Mission

Statement-Related

Gary A note before proceeding. The first question seems self-evident to me. However, among the objectives for having this interview was the hope that this material would serve as an internal resource for L/L Research in the future—as a guide, of sorts, for those who will come after you, and me. They will be able to consider your reflections and rationale.

When did you decide that you would make all of your information available for free without charge, and what do you hope to achieve by this policy?

Jim You and Don already had that going, didn’t you?

Carla Right from the beginning, we wanted it to be available for free. There was never any thought of anything else. The material was there. We never had the desire to push it on people, but if they found it helpful, we wanted to make sure they were able to get it. That was Don’s policy. We’ve just not changed.

Gary In a capitalist world, that’s not a very smart position.

Carla “Our kingdom is not of this world.” I might use that quote freely.

Gary So you have always offered this information in a spirit of use what resonates and leave the rest behind. This basic idea prefaces virtually every

Q’uo channeling, and permeates everything L/L does. How is this helpful?

Jim I think it reaffirms people’s free will. There are so many groups around that say they want to help people, but when people get involved with them, they discover that there’s some price to pay, that they have to do a certain thing or a certain way, or . . .

Carla Believe a certain way . . .

Jim Believe a certain thing or whatever. We want people to know that their free will is of utmost importance. That’s always the way we’ve been treated by the Confederation sources, so it just makes every sense in the world for us to treat people that same way too. It lets people know that we value them, and if they have any need for what we’ve got to offer, we’re glad to give it.

Carla I think it helps people to be supported in their search for their own spiritual path. They’re often unable to join the spiritual path of their forefathers, shall we say, or the Christian Church, the Jewish Church, the Buddhist—whatever church it is they were not able to find a home in. They’re making their own path, and they have their intuition and good sense, and we want to support that, to let people know that we trust that for them. Whatever is resonating for them is what they need to follow. If it’s our work, we’re glad to help.

Gary Tackling the same basic question from a different angle, why is it important, in your opinion, to refrain from proselytizing, and to share this information (if you feel called to share it) in a dispassionate manner?

Jim Well, that just seems to be another way of validating people’s free will; you wait until you’re asked. You might drop a hint somewhere, but there’s no need to proselytize. You usually waste a lot of energy doing that, yours and theirs. It’s disharmonious to do that. You’re trying to manipulate people’s free will, that’s the negative path. Doesn’t feel good.

Carla And we find we have plenty to do just from people who come to us and ask us about our material. Why waste our energy and time trying to convince people who would never be convinced in a million years? Why do they need that? They’re doing just fine without us. It’s the people who need our material—find it useful—that we want to support.

Gary Though you’ve offered plenty of your own reflections and interpretations of this material, you’ve always, all along, insisted that you are, as Carla says, “bozos on the bus” just like everyone else, and that your opinions are not to be elevated to that of the authority. Can you speak to this?

Jim Oh my goodness, yes! [laughs] I mean, we have the same catalyst as everyone else has; it may be tailored in our own way to learn a more specific lesson, I don’t know. But we have our own strengths and weaknesses and needs for help, counseling—we do the same thing everyone else does. I mean, it just seems so obvious to me because I live inside my skin—I know what an idiot I am! [laughs] But I work with myself too; that’s the way I happen to grow. And I think everybody does. All of us have strengths and weaknesses, desires and goals, and we’re doing our best. Now and then we need a little help. So we’re here for those who need a little help because we’ve gotten help in the past from others.

Carla We get by with a little help from our friends.

Jim [laughs] We do.

Gary You have sought to foster community among spiritual seekers. Why is this important to you?

Carla I think people are community-minded. We can do almost nothing alone. We can pretend that we’re alone, and we can order out food. We can order things online instead of going out amongst people, but the catalyst is with people. There’s a fundamental help that we get from being with other people, especially in terms of talking things over, chewing over things that are on your mind, and not everybody has a chance to do that in their home environment. Many people have expressed to me that they feel so isolated and so miserable in their home environment in terms of not having anybody to talk to about things that matter to them. So let’s try to help provide a place like that.

Jim Ra said it really well. “Those who of like mind together seek will far more surely find.”¹ It helps to have mirrors. It really does. As much as I love solitude in my life, it doesn’t teach nearly as well as being with another person.

Gary You’ve identified collaboration as an important aspect of L/L Research’s operation. Do you see L/L Research as a collaborative effort?

Carla Oh definitely! From the very beginning it was the group that produced the material, the Ra sessions. It’s always the group that asks the questions and produces the tone of the answers received during a session. So even from the heart of it, there’s collaboration in the creation of the work. I don’t know where we would be if Jim and I were the only ones who worked for L/L Research. It certainly wouldn’t be like this. Nothing like this. We don’t know half of how you do what you do. We’re just thrilled to death that it works so well.

Jim Indeed.

Gary And for my own part, working with and through L/L Research, the teamwork aspect has been prominent. So often I’ve appreciated and loved that teamwork, and have noticed—you and I have talked about this quite often—how the end product is always better when the whole team is involved, or more than one person.

Carla Yeah, that second pair of eyes is always helpful.

Gary You’ve run annual fundraisers and sought to sell hardcopy versions of your material along with other associated things through your online store. Is earning money and paying bills incompatible with spiritual seeking and serving in a spiritual way?

Carla Heck no! Everybody needs to pay bills. We need to be responsible for what it is that we are buying. I think the concept that if you do spiritu-al work you can sort of sit back and get everything for free because it’s spiritual work is not going to work. You have to get down and dig in the dirt just like anybody else.

Gary In the first session, Ra says:

RA Each of those in this group is striving to use, digest, and diversify the information which we are sending this instrument into the channels of the mind/body/spirit complex without distortion. The few whom you will illuminate by sharing your light are far more than enough reason for the greatest possible effort. To serve one is to serve all. Therefore, we offer the questions back to you to state that indeed it is the only activity worth doing: to learn/teach or teach/learn. There is nothing else which is of aid in demonstrating the original thought except your very being, and the distortions that come from the unexplained, inarticulate, or mystery-clad being are many. Thus, to attempt to discern and weave your way through as many group mind/body/spirit distortions as possible among your peoples in the course of your teaching is a very good effort to make. We can speak no more valiantly of your desire to serve. 1.10

Here, Ra conveys both the ascendancy of the service of being—that effortless emanation or radiance of being who you are without reference to what you’re doing—but they also commend Don’s efforts, or the group’s efforts, to share this information. Why try to share this information?

Jim Once you gotten the taste of something that’s really helpful to you, wanting to share it with other people seems to be a natural outgrowth. If you’ve got an open heart and you point it towards service to others, it just happens. You want to share it. You’ve got something good. Little kids discover a new cereal to eat on the shelf, and they go and eat the cereal, see a new show on television—I think it’s almost DNA, like it’s genetically programmed. Hey, share it with your buddies!

Carla Yeah, we’re thrilled to death to be able to help anybody who might be able to find our stuff useful. Why else would we open up like that? Like I said, we’re social people. We are a social people. And golly, if we find it useful, then maybe somebody else will too.

Gary What are your thoughts on advertising this body of work?

Jim It gets tricky. You have to pay for the ads, so we still use a little of it. Do we still have an ad somewhere in a magazine?

Carla We tried it. It didn’t fly.

Gary Not currently. We’re waiting for the launch of the new website and then we’re going to try to, smartly, in a limited way, explore some advertising.

Jim I think . . . we’ve got to think about that. [laughs] It’s a possibility. It’s so widely used in this culture. You advertise what you’ve got so that people will know about you. Word of mouth has treated us very well in the past. I really lean towards that direction. Every day you hear about things going viral on the internet. I think that when the time’s right, people will find out about us. I find myself midstream changing my mind about advertising. [laughing]

Carla Yeah, I’m not a fan of advertising. I like preserving the status of being somewhere between obscure and unknown. I like that people have to search to find us, because I think that spiritual search is all-important. It’s intention; it’s will that drives desire. It lets spirit know, hey, I would like this kind of material, and spirit jumps in and helps. People have found our material in the oddest ways. It might fall on them in a used book store in Athens—very strange ways that historically people told us they found it. But with the internet, it’s likely that most people do a search and wind around to finding us that way.

Jim The only time we ever tried advertising, we offered the book free to read, and if you wanted to keep it, send a donation of your choosing—your amount—or send the book back. I guess we probably reached a few people that way, but I don’t know how good a way of doing it that was. That’s the only way in which we’ve undertaken advertising.

Gary The thinking that emerged from the staff meeting workshop² was that, firstly, if we did engage in advertising, there was no intent to manipulate the psychology of the person or to produce a consumer—like to try to convince them that they need this for any reason or they should buy this, that it will help them to perform better or to score a date or to find salvation, et cetera. And also, if we used paid advertisement, to just plainly and simply state, “This is what it is; this is what we have. If you want it, come check us out; if not, hey, it’s all right. Maybe you want something else in that case.”

Carla If you think about it, the culture being what it is, if we try to go big and we try to fly above the radar, it would be 15 minutes before someone who is related to one of the more stringent churches would be pointing at us and saying, “They’re of the devil!” I don’t see any reason why we want to encourage that. I’m so content to fly below the radar; I think it really serves the spiritual purposes that work to help people, genuinely help people who are seeking to make their own path.

Notes

[1] Those who together seek may also enjoy the full quote: ↩

QUESTIONER Could you expand on what you mean by that interaction of polarized entities in piercing the veil?

RA I am Ra. We shall state two items of note. The first is the extreme potential for polarization in the relationship of two polarized entities which have embarked upon the service-to-others path or, in some few cases, the service-to-self path. Secondly, we would note that effect which we have learned to call the doubling effect. Those of like mind which together seek shall far more surely find. 83.17

[2] A call was issued to every corner of earth for the wisest and most spiritually advanced seekers to convene a Great Council at L/L Research. The goal would be to address the ills that plague this planet and discover a way to bring enlightenment and alleviation of suffering to the great multitudes. When no one responded to that call some of our close friends and long-time volunteers convened at L/L for a staff meeting in 2013 to reflect on L/L Research’s work and discuss its path ahead. ↩