Chapter One
The First Three Distortions of the Law of One

The Unitary Gameboard

Why did the Creator choose to make creations? Our comment has often tended to be that the Creator is attempting to gain in knowledge and appreciation of Itself. The Creator wishes to know Itself. Thusly, it sends forth parts of Itself within illusion to see what will happen and to learn from the colors created in the palette of emotions that you have created through many experiences and incarnations. This palette contains your beauty and is unique to you, so that you can teach the Creator that which no one else in all of Creation is able to teach. For you are the only one of you in all of the infinite universe. Thusly, it is your gift to the Creator that comes from you, that is greatly desired. You cannot please the Creator by being someone else but only by being most truly and deeply yourself. ⁶

In the Introduction I suggested that the information in this book helps you to live well. It helps you to become familiar with the rules of the Gameboard. It is about being able to make informed choices in this life. And it is about knowing why.

Throughout this book, I use the capitalized Game and Gameboard to talk about spiritual seeking and making The Choice. I use the lower-case terms of game, gameboard and choice to talk about the choices we make within our flat-gameboard society without regard to spiritual values.

The Game of Life is about becoming an ethically motivated human being. The game of life with which we are already familiar is about getting by, amassing resources and taking care of our families. That lower-case gameboard inevitably brings us to spiritual crises. However, it does not furnish us with clear guidelines for choice.

Getting you familiar with the Game is my job here. As I talk, remember that I am talking about spiritual seeking, which is a whole different Game than the one we play before we wake up to our ethical nature and our desire to know the truth.

In this chapter we will look at some features of the Gameboard which the Confederation sources describe. The first feature of the Gameboard to report is its unitary nature. To the Confederation, the entire creation is one organism, one energy field and one thing.

Each individual thing in Creation has its own energy field. We have many energy fields in our physical body, in its organs and tissues. Our body has a master energy field which contains within it all the sub-fields of organs and tissues, nesting them all within it. The skin represents the boundary of our individual physical energy field. The energy fields within our body cooperate with each other for the integrated health of the whole body.

All other humans, plants and animals which have physical bodies have these nested energy fields too. All of those plants’ and animals’ energy fields, plus the forces of nature like wind, fire, water and earth, are wrapped into the energy field of the planet itself.

Our sun has its own energy field, and that field wraps our Earth and the other planets and other heavenly bodies which orbit it into its field.

The Milky Way Galaxy’s energy field wraps the energy fields of our sun and all other suns and even other heavenly bodies such as black holes, as though they were the organs of its body.

Eventually, through orders of magnitude, all of the energy fields of the universe are wrapped into the one great original Thought or Logos, which is as close as the Confederation entities come to speaking of the Creator or Godhead principle in a personal sense.

The Confederation information suggests that, metaphysically speaking, you and I and this planet are all one being. You and I and every other soul on Earth today are one with every animal and plant and every element and force of nature that is part of the environment of planet Earth. The connection is unity. The Confederation group of Ra says,

You are every thing, every being, every emotion, every event, every situation. You are unity. You are infinity. You are love/light; light/love. You are. This is the Law of One.⁷

All of the major world religions have a mystical aspect to them which proclaims an underlying unity to the creation. Many also have a dogmatic aspect and this aspect typically divides people into believers and nonbelievers of that religious dogma. This division, if unaccompanied by tolerance, encourages the faculty of judgment and also, ultimately, conflict. The believers judge the non-believers as unworthy and in need of correction. When two religiously oriented nation-states choose to act out this lack of tolerance, Crusades and pogroms can occur. The ideology of “true believers” makes it harder to create a peaceful world.

Perhaps the closest the Holy Bible comes to a statement of this underlying unity of all creation is at the beginning of the Gospel according to John, which says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” ⁸

Saint John is saying that in the Creator is the Word. And indeed that Word or creative principle can be seen to be the Creator Himself. This “Word” is a direct translation from the Greek word, “Logos,” which is the term the Ra group uses for the creative principle.

From religion, therefore, we can see hints of this concept of all things being one thing: the creation of the Father. The description of us as children of God likewise creates the realization of our unity as one family, one body of humankind.

From the standpoint of our culture, then, the idea that we on earth are all one single organism is not too long a stretch.

The Gameboard, Scientific Version

Taking inner experience as seriously as outer, the new breed of scientists is engaged in research projects inspired by cultures with long experience in studying inner worlds, thus building important bridges with spiritual traditions.

From this new perspective, everything perceivable in our universe and on our planet self-organizes and creates itself within and from a common field of Oneness, now called the Zero-Point Energy Field in physics. New theories are emerging that challenge the doctrine of a universe slipping toward the meaninglessness of entropy, seeing instead a dynamic balance of forces.⁹

In high school we hear about science and the scientific method. There we learn the central assumption of classical science, which is that there is a world “out there” which has nothing to do with us or what we think. The scientific process is to observe the naturally occurring phenomena of the world out there until you have enough information to form a hypothesis about what you are observing. Then you conduct experiments which will support or reject the hypothesis. The classical scientist is as happy with a wrong answer as with a right answer because, either way, the sum of scientific knowledge is advanced. It is a highly appealing and tidy way to look at the universe. We have come a long way by applying the scientific method, in terms of creating our present culture with its many conveniences.

Before this tidy state of affairs existed, scientific and religious studies were connected. Medical and astronomical knowledge, chemistry and the study of the elements were tightly linked to a mystical kind of discipline called alchemy. In ancient times, the great Hermetic thinkers of Egypt and Greece did not separate matters of faith and philosophy from matters of science. The rich, allegorical texts of alchemists still offer a sophisticated and subtle exploration into the interconnections between the microcosm and the macrocosm; man as a soul and creation as a whole.

The classical scholastic discipline of the Greeks and Romans and, later, of the medieval schools thrived as the great churches and various townships founded schools and colleges. Their curricula included grammar, logic and rhetoric, which trio of subjects was called the Trivium, plus music, mathematics, geometry and astronomy, which four subjects were called the Quadrivium. Science and the arts were all studied together in this plan for study.

It was considered quite possible for a student to become the master of all branches of knowledge back then. Our word, “university,” comes from this period, where the student expected to study the entire universe of accumulated knowledge before he was finished with his studies. Indeed, the term “Renaissance man” intends this meaning of one man who knows the whole range of human knowledge.

In the thirteenth century C.E., Saint Thomas Aquinas changed the course of scientific study completely. He chose in his pivotal theological writings to separate matters of faith from matters of this world, which included, for him, scientific inquiry.

This firm separation of the study of faith from the study of all things of this world was critically influential. One may trace the path of modern scientific inquiry to this beginning. To this day the general assumption is made by many people, both scientists and non-scientists, that there exists a distinct separation between the study of science and the study of all the arts, metaphysics, philosophy; and further, that this is an appropriate separation.

When we choose to study science in college today, we take an entirely different curriculum from liberal arts and fine arts majors. There are some core courses everyone takes, but by the end of one’s college days, science majors possess an education which is enough different from that of arts majors that often they can barely converse. This is because science uses some words differently enough from the way the words are generally used that these words mean quite different things to scientists and to the general public. Recently I had a most confusing conversation with my web guy because I did not understand the term, forum, as used by web designers. A forum on the internet today and a forum in ancient Rome are two completely different things!

Since science and its applications in technology have created the gadgets which have increasingly made our civilization hum during the past two centuries, scientists have become the “priests” of our culture, taking the niche of trusted judgment over from religious figures. Rational thought and empirical observation have become accepted as respected way to seek the truth. Faith has pretty much been consigned to the interest of the foolish and naïve.

However not all scientists of the twentieth century were thoroughgoing rationalists. Physics seems to bring out the mystic in scientists. Albert Einstein, writing in 1937 in the Reader’s Digest, said flatly that “science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” He was eighty years ahead of his time in making that statement. His unified look at the two disciplines of thought and study was quite prophetic!

The classical algebra and geometry that built the ancient world’s wonders of architecture explored the laws of things at rest. Isaac Newton, working a century after Shakespeare, wanted to study the laws of things in motion. He developed the tool of calculus as he pursued this study.

Werner Heisenberg was still studying those laws of motion in the early twentieth century when he found difficulties in the study of tiny particles of matter in motion. He was unable to determine enough facts to form a complete picture. In 1927, he offered a paper exploring his dilemma, which is that an observer cannot know for sure both the position of a subatomic particle and its momentum, which is its mass times its speed. One can know one or the other, but not both, because one cannot observe both at the same time. If one measures a particle’s momentum, one cannot at the same time observe its position and vice versa.

Heisenberg formulated the “uncertainty principle” to express this dilemma. This principle, which is at the heart of quantum physics, embroiled Heisenberg and other physicists of his time, like Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger, in a debate which still continues. Heisenberg stated that the microscopic orbit or path of a subatomic particle only comes into existence when we observe it. Therefore, the observer becomes part of any experiment, since the act of observation cannot be separated from that which is observed. This destroys the classical notion of scientific objectivity. The scientific basis for stating that the entire universe is one unitary thing stems from Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.”

Quantum physics asserts that the separation between the observer and the observed is an illusion. Since the application of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s principle have afforded us such modern gadgets as the computer and other electronic tools, lasers, superconducting devices and fluorescent lights, the theory cannot be dismissed as “mystical.” It produces observable, useful results. Thus scientists already acknowledge the inseparability of the observer and the observed while not yet acknowledging that the source of this is, in the words of the Confederation, consciousness.

One modern theory spawned by quantum physics is the “string theory.” In general, string theories posit that after we reduce the physical object into its atoms and then divide the atoms into their subatomic, component particles of electrons, neutrons and protons, we add an oscillating loop in the path of each subatomic particle. This loop can vibrate, oscillate or become “excited” in different ways when acted upon, just as a guitar string can produce different notes when the guitar string is fretted to hold different lengths of tension. The loops, vibrating together, make “harmonic chords” of interaction and all of these strings can hook up under the right circumstances.

The implication of string theory is that everything, all matter and all “forces” (the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity), are unified by the “notes” which the strings can play and the “music” which they can make together. When scientists explore the world these days, their hypotheses are beginning to re-explore the unified ground of being which mystics have proclaimed throughout recorded history. Science and religion now have a common window on the world in positing an underlying ground of being that can only enlarge as new discoveries reveal more new data.

In this picture of a universe made entirely of oscillating, interacting, tiny units of shimmering energy, we can easily see the Confederation’s suggested model of a unified and interactive creation. It is an exciting model, for in it we are literally connected with everything else in creation.

The main difference between the string theorists’ and Confederation’s view is that the string theorists see the dance to be random while the Confederation sees the dance as having purpose.

Physicists and the Confederation agree that the observer, the human in the equation, constitutes a connection point with the observed phenomena which can affect the action of the phenomena. Naturally, physics does not try to address the possible purpose of the observer. It merely notes that the observer influences the action that is observed.

However, the Confederation suggests that in our Density of Choice we humans have the power, by our physical actions, our thoughts and our intentions, to change our physical environment. They state that there is purpose in the choices we make. The environment over which we hold sway starts with our inner selves and continues out into our interface with the world around us. It explains why we draw to ourselves those things we most desire or most fear by merely focusing on them in our thoughts.

This attractive process takes place because the universe, as an interactive, unitary system, vibrates according to patterns of attraction. What we most love or most fear is what we attract, by the focus of our attention. One of the more subtle choices we make every day is whether to focus on thinking about the things we love or the things we fear and dislike.

According to Fred Alan Wolf, we can change the very fabric of our reality by the choices we make, by the things we choose to see or not see and by what our honest intentions are, as opposed to what we might be saying, when we come to a point of choice.¹⁰ If we focus on the things we love, we attract them. Good multiplies. If we focus on the things we fear, we attract them instead. The heavens seem to pour bad weather on us. What we choose to think about makes a difference!

The picture of the Gameboard drawn by the Confederation, then, is of a unitary, interactive Creation where all of the parts are related and can influence each other according to natural paths of interaction between energy fields.

The position of the human being in the Game is that of a player. He is not a pawn or any other game piece. He is not tied to or bounded by the Board. He is sitting at the Gameboard, observing the flow of play and making his Choices as he makes his moves.

Please note again that this is a holistic, multi-dimensional Gameboard, not a flat, two-dimensional one like a chess board. Our gameboard, lower-case version, is life as we perceive it right now. The trick, in getting ready to play the Game of Life, is to decide to move to a position outside the regular gameboard itself, in order to see the Gameboard. We do this by an act of will.

Free Will

The impact of beginning to grasp the actual nature of the nested illusions of experience is daunting and can constitute a time of adjustment in which the nature of the self is allowed to transform itself according to the ways of this free will that enters into the creation upon each level of development. The free will of yourself can barely be distinguished from the free will of that Logos that is your higher self, that overarching Logos that is the group mind of that soul stream, that overarching Logos that is the planetary mind, and so forth. The connections that each entity has with other aspects of an infinite being that is the self are unending, so that free will is, shall we say, that icon of deity which expresses the feminine, the ever-moving, the fructifying.¹¹

In general, we assume that we have freedom of choice. We work and live where we wish. We choose our mates and our interests freely. However, to a range of authorities from psychologists to scientists to religious figures, this seeming freedom is an illusion.

Scientists classically assume that the world of nature operates according to fixed laws of behavior, adaptation and evolution. Psychologists follow closely behind with suggestions that our choices are genetically and culturally determined. We may think we have free will, they say, but in actuality we are acting according to our instincts, modified by the training of parents and other cultural authority figures and by the propagandizing and marketing forces of our corporations and the mass media.

Religions also tend to deny the existence of free will, sometimes specifically. They tend to describe human beings as too sinful to be able to make skilful choices for themselves. Human beings, they say, only have access to free will in the decision to throw themselves upon the mercy of their Creator. The religious attitude is that the Creator icon, whether that icon is Jesus, Allah or another figure, is humanity’s only hope for salvation.

Both of these models leave the individual human being feeling completely powerless. The Confederation model, in stark contrast, places the individual human being in complete charge of his life, with the ability to make free choices.

The Confederation entities agree with science and religion in saying that humans are weighed down by all the cultural information and biases they have learned. They suggest that we must wake up from the cultural dream into which we were born. And when we humans do become aware that there is more to life than the culturally accepted channels of thinking, we start from scratch as to what we really know for sure.

We are not questioning things within consensus reality like newspapers being delivered or the electricity being on. We are seeking a new, “outside the box” reality—a new view of the physical and spiritual world in which we live. We come to this deeper seeking process with empty hands. We lay down those cultural, religious and intellectual assumptions we have learned. We begin anew with the basic questions: What is really true? Who am I? What am I doing here? When an assumption is tested, what solution is found to work?

That realization that we have drunk in a lot of bad information during our childhoods is often our starting point in choosing to accelerate the pace of our spiritual and mental evolution. Before we begin to play the Game of Life, we consciously choose to know the truth for ourselves. We begin to build our own intelligence.

Breaking away from religious authority, we take personal responsibility for the process of our spiritual and ethical evolution. Breaking away from the scientific view, we claim to have as much of a higher or heavenly nature in our make-up as we do of the lower or earthly nature which is the study of science and psychology. The Confederation suggests that we are every bit as much citizens of eternity and infinite things as we are limited, earthly beings who are born only to die.

When we make that decision to seek the truth, we are knocking on the door of “spirit,” says the Confederation teaching. By spirit, the Confederation means the whole range of spiritual guidance. Some people who are brought up as Christians think of spirit as the Holy Spirit or as Jesus the Christ. Some think of spirit as the world of nature. Some think of spirit as the hidden world of ghosts, “Ascended Masters” and inner-planes teachers. The Confederation’s term, spirit, includes all of those meanings.

The Holy Bible suggests that what we ask for, we shall receive and that when we knock, the door shall be opened.¹² It, like the Confederation, targets that conscious choice to seek as important. When we choose to begin the journey of seeking, we alert spirit that we are ready to become a player in the Game of Life.

The Confederation states that free will is involved in the very first movement of the infinite Creator away from its mystery-clad unity. In their story of the creation, the Creator uses the faculty of Its free will to choose to know Itself.

It then sends forth the Thought or Logos which is Its creative principle and the essence of Its nature. The essential nature of the Logos is unconditional love.

The Logos then uses Light to manifest the Creation in all of its rich detail. Endless orders of magnitude, from stars to subatomic particles, are then formed.

So the first distortion or movement away from the pure potential of the unmanifest Creator is free will. When we awaken to the desire to seek the truth of our being, we imitate the Creator’s decision and turn to free will. We choose to set out upon the Game of Life, which can also be termed the “seeking process” or “seeking the truth.”

It is tricky to choose to seek the truth, because we have a lower faculty of choice which comes with our great-ape body. That great-ape body and mind come with a faculty of fake free will. Our bio-computer minds are able to make our choices—but only from a menu known to it! That is the fake part, because we do not know all the options. We are given only the things we have learned in school and church and at our parents’ knees. We know how to live this life on the level of getting by. That is the usual game of life with a flat gameboard.

When a person delegates to a religion, to science or to cultural norms the power over his personal decisions, he is choosing to play the game, lower-case. A person can thread his way through the maze of dogma and get to the next level from that flat board, but it is harder to play the game when no logical thinking or questioning is allowed. That is the game you choose to play if you do not invoke the free will that comes from a higher source.

True free will is a characteristic stemming from the Creator. It is the principle by which the Creator chooses to know Itself. It generates the universe in which we live. When we use this higher faculty of free will, we are moving away from the flat gameboard and are setting up the enhanced Gameboard for a Game of Life.

This faculty of free will imports data from our spirit world sources of guidance into our subconscious minds. We call upon that higher faculty of free will as if it were an angel which has dwelt within us but which we have not yet recognized. Only by that inward reach to the faculty of true freedom of will can we catapult ourselves outside of the box and into a position above the mundane where we can, for the first time, begin to look at the gameboard without getting caught by the muddied emotions of the flat board.

Love on the Gameboard

You are a spark of the one great original Thought of the infinite Creator. Say that the Creator, in its infinity, in its impossibility of being described, is a vibration. You have that original vibration, which is unconditional love, as the basis of every cell of your being. Without that Thought of love has nothing been made that is made.¹³

The word love, as we use the word normally, is not the energy of the love or Logos on the Gameboard. We sometimes use the word love to indicate romance with its flowers, poems and serenades. We all understand the iffy nature of romantic love. Who knows? It may last but it may not. That is not the love which created the universe.

Neither are almost any of the other normal usages of the word love. We love our car; our new outfit; our hobby or being able to have a holiday from work. We just love our favorite restaurant; that new movie or the latest and greatest music. None of those emotions begins to uncover the love that created all that there is.

It is not until you ask yourself what kind of love caused the Creator to fling the various bits of Itself, via the “big bang,” out into the universe It manifested just for the purpose of watching it progress, that you are ready to think about the Confederation’s story of how the Logos generated the universe around us.

The Confederation suggests that the one great original Thought or Logos of the Creator is pure and unconditional love. This vibration of unconditional love creates and manifests all of the worlds that there are according to the nature of this Thought.

Unconditional love or the Logos, then, is a feature of the Gameboard, along with its unitary nature and its foundational free-will choice. We know that the Creator’s very nature, Its “I AM,” is unconditional love. We can count upon the Creator to love us unconditionally and absolutely. The Creator will not withdraw that love. It is fascinated to see how its creation will progress.

We, as a player of the Game of Life, have as our core vibration that same unconditional love. The Game’s object is, in part, to discover that great, original Thought or Logos within ourselves. The dogma of religion suggests that we cannot find that love within ourselves. However, the Confederation channeling suggests that as we learn to play the Game, we will find ourselves uncovering deeper and deeper levels of this love hidden within the folds of our everyday natures.

Light

Quantum physicists state that the material world is really variable fields or frequencies of energy. All energy is ultimately reducible to light.¹⁴

The natural process of creation on the part of the Logos, when It has chosen to know Itself, calls forth light, in the form of photons,¹⁵ to match its Thought of love. The physics of this process have been best described by the physics of Dewey Larson’s Reciprocal Theory. In Larson’s core equation, what quantum physicists call vibration, he calls velocity. Both terms indicate that all particles in the universe are in motion. In Larson’s Reciprocal Theory, velocity or vibration is made up in one of two ways to create all that there is.

Both ways involve a slight, necessary mismatch between space and time. This mismatching is necessary for the manifestation of this illusion. Everything we see is actually made of energy. So regardless of whether we are considering unseen things such as ideas or forces, or manifest, physical things which have weight and form, we are talking about illusions. The only ultimately real thing in this Game is the Creator. We as players of the Game are little sparks of the Creator who are also choosing to know ourselves.

The first way the Creator links space and time creates a mismatch between space and time favoring time. That mismatch, called time/space by the Confederation, creates the inner planes. Other terms for the inner planes are the metaphysical worlds, the spirit worlds and the various levels of the subconscious mind. That is the place from which the Gameboard for the Game of Life is called by the seeker’s free will decision to seek outside the societal box for the truth.

The second way the Creator links space and time creates a mismatch between space and time favoring space. That mismatch is called space/time by the Confederation. This mismatch creates the physical world of our conscious experience. We have been playing the game of that little life within the parameters of that flat gameboard all of our lives. If we are attractive, wealthy, well-mated, well educated, have a good job or otherwise are seen to be successful at what we do, we are winning. If we are unattractive, poor, lack a good mate, are uneducated, do not have a good job or otherwise are seen to be a failure, we are losing that game on the flat board.

When we choose instead to play the Game we make life more interesting. We use the flat gameboard in order to collect material for The Game. Then we make our move on the Gameboard, which is found within the inner world of thought and choice. When that is done we can move back into our regular life and create moves on the flat board which are informed with the wisdom we have gleaned from playing the Game.

As seekers we merge these two realities, the spiritual reality of the inner and eternal life of our soul’s consciousness and the consensus reality of the outer and physical earth life and our bio-computer minds’ awareness. We can live in both worlds at once. We are intended to do so.

Illusion on the Gameboard

When the infinite Creator wished to know Itself, Its great heart beat out the next creation with all of its densities and sub-densities and all of the patterns of those densities and creations. Time and space were invoked and that which before was immeasurable and unknowable became a series of illusions that, paradoxically, were to some degree knowable, and these shadows of knowing were much desired by the Creator. And each of these sparks and shadows became agents of the one infinite Creator, thoughts in and of themselves, thoughts rounded and centered in the one great original Thought which is Love. And so each of you is a Logos, stepped down and stepped down until you are able to experience the very illusion you now experience. And each of you has come through many experiences and many densities to this particular time, at this particular place, each balanced exquisitely in the present moment.¹⁶

When my first illusion was crushed I was five and had lost a tooth. My father, the Tooth Fairy, crept in to my bedroom to deposit his dime and collect my tooth from my bedside table. I happened to be awake. From this information I began to figure out that the Tooth Fairy, as well as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, were not literal, physical beings.

I did notice, however, that I was rewarded for enduring the pain of a lost tooth. I received a basket with green straw, colored eggs and other goodies at Easter. At Christmas, I received gifts and also the increased sense of kindness and happiness in the air and on the news. This business of illusions, I decided, was not black and white. Illusions may not be real literally, but they had measurable effects on my life and piggy bank.

On a whole other level, the solidity of the fingers with which I am typing these words is an illusion, as is the solidity of the computer on whose screen I am viewing what I write, the chair in which I sit, the floor on which the chair sits, the ground on which the house and its floor sits, the planet itself and absolutely everything I see with my physical eyes. Like the Easter Bunny, everything we think of as solid is not really, literally, solid. It does have measurable effects. I can move myself around in my individual energy field, which is my body. My world holds together. The keyboard works. The computer works. The chair and my house persist from moment to moment and day to day. Everything is as solid as it can be. That is consensus-reality and accepted generally as fact.

However, science tells us differently, in terms of how things look up close. Under a high-powered microscope, solidity falls away and our cells, as well as the cells or molecules of all matter, whether organic or inorganic, look like the starry night sky. We look, on that microscopic level, as though we were part of an endless universe of suns with planets orbiting them, which are in relationship with other sun systems in various ways.

If one takes the model of a hydrogen atom, for instance, and places a pea-sized proton on the fifty-yard line of a football field, the first particle that orbits it is the size of a dot and sits somewhere in the cheap seats. To the observer of the whirling orbital path of the electron of this hydrogen atom, the so-called solid matter is almost entirely empty space. Mass itself is in heavy question! This is fundamentally a universe of energy in motion or vibration rather than a universe of matter at rest.

The belief systems of the East would say that the entire physical world was pure illusion, which they call Maya. They value it at nothing. They suggest that its only use is in being discovered and given over to the growing list of illusions which mean nothing. The goal is to move beyond all illusion and dwell in the peaceful nothingness of no-desire.

To the Confederation, on the other hand, the “empty” space is actually full. The Q’uo group says,

Your creation and mine is a plenum, a vast infinity completely full of that light which is life itself in first manifestation.¹⁷

Dictionary.com defines “plenum” as “the whole of space regarded as being filled with matter as opposed to a vacuum.”

The plenum of our seemingly empty space, whether between atoms inside our bodies in our inner universe or between worlds in our outer universe, is filled with vibrational energy. The energy is living. The Yoga tradition calls this energy prana. Older science called it ether. Later scientists call it, among other things, Zero Point Energy. In current science, the ZPE is thought of as “potential” energy. This means that it has the potential to do work, that is, to produce motion, but that it exists in an unmanifested state. By whatever name, it is full of the energy of the one Creator. There is no energy shortage in the one infinite Creation!

Occasionally, regular people have amazing experiences which demonstrate the illusory nature of the world around us. Perhaps you have seen hypnotists pierce a subject’s skin with a needle, with the suggestion that there is no pain. The subject feels no pain. Or perhaps the hypnotist has suggested that a subject may walk on burning coals and receive no burn. The subject receives no burn. Or perhaps you have read of instances where a small woman whose child is trapped beneath a car lifts the entire front end of the vehicle to free her child. Under conditions where the individual believes with his whole heart that the rules of the illusion can change, they can and do change.

It would be silly to operate as though the body, the keyboard and computer, the chair, the house and the earth beneath it were not solid. Within the illusion of consensus reality, everything is solid. This can be trusted in the general run of waking reality. However, in order to get a grip on the nature of the Gameboard, it is necessary to remember that the universe is one of vibration and motion, not solidity and rest. Some scientists still cling to the notion of “equilibrium,” which they think of as an infinitely persistent state. According to the Confederation, however, each piece of the universe is affecting each other part all the time and these vibrations never reach equilibrium during the billions of years while the creation itself proceeds through its densities.

Catalyst on the Gameboard

It is very difficult to think of the main and centrally constituent service to the one infinite Creator as that of being. And yet that is what you came to Earth to do. You came here to be yourself; to breath the air; to participate in the illusion of planet Earth; to go through each and every detail of receiving catalyst, responding to catalyst and moving through the periods of joy and suffering that this catalyst offers you.

And always your chief responsibility is to be yourself; to feel truly; to examine yourself as fully as you can and to know yourself to the very limit of your ability. You wish to know yourself not to judge yourself or to condemn yourself or to pat yourself on the back but simply to become aware of who you are.¹⁸

In this first chapter we have begun to build some idea of what the universe around us is really like. In the eyes of the Confederation, we live in a unitary, interactive universe where everything is alive and all is one. We have found that the Creation as we know it stems from the Creator’s desire to know Itself and that the creative principle, or the essence of the Creator, is the Thought or Logos of unconditional love.

We have seen that the Logos uses primal light; that is, the photon, to build the creation, and that we have a creation of energy rather than matter; a creation built of light in its natural generation of the elements¹⁹ and all of the combinations of elements that dwell in every created thing. And we have seen that all of these created things form a physical creation which is illusory. The things we think of as solid are not solid, if we investigate closely enough.

This is not the flat gameboard of consensus reality. The Gameboard presents a far different picture of our world. On this larger, metaphysical Gameboard, we players are not caught within the illusions of consensus reality. Knowing that things are not what they seem, we release our eyes and ears from having to believe everything we see and hear.

This includes what we see and hear about ourselves. Who are we? Our parents have told us. Our teachers have told us. Whatever other important figures populated our world as children have also told us. Not only that, but also close friends, mates and other people have continued to define us as adults. And we can believe none of it, at least not to the extent that we allow these opinions to define who we are.

I can remember, as a child, trying to write a complete return address on a letter to my parents from summer camp. I wrote my name, the road, the town and state, the USA, and then I added “Earth” and “The Universe.” Somehow the address still felt incomplete.

Similarly, at a young age my ever-teaching mother asked me to write a little essay on who I was. I wrote down that I was a person named Carla born in Lake Forest, Illinois on July 16^th, 1943 at 6:42 AM. I was the daughter of Jean and Ted Rueckert. I was a female. I was an American. And I was a child of the Creator. Again, my self-definition did not yet feel complete. Nowhere did I find the glorious certainty of the Creator figure of the Old testament of the Holy Bible with its “I am what I am.” Or more succinctly, “I am.”

We all try to define ourselves, to ourselves, many times as we go through life. Our culture, focused on outer things, tends to define us by what we do. No one at a party asks us who we are. They ask us what we do for a living or what our interests are. Such conversations tend to remain somewhat shallow because we are not what we do! Our career or job does not come anywhere close to defining us. Neither does our marital status, our sexual preference or any other outer thing about us.

In the midst of this web of nested illusions in which we are living, we are searching for an ever deeper understanding of who we are. If we are not our biology or our IQ points; if we are not our work and interest preferences; if we are not defined by where we were born and into what class within society, and if we are not the rest of the many ways we separate ourselves from each other in our minds, then who are we, indeed? And how do we start to investigate that question seriously?

To investigate who we are, we can rely on the always-available present moment and what it brings us from the illusion around us. This is one great thing about the Game of Life. You can play it anywhere! You take the Gameboard with you wherever you go, once you set it up in your deeper mind. Remember, the illusion is not literally real, but it does have real effects on us. The illusion brings us what Baba Ram Dass calls “grist for the mill.” ²⁰ The Confederation calls this grist “catalyst.” We discover ourselves as we respond to incoming catalyst.

In chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that enables a chemical reaction to proceed at a faster rate or under different conditions, as at a lower temperature, than otherwise possible. The catalytic agent is not, itself, necessarily involved in the chemical reaction. We get incoming catalyst all the time from the people and the events surrounding us.

Catalyst can be a simple thing which does not tell us about ourselves. When I sat down to write this morning, my physical catalyst was that the sun was still low enough in the sky that it was overly bright in my eyes. My response was to close the Venetian blinds in the upper half of one office window in order to rest my eyes from sun-strain. There was almost no emotion involved in this response to catalyst. A lot of things that happen to us have no power to move us emotionally. They are random, neutral catalyst.

Usually catalyst that is going to give us information about who we are is either positively or negatively emotionally charged. Positive catalyst tends to make us happy. Negative catalyst tends to make us unhappy. Perhaps someone cuts us off in traffic. We have to brake suddenly in order to avoid a collision. Do we curse the other driver? Or do we brake while thinking to ourselves, “Here’s some room for you, Buddy.”

I confess that most of the time I would, if not curse, at least mutter at the offending driver! My Uncle Marion, now gone to glory, was a saint who once, when jammed for space by an encroaching vehicle on the expressway, actually said in my presence, “OK, Buddy, here’s some room for you.” The ensuing braking sprained my wrist as I was thrown against the back of the front seat of Marion’s car, and I was angry. My Uncle Marion never expressed any response to that event—other than slamming his full body weight onto the brakes—except pure compassion. I believe wholeheartedly that my Uncle Marion passed from this illusion having won his Game of Life.

My attitude towards that driver was not loving. I did not see him as being one with me. I had failed in that instance to use my catalyst on the gameboard in order to make a choice on the Gameboard.

As I look at Uncle Marion’s response to that situation, I see that Marion’s identity and essence included his conscious, disciplined awareness that the other guy and he were one. The essence of Uncle Marion’s response was to balance that moment of fear when a car suddenly loomed in front of him, impossibly close, with an outpouring of conscious awareness of the truth. Fear and love cannot abide together. One or the other will win. We all tend to start from a position of fear in situations that feel risky to us in some way. Balancing that response by bringing it around to love is the basic ethical challenge of many of our rounds with catalyst.

We will be looking at choices a lot in this book. Indeed, the subtitle of this volume is The Choice. What brings us to the moment of choice is our catalyst.

The main problem we have in responding skillfully to positive catalyst is that we find it so pleasant. We get lost in the enjoyment of it. Romantic love wipes many surrounding details off of the face of our internal map. Friendship, the pleasures of good company and easy times and all the blessings of life come into season in our lives to find us appreciating them as they pass. In this daze of happiness it is a challenge to remember to give thanks. Taking things for granted kisses them good-bye in terms of the Gameboard. Even if they last all of our earthly life, they are never part of the Game of Life. Giving thanks for things lifts that catalyst to the level of the Gameboard. Gratitude seats positive catalyst metaphysically so that it works within our evolutionary process.

The catalyst we human beings really notice tends to be negative catalyst. We get fired, or our mate leaves us, or we are insulted or some catastrophe strikes us. We feel depressed, or angry, or guilty, or unworthy because of—fill in the blank.

Catalyst in and of itself is not remarkable. It is coming at us all the time. We share it, actually, on a deeper level than the conscious mind. We all know what the emotions of jealousy and envy, sloth and anger are. We as humans hold these emotions in common.

What shall we do with these emotions when their energy is activated within us by incoming catalyst? If our response is anger, do we immediately turn to the catalytic agent, probably another human being, and express that anger without regard for that person’s feelings? Do we turn anger inside, instead, and hone it to a fine edge—into a crafty, sweet revenge? Do we let it slide off of our backs without taking it in or caring about it? Or do we point the anger inside, targeting ourselves, and call ourselves unworthy? What do we do with this energy that our catalyst has generated?

It is a creation of energy. The choices we make about what the Ra group calls energy expenditures are absolutely crucial as we play the Game of Life. We have just so many seconds to live. We have just so many heartbeats before our environment changes and we drop our physical bodies. And in those times of our life’s heartbeats, we have just so many opportunities to feel, sense, think and choose how to respond. Each incoming bit of catalyst is a precious gift. Here, in this present moment, is a fully sufficient environment for playing the Game of Life.

One more point about the search for the true self: The unitary nature of the creation and the essence of the Creator being unconditional love, it is logical to infer that the true self is made of the essence of unconditional love. And the Confederation gives us this assurance specifically, encouraging us to realize that we are sparks of the Creator and possessed of Its nature. We are Its love made visible. So is all of the rest of creation.

But how to discover that in an authentic way is the question! It is a real challenge. The Game of Life is a long game. It is a challenge to play it through, a challenge worthy of extreme sports, marathons or the Olympic games. It can be played, and played well, however, by anyone.

The principles are simple. Once these principles are understood, it is a matter of using the inner discipline of the true Player to become a metaphysical athlete.

This all sounds pretty hard. And a challenge it is, indeed. It is a life’s work. But its rewards—graduation into a new life and adventures surpassing the imagination—are worth it.