DAY 4 · Part III: After the Ra Contact
CHAPTER 17
LLResearch.org
to Spiritual
Community
1996–2003
Gary In 1993 you were first contacted by an individual who, after you two and Don, has arguably done more to connect seekers to The Law of One, and to preserve the integrity of the Confederation philosophy, than anyone else. Who was this individual and can you describe what he did to help you?
Carla When Ian wrote me, he was still working for his own company, which had to do with artistic software for computers. Shortly after he initiated correspondence with us, he sold his company and he was able to retire. So he could spend all his time working on projects that he wanted to work on, and he was very keen on working on this project.
Ian asked if he could read all of our material, and I told him there was a huge backlog of stuff that either hadn’t been typed up or published. We sent him—clunk—a bunch of hard copies. But at that time they weren’t on the computer, so they weren’t digital, so they had to be OCR’d1 and scanned into the computer, and then he had to edit every single one of them.
We, on our part, initiated a year’s long attempt to get the rest of the cassettes typed up digitally, and a lot of people took part in that. Judy D. was remarkable in her faithfulness for many years, probably a decade. She typed everything that I channeled through the ’80s. And she—I don’t know how many she had—she had volumes of them that were digitally recorded by her, and she did a beautiful job—she was very literate and so forth.
And then there was Kim H., also known as Kim [another surname beginning with] H. (She went back and forth on using her maiden name and her married name—she was divorced. I don’t know where she settled on that. She’s probably somebody else like “Sparrow.” She’s gone Zen and joined—the last I heard—she had joined a Buddhist-type commune, and she was very happy doing that.) She would sit down and she would whiz through a session almost at the speed at which it was spoken, without having to go back, ever. When she typed you couldn’t hear the keys—they didn’t go tap-tap-tap, they went whirr—a continuous sound. She was an incredible typist, and she was very faithful. She tried living with us for a while, and it didn’t work out. She and Jim had one brangle after the other. They finally figured, well, it’s just a very deep personality problem, nobody’s fault. So we parted as good friends. She continued to come over and work for years after that, but she couldn’t live with us.
I can’t think of anybody else who spent that kind of time doing it, but one way or the other we had volunteers, wonderful volunteers through the years that plugged away, and, finally, as far as we know, we’ve gotten everything we have on tape typed up digitally so as to preserve it.
Jim Then Ian did the same thing with our books.
Carla He did the same thing with our books. But at any rate, he had sent me a thick binder with a proposal of how he wanted to put this stuff on a website. And it involved the OCR and scanning everything that I’m describing. But then he would do the coding, and he would create a website that was a library. I loved the concept—I loved his idea. I had no idea how much it would take, really, even looking at that. The depth of his fidelity was incredible and, oh, how many years? Twenty-some years?
Jim Seventeen.
Carla Seventeen years he plugged away at that. The amount of work that he got up on that website was huge, absolutely huge. And it’s all beautifully done. It’s not done in a way that’s particularly grateful to the non-scholar, and it’s hard for somebody to just pop in and surf their way through the site. We’re now trying to make it more accessible.2
Ian was so grateful that I did not want to become a personality, that I just wanted to give the material here—me here, yes, I took part in doing it, and that was my part—here’s the material. Look at the material, don’t look at me.
So he was very grateful for that. He said it was the reason that he stuck for so long, and he so totally agreed with the energy of this group. He didn’t come to be part of every gathering. He wasn’t that kind of a guy. But we were his go-to volunteer work and he was a worker, just like Jim. He would get up and go to the computer and start his day. A lot of times, we were it, so we were very fortunate in being able to have his volunteer efforts for so very long. He never asked for anything for himself or wanted to have any credit given to him whatsoever. I’m not sure that he’d be terribly pleased with me praising him so lavishly. He thought that what he was doing was not remarkable; it was—it is—remarkable and we’re very grateful to Ian.
Gary Being aware of his history as well, he stands out in my mind as one example of a person who, when they come to this material, would also like to know more about how the material came into existence, how the people who created the material conduct themselves, what the channel’s relationship is to the material, etc.
Some people come straight to the material and don’t need to know anything about L/L Research or Jim and Carla or the channels, and that’s perfectly fine. But for some people like Ian, it becomes important.
So for those who are of the school of thought that think they would just like to delete, erase, or negate the human element in the equation (which is impossible to separate, I think), I invoke Ian’s example, as you were a factor in his decision to serve.
Carla You’re right. That’s right. And Jim as well. He thought a lot of Jim.
Gary Oh yeah, absolutely. When I say you, I mean the plural. And also, it’s been unmentioned in this particular Q&A that Ian also served as the editor for every one of your books beyond A Channeling Handbook [all the way until 2012].
Carla That’s right.
Gary And all those years he maintained a consistent standard of professional presentation for L/L Research on the internet.
Carla Yes. He produced them all.
Gary So I corresponded with Ian on this question just last week, and he thinks that the website first launched in 1996. I assume that at that time there was some measure of jubilation to see your life’s work available for anyone the world over?
Carla Oooh, I knew that Elkins would just have been in alt*—I mean in his way, you know. He would have nodded and said, “Beautiful”—and meant it. This is what he wanted. It was now available globally, for free. Perfect.
Gary Could you describe the effect that the archived website had on the organization or your work?
Jim We started getting orders over the internet! We bought a computer—leading edge, Model D, 1987. I built a little computer station for me on one side, and on Carla’s side she had her own computer, so we were looking at each other across the tops of the computer, doing our work together, every day. So we had more orders, and more communication.
Gary Did you look at the new device askew for a while?
Carla Do you mean askance?
Gary Askance. I imagine it took some time to warm up to it.3
Jim No, I didn’t have any problem then. It was in the beginning—everybody was in the same boat. I was actually fairly competent at that time.
Carla The first thing Jim did on the computer—he actually got the computer for this reason—was that he set it to type the— What was it you did that with?
Jim It was The Channeling Handbook.
Carla The Channeling Handbook. In other words, there’s a six-number-letter code that you do for a comma, for a period, for a space—that kind of thing. So Jim did that the whole way through with all of those codes and sent it off to Ray Palmer of Palmer Press, which was the old traditional press that had published Gray Barker’s books, and we were part of the UFO story that way. Jim didn’t make very many mis-
* “In alt” means “to be in an exalted state of mind.”
takes, so he really liked the computer for that. He had a good relationship with it.
Gary I didn’t know that you and the computer were close, ever. That surprises me.
Jim I had to take this little hiatus into cutting grass for a while and everything got away from me in eleven years. Can you imagine?
Gary Yeah, the way things move especially. Spend a few months away and things are different now.
So you met Roman Vodacek somewhere in this period too. What role did he play in L/L Research?
Jim In May, 1992, he was living in Hagerstown, Maryland. He had been a pilot for Pan Am at that time and read our books because his then-girlfriend, Janet Decker, who now works for IMU,4 had them on her shelf. So he started reading them and got excited. He came to visit us in May and we got along great, so he decided to move to Louisville. Throughout the early ’90s, from ’92 through ’95 or ’96, most Sundays he was the only other person there, the third person necessary for a channeling to occur. Carla had never channeled Confederation sources with just the two of us. The contact needed a third person, because it universalizes the material that way. So without Roman, we would not have any of those transcripts from 1992 through 1995 or 1996.
Carla And those were very fertile years. I was still channeling 12 months out of the year at that time, every week, so I produced 50 or so per year.
Jim He loved our material and the food was great. We served a meal after the meditation on Sundays.
Carla Well, that was one of the reasons I had Romi over, was that I wanted to feed him.
Jim Yeah, he was a bachelor, and he wasn’t a real good cook.
Carla He was so lonely. He was in a foreign country, he didn’t know anybody in town, and he didn’t make friends that easily, and everything was high drama with Romi. You know Romi—he was always having pain one way or the other, a lot of angst, and getting over the girlfriend that he’d lost (Janet). She just didn’t want to marry him, so that hurt and he would cry and we would comfort him. And we helped him through all the growing pains until he got a decent job and settled down. After that, he was still very faithful, and he took care of our computers from the beginning until he left to take care of his mom last year. Oh, we miss Romi!
Gary So, from 1992, when you said you met him, to 2013, he was here in Louisville faithfully attending meditations and taking care of the computers. A long haul for—
Jim Faithful is a very good word to describe Romi.
Gary You continued to hold your regular public meditations and channelings. Did you do any workshop/gathering sort of events in the ’90s?
Jim It seems like we did. We were always doing something.
Carla We did Homecomings. We were always teaching somebody to channel; usually on Wednesday we’d have a channeling teaching. And remember Mike?
Jim Yeah, from Ohio.
Carla From Ohio. He would come down, drive all the way down from Cincinnati and maybe stay a couple of days over the weekend and work on his channeling. He and Steve Tyman worked on their channeling together for many a year. Steve driving up four hours from Illinois, and Mike coming down from Ohio. So we did stuff like that. We did whatever was called for. If anybody needed something, we’d try to see if we could do it. And we had Homecomings—not every year, but as often as we could get it together.
Gary You mentioned cooking for Sunday meditations. When I first came to Louisville that tradition was nearing its end, I think. You had some good food!
So your public meditations have always included the ritual of tuning prior to the commencement of the meditation. Could you describe the tuning rituals you’ve utilized?
Carla Surely. For myself, I would work on tuning using the prayers of my experience that had stuck with me the longest and given me the most energy—brought me higher than any others—and I would sing to myself or chant or both. I would then meditate for a brief period of time, and then I would set my intention—what I was going to do.
Then I went through a period of preparing myself which involved going to my inner room and asking the Holy Spirit for help and getting all ready to go. Then I would go to the group and tune the group just by having them talk around the circle: “I’m so-and-so and I ran into The Law of One in such-and-such a way,” or “I’m so-and-so and that’s all I want to say,” or “I’m so-and-so and here comes a half hour of my telling you my personal problems.” And all these things were okay—whatever people wanted to do.
So after we got all that done, then I would go and tune myself. Then I’d come back and we would continue tuning the group by playing music or singing or chanting, “Auming”—doing something that brought us all together and got us to the edge of being ready. Then we would say The Lord’s Prayer, and then we would go into meditation. That was the tuning process.
Gary Has it always been pretty much the same structure: the group round-robin, everybody shares around the circle, then the singing or listening to music, then The Lord’s Prayer, then off you go?
Carla I’ve never found a better way.
Gary So you had two large writing projects between the late ’90s and early 2000s. In 1998, you published Book V of The Law of One series. Can you tell us about this book and what prompted its publication?
Jim What did prompt the publication?
Carla Well, it was your [Jim’s] idea.
Jim [chuckling]
Carla You said, “You know, Ruck, it’s been 15 years since this . . .” Just so many people wanted to know: Give us the rest of the material. We want the rest of the material. We tried saying, “Well, it’s mostly personal stuff, it’s not important.” But then Jim took a read through it and said, “You know, Ruck, this is pretty good stuff. Some of it is . . . I want to share it.”
So, he said, “What if we did it this way? We’ll do it by fragment: I’ll take each fragment and then I’ll write my comments, and then you write your comments.” And I said, “Great.” So he did his and then handed it over to me, and then I did mine. And I remember doing one a day for quite some time until they were all done. It was just a matter of getting it all done, and then we collected everything and sent it off to Ian.
Jim That sounds familiar.
Carla A lot of times we’d be working on that and we’d wave at each other.
Jim Yeah, over our computers.
Carla Every morning we worked together until noon.
Gary So where did the fragments come from to begin with? Why were they fragments?
Jim Well, they’d been excluded from the original publication, basically, by Don’s decision. We all supported that because we didn’t want people to be looking at our personal lives as being as important as what the material had to offer. So we’d taken it out, and they came from the original transcripts that I transcribed after each session in three-ring notebooks.
Gary So Don was the one responsible for selecting all the omissions?
Carla Uh-huh. He’d just X it out—don’t want that, don’t want that—yeah.
Gary And then after Book V in the early 2000s, you completed a book you called A Wanderer’s Handbook. Can you tell us about this book and how it came to be?
Carla Okay, I started telling you about it before so I won’t repeat it. In addition to my getting ahold of everybody that I wanted to quote in the book as “another wanderer,” I numbered them and I said, “Do you want to be number 47, do you want to be known as your avatar online, or do you want to be known with your name?” I kept a file at the time—and I’m sure it’s still in my files somewhere—of who all these people were, and I used as many of their quotes as was necessary.
Then I just took all the answers that I had given through the years and I categorized them. I found that there were about 107 questions that people asked over and over. So rather than having to repeat my answer over and over, I thought, “Well, I’ll write this book, and people can look it up in the book.”
So I separated it out into very logically flowing chapters of how the material would fall out: do this, then write about this. And the idea was to help wanderers tell their stories and to come out of the closet with being wanderers and say, “Yeah, that’s who I am.” Own it, and love it, and use it.
Jim went through all of the sessions (that we had up until that time) with my list of questions, and when he found a session that applied to one of the questions, he excerpted the material and numbered it. Romi set up a database for us, for both of these things. So when I wrote it, it was just a matter of taking the database with numbers for Question 1, then Question 2, and sharing some of the quotations from the Confederation, as well as sharing lots of quotations from the letters I’d gotten from real people who had the same problems that hopefully the reader was experiencing. And then my writing—I did my writing and I wove it all together with my writing. And that was it. The book wrote itself once I got all my data in order.
Gary Do you remember how many pages it clocked in at originally?
Jim [chuckles] A thousand.
Carla Twelve hundred. You took us down to 800.
Jim Further than that. I think we got it down to 650, didn’t we? By removing footnotes. There were sometimes four and five footnotes for a point.
Carla Quotes, you know. I might use five different people saying the same thing. He got it down to three.
Jim I didn’t edit any text. Everything she wrote stayed. What I edited was the quotations, the footnotes and things, and duplications.
Gary The abridged version is already a very thick book. It continues to serve as a helpful resource when people write L/L Research, as we can direct them to the book in general, or—because it’s, like you said, constructed of chapters answering particular questions—we can direct seekers to particular chapters to help them think about their questions. It’s proven enormously valuable in that regard.
Back to Book V: Do you remember reactions to its publication at the time? Were people pretty thrilled to see it?
Jim Yeah, we got a very good response, very positive.
Gary Living as I do on the other side of Book V coming out, I pretty much came into a completed The Law of One. I can imagine, if I was told that there are some extra sessions or material I hadn’t seen, I would be on the moon with excitement. It had to be a great period for students of the material.
This next question pertains to an event that probably stands out a lot more in my mind because it was a pivotal moment to my life, but I’ll ask if you guys have any recollection.
In April 2002, you were invited to participate in Scott Mandelker’s “Time of Global Shift” seminar, which he had hosted here in Louisville, Kentucky. There you met a few seekers, some of whom have played important roles in your life in the subsequent years. Any recollections of this event?
Jim [chuckling] Well, I think we met Gary Bean there, I’m not really sure. [laughter] That wasn’t our first meeting with Scott as we’d met him here a couple of times. He’d come to meditation.
Carla Scott has had us out to California once.
Jim That’s right. We went up to his apartment once, didn’t we?
Yeah, that “Time of Global Shift” was fun. It was down at the Galt House, and we had a lot of folks there, and the format was pretty nifty. It was, I guess, a tried and true technique for sharing the material that Scott had used around the country. He decided to bring it here to Louisville, Kentucky.
Carla David Wilcock was part of it. There was a lady who was familiar with the Mayan Calendar—no, it was a gentleman who was familiar with the Mayan Calendar. All of these things fell into the fact that it was time for a global shift—that was the point. Scott had long been a fan of The Law of One material, and he just asked me to take part in it. So I sort of was wedged between Wilcock and John Major Jenkins. I couldn’t have been in better company.
Gary It was kind of a singular event. There are very few public people out there working with this material, so it was unique in that this grouping of people working with The Law of One and the Confederation philosophy are on the same stage, so to speak. It was a most wonderful weekend.
Notes
[1] OCR (optical character recognition) is a scanning process used to scan the printed channeling sessions and convert the text into a file for a word processing program, like Microsoft Word. Once converted, a human eye is still needed to review the Word document to ensure that all the text was converted correctly. Many of the channelings now available in the Library section of www.llresearch.org were published to the site using OCR. ↩
[2] By building a new website! Begun almost two years before Carla passed, it has been a long work in progress and may be launched by the time this book is published. Its objective is to unify the existing archive with community websites. ↩
[3] Jim is notoriously averse to using new technology or anything overly complex. ↩
[4] IMU is International Metaphysical University, through which L/L Research offers the Basic Principles of the Law of One course, with Living the Law of One 101: The Choice as its textbook. You can find it at http://www.intermetu.com. ↩