DAY 4 · Part III: After the Ra Contact
CHAPTER 18
Community to
Bring4th.org
2003–2008
Author’s Note: The following material might be confusing without some backstory. For many years, Carla and Jim had hosted small gatherings and workshops in their home, consisting typically of less than ten people. One such event was the February 2003 Homecoming Gathering. In attendance were two others and myself. All three of us were given an invitation to move in with Carla and Jim and make an attempt at spiritual community. It was a longstanding desire of Don Elkins to have such a community, and Carla and Jim decided it was time to try.
One moved from Minnesota, the other from Virginia Beach, and I moved from Cleveland. Others came and went as time moved on. At maximum there were five or six people besides Jim and Carla in the house. The experiment had ups and downs, and after a couple years everyone had trickled away leaving only me remaining. It was, for me, the opportunity and honor of a lifetime. I’ve been in Louisville ever since.
Gary As I partition the history of L/L Research into chapters, a new one began at the February, 2003 Homecoming. Can you tell us what happened then?
Jim Everybody stayed. [laughter] They wouldn’t go home.
Gary It was the cooking. We liked the cooking.
Carla Suddenly we had seven volunteers in the house and we had a crowded house and a happy house. There were some moments of high drama, but we were all trying to get along and to help out L/L Research however we understood that to be.
The one thing that happened that I didn’t expect was that, with people living here, we really needed to have a better basement because it was just a basement. So there was an enormous amount of effort put into rehabbing the basement: making walls, actual walls, closets, ceilings, rooms. It’s beautiful down there. We still have places that we can put people when gatherings come. It’s not a lot of people because we have people living here, but there are a few extra bedrooms and it’s very nice to have them.
And all of this was accomplished by the volunteer efforts of those who were in the house at the time.
Gary So, another way to say everybody “just stayed,” was that you also set out to form an intentional community?
Jim Right.
Gary Not the first such time that you’d done so, but the first time on that particular scale. You had three different people that stayed on from the 2003 Homecoming Gathering and then a couple more who came in shortly thereafter.
Jim One showed up about June 21.
Gary Yes, the best one. [chuckles]
Jim Not sure who that was. Yes, I wasn’t sure about this young fellow. He was the youngest in the group, and I thought, he’s kind of young for this. I wonder what’s going to happen. What happened was he was the only one who stayed, and did a great job. That would be, of course, Gary Bean.
Carla I felt strongly about you from the very beginning, as you know. There was just something—there was a connection.
Gary You had good soil here, and good nutrition and good sunlight, and good mentorship too. The conditions . . .
Carla Yeah, and I trusted you. You may have been young, but you had good sense. So when I got to the point where I had to throw up my hands in the air and say, “I need an admin,” you said, “I’ll take on the job—I’ll see what I can do.” And you took it between your teeth and ran with it, and you have created your own position.*
Jim And you’ve become invaluable.
Carla Yeah, you’re the one who’s out there hoeing, and if you want to use the garden thing as a metaphor, you’re the one who’s planting and hoeing in the garden of the front office of L/L Research.
Gary Thank you. So when you started out with this intentional community, what did you think would result from the experiment? What did you hope for?
Jim We really had no idea what would happen.
Carla I was hoping that everybody would get together, get up in the morning and say, “What shall we do today?” And everybody would get together and have a unified idea of what we were going to do.
That did not happen. People got up when they wanted to get up, they did what they wanted to do, and it seemed that everybody had a different idea of what L/L Research should be.
More and more through the next couple of years, people found themselves very dissatisfied with L/L Research as it was. They wanted it to go this way, that way, be a farm, be organized this way or organized that way, and it basically splintered into two main groups: There were those who wanted to work on the farm idea—and we had a farm to work with. Jim and I owned a farm, 93 acres, upriver about 50 miles, and so we had that land. And it was a gorgeous wilderness. And then there were those who stayed in town and worked in the office doing the things that we had been doing all along.
There became more and more of a “we/they” energy, rather than a unified energy, and I never could get everybody to work together. It was impossible. So everybody did what they wanted to do, got what they wanted to get, and then spun out and left.
Over a period of about five years we saw one person after another leaving.
* Gary did indeed create and develop the role, organizing and coordinating L/L Research over the years, but becoming Carla’s administrative assistant was in response to Carla’s request and insistence that he give it a try.
So people were here from 2003 through 2005, and then after that people started leaving, and during the 2003 to 2005 period it was mostly construction. That was what we did really well together.
Gary Yeah, I would agree that one of the key issues was lack of common vision and unity.
Then if I were to ask what lessons were gleaned from your attempt at a spiritual community, I presume that would be one of them—the need for unity, for group cohesion?
Jim Yes, yes.
Carla And I was not willing to put my foot down and be bull-headed about it and say, “Do it my way, or it’s the highway.” I was more, “Well, tell me about your idea, let’s see what we can do with it.” That was not a productive way to lead a group. It didn’t make for cohesion.
But it was the way I am. I could never be the kind of person that leads a big group and pulls them all together because I’m just me. I don’t want to be a leader. I want to facilitate and support people. I was surprised that there were so many different ideas of what to do with L/L. It had seemed obvious to me from the beginning—what to do. And I never heard an idea that was better than mine, in my own personal opinion, so I was never swayed.
Gary I think the situation may have benefitted from a stronger central focus in order to organize and rope in all the cats, so to speak. But I think the differences were fundamental enough that the energy would have dissipated, regardless. I think people just came to the experiment, each wanting different things, and it probably wasn’t going to be unified and brought into commonality whatever efforts were made.
Carla Yeah, and it wasn’t that anyone had negative feelings or wished us harm or anything like that. There were strong disagreements certainly, but I think people ended up realizing, well no, all is well—it’s just that I need to do something else. So people left under very friendly circumstances, but they left.
Gary Moving forward in time and to another subject: in 2004, you gave Tobey Wheelock permission to host your material on his website, www.lawofone.info. He subsequently built that website, dedicated to the study of the Law of One exclusively, and it’s one of the best possible resources for the study of your work, in my opinion. Can you describe how this came about?
Carla I think Tobey was one of those who wanted to know about the extra material in Book V. Where did each fragment fit? When Don X’d the stuff out, and then Jim included the omitted fragments in Book V, we didn’t maintain an original, unedited manuscript identifying, okay, it starts here and it ends here, and this is where it fits in. So we didn’t actually know where it fit in after a certain point. We’d lost that information. He wanted to get it further—he wanted to make sure that everything that was transcribed was accurately transcribed. So he found that 97% of it was accurately transcribed, and for the other 3%, there was a little tweaking to be done, and in just a few instances, there was material that had been lost, and he found it and restored it to its place.1 And we’re grateful for that.
So through the years—and I’m talking years—he listened to the original tapes, which you [Gary] made available to him. And after he would listen to one, then he would enter the data and have new information. And then years later, when he finished listening to it the first time, he conceived of the idea of listening to it a second time just to make sure he’d not made any mistakes himself—just to check himself.
So eventually, in the fullness of time, he and other volunteers got through all of the tapes again, so it was re-relistened to. So the website recorded all of these changes, small and large, and he created a way to enter the data using a notation of two numbers: one, the session, and two, the question; so you’ve got 22.15, for example, and you know it’s the 15th question Don asked in Session 22, and you can find it just like that in Tobey’s search mechanism on his website.
Further, because it’s all digitized now, he has a search function which is just crackerjack good, and if you have a key word or phrase that you want to locate, you can locate it in a matter of seconds. So I’m very high on his website, and I use it all the time. It’s easier to find things than it is any other way.
Gary And it’s been an invaluable ally in my own personal study and in my work through L/L Research, especially when people write in with questions and with just a couple of keystrokes you can get the material for the person, paste it, or link directly to it. It’s been amazing, and I’m really grateful for it.
So, in 2005, why did you start something that you named The Camelot Journal?
Carla When I went to Europe on a teaching tour of England, I kept a journal of daily events, and I saw a lot of value in it. It showed that we were very active. It recorded things on many levels, including thoughts on the archetypal mind which occurred during that journey. I thought, well, you know, I don’t want to miss any of this stuff, so I just continued doing it. And once continued, it had an energy of its own. And as I did more of it I got more good feedback, and so it’s a tradition we don’t want to quit now. Jim has taken that over and has done a wonderful job with it, as you know, because you [Gary] contribute to it every day—well, every day that you’re here.
Gary If any reader is unfamiliar, Carla and Jim keep a daily blog called The Camelot Journal. It is currently on the home page of Bring4th.org, but when the two L/L websites merge into a super website it will be available at www.llresearch.org. It reports on our activities every day here at L/L Research.
Also in 2005, one of the community members, moi, produced a Homecoming at Wooded Glen Retreat. That was the first in what has become a long string of L/L Research workshops that he has led in the production of. [laughs] I don’t know if I should refer to myself in the third person.
So has this new generation of workshops and/or gatherings differed from what you’d done in the past?
Jim Oh, a lot more fun. A lot more activities.
Carla It’s bigger. We never had the number of people all at once that you’ve generated by opening it up and announcing it on the website. I guess that’s the difference, really, from doing it by word of mouth— By the way, we’re having a gathering, you want to come?—and just letting the people know that we thought might be interested. So before, we’d have maybe five people if it was a big year, to your gatherings which number between 30 and 40.
Gary Yeah, we decided our maximum capacity for Homecoming was 40 people. And when you say “your”— I’m not taking ownership or credit. These people are coming because of the work you guys have done over the decades, but I’m helping to facilitate . . .
Carla I know, but you’re the producer of it.
Jim I think there’s a Gary Bean brand on this thing, Gary. The word is out. Have you been to a Bean party yet?
Gary I have heard people whisper that as I walk by.
In 2006, you created—and you started to get into this—but you created the position of Administrative Assistant for L/L Research. Why was this needed, and how was it fulfilled?
Carla It was needed because I was going crazy trying to get it all done. I was responsible for getting the books done, which was laughable, but I somehow hacked my way through it.
Jim You created your own technique for bookkeeping.
Carla I did. [laughs] I was only vaguely involved with the actual QuickBooks, but I did my bit. I did the books, did all of the correspondence, did everything that was done, and I was running out of time to the point where I would find myself on vacations answering prisoners’ letters because it was the first time all year that I’d had some hours free to do it. I worked from when I got up to when I fell into bed, and I still wasn’t getting it all done. I kept falling behind and it was driving me crazy, and of course the idea of doing creative work on top of that was laughable. There was no time, and I really did want to do creative work.
So a fellow named Bill Hay gave me seed money to start up my own office where I could do my own work, and then I could have some help. And I offered the job to Gary Bean, who is you, and as I said before, you took it and leaned on me for about two weeks, got your feet under you, and took off running.
Notes
[1] By working directly with the audio on the cassettes for the Ra contact, Tobey’s efforts produced two versions different from the original published books. The first is the Relistened Version, which is an exact transcript of the Ra contact audio on the cassettes—stutters and coughs included. ↩
Some of the differences between the Relistened Version and the five original published volumes include:
1. Because of its personal, transient, or sensational nature, some material was omitted from Book I through Book IV. (Most of this material was later published in Book V.) These omitted fragments were returned to their respective places within the text of the 106 sessions.
2. In some cases, Don Elkins’ questions were edited for the books in order to improve readability.
3. In several cases, material from one session was placed into another for coherence in the published books. For example, session 26, as it appears in the books, contains a fragment from session 31.
4. Each Ra contact session was recorded onto three cassettes, all of which were flipped from side A to side B at different times. During the course of the Ra contact from 1981 to 84, two of the three cassettes were reused for later recording. This means that the remaining, non-reused cassette for each session (which the Relistening Project used) have small sections of missing material where the tape was flipped from side A to side B.
5. In some instances in the original volumes, names were removed (or erased from the audio) to protect privacy. Some of these names have been restored in the new versions (where permission was granted or the person named has passed away, or in the case of prominent UFO contactees).
6. And in some cases, simple errors were made in transcribing or typesetting the original manuscript.
The majority of the changes made were to Don’s questions.
From this version was created the Lightly Edited Version, as described by Carla.
The Lightly Edited Version then met Jim, whereupon it underwent further tweaks to become the version used in The Ra Contact: Teaching the Law of One. Even at this advanced stage, the text is still an almost exact facsimile of the audio on the cassettes.