DAY 2
CHAPTER 6
Mechanics of the
Ra Contact
Gary We resume our interview with “Mechanics of the Ra contact,” which concerns some of the nuts and bolts of the contact. To begin, what was the procedure of scheduling the session with Ra? Did you plan sessions for a particular date and time in advance?
Carla Jim is probably going to be answering more of [these questions] because I was just done unto, and the guys were taking care of everything.
Jim We planned around flights that Don had to make in order to earn a living. And when he was home, then we focused all our energies on when it would be possible to have a session with Ra. Usually Don was home anywhere from five or six days to eight or ten days, so it was possible to plan two or three sessions in advance, keeping two or three days in between. That was after we got going. At the very first, we planned them every day. [laughs] And overdid it.
But it was around Don’s schedule. He was a pilot for Eastern Air Lines at that time and was frequently flying various locations around the country. When he was doing that, then we were getting Carla in good shape, doing her exercises, thinking about questions for the future, and getting ready for Don to come back home.
Gary So where Don’s schedule and Carla’s health coincided, a session with Ra happened.
Jim Right. Very seldom was Carla in too bad a shape to have a session, so it was usually Don’s availability that determined when we were going to be able to have a session.
Gary Was that the center point of your lives from 1981 to 1982?
Carla Oh yeah, definitely. And Ra had suggested that exercises be done, and I was already exercising—I did “shapenastics” every day. Or what was the other one?
Jim Jazzercise.
Carla Jazzercise—I loved Jazzercise.
Jim And walking.
Carla Yeah, and then also I took a walk—separately from that I took a walk that lasted about an hour, and usually it was at least three miles and sometimes as much as five. I walked pretty fast.
Jim And I had to hustle to keep up with her.
Carla [laughs] So I was very grateful for Jim’s company. He’s always good company, so we did that usually around the middle of the day and closer to the end of the day for the two exercises, depending on when the classes were held.
Gary So even when not in session you were planning or preparing for the session-to-be?
Carla There was a good bit that went into the planning of—let’s see if we can do it now.
Gary Was there ever a session that, upon getting everything in order, Ra failed to speak through the instrument?
Jim No.
Gary Can you walk us through the protocol undertaken before each session, along with the purpose for each step?
Jim Well, as I said, it started the night before. We would have a meditation together, usually in the living room where the public meditations were held (but this was just with the three of us in the evening), and after the meditation we would talk about the previous session and information we got; then logical questions went on from there. And once those were determined, then it was usually time for bed. And when we finally figured out that sexual energy exchanges were helpful to the Ra contact and gave Carla more energy, thereby lengthening them, then Carla and I would do our thing and help out.1
Carla Usually Jim would say, “It’s time for that massage.” And he would give me a really good massage, and then it would naturally flow into more intimate relations while we listened to our beloved rock ‘n’ roll. We listened over and over. What were our favorites at that time?
Jim Oh, Rod Stewart, Rolling Stones, the Beatles.
Carla Yeah, so there was something there, too, that was fun.
Jim And then the morning of the session we would have a light breakfast together, not usually a whole lot—toast, juice, maybe an egg or something. We would then have a meditation in the living room where we would work on any questions that needed to be refined. And then we would retire to the room that was devoted just to the Ra contact, a bedroom off of the living room. And Carla would be in her outfit—after a while it became sort of interesting what she was in. She wore a special white outfit, and as her hands became more delicate and the covers were heavy, we put her hand through a little expandable tubing that is usually used to connect dryers to the vent. So she had her hands through those to keep the weight of the covers off of her hands, and then there was a—I guess it was a white linen over your eyes.
Carla It was one of Don’s—
Jim Shirts.
Carla T-shirts, yeah, undershirts.
Jim One of his t-shirts over her eyes, and then we covered her with the white cover, the blanket—
Carla I had little white gloves because my hands were cold.
Jim —to keep warm.
Carla And then I had shoes, I had white shoes.
Jim Ballet-slipper-type shoes.
Carla Yeah, little t-strap-type hippie shoes. They did the job.
Jim Once she was in position, then Don would do a measure of the perpendicularity of the censor, the chalice, the Bible—all of the accoutrements—with a yardstick. While he was doing that, then I was getting the tape deck ready to receive the cassette tapes. We had three recorders going at once because there had been times when one or two would fail, so we had redundancy. I got those ready to go, got them labeled, and then at that point, Don and I would walk the Circle of One using the ritual words that Ra gave us to begin.2
Then it took probably a minute or two or three before Ra began to speak. It would take that long for Carla to seemingly go to sleep and apparently then leave her body. Ra did not enter her body, but used it from what we would call “at a distance” to make words. That’s why if she had a pain flare it was necessary to move her limb: arthritis requires, now and then, that you move your limb and get it in another position so that it’s more comfortable, otherwise it freezes there and there is more pain. So it was difficult for Ra to move, but they, on a number of occasions, did move one of her limbs in order to reduce the pain. The sessions usually lasted anywhere between 45 minutes and 1½ hours.
Gary Why the necessity of white?
Jim We just felt that that was a good color, you might say—although white is all the colors, so it’s not one color—but it felt like it was in congruence with the purity of the undertaking which we were experiencing.
Gary You touched on the question formulation. You said the night prior to a session you would get together and discuss the previous session. So were you aware of all the questions that Don planned to ask for the upcoming session?
Jim We were aware of most of the questions he was going to ask until the next morning when we had our final meditation together before the contact started. Frequently, Don would get another question in meditation and he’d write that down, and we may or may not—
Carla Yeah, we’d be meditating and he’d write it down, then go back to meditating, and write it down. It drove me crazy actually, but that’s the way he operated. He would get them by intuition during the meditation.
Gary I recall a few different moments during the Ra contact where Don states or prefaces the question by saying he got it, or it came to him, during meditation. When he meditated, was he mentally chewing over the contact to come, that you were aware, or was he . . .
Carla As far as I know, he just wiped everything out of his mind and hung out in the silence. He loved doing that.
Jim He didn’t talk a lot about his technique of meditation.
Gary So Don developed the vast majority of the questions?
Jim Right. At least 90%, I would say. Occasionally either Carla or I would come up with questions— personal questions for ourselves—and we would submit them, and Don would usually try to ask those at the beginning and get them out of the way [laughs] so he could get to the real stuff.3
Carla Yeah, he was a little embarrassed. He thought that they were lesser and not very important, so he apologized, but we were grateful that he asked them at all.
Jim Though very interesting information came through frequently. Ra didn’t give bad information—it always had spiritual principles as its foundation, so whatever question you asked would be answered from a spiritual point of view.
Gary Don didn’t give you any resistance to your questions?
Jim No. We were aware that we didn’t want to take up too much time with such things, but it was hard to avoid. He was basically—in the first book especially—he was putting together the puzzle pieces that he had been looking at and thinking about all his life. So he was doing sort of the same thing, it just wasn’t real personal as to . . . He did ask a couple of personal questions for himself, but we had some [personal questions about Carla or me] that we eventually did ask.
Gary Yesterday you described how Don would pace outside of the room where you were typing. How and when would you transcribe the sessions? I would imagine that “ASAP” would be your response.
Carla Immediately, forthwith, yeah.
Jim It was ASAP. Got the tape out of the recorder, the session was over, Carla was off doing her thing for a little while, I would do the transcribing; and when the transcribing was done, then Carla and I would take a walk and get her exercise done. She would pester me most of the way: well, what was in that? And for about the first 23 sessions,4 of course, I couldn’t tell her anything because Don wanted to keep this as a pure scientific experiment. He didn’t want her mind polluted with what had been said.
Carla [laughs] It was very frustrating.
Jim He didn’t want her to know anything about what had gone on, but we kind of gave it away and made it impossible for that to continue by asking her, “Is your mind/body/spirit complex distorted towards fullness?” In other words, you want to go eat?
Gary That’s hard to sit on.
Carla [laughing] I knew something was going on. I didn’t know what exactly, but it was different.
Gary So one feeling that is common to those who fall in love with this material, myself included, is a desire to ask Ra more questions. Did you receive questions from outside sources, sources outside of your own group who wanted to ask Ra questions?
Jim Very rarely. Don was good friends with Andrija Puharich. Puharich had been investigating this field for his whole life too, and when he found out we had a contact with Ra and read some of the sessions, he had a couple of questions. That was about it though.
Carla There was a question from your . . .
Jim Oh yeah, from Paul Shockley, which was very interesting. He was asking about the Law of One and his participation in it, and that’s where we discovered that Ra had built the pyramids, and the way they had built them had resulted in their physical vehicle half appearing and half not appearing—visible from the waist up and not from the waist down—as they were using the interlocking dimensions to create what they would see as a crystal, but what we saw as pyramids.5
Gary Another interesting tidbit I took from that particular Q&A was that Paul Shockley is asking about . . . Did he have a dream or was it a past life progression?
Jim He had gotten information from the source he was channeling, the Akashic Records, that he had partaken in something to do with the Law of One. Ra mentioned that he was one of those who had prepared the people, at that time in Egypt, for the eventual transmission of Law of One principles and the visit by Ra in person.
Gary Upon commencement of a Ra session, did you sense, perceive, or feel any shift in the room?
Jim Nothing that was particular to the Ra contact. Whenever we entered into meditation I would always feel a great sense of peace, and the enhanced vibrations that you feel when there’s a group of people meditating. But it wasn’t anything I could identify specifically with the Ra contact. I am not psychic, so I am sure that someone who is more sensitive would have been able to sense what was happening—special vibrations or something like that—but I didn’t.
Gary Who, beyond you two and Don, attended an actual Ra session?
Jim There were three people. They were all good friends of Don and Carla and, eventually, of me. There was Sally D., Carla’s ex-husband’s second wife and Carla’s best friend at the time. Sally attended one session. And then there was Leonard Cecil, the fellow who was learning to channel when the first session of the Ra contact happened. He came to two sessions. He was the one who went to sleep later on when Ra spoke about that it would be handy if people didn’t go to sleep here6 (aside from the instrument, of course). And then Tom Flaherty. He had been the one whose wife, Elaine, had died earlier—Carla’s first two sessions with trance took place because she was helping Elaine to contact Tom in order to let him know all was well after she died.
So those were the three people who came. We thought that Andrija Puharich was coming at one point, and even George Hunt Williamson, but neither of those did actually come.
Carla They were trying, but for one reason or another it didn’t transpire.
Gary It’s incredible how free of outside influence, minus the negative greeting, you three were. You didn’t have other people knocking at the door or trying somehow to participate in it.
Carla Well, we discouraged it. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t let people know what we were doing.
Jim The meditation group knew about it, the Sunday night meditation group.
Carla They knew about it in general, but they didn’t know when we were going to have a meeting, and they knew that they were not invited.
Gary Were I a contemporary at the time, I would have a hard time not asking—
Carla Well, you probably would have gotten to go to one, just to satisfy your—the way—like Tom Flaherty did. Tom was a friend since ’75, so, sure, why shouldn’t he check it out. Leonard [likewise] was in on the first session, so he wanted to do another one to see how it was going.
Gary Well, beyond Don’s opinion and your opinion, I think Ra was the ultimate arbiter there and would have to vet somebody.
Carla And Jim and Sally worked hard because they didn’t meet each other before hand. They meditated with each other’s pictures in their hands so that they would be aware of each other and comfortable with each other.7
Jim And Sally was the third of the three to come, and when we asked if it would be okay for her to join, Ra said it would be okay, and that this completed the group of those that were able to come to the contact (that we knew).
Gary Nobody else was eligible beyond that point—you’d exhausted the list.
So do you know why Ra virtually always began their response with “I am Ra”?
Jim To let us know who was on the line. It’s a formality, but they, I believe, wanted to be very careful that they let us know who they were.
Carla I think it was a tuning thing too—by saying, “I am Ra,” they were tuning, making sure one last time that everything was tuned perfectly, and that I, as a channel, was tuned perfectly.
Gary Do you think a negative entity would find it difficult to mimic that and say, “I am Ra”? So that it turned out to be a safeguard of sorts?
Carla I do. Very difficult. The energy in the room would have been like trying to get through a brick wall.
Gary So, we’ll get more into the psychic attack—or rather, psychic greeting aspect of the work later on in the interview. And I will ask you about standing so close to the light in “The Art of Channeling” chapter.
For now I want to look at the following statement from Ra:
RA This contact is narrow band and its preconditions precise. The other-self offering its service in the negative path also is possessed of the skill of the swordsman. You deal in this contact with, shall we say, forces of great intensity poured into a vessel as delicate as a snowflake and as crystalline. The smallest of lapses may disturb the regularity of this pattern of energies which forms the channel for these transmissions. We may note for your information that our pause was due to the necessity of being quite sure that [the instrument] was safely in the proper light configuration or density before we dealt with the situation. Far better would it be to allow the shell to become unviable8 than to allow [the instrument] to be, shall we say, misplaced. 64.5
Ra says that “preconditions [are] precise,” and says, “forces of great intensity poured into a vessel as delicate as a snowflake and as crystalline,” and also adds that “the smallest of lapses may disturb” the contact. This sounds like a real tightrope to walk. Did you feel under sort of a pressure during or between the sessions?
Jim We more had the bliss of the fool. We didn’t feel, I didn’t feel, and I don’t think Don and Carla felt pressure.
Carla I didn’t feel it.
Jim We were aware that harmony was extremely necessary.
Carla And we entered into that harmony gladly. I felt very protected and ready to work. I did not worry about it at all. We did our work and we tuned. We challenged beforehand, of course; I couldn’t do it at the time because I was asleep. I was very lucky to have been able to do a physical, conscious, challenging at that first session because that reassured me tremendously. I knew who Ra was; I trusted that.
Gary Otherwise you may have had doubt?
Carla Yeah. Otherwise I might have, but as it was I felt very secure, I felt very loved, and I felt that all was well—as long as I did the work I needed to do to stay honorable and pure and to do what I had agreed to do. Jim was the same. He was very ethically upright and did everything that he possibly could to enter into the harmony of the group. Don was his own beautiful incredible self and would never have been inappropriate in a million years. He was always just fine—he’s quite silent, he didn’t say anything, but he was right there.
Gary That sense of confidence and trust and security was also, in and of itself, a protection. Had you given into or dwelled upon the energies of panic or doubt or worry, you would have opened the door, big time, for negative intrusion into the contact.
Carla That’s right. I was not tempted to do that at all.
Notes
[1] In 16.52 Don notes that the session was longer than usual. Jim writes, “That was our first clue that sexual energy exchanges gave Carla more energy for the sessions so that they were longer. It took us a while longer to figure that out.” ↩
[2] Ra’s instructions for walking the Circle of One: ↩
RA The vibrations may well be purified by a simple turning to the circle of One and the verbal vibration while doing so of the following dialogue:
Question: What is the Law?
Answer: The Law is One.
Question: Why are we here?
Answer: We seek the Law of One.
Question: Why do we seek Ra?
Answer: Ra is an humble messenger of the Law of One.
Both together: Rejoice then and purify this place in the Law of One. Let no thought-form enter the circle we have walked about this instrument, for the Law is One. 2.6
[3] A couple of examples of Don getting Jim or Carla’s questions “out of the way”: ↩
QUESTIONER The instrument would like to ask a couple of questions of you. I’ll get them out of the way first. The instrument would like to know why she smells the incense at various times during the day in various places? 22.1
QUESTIONER I have three questions that the instrument asked me to ask that I’ll get out of the way first. She wants to know if the preparation for her hospital experience could be improved for the next experience. 77.6
[4] That would be for about the first four weeks that Carla was not informed of what Ra said. ↩
[5] For more information about Paul Shockley’s experience and questions, see 27.1– 2. ↩
About Jim’s statement regarding Ra seeing crystals of (what to human eyes would be) pyramids, see 27.1–2 and:
RA We attempted to aid [two of Earth’s ancient cultures] in technical ways having to do with the healing of mind/body/spirit complex distortions through the use of the crystal, appropriate to the distortion, placed within a certain appropriate series of ratios of time/space material. Thus were the pyramids created. 2.2
It’s not entirely clear in Ra’s replies that the pyramids were, to their perception, crystals. This assertion may be entirely true but in the absence of definitive testimony from Ra, it is likely conjecture on Jim’s part.
[6] See 22.29: ↩
RA I am Ra. The instrument is well. It is somewhat less easy to maintain clear contact during a time when some or one of the entities in the circle of working is or are not fully conscious. We request that entities in the circle be aware that their energy is helpful for increasing the vitality of this contact. We thank you for being conscientious in the asking. 22.29
[7] See 53.2: ↩
QUESTIONER Thank you. I would like to know if [name] may attend one of these sessions in the very near future?
RA I am Ra. The mind/body/spirit complex, [name], belongs with this group in the spirit and is welcome. You may request that special meditative periods be set aside until the entity sits with this working. We might suggest that a photograph of the one known as James Allen be sent to this entity with his writing upon it indicating love and light. This held while meditating will bring the entity into peaceful harmony with each of you so that there be no extraneous waste of energy while greetings are exchanged between two entities, both of whom have a distortion towards solitude and shyness, as you would call it. The same might be done with a photograph of the entity, [name], for the one known as James Allen. 53.2
[8] An unviable physical shell might otherwise be called “death” in our culture. ↩