[This L/L Research Reunion and Conference was held at the Wooded Glen Retreat Center in southern Indiana near Louisville, Kentucky, on August 19 through 21, 2005. Carla gave this talk on August 21, Sunday morning, after breakfast, immediately after finishing the opening Meditation of the day.]

This morning Carla’s going to continue talking about the higher energy centers, starting with the green and moving her way up. There’s an outline of what she’ll be talking about coming around to you so be sure to take one of those papers. Without further ado, here’s Carla.

Thank you. Good morning everyone. It’s good to see your smiling faces. And happy Sabbath to you. I had a good sleep last night and I hope you all did too. I feel very refreshed, ready to take on the thorny subject of the open heart.

When you talk about opening the heart, it sounds relatively simple, but it isn’t. I love the parable in the Bible of the money changers in the temple, where Jesus walked into the outer temple in a Jewish synagogue—I believe it’s true to this day, there’s an outer temple and then there’s an inner temple. In the outer temple they were selling doves and other small animals for sacrifices. Lots of money was changing hands and Jesus became exercised. He was unhappy with all the money being involved in the practice of religion. So he chased the money changers out of the temple.

What we need to do is look at the money changers in our temples and integrate them into our universal selves. It’s a little bit of a challenge. It’s easy to chase them out and say, “That’s no part of me.” But that’s not the way you do it if you want to get into the open heart. Because we are universal souls. We have every emotion, every aspect of humanity [within us]. The way to the inner sanctum of the heart is paved with the hard work of integrating the shadow side and embracing it.

So when you start to go into the open heart, even if you’ve got your red ray, your orange ray and your yellow ray all cleared and the energy is pouring through into the heart so that you’ve got full power into the heart and you’re ready to do your work, immediately you run into the problem of walking into that inner sanctum, that inner room, because you’re leaving behind little bits and pieces of your universal self.

You look at murderers and you say, “Well, I could never do that.” But of course you could, if your life were threatened, or especially if your loved ones’ lives were threatened. We all have it in us not only to have a gun and use it, but to use it well.

It changes you to have to do that, but in a lesser way we do it all the time, with thought. I certainly am guilty at times of murdering people with my tongue—in a very ladylike and civilized way.

[Audience chuckles.]

My husband has said to me more than once that I have an amazing ability to bring people up short with a single word. He usually gives the example of when he said, “Well, Ruck, I’m gonna go out in the back yard and I’m gonna do so-and-so,” and I looked up at him, and looked around at what was left to do in the kitchen and said, “Oh?”

[Audience chuckles.]

One word, man, and his whole morning changed!

There’s a murderer in there. There’s a thief in there. There’s the wolf that bites—I love that phrase. The parts of ourselves that we have not yet developed are the wolf that bites. They will savage the innocent lambs of the rest of our characters continually until we work with them. If we do not work with them, furthermore, we challenge ourselves with various kinds of ill health, neurosis and all the panoply of things that people take pills for in this society because they just don’t want to deal with the shadow self.

I have taken many of those pills, and not that I’m against pills, but I’m for working at a deeper level, working with the energy body, rather than staying in the physical body and using the mentality of the American Medical Association and thinking you’ve just got a body to work with. Well, you don’t. You’ve got a body, you’ve got a mind, and you’ve got a spirit.

You can’t do much with the spirit until the mind is known to itself. The outer temple of the heart is where the mind needs to become well known to the self.

I personally work a lot with impatience, judgment and pride. Pride is probably my besetting sin. It’s the one I always confess first. I confess my sins twice a year, during Advent and Lent. I have found in my own rule of life that confessing your sins and being absolved of them has a tremendous cleansing effect psychologically. It feels like you’ve just spring-cleaned your soul. It’s a wonderful release.

It was hard when I first started making confessions because I had a whole lifetime of confessions to make. I had to go back and confess stuff I’d done when I was seven; when I was nine; when I was a teenager. None of it was all that bad, but it had never been confessed before. It was difficult.

These days I generally have no outer sins to confess, although this Advent I will have one outer sin to confess because of the matter of H. I was fine as long as H was attacking me, but he started attacking J and V, and I lost it. So I’m going to have to confess that I used the sharp sword-edge of my tongue and told some surgically accurate truth that hurt him, and that told his secret, his little secret that shaped the way he told his story in such a way that he was the good guy and V was the bad guy. He had made it seem like V was the mother of his children, that she was married to him, and she’d run off and left him to join L/L.

Actually, V never married him, was not the mother of his children, never lived within three hundred miles of him, and was thinking of moving to the same town he lived in, but not at all in the same house he was in, simply because she wanted to investigate the relationship. That was as close as it ever got. She finally came to the conclusion that he was not going to treat her very well if she did try to move the relationship forward.

Anyway, that’s the sin I’ll have to confess and that’s the wolf that bit me. It had to do with people that didn’t need me or want me to defend them, but I just felt the need to tell the truth. I find it difficult to categorize what kind of wolf that was in myself, but it was definitely a money changer in my temple. It was distracting me.

I think that’s the thing you’ve got to realize about allowing yourself not to come to the most honest and deep grips that you can with these undeveloped parts of your own life, is that they constitute a distraction. The essence of this distraction is to keep your mind off of the main goal, which is to be yourself.

So what you’re trying to do in the outer temple of the open heart—we’re on the thumb now, by the way, we’re almost off the left hand completely.

[Carla indicates her gaily painted fingernails.]

This is green ray. I don’t think it’s often been investigated that green ray isn’t just one energy center. It really is subdivided into two, I think, the outer and the inner heart. So what you need to do is to realize that everything in this universal self of yours has its own merit. Just because it is wearing the mask of murderer, thief, envier, jealous person, slothful, lazy person or whatever—fill in the blank—doesn’t mean that there aren’t aspects of that shadow self that won’t really help you.

V was trying to talk about this yesterday. She said I was going to get to it. She was right. She’s listened to me talk about the Law of One quite a bit. After five speeches in England in two weeks she probably could rattle off a lot of what I have to say on certain subjects.

I think it’s really important to grasp the fact that not only are these lesser aspects, or those aspects that seem lesser, a part of you, but that they are a worthy part of you. They are an actual advantage to have, to claim. But you need to go through the process of seeing them, loving them, accepting them and redeeming them, because you are Christ. You have the power of judgment and redemption. If you judge that person, if it’s yourself or another person, the judgment is adhering. If you forgive, that forgiveness sticks. That person, whether it’s you or another self, is forgiven. You have that power. You are that kind of energy and that kind of being. You have the power to take and to release, to bind and to set free.

Of course you want to set yourself free and you want to set everybody else free. So what you need to do in order to change judgment to compassion is to do the work of the outer temple of the open heart and to redeem your unforgiven self. It’s not that easy to think about as it is an abstract thing.

But do the work once with just one thought of yourself that you have deemed unworthy and want to sweep under the rug, or like Jesus did, drive it out of the temple. Don’t drive it out. Sit down with it. Open your arms to it. Embrace it. This is the wolf that you’re taking into your bosom, in the faith that love will alter those biting teeth and create out of that wolf that would savage you a defender that will stand at your back and be your fine, white knight in shining armor. It will make you have persistence and grit and toughness and depth to yourself so that nothing can dismay you. You have acknowledged that within yourself. You have forgiven it. You have understood it, accepted it, redeemed it, taken it into yourself, and integrated it. And now it stands as part, and a very proud part, of that which serves the Creator.

What you have to do is tell this wolf your story, to open yourself up to be as vulnerable as you can and say, “Okay, I’m all intention here. I’m totally under construction. I’m not finished. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m an idiot, a bozo, admittedly. But I love the Creator. All I want to do is serve the Creator. Can you help me? Can you come and help me? And I will take you in. I will love you and thank you every day of my life.”

At that point you have integrated your shadow self. And then, when you walk into that place where the door of the inner temple is, you knock on the door.

Do you know that hymn, “O, Jesus, Thou Art Standing Outside the Fast-closed Door”? I think they got that wrong! Jesus is not standing, knocking on the door of our hearts. We are. Jesus is already in there. Jesus is the “I” of me that is already in my open heart, waiting for me to remember that I can go there. I can become the “I” that Christ-consciousness is. But I have to remember to knock on that door. I have to get there. And I can’t just wade through the outer temple, pushing the money changers out of the way. I’ve got to bring them into myself and bring the whole “me” to that door. And then when I knock, Jesus answers and says, “Welcome.” That is a precious, precious moment, when you finally feel for the first time that you have done the work.

I was talking earlier about distraction. Everything that’s undeveloped about your life constitutes a self-related psychic greeting/distraction. It can either distract you or you can do the work to integrate it. When you finally are integrated and there is no more wolf that bites, then you are self-forgiving, self-accepting, and compassionate toward your own redeemed self, seeing the impurity and imperfection, but loving the intention.

I think you finally become able to have compassion for other people and to look at people not with the eyes of judgment but with the eyes of true compassion, when you have nothing more to prove to yourself. When you have nothing more to defend against, when you know you are everything that there is, every emotion, every aspect, then when you see that in someone else, the mirror doesn’t hurt you. You go, “Okay, I see that undeveloped light. I understand that. I accept that. I embrace that.”

Now, when you do look at someone else, you may see that the other person hasn’t done the work. That’s all right. The other person has their own work to do. You have no part in that. If they ask you about it, you can talk about it. But if they don’t ask about it, you are free to understand and forgive that person without any adhering of your attention. So if you perceive the person to be somewhat of a jerk or an idiot, okay, aren’t we all? There’s nothing more to defend against. And so you are free to love.

That’s where we’re trying to get here, in the heart, to get into the inner reaches of the heart where you can at last rest. The joy of being in that place is wonderful. I’ve often had this image in my mind when I’m especially exhausted, of the Creator in one of my childhood forms, of the flowing white robes and the flowing white beard, the old man Creator God, Yahweh. I’ve rejected the names of that old man. I have not at all rejected the image because it’s very comforting to me.

I see this grandfatherly, Kris Kringle kind of God-figure sitting there in my open heart sort of like, “Come on, sweetheart,” and I’ll go and I’ll curl up in that big capacious lap and huddle against the big, bulky paunch of this father-God image, and I’ll just rest and he’ll rock me. And I can just feel that unconditional love pouring out of Him and just wrapping me in wonderful swathes of love. And finally I have the strength to get up and give it another whack. Sometimes you just get so exhausted. You don’t know where the strength is going to come from. But there’s this source of incredible, unconditional love just waiting in your heart.

So getting there, I will admit, is more than half the fun. I mean that sarcastically. It’s no fun to do this work. The hardest work you’ll ever do is to get into your own open heart. I think that’s what a lot of teachers miss when they talk about “How do you open the heart?” They don’t talk about the work of integrating the shadow self, of redeeming, and collecting, and integrating the undeveloped life, and doing the work to develop it. It’s not that you’re going to change these very gritty parts of yourself, but that you can give them direction, and you can inspire them to join you by telling them your story. A loose association is enough to give those undeveloped parts to yourself—the judger, the one that wishes to acquire, the one that wishes to shed, all of those bits of the self—dignity and honor, and knight them, and dub them your royal helpers, and it will be the truth. It isn’t a mask. It is a true process.

The problem you have doing this work is that there aren’t a lot of structures for doing it. And when you read in religionist writings, the structures you run across, while very helpful if you take them without literal meaning, become very restrictive and difficult to deal with if you take them literally. I can’t tell you how many damaged souls have come to me by email or snail mail or by visit, to tell me stories of their suffering.

If you have had trouble getting into that open heart, had trouble feeling the unconditional love that is just pouring through you at all times, don’t feel like you’re an idiot, or not “getting it.” There’s a fairly complex process involved simply in forgiving yourself and becoming able to be fearless. It’s really a matter of finally letting go of fear.

When one actually confronts that pithy sentence, “Know thyself!” there is a great fear involved, as you know you don’t want to know your whole self. You just absolutely are sure of that. “I don’t want to go there.” But that’s exactly where you need to go.

In your hall of mirrors, your family and everybody that’s around you will continue telling you that, will continue imaging to you those shadow parts of yourself. You’re getting heads-ups all the time. Every time you say, “Well, that person was certainly rude,” or “That person was certainly this or that,” it catches you. That’s your shadow side saying, “Look at me. You haven’t dealt with me yet, at least not today.”

Finally you get into the open heart and you’re exhausted and you rest. Take the time to rest before you think about doing something in the open heart, before you think about prayer, or meditation, or healing people, or any of that. Take your rest, because it will exhaust you to get through that door. The lions at the gate will make it very hard for you, and you do have lions at your temple gate, and they guard the you that needs to be in that open heart. They don’t let you through until all of you is going to come through.

Now, of course you can skate in on someone else’s coat tails. That’s what someone like Jesus or a guru is all about, because to take a short-cut and to have the feelings, and to know what it’s like it’s almost like if you were to take a drug, to invoke the name of Jesus, to invoke the affectionate knowledge of your guru and say, “Can I skate into the open heart on your coat tails because I totally trust you to have an open heart?” You can do that. But it’s going to wear off and then you’ve got to invoke Jesus or the guru again. People do that ritually. They do that their whole lives sometimes, they just skate in on Jesus or they skate in on their teacher.

Okay, at some point though, you need to internalize that voice, that presence, that Jesus-consciousness, that guru-consciousness, and become able to stand on your own two feet and know that the “I” that you are is the consciousness of the guru, is the consciousness of Christ.

I don’t know how to express how to do that. I think the best person I’ve ever read in writing about it from a Christian point of view is Joel Goldsmith. Joel Goldsmith was a Christian Science practitioner and back in the 60’s and early 70’s especially, he was doing a tremendous amount of teaching. He broke away from the Christian Science Church because he felt that there was too much distortion in the practitioner system where they were skating in on the practitioner’s coat tails and not dealing with their own Christhood. He wrote about the “I” of Christ becoming the “I” of us all in a very inspired and inspiring way. Joel Goldsmith is probably best known for a little, tiny book called The Infinite Way. Another is Parenthesis in Eternity. Another is Meditation.

Actually I don’t think he ever wrote a book in his life. He never wrote anything, he just sat and talked. People recorded it, took the transcripts, and published them. But—I’m trying to remember your name, sir. You’re the one who was talking about the difficulties of trying to get into the open heart. Jim, yes. Well, Jim, I would recommend the writings of Joel Goldsmith to you. Just start with The Infinite Way and see if that’s a fit for you, because he wrote about it better than I could ever speak about it. He was just inspired. He had a real gift.

I’ve been very lucky in my life in that I brought into my personality shell a conscious memory of what it is to be in love with the Creator. My mother told me that I talked about Jesus with her when I was about a year old. I didn’t walk early but I was talking early—sitting on my tail just talking away. And with glasses on. I had glasses at a very young age because my eye was turned completely into my head and things had to be done. Very strange little child, completely bald, fat, Buddha-like, cross-eyed, and just talking away, which I’m still doing.

[Audience chuckles.]

And a joyful baby. Who wouldn’t be joyful when you’ve got this total memory, this knowledge of a wonderful being like Jesus the Christ? Now Jesus the Christ, to me, was a very real being. I was with Jesus every day in my magic forest where all the animals talked to me, and the trees talked to me. I remember talking to a rose and telling the rose how beautiful it was and it wound itself around my arm and there were no thorns. That is the kind of magic forest every child should have! I had it until I was about five years old and made the mistake of telling my parents about it and they told me I was dreaming, making it up, and I never could go there again.

But Jesus was one of the inhabitants of that magic forest. He never said a word to me. He was not a talker. But he would look at me, and I would look into his eyes, and I would know what love was. I would absolutely know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what it was to love and be loved. Those eyes of love are still with me. Jesus, in my magic kingdom, was short, a little inclined toward stoutness, dirty. The hem of his very rough garment was stained with dust and his feet were dirty, with sandals, he had golden eyes and sort of reddish-brown hair. That was what he looked like in my little kingdom. Who knows how accurate that was or how real that was? But it was very real to me.

So I had an objective referent that was internal to me, internal to my system, for what unconditional love was, and I still carry that. How lucky is that? I mean, why did I give myself that, and why doesn’t everyone? I think it was just, there was something about the way I shaped this lifetime where I gave myself that gift along with other gifts that balanced it, like the tendency towards becoming ill if I wasn’t doing my internal work. Any time I got too busy on the outer, and got too full of myself, and too full of business and doing things, rushing around and things, I’d get sick. And I don’t mean a little bit sick, I mean, like, in-fear-for-my-life sick.

So, this has been a pattern in my life. We give ourselves these gifts and I just happened to give myself that open heart gift that made it very easy for me to understand what it is to have Christ-consciousness. I wish it could give it to you. I know I can’t, but you have your own ways of getting there. I know you do.

Working directly with love…

[Looks at her notes.]

I don’t have my template for Speech Three. I have my template for Speech One.

[Laughs at herself.]

No, G, it’s perfectly all right. I don’t need it. I’ve got the outline. I’ll go from the outline.

Working directly with the open heart, there are four exercises that I dearly love. You probably all are very familiar with them. They’re in Book I, so if you’ve read anything in The Law of One, you’ve read these. But they bear some looking at.

The first exercise is: “There is love in the moment. Where is the love in this moment?”

Think about that. It’s easy to see the love in this moment. It’s all around us. There are twenty to thirty people in this room, somewhere in between that, that are just ready to love you, unconditionally, because you’re here; you’re part of this group and you’re ready to love them. You feel so grateful and thankful to them because they are part of what has rapidly become a kind of home to you this weekend. And you’ve become safe and home-like to them. So another way of doing it is to look at the people in the group around you and see love in them, and trust it in them if you can’t trust it in yourself.

A lot of times it’s not so easy to see the love in the moment. When somebody cuts you off in traffic, the love in the moment’s going to have to come from you. You’re going to have to scrounge it up. I remember Don Elkins had a wonderful uncle, who was a student of Joel Goldsmith’s, actually, but I’ll never forget him. He was a mess at driving. I was in fear for my life every time I got in his car. He just did everything wrong, you know, he stomped on the brake, stomped on the accelerator, never looked in his rearview mirror, and he let his wife backseat drive. He’d say, “Is it okay to turn now? Is it okay to go on?” And she’d say, “Oh yes, Marion!”

I’ll never forget this moment when he was merging and somebody was absolutely determined to cut him off. And he goes, “Okay, buddy, there’s plenty of room for you.” You know? He never missed a beat, never said, “Well, you idiot!” No, he just didn’t even want to go there. He was so aware that behind that bully, behind that guy in the big car who felt that it was his road—and you know how people are on the road, can be on the road—he is like totally aware of that person that had a perfect right to be on the road and he was going to make sure that guy could be on the road exactly the way he wanted to be on the road. He had no animus. He had no axe to grind. He was like, “Let me stomp on the brake for you, buddy, and make sure you’ve got your road.”

What a wonderful attitude. I wish I had it. I’m muttering to myself usually, and I’m invoking Marion, “Okay, Marion, show me how to do that, “Okay buddy,” thing!” I don’t do that naturally. It’s not my gift.

But these are all times we can practice the love in the moment. Where is the love in the moment? Well, you might be the love in the moment. So, look sharp, because you do want there to be love in the moment.

Exercise Two: Look into the eyes of an other self. See the Creator.

That’s a two-edged sword. There are some people, you look into their eyes and you do see the Creator, and you’re so grateful. There are people that you look into their eyes and you have to invoke the seeing of the Creator because that person is not showing you the Creator. That person is showing you a distorted reflection. At the soul level that person is just as you are, as part of the infinite Creator.

So do the work. Look into the eyes of the other self—the jerk, the murderer in the cell, the thief on the dock that has knocked out an old woman just to take $7.35 from her purse, her Social Security check for her food—see the Creator.

Exercise Three: Look into the mirror, see the Creator.

This I have found to be a very transformative exercise. We all have a mirror in our home, a medicine chest mirror if nothing else. Go to the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror. And I don’t mean look at your face. I mean get close up to that mirror and look at the black part of your eyes, look into your eyes, penetratingly. Just do that, and do it for five minutes straight and come back and tell me of your experience. Something will have happened to you.

I’ve had people tell me that they have seen a stream of faces, their previous incarnations, begin to roll, just from looking into the eye. They see the soul stream, because the eye truly is the window of the soul. The light entering your eye goes into the various mechanisms that end up forming a sort of pixel-type representation that ends up being what we think is what we’re seeing. But if you look into the black part of the eye so that you’re looking into the self, you’re inviting something—and I’m not even sure precisely what that mechanism is—but it’s extremely powerful. So it’s a wonderful exercise to do, and if you can remember to do it, it will reward you. That is the third exercise: look in the mirror, see the Creator.

The fourth exercise is the easiest one for me because it’s looking into the creation of the Father to see the Creator.

I look out every window of this place—congratulations once again, G, for choosing such a wonderful room to sit in where we have windows and we have light and trees, the real feeling of the Creation of the Father. To me, putting my feet on the ground, getting my hands into the weeds—I also am a weed-puller by nature. I love to pull weeds. I have a brown thumb. Nothing I’ve ever planted has come up. I am hopeless. I have conceded defeat as far as being a farmer or a gardener, but I’m a great weeder. I have that librarian and that critical aspect to myself where I look at something and, oh I am so cutting, it’s like, “What is wrong with this picture?” I don’t know where I learned that, although my father and my mother both were very perfectionistic and critical. My father, all through my childhood, his idea of table conversation was to say, “Well, what did you think of that op-ed piece in the paper today?” And if I was three years old, he didn’t care, he wanted you to defend yourself. And, yes, I was reading at the age of three.

He didn’t put anybody down because they were three years old or five years old or seven years old, he just wanted you to be able to defend your position and he was merciless if you couldn’t do it. So I learned very young to be able to debate, and to hate it. I do not like debate. I do not like controversy. I do not like to get into that kind of clever conversation situation where you make points, you know, it’s all very sophistic, rationalizing, analytical and so forth. I’m very good at it but it is not my favorite thing to do.

To realize yourself as a sacred and holy being is kind of a shock. It almost feels like a complete untruth: “How can I possibly be the Creator when I’m imperfect, when I’m a bozo and have so many faults?” We’re all heavily flawed. I mean, get over it. We’re human. It is impossible not to make errors. There are uses for that solution-oriented problem-solving brain. Don’t just put it off to one side and go for intuition. It’s too valuable an asset to dump. Don’t dump it.

But control it. Your brain will run away with you if you give it half a chance. You will start rationalizing, and figuring out reasons for whatever you want to do. You can tell yourself any number of untruths that way. Don’t let yourself get away with it. You’re the only one who can ride herd on this intellect.

And other people will reward you for doing it. They’ll say, “Oh, how wonderful, oh this wonderful brain of yours.” You have to ride herd on your brain. It might be a real big engine, but you’re at the wheel. Be at the wheel. Take responsibility. Don’t let that brain just start going off on you. Balance the brain work with intuition work.

But at any rate, the outer service that people like to do from the open heart, and that is appropriate to do from the open heart, is for the most part healing. When you have come into your open heart and you’re resting there and you feel completely full of love and you’re just feeling that your self is like a big lighthouse and you’re just shining, then you’re in a perfect place to heal.

D was telling me last night that she had gotten a lot of indication that it was very possible she had a healing ministry. This is the center from which you do that work. And, of course, as I was talking yesterday about healing, I feel it is true that when you heal from the green-ray center, you’re actually exchanging energy with someone. They are giving to you, you are giving to them, and you share energy together. You sit in this place that you’ve created together, and as the healer, you are offering them an environment, a healing environment.

When I do the counseling, that is where I’m coming from, green and blue together, but green is very important because I think having that open heart, having the non-judgment, having the compassion, is what sets you up to be able to do the communication work. You have to be in green ray, and firmly established in green ray, before you can do the counseling.

But a lot of people have the ministry of touch, or have energy healing that they do, or Reike healing. There are all different kinds. And naturopathic healing. One is more wonderful than the other. If you do find that you have a gift of sharing, being in a healing environment with people, what you end up doing usually is reading a lot of books, doing a lot of web surfing, going to a lot of workshops until you have found the techniques of healing that are most compatible with your own gifts. So, again, it’s a matter of knowing yourself, and then informing yourself. Information is very important.

I was talking earlier about how sexuality only begins in red ray. I think what you need to realize is that whether an energy begins in red ray, orange ray, or yellow ray, it can be ennobled and lifted, not by effort, but by the way your awareness is working with these energies. After they’re balanced and you understand them, and that part of your mind is known to itself, this part of your energy system is known to itself, and you have accepted this and you have seen the way to balance for this, you can gradually find the sacredness of that energy. You can find the sacredness of friendship and companionship. You can find the sacredness of sexuality.

What happens is very natural. Let’s take sexuality, for instance. It starts with a chemical attraction between a man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and—it starts between two entities on planet Earth and they are attracted to each other because of the make-up of their natures.

I always tell people I don’t care who you’re attracted to. The rules are the same. I don’t care if you’re homosexual, or heterosexual, or pink and green spotted, you know, like dogs. All I care about is that when you address the other self in that relationship you are seeing that entity as the Creator and you are honoring and respecting and serving that entity as if that entity were the Creator.

If you love that person, what the heck difference does it make, except to you, as to whether it happens to be a heterosexual or homosexual relationship? I don’t see the point. I don’t get it. I don’t get all this judgment about it. But then I’m very fortunate. I was born heterosexual. And nobody’s ever looked at me and said, “Well you’re just wrong. And what you feel is wrong. And I’m going to fix you if I can, or heal you of your terrible homosexuality.” Well, phooey. You know, if I was born homosexual, I’m going to have to say, “Sue me! This is the way I was born, okay? Deal with it.”

Well, in this culture I think more and more people are doing that. But the point is, whoever it is that you love, you begin with a chemical attraction. That’s the way it always begins. You don’t look at somebody and say, “That person is a really good soul. I’m going to learn to desire that person.” It doesn’t work that way. You can’t manufacture the physical desire that goes with the physical body. It’s a natural function. It’s not a learned function. It’s natural. So, certainly the culture tries to teach you biases. All the images on TV are starved young women with breast implants. It’s not going to happen in real life very often. So, you know, part of learning how to love an actual person is to look beyond the image, look beyond the skin, the facial structure, the age, and so forth, to begin to see into that person so that you’re loving in a deeper sense.

But that doesn’t happen right away. The first thing that happens, for one reason or another, is that you get attracted to someone, you know, red ray. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s more to it than that. When people try to be cowboys and cowgirls, and try to keep it simple and stick with lust, they find themselves in an unending hunger for more, because the snack is tasty, then it goes away and you’re hungry again. It just doesn’t fill you up. It doesn’t satisfy you.

And so you enter into orange-ray personal relationships. That’s lifting it up. And it’s a very natural progression. And what’s more natural, as you get into a really good orange-ray relationship, than wanting to make it legal? You want to create a corporation out of this personal relationship, so you marry, or you make vows to each other that are the same type of energy as being married. You make yourself into a family. It’s a business. Any kind of yellow-ray relationship is, in its own way, a business, and you have responsibility. You have honor. You have duty.

I remember, Don once asked the Ra, “Well, what do you mean by honor/duty?” Ra simply said in that total deadpan humor that they always had, very dry wit, “Every honor is a responsibility, and every responsibility is an honor.”

So you lift it to that yellow ray. It’s still not satisfying, but then you fall in love with the whole person, with the person you were attracted to, with the person you’ve come into relationship with, with the person you’ve formed a legal entanglement with and created a corporation out of, and now you have a long view where you’re looking towards the future and thinking, “How shall we paddle this boat together?” And suddenly you’re in the open heart and it all suddenly makes sense. All of the rest, all of the lower energies fade away beyond the glory of loving and being loved.

It is a true exchange, for the first time. It’s that exchange where you’re not trying to get anything. Once you’re trying to get something, you’re probably back into orange ray. Okay, well, you’re back into orange ray so you have work to do. But while you’re in green ray, how you can tell you’re there is you’re just so thankful, and you’re just so ready to help, and to do whatever you can for this wonderful person that you see the Creator in. And this person is looking back at you and seeing the Creator in you, and it’s just the most wonderful energy exchange. And that’s the potential for any relationship, is to develop it, to do the work, and to come into the open heart together and feel that exchange.

Now, in terms of sexuality, there are places you can go that are above that because you can, and certainly Jim and I have through the years, done a lot of work in sacred sexuality where there is a third person in bed with you, and it’s the Creator. As you develop those wonderful energies of the natural functions of sexuality, you are creating a gift to the one infinite Creator, and you are allowing yourself to just be completely filled up with this wonderful energy that you’ve created together. And then when you’re all filled up, you just give all the incredible infinite rest of it to the Creator and say, “Thank you. This is my gift to you.” It is an extremely rewarding ending to the saga of your own sexuality because you have been able to understand yourself in so many different ways through working with this expression.

It’s a natural function. But it doesn’t have to just lie there and stay a natural function. It can become part of your work, part of your sacred practice, part of your role in life. And as I was saying yesterday, anything in your life can be lifted up into that area of sacred practice. So in the end, and this is certainly true in my life, your life becomes a 24/7 sacred practice and nothing is left out.

Oh, by gosh, it’s ten o’clock. I didn’t get to the blue or the indigo work. Probably other people will talk very well about these things. I will just take the next four minutes to say a couple of things.

Is it useful to teach? Yes. The Ra group said it is nearly impossible to teach, but then on the other hand it’s the only thing worth doing as long as you’re teaching what you’re learning.

Is it useful to teach without being asked? No. Don’t do it. Don’t proselytize. Don’t tell people about the Law of One. Don’t get excited.

Radiate. Be yourself. If somebody asks you, tell them anything that you know, but don’t worry about the information you’ve got and how it needs to get out there. Respond to questions only. That’s when you’re of service.

As far as doing work in consciousness, it is that which is a practice unto itself and could constitute a full hour, easily, just in talking about the different ways you can do the work in consciousness. What you need to know about it is that the prerequisite is to come into the open heart and do that work first. So my recommendation about the energy body is simply that you see yourself as this wonderful, living, crystalline entity.

And don’t see yourself as a third-density crystal. Don’t see yourself as that kind of crystal that you see with gems and so forth where there are sharp angles. Because when you’re crystallizing in a third-density fashion, you solidify and you’re unable to change. But as a human being, as an evolving spiritual aspect of the infinite Creator, you will be constantly changing. So, see yourself more as the kind of crystal that water is, and allow that liquid nature to be your crystalline self. Because as you change, water will not break. I think that’s the nature of the fourth-density crystal.

As we come together in meditation, I think that’s the nature of the crystal that we link together. We don’t just hook at different points the way crystals do when they become bigger or when they merge. We become one. We pour together. We flow together. We live together.

So as we come together to be a bigger crystal with a bigger power to share light, and to dedicate that light, and to give intention to that light as we bless it on its way, see ourselves then as that kind of crystal where all of us are these little drops of water coming together to be a bigger crystal.

Ra said the trouble with water as a crystal is that you can’t wear it around your neck. That’s okay. Let yourself be that kind of crystal because you are in the process of growing and you don’t want to have to break and start all over every time you change your mind about who you are and where you’re going.

All right, I’m going to let that be that and if you want to ask about anything else, we can cover it in a Q and A session later because I have gone a little bit overtime. So I will yield the floor and I thank you very much.

[Applause]