DAY 4 · Part III: After the Ra Contact

CHAPTER 16

Post-Ra Contact to

LLResearch.org

1984–1996

Gary In this chapter, we focus on the biography of the organization beyond the end of the Ra contact in 1984. To begin, after the dust had settled from Don’s death, what did you hope to achieve through L/L Research?

Jim I guess the same thing as we were trying before: to get the word out. We had information—just to keep on doing what we were doing.

Carla We had our marching orders from the very beginning. We knew that Don wanted to have a spiritual community, that he wanted to make this material globally available, and we assumed he wanted the experiment to continue, and to continue gathering data. So we just kept doing that, and from time to time people would visit us and see if they could live with us (and nobody ever could), but we were still thinking in terms of a physical family. Yeah, just what Jim said: we kept on doing what we were doing.

Gary So that continuity in the mission—was it interrupted at all? Maybe interrupted isn’t the word . . . Did you take a moment after Don’s passing to reassess your goals and visions—

Carla No.

Gary —or did you just keep putting one foot in front of the other?

Carla Yes. That was it.

Gary I presume that you never even considered disbanding or discontinuing your search.

Carla Good heavens, no.

Gary I was going to ask you if you considered expanding the core group from ’85 onward. You said that people tried—you and different people tried to live together. So you had always been open to the possibility and the desire, but it just didn’t come to fruition?

Carla Well, it’s funny. Jim was a loner, so he would go through this process of nobody will ever live in this house again, and then there would be this person that was so perfect that he’d think well, let’s try. And we’ve done this every single time there has been somebody in the house.

Gary In one of the early channelings after Don’s passing, you, Carla, with great sincerity and interest asked Latwii about the prospect of regaining contact with Ra. What were your thoughts at that time, and why wasn’t that course pursued?

Carla I just remember I loved life and I thought that it was dangerous. I did not think that I would be able to do it, honestly.

Gary And judging by what I understand, I agree. It was wise not to continue without Don.

Carla Ra asked me a question, I think it was fairly . . . maybe in the middle of the contact or fairly towards the end, and basically said, “Do you want to be a martyr, or do you want to choose wisdom? Is this your time to go to Jerusalem?” That was in a Christian context: Is this your time to get up on the cross and die?

Jim and I thought about that very deeply, and the result was that we took our first vacation in eleven years.

Gary You held on to the impulse, though, to serve as an instrument for Ra?

Carla I wanted to serve, but I’d decided to try to cooperate more in cutting back and being part of the team and communicating how I truly felt, and not just going, send me in, coach. I can do it regardless.

Gary Personally, I think that your life and your health are worth more than more Ra sessions.

How would you describe your life and your work until the end of the 1980s?

Carla I was desperately unhappy but I continued. Jim was a wonderful support. We had a nice routine. I went through a period of trying to figure out what I was going to do next. My first attempt was to try to become a librarian again, and I realized that I had to understand computers first. So I went back to school at JCC.¹ I took computer classes for two years, and that convinced me that I was not going to be able to do it. Not because I couldn’t understand the computer, but because I never could keep my health together for a significant period of time without it breaking down and my having to have a quiet period. I knew I couldn’t hold a job under those circumstances. So that was out.

So then I thought, well, I’ll do church work, which was great except that it had the same problem politics did. Any organization has politics and committee meetings, lots of committee meetings. If I wanted to serve, for instance, as head of the women of the church, I was expected to give parties. I don’t like to give parties. I would prefer simply to scrub down the church, organize the kitchen—that sort of thing. And that’s what I did. I was not appreciated by a significant number of the congregation’s women who wanted a continuation of the silver tea services and the old fashioned parties that we would give as women of the church. And I just couldn’t hack it. I couldn’t do it.

So eventually I had to give up the idea of serving as a volunteer in the church. And that made me stop and think, okay, now what? So I took a look at Jim. Jim had simply gone on from strength to strength working in the yard, never missing a day, always creating something beautiful in the yard, and making gardens out of every part of the yard. When we came here, the property had been an acre of dead leaves and a house. There was nothing on it and he created place after place after place of beauty, and he had a schedule. His day was very organized and he got a lot done every day.

So I thought, I want to get in on that. I want to learn how to make my schedule, and I want to dovetail it to his so that we have a beautiful life together. But I played a lot of solitaire² while thinking about it, and finally it hit me: I need to work for L/L Research. I need to write. I’m a good writer; I have things to say. I had had more and more correspondence with more and more people. About 200 people—when I counted up all the email—had written me asking me questions about how to deal with being a wanderer. So I wrote the Wanderer’s Handbook.

That took me years—mostly just gathering my data, writing everybody asking for permission to quote them, and organizing the book in terms of chapters. The writing itself went very quickly. I knew just exactly how I wanted it to go.

So I finally got a handle on it and I’ve been working for L/L Research as a writer ever since, with the exception of these last few years where I’ve had to let that go and just basically put myself to finishing up things that I had not been able to finish up because I had too much stuff. I create things, and I don’t edit them—they just sit there—so I went back and I started editing things.

That’s how the books like A Book of Days, and my poetry book, and a coloring book we did for kids happened. The Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues, the co-channeling I did with Barbara Brodsky, followed a similar pattern but was initiated on Barbara’s end. I went back and edited all my recipes in hopes of doing a recipe book. I have not gotten through with that project by any means, but I have formatted everything.

Gary One of your first book projects after the end of the Ra contact was A Channeling Handbook in 1987. Can you tell us something about that?

Carla Well, Ra had talked a good bit about wanderers and had indicated that there were a certain number of entities that had come to Earth to serve in a certain way, basically by sharing their vibrations with Earth by opening up their hearts and letting the energy of the Creator pour through so that there was more light coming through into the consciousness of Planet Earth.

And the wanderer has a tough job, because the work isn’t involved in do-ing so much as being; it’s involved in essence rather than behavior, and that’s very difficult to get. People say, “What do I do? What’s my service?” And it’s so hard for them to realize: you are your service—just keeping your heart open is your service. And yeah, if you want to do an outer work, that’s great, what do you want to do? Do you want to raise a kid? Do you want to keep a house? Do you want to teach? Do you want to channel? Whatever you want to do, whether it’s dramatic or whether it’s seemingly tiny, it’s equal. Everything is equal because it’s what you’re good at and what keeps your heart open. Other than that, it’s all inner work—it’s all the passive radiation of life.

Jim It sounds like you’re talking about A Wanderer’s Handbook.

Carla I am. Is that what you asked about?

Jim He asked you about A Channeling Handbook.

Carla Whoops! Okay.

Jim Remember all that for A Wanderer’s Handbook.

Gary I was eventually going to ask you about A Wanderer’s Handbook.

Carla Well, that’s good, but I wish you’d stopped me earlier.

Okay, Channeling Handbook: I couldn’t write at the time, I couldn’t even sit up straight, so I did it on tape, and I was never satisfied with it. I’m not satisfied with it to this day, but to go back and redo it is unacceptable. So I’ll just leave it as it is because it is as it is. And it’s very clear what I wanted to say and what I wanted to get across.

I had done a certain amount of study and research, and I hadn’t written it up, so I wrote it up. Simple logic dictated that I would make a report, and this was basically my report. I tried to help anybody that wanted to channel to do it better. I didn’t teach people to channel in the book; that wasn’t my goal. My goal was to help channels who were doing it to do it better, because there are so many ways you can screw up and fall short. I tried to show the pitfalls.

Gary What about the book are you dissatisfied with?

Carla Well, if I had been able to write it, it would have been a much smoother book. I’m a good writer; I’m not a particularly good visualizer-writer. Some people always write from tape. They can just see it in their head and it comes out perfectly on the tape. Not me. There were things that I would leave out because there is something about the process of seeing it on the screen as you’re writing it. There’s a feedback that starts happening. It’s a very yeasty, fertile feeling. You put in and you take out, and you enlarge, and you play with it. And eventually you get something that you’re satisfied with, that is written well, and goes smoothly and all that. I don’t think the Channeling Handbook has that. Unlike my other writing, it’s a little bit less well-done, well-written.

Gary Given your flow when you open up to speak, and your eloquence and depth of thought, I would venture to say that few would notice the difference between speaking and writing, Carla.

Prior to the construction of the archive website, LLResearch.org, how did you guys seek to get the word out; that is, to share and disseminate the information?

Jim Smoke signals. [chuckles] We advertised in four or five different journals like the Yoga Journal, East-West Journal, Flying Saucer Review in England, and a couple of others.

Carla Fate.

Jim Oh yeah, Fate. That was our first and foremost. That little ad, a little inch ad that offered the book to people, free for the reading: “If you want to keep it, send a donation; if you don’t, send the book back.” And we spoke here and there when invited, and continued having our Sunday meditations, and people would show up. It was meager, especially compared to what is happening now on the internet.

Gary There were still means for people to come across the material, and they did, and you still had people writing the organization, interested in the work.

Jim Oh yeah. Back in the days of snail mail.

Carla Yeah, there would be this stack of letters on my desk. I was forever trying to get it down to answering all the letters. But that seldom happened.

Gary I wanted to note here in the interview that what’s been remarkable to me is that you continued this work—especially prior to the launch of the archive website—you continued this work without a strong means of sharing it with the world, and with little prospect of any financial remuneration. Nevertheless, you felt the call to do this. You felt you had to perform this service and you wanted to help others. So you just kept on channeling, week after week. I guess I won’t turn that into a question, I’ll just leave it as a statement.

Jim What else could we do? Go out and sell used cars?

Carla That’s what we did. Don had been very clear in his instructions and we were still working for Don. And, as I said before, we still are, and that satisfies us deeply.

Notes

[1] JCC stands for Jefferson Community College, Louisville’s local community college. ↩

[2] All the way to the end, solitaire was one of Carla’s favorite and frequent go-to’s. It helped her negotiate pain, medical difficulties, and limitations. The other was devouring cheap romance novels. ↩