and accept, but becoming independent from them. This enables them to still be able to relate to societal standards and norms, while still being able to show people who hold those values that there are other ways to live, and that there are other ways to exist as a human being. I think it’s a really powerful thing when somebody does that after having been molded by society and been firmly planted in this soil of third density. I think that’s how Wanderers really affect the world that we’re in.

I agree with everything you said and appreciate it. I also have a quick thought to augment it. I agree that this molding process, wanderer or not, is a natural and needed process. Part of the core program of wandererhood, as you were saying, is that social memory complexes like Ra and their cohorts are outside of this system. They can beam love and light and send information, but they can’t transform it from within. The wanderer, however, is born and grows up through the soil of this planet, is molded by it, as you said, and takes on its societal distortions unto itself.

As the wanderer moves through their own process of love and acceptance, it transforms those distortions that it has taken on, and in so doing, transforms society itself in much the same way that self-work is world work. Then ultimately, as the wanderer transforms these many distortions such as, say, self-rejection, the wanderer then offers another model or another way of being. It’s like they have cleared out the pollution, so to speak. They’re part of the ocean and this process helps clean out the entire ocean.

Oh, all right. We covered that one pretty well. Any final thoughts from you, Jim?

One little one. I remember Ra saying that it was very likely that a wanderer would suffer some kind of difficult psychological impairment on the planet. Alienation was the most likely. I’m just curious, I don’t think there’s any way of ever finding this out, but how many wanderers are able to do what we hope they’re doing, which is awakening and then doing some channeling of their own energies to help change the planet? How many are maybe not able to adjust to the planet and have basically incarnated into a really bad situation from which they never awaken?

My guess would be that a minority of wanderers are able to awaken to who they are and to begin serving as they intended. But, again, that is just my guess. There is a thought I came across in Secrets of the UFO. I don’t know if it’s Don and Carla talking about it or it’s early channeling talking about it, but the thought was that some species create a thousand eggs knowing that, you know, only a portion of those eggs are going to survive, but in redundancy is the goal. Much is the same with wanderers who came in masses knowing that a lot of them weren’t going to awaken. But the over-abundance and the redundancy is what helps the mission to be as successful as possible.

You suppose there’s a certain ratio referenced by the Council of Saturn that makes them say, “Well, let’s see. We need to put in about 65 million wanderers, you know, because only 20 million are going to awaken.”

Yeah, they have their version of online calculators.

We’re looking at a 6.99 repeating success rate here, so we need to incarnate with at least 65 million.

They are crappy with numbers, though.

That’s true. What if they got it wrong? [Laughs]

I think we’ve got our next question, which is pretty significant. It also comes from Arnold, who asks:

“If an entity experienced great childhood trauma and rejection, is it then likely the result of karma and that this entity rejected itself or others in a prior life or was this trauma chosen by the entity to accelerate or increase its own vibrational development and increase its service to others suffering from similar trauma? Or, is it possible that such trauma was simply the product of the free will of others who indirectly harmed the entity when it was very young?”

Gary, let’s start with you.

Yeah, that’s a good question. Obviously, I can’t speak to the specifics of any given situation, but it did launch me into more fundamental inquiry. This has been a chicken and an egg conundrum for me for a while. The question being: Is what we experience, including situations such as you describe where others hurt us, an outgrowth or result of our own past actions, or can someone seek to hurt us without our karmic schedule inviting it?

To try to illustrate this, let’s say that I travel to a distant city. I’m walking on a sidewalk and, let’s keep it mild, someone I’ve never met before with whom I have no obvious connection, passes me and spits on my shirt. Was I somehow complicit in that act? Did my vibrational state in that moment or my karmic balance open the invitation to that passer-by? This basic scenario has been an unresolved question in my mind for some time. On one hand I can see how people attract to themselves that which is needed for learning, including negative or harmful or destructive situations. In that metaphysical sense, there are no victims, as each is experiencing that which they need. Caveat: From a legal and emotional standpoint, there are victims and justice does have a place.

But surely, and this is where it gets tricky for me, Person A can step forward and hurt Person B without cause, provocation, or previous action on person B’s part. There must exist the possibility that someone with ill or confused intent can just simply hurt somebody without corresponding invitation or opening on the part of the recipient, Otherwise, how does inflicting pain upon another ever happen in the first place? It must be initiated and set into motion somewhere.

I’ll just skip over my last couple of paragraphs in the interest of time. Back to you, host.

Thank you for that. Jim, how do you feel?

Well, I think that in the personal part of the incarnation for a Wanderer anything is possible because each wanderer programs pre-incarnative lessons as Gary was talking about. I do believe there is a good reason for what happens to us in every life experience and that we choose our lessons. Now, these pre-incarnative choices are probably not specific to the point where you are choosing to have somebody spit on your shirt, but you can choose how you can respond to it and see that the action isn’t over after the spit occurs. There can be a whole range of possibilities that you could get excited about. You could say to the person, “Well, can I talk to you for a second here? Because you know that would be taken as a bad thing to do back where I’m from, but you know, I have a different point of view and I was thinking maybe there’s something bothering you that I can help you with.”

Now this goes back to Charles Eisenstein’s, Consciousness of Inner Being: A New Story. There are different ways of looking at things. Going back to the self-rejection aspect of third density experience, there could be other reasons for the wanderer feeling that rejection of the self from others. Maybe it’s a desire on the wanderer’s part to develop an inner strength to stand up for the self that would come from it being necessary for him or her to do because there are others that are not standing up for the self, or are in fact trying to take the self down.

Maybe you’re trying to develop love for people that do that, you know, for those like the Bible says who use and abuse you. Maybe you’re trying to develop love on a more difficult level of being because it’s easy to love people who love you in the family, but if there’s people who don’t particularly show that they love you, maybe they do, maybe they don’t, then you still want to love them and you still try to love them.

Any catalyst that seems to be negative can be seen in the positive light and vice versa, you know. In the Tarot our conscious mind is known as the Magician because it can magically transform any situation into a positive learning experience. I think one of the best ones I’ve read is a woman by the name of Michaela Small Wright wrote a book called, Perelandra. Perelandra is the American equivalent of Findhorn where she works with nature spirits.

Most of the first half of the book is her childhood. Her parents pretty much abandoned her by the time she was 12 years old. Before the age of 12 they were around most of the time and got her into school and so forth, but after that they were gone and it was up to her to get herself enrolled in school and to explain to the school officials why her mom and dad weren’t going to be able to come to the various meetings. It was also up to her to get money to survive, and to cook her own food. Her parents would show up now and then and, you know, maybe leave her a little money and so on. It was almost as though they were consciously trying to ignore this child and they did.

After she grew up and she began Perelandra, she held workshops around the world to let people know how to work with nature spirits and devas. One person said, “I’ve read your book and I can’t believe that you went through all that stuff. Have you found a way to forgive your mom and dad?” And she said, “There’s no need to forgive. I wouldn’t be who I am without what they did. I can take care of myself. I am self-reliant, and I can teach other people to do that. No, there’s nothing to forgive.”

That blew my mind. So, anything is possible. The mind can look at any situation and decide that it wants to respond in a certain way. In #95.24, Don asked Ra:

“If the experience of the mind has sufficiently chosen the right-hand path, as total purity is approached in choosing the right-hand path, then total imperviousness from the effects of the left-hand catalyst is also approached. Is this correct?”

Ra answered:

“This is exquisitely perceptive. The seeker which has purely chosen the service-to-others path shall certainly not have a variant incarnational experience. There is no outward shelter in your illusion from the gusts, flurries, and blizzards of quick and cruel catalyst.

However, to the pure all these encounters speak of the love and light of the One Infinite Creator. The cruelest blow is seen with the ambiance of challenges offered and opportunities to come. Thusly, the great pitch of light is held high such an one so that all interpretation may be seen to be protected by light.“

Now most of us aren’t going to, you know, reach those heights because we’ll probably fall short. But each of us can move in that direction on our path of seeking the truth.

Gary, what do you think? Or, Austin, what do you think?

I think that your response is the central aspect here in that no matter what the real answer to this question is, whether everything can be divinely planned and whether or not some things can be random, the response is always going to be the same. You can choose how you want to have that affect your life and that is the central teaching, I believe.

I guess to focus in a little bit more on the less important details, I struggle with the question a lot of whether or not trauma is always something that is planned, whether Gary getting his shirt spit on is something that him and Higher Self decided on before the incarnation. It seems kind of silly to think that they had that conversation and his Higher Self is like, that’s probably a good lesson for you to learn right there. But there are a lot of spiritual teachings that say that it is the case that you are attracting every little thing that happens to you and that everything that happens to you has been planned in a certain way for a certain lesson.

So I will say that I do think that traumas can be the result of karmic balancing or another type of planned incarnational lesson. Ra actually says that it is to be noted that among your entities a large percentage of all progress or all progression, has as catalyst, trauma. I don’t think that they ever made any sort of definitive statement saying that all trauma is planned as catalyst for progression though—just that progression usually has as catalyst trauma. I do hesitate to say that I think this is sort of the theme that Gary was going on, that all trauma is the result of karma or planning. If everything is divinely planned then I think that something doesn’t quite add up about the nature of our reality.

If things all divinely planned, we wouldn’t have issues with progression and evolution of the spirit, I don’t think. Yet, Ra and the rest of the Confederation say that they are concerned when there isn’t progression that results in harvest. If all is divinely planned, including trauma and experiences that inhibit our spiritual progression, then what exactly is there to be concerned about if everything is going according to plan? I think that we accept that Ra and the Confederation have a greater viewpoint of the metaphysics behind what is going on. But there is definitely a viewpoint above what Ra can see. They reiterate a few times throughout the material that they are sharing their opinion and perspective and beyond them there is mystery that they themselves do not grasp.

I think that that divine plan probably does exist and that it exists within that mystery that Ra cannot see. But from their perspective, there is still reason to be concerned when there is not progression. So one can say that a trauma itself may be planned, but how that person reacts to that trauma is up to the incarnated entity’s free will, as Jim was talking about.

So, my question would be that if a person’s free will could cause them to reject a lesson and to stifle their own growth, wouldn’t it also be possible that another entity’s free will would cause them to create unplanned trauma in the life of another person who also did not plan for that trauma? I do think it’s possible that trauma between two people can be planned before an incarnation, but also that the free will of incarnated entities creates a mystery and unknown aspect of how the entity’s progression will unfold. I think that element of the unknown free will can result in someone creating an unplanned trauma in another person’s life. Perhaps not all traumas are necessarily the result of a desired lesson or any karmic balancing or something like that, but that it could be a random event generated by the free will that we’ve been afforded in our reality.

Any further thoughts from either of you?

Don’t think so.

Bunch of meaty, philosophical threads we could explore. I will refrain though and offer one quick thought. Regarding planning versus random, my understanding from Ra’s description of the workings of the universe is that the further along the third density entity is in their progression, the less and less random their catalyst is—the more and more it is either being planned by them at pre-incarnational level or as they get more advanced is chosen by them on an increasingly conscious level while within the incarnation and that’s all.

All righty. Well, I think that that brings us up to the end of our show. Any final words for the listeners, Jim?

Yes. I want to thank you all for sending questions, thank you all for listening, thank you all for being and thank you all for letting us love you. We can feel the love coming back to us and go ahead and spread the love around. We need more of it in the world.

Yes, we do. You have been listening to L/L Research’s weekly podcast, In the Now. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please visit our websites: LLResearch.org and Bring4th.org. Thank you so much for listening and a special thank you to Arnold who submitted today’s questions.

If you’d like to send us a question for the next show, please read the instructions on our page at www.LLResearch.org/podcast. New episodes are published to the archive website every Wednesday afternoon around 1:00 p.m. Have a wonderful couple of weeks and we will talk with you then.