DAY 5 · Part V: Spiritual Principles & Channeling
CHAPTER 25
The Art of
Channeling
Gary What is channeling?
Jim [to Carla] You ought to take that one. You’re the channel. I gave it up.1
Carla Channeling is the production of subconscious material in a conscious manner, to be the most general about it and still accurate.
Gary Using the term “subconscious” raises a question. It seems to imply that the source being channeled is derived from within one’s personal system, whereas the channeling I’m inquiring about is alleged to be derived from outside of one’s personal system.
Carla Well, you can channel yourself, or you can channel an outside source. But it has to come from within you. So basically, what you’re doing is you’re getting subconscious material which is not finite, it’s infinite. You’re getting a concept and then translating it into conscious material words. You basically take a cookie cutter to this infinite concept that you’re getting, and you produce words to try to explain what it was that you received.
So it’s really almost like the channel is a translator of subconscious material that it’s receiving from an outside source. But you can, actually, channel parts of yourself, especially if you have a fragmented personality, or perfectly healthy if you’re channeling spirit.
Jim But that was not how it worked for the Ra contact.
Carla No, in terms of the Ra contact, it was done from within trance so I had no control over the production of material.2
Gary So when you say “subconscious material,” is it accurate to say that you mean concepts that are outside of the conscious mind that then pass through the conscious mind, which acts as a translator for that material?
Carla Yes.
Gary Do you remember the first time that each of you encountered channeling? And what your initial thoughts were about channeling?
Carla Well, my first experiences with channeling were with the Louisville Group in ’62 through the next several years as we met every Sunday night at Hal and Jo Price’s house, at first in Indiana and later in Kentucky. It seemed pretty silly to me. It was very laborious the way the guys were doing it. They wanted a lot of working of their vocal apparatus to make sure they weren’t producing it themselves, so they’d, [Carla imitating] “We [click click sound from the mouth] are [click click],” like that. I thought it was kind of a silly way to gather information, and it didn’t attract me. So I enjoyed the messages, such as they were. They were very loving and I respected them. I respected the efforts that the guys were making—all these physics students that were friends of mine, to be accurate. I respected Don once I understood what his goal was, what his experiment was all about, which he didn’t tell us for the first few months because he wanted an absolutely pure source of data. He didn’t want to mess up the data.
So when this guy came up from the Detroit group and channeled much more smoothly, and said, “Why aren’t you guys channeling? Let go and bring it out,” Don considered that the experiment was blown. It was no longer pure because it had been diddled with from the outside.* But he
* Don had initially launched his experiment without disclosing that its actual aim was to produce telepathic data from ET contacts. His hope, presumably, was that if information was received in this manner, then it would be pure because there would be no chance that the members of his experiment, unaware of the purpose of the experiment, could have intentionally or unintentionally fabricated the received material. The visitor from the Detroit Group, however, let the cat out of the bag, as it were.
still felt that it was legitimate to continue collecting the material as thickly as possible, and that’s what he did, constantly.
So at first I wasn’t over overwhelmed by this material that was being collected in this way. I had no desire to do it. Didn’t think I could do it.
Jim I read Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts back about 1970, ’71, and I thought it was good material. I still think it’s pretty good material. And I was interested in it and wanted eventually to learn how to channel one day.
Carla Jim is one of my best students. Ever.
Gary We will come to Jim learning to channel in the not-distant future.
So Carla, you and Don developed a unique set of protocols for establishing contact with Confederation sources and channeling their message. How much of that protocol was transplanted from the Detroit Group, and how much did you and Don develop through your own experiment?
Carla It was all me. I was pretty much on my own. Don was able to teach me the basic heart of channeling, which was to let go and say what was coming through, but he had not been able to get any refinement of that. I refined and refined trying to find out how to be a better channel and how to create a better session. So I observed what worked to make me a better channel and incorporated those things little by little over the years. Around the turn of the century I spent about three or four years practicing the tuning and the challenging process over and over again, every day after morning offering.
Gary So we’ll dive more deeply into challenging and tuning later on, but for now are you saying that the challenging and tuning processes were your own creations after Don taught you the basics?
Carla That’s right. And also, the things that I observed that would make a group better were simple. There were just two things: stay away from specific information, anything that would not still be useful in 10,000 years, and let the contact say, “I don’t know,” rather than trying to get an answer to every question.
Gary Jim, how and why did you become an instrument?
Jim Well, I had the same desire as Carla to be of service. I guess in the beginning it was also sort of an attractive thing to do: I want to be a chan-nel—I want to get my channel stripes. [Carla laughs] So I worked at it for 25 years. Clawed my way to mediocrity. Decided, why bother. I’m sitting next to the best channel I’ve ever heard. I’ll help her out some other way. So I gave it up.
Carla And that really bothered me because I don’t agree with him, but that’s all right. We’ll talk about that another time.
Gary I was going to ask about the conclusion of Jim’s channeling.
Carla Oh, he’s totally wrong. He’s an excellent channel. We all have our gifts. I’m a blah blah blaher, and there’s a value in that—you get poetry from people who talk a lot; you get depth; you get poignancy; you get nuance. From Jim you get the answer to a question in the shortest possible time. At the end of a session, when everybody’s tired, this is wonderful. It’s much to be desired. So it just depends on what it is you’re looking for: short, terse answer that gives you all the high points, or more of an eloquent answer.
Gary I will say, for the record, that after Jim discontinued his own channeling service based on his assessment that he was mediocre, I gave him the Pepsi challenge. I took channeling from Carla and channeling from Jim, put it on the same piece of paper, mixed it up and removed any identification regarding who was doing the channeling. I then I asked Jim if he could identify who was doing the channeling. Jim indulged me and took the challenge. He had about 50% accuracy.
Carla [laughs] Way to go, Gare!
Gary So his channeling wasn’t that objectively mediocre. But I guess it comes down to how you feel.
So now we begin diving into first challenging, then tuning. So the practice of challenging is a key aspect of your procedure. What is challenging, and why is it so important?
Carla In this physical realm we can get by with an amazing amount of B.S. We can lie, we can slant information, we can do all kinds of stuff like that. And people will buy it if we’re good at it, if we’re clever. In the realm where channeling comes from, the metaphysical realm, there’s no fudging, there’s no lying, there’s no bending the truth. The more you know who you are and can stand on your own two feet, the more you exist in that realm. If you don’t know who you are, and are able to say, “This is who I am; this is what I believe; this is the epitome of good qualities for me, and it is this quality which I choose to use as my challenge.”
For instance, I’m a Christian and I would naturally be drawn to challenge by saying, “Can you say that Jesus is Lord?” And that’s been my challenge from the beginning. That’s the depth of who I am as one who follows Christ, so that is very real in metaphysical terms.
I ask people to find out, if they don’t really, really know, what is the essence of yourself? What’s the heart of it, and then what do you believe? Whom do you follow? Whose are you, if there is an entity that you follow? What quality would you say is that which you believe is the highest and best? So I don’t tell people how to challenge. I ask them to find their own challenge.
For instance [turns to Jim], when faced with the request what did you choose? You chose things positive. . .
Jim For my challenge? Christ consciousness.
Carla Christ consciousness. He distances himself a little bit from Christ and uses the consciousness, but that’s the heart of who he is so that works for him.
So that’s what I mean by challenging. The reason it is so important to use that filter is that it’s a very crowded universe. You could get anybody on the horn and you don’t want to dial at random and go, “So tell me, what do you think?” You don’t know who you’re talking to. You need to get the best contact you possibly can. You’re expending energy. You need to make the best of it. So basically you’re looking for a contact that is in harmony with who you are and how you challenge so that the information that you get is going to be the clearest possible information—the least distorted. Those are very desirable things so that’s the reason that you challenge: to eliminate receiving a negative contact, to eliminate getting fooled, to eliminate wasting your time.
Gary So you declare who you are and issue that vibration, that challenge, and any entity—especially those of negative orientation that can’t meet that vibration—are thus barred or prohibited from speaking?
Carla Right. They simply can’t function in that environment. It’s like they’re trying to get through a brick wall—they simply can’t do it.
Gary You issue your challenge three times in a row.
Carla I do.
Gary Would you call that a universal standard or is that just unique to your own processes?
Carla I recommend redundancy for anybody, whether they want to do it two times or three times doesn’t really matter, but are you really doing your highest and best work every single time out of the gate? I just want to eliminate the possibility that I was having a bad day, and so I focus and then I get it together again, and focus, and then I even do it a third time because I want to make absolutely sure that I’m not fooling around with the people that are interested in what I produce. I want my work to be as excellent as I can possibly make it, and I move heaven and earth to do my best because nothing less than that would satisfy me. Once I do that, whatever comes out is what comes out—I can’t speak to that, I can just say that I prepared the very best I know how.
Gary So you describe that entities who can meet that challenge are able to pass it and those that are not able to meet it, go away. How do you perceive that process?
Carla Well, I feel it, I think, more than anything else. Let me give you an example: I was in London teaching—what a wonderful thing to say [laughs], “I was in London teaching.”—and the hostess who was putting me up for the night had a son, and the son, I could tell, was just absolutely hating the ground I walked on. He was very, very jealous, and she took him upstairs to get dressed, and when I got through with the challenging process and I asked my gatekeeper (there’s a lot that goes into my process, including working with my gatekeeper), I said, “Is there anything I need to be aware of?” And she said, “Yes, you’ve got a negative entity that wants to mess you up, so you’re going to have to shake him off.”
So I think I sang a positively oriented song, and went through that from beginning to end and then I asked the gatekeeper again, “Are we okay?” And she said, “No, you’d better do it again.” This is not in words, this is in feelings. So I did it again and the third time that I did it, about half way through the song I felt almost like a snap, and then I felt a release of pressure from inside my head, and I heard this little boy screaming from upstairs—furious, absolutely furious, he was unable to get to me. So I had to shake a very real, very unusually skilled negative entity that just wanted me to go away.3 It was right there in the physical; it didn’t have to be a discarnate entity. It was incarnate.
At any rate, it’s that real, it’s that specific. You don’t want anything that’s hanging around the edges of the contact that could misconstrue an answer or something like that so you need to remove anything like that. So you just make sure that you’re good and clean before you go into the contact.
Gary So in terms of how you perceive non-physical entities is that you perceive presences—a feeling, a field of an entity.
Carla Yes. A feeling, usually some kind of internal pressure, like maybe a headache coming on or something like that.
Gary So for those entities who have not been able to pass your challenge, presumably they’re of negative orientation, did they feel any differently than the positive entities?
Carla No. All entities that are able to impress others with their messages are using light. Light is light—no difference positive or negative.
Gary Which is another reason to challenge because they can mimic the same field.
Carla Right, you cannot tell.
Gary Jim, you used a challenging process tailored to your own unique essence. Did you perceive similarly to Carla? How did you know when a challenge had been passed or failed?
Jim Just an inner feeling. I only had one or two times that I felt there was a negative entity that was resisting.
Gary And in those cases you just repeated the challenge until that feeling dissipated?
Jim Yes.
Gary The other key aspect to your pre-channeling procedure is tuning. What is tuning and why is that so important?
Carla In the process of your own spiritual life, tuning is an internal process which has to do basically with cleaning away negative parts of you that might keep you from having your heart open—like anger, for instance—and then working to release that.
When it comes to channeling, you want to tune your instrument just like you’d take an instrument that, say, has a reed, or something that you can adjust. Come to think of it, the reed is one thing you can’t adjust, isn’t it?
So anyway, you’re tuning to I guess you’d say 440 to concert A. You’re tuning to a default vibration which is the one great Original Thought of Love, and the distortions that you have that make your energy less than loving, you’re tuning them out. You’re letting them fall away, so that you become your highest and best self, so that you can do you’re very best work.
It’s got to be real though. You can’t just say, “I’m going to be positive, damn it!” It doesn’t work. You have actually to become more positive. And so you observe what works for you. What works for me is what you’ve experienced before these sessions. I use very simple prayers that I’ve known since childhood, and I used them over and over and over again. And they never get stale to me because the ideas are so basic and so loving. The prayer of St. Francis, the prayer of the Holy Spirit: those two are very dear to me. So I use prayer, I use singing, sometimes I use chanting; I use whatever works to lift me up and become my best self for that moment. That is sort of a quick look at tuning.
Gary So tuning not only improves the efficiency of the contact but also serves as a means of protection just like the challenging, because those who don’t match your tuning have difficulty relating with you or at least speaking through your instrument.
Carla Right. Yeah, they need to harmonize.
Gary In Book V, Jim wrote:
As time and experience with the Ra contact accumulated we became increasingly aware that the honor of providing this kind of service brought with it the need for just as much responsibility for providing the service with as much purity and harmony as one was capable of producing in every facet of the life experience. What was learned needed to be put to use in the daily life, or difficulties would result in the life pattern.
So, this is a theme both of you have repeated elsewhere, that is, the need to live the message being transmitted through one. Can you expand on this?
Carla Well, in street talk it’s walking your talk. You can say all kinds of beautiful things, but if you don’t do it, then your kids, for instance, can look at you and say, “Mommy, you told me to do this, but you don’t do that.” You’re caught. So you need to be able to be as close to those things that you’ve been learning as possible.
Jim Ra calls it the Law of Responsibility. If you stand close to the light you need to be more careful about how you conduct yourself. You have a magnifying glass on you, usually from negatively oriented entities that are willing to accentuate whatever disharmonies that you might allow to creep into your relationships. Always got to be more careful.
Gary What are some of the consequences of not living the message that is being transmitted, or at least not attempting to live the message that is being transmitted.
Jim Getting a mixed message—negative entities taking over, positive entities saying, “Oh, well, we tried.”
Carla Basically, if people don’t respect your efforts, it reflects on the message, and we wouldn’t want to do anything to reflect on this message which we consider to be anything less than very helpful.
Gary So not living the message might be linked to, or connected to tuning. It’s a way of losing your tuning.
Carla Just being real, being who people think you might be, being who you might say who you are, being it to your very core, no mixed messages here, a straight message.
Gary That speaks to the responsibility that the instrument has regarding the messages that come through the instrument: their content and spirit have to match the vibration of the instrument. If that instrument lowers its vibration then it can’t successfully channel that higher vibration content.
Carla That’s right.
Gary Ra says:
RA We may only suggest that the honor of propinquity [proximity] to light carries with it the Law of Responsibility. The duty to refrain from contumely [insulting treatment/language], discord, and all things which, when unresolved within, make way for workings lies before the instrument of which you speak. 101.8
What do you think Ra means by “refrain from discord and contumely” as part of the responsibility of the instrument engaging in a channeling practice?
Jim Well, that’s again, practicing what you’re learning from the contact, putting it in into practice, putting it in your life and not engaging in disharmony that you can avoid.
Carla Being sweet with each other.
Gary So if you’re mistreating other people, it’s probably not going to go well for your channeling practice.
Carla Right. [laughing] And a lot of time there is a little ego involved so you have to ask yourself, why do I have this impulse to distance myself by saying something sarcastic, saying something hurtful? Why can’t I just support that guy? And then working on yourself until you can support the guy, in all sincerity
Gary And this notion of standing closer to the light, serving the light, serving in the light, implies also that any shadow within you is going to be intensified, energized, and magnified so you have to be extra vigilant and extra mindful.
Carla We felt like we were standing in full sunlight at just about high noon, and so the shadows were very intense and very short.
Gary During the Ra contact?
Carla Yeah, during the Ra contact. When the Ra contact started and it settled in, we could feel the tenseness, the intensity mounting daily.
Gary So if you’re not attempting to stand so close to the light and you feel, say, anger, that anger might be a more mild version; it might come and go, it might have less consequence, it might grip you less. But when you’re attempting to stand in the light, that same anger might be that much more energized, might gain more momentum, might have more capacity to take you over, so to speak, if you’re not mindful, if you’re not careful.
Jim Right.
Gary So now that I know that you, Carla, were responsible for developing the challenging and tuning aspects, how did you come to develop those? How did you know that that was needed, that that would be of help?
Carla Well, I just looked at every session after it was done and I was typing it up—for a long time I typed up the session that we had at a 5:00 o’clock meeting, by the next day I would have that done. [These were the conscious channeling sessions that Carla participated in during the 1970s.] While I did it, you know, being very fresh in my mind, I could think about it. I could look at how the questioning went, I could look at the answers, I could look at the dynamic. You can see things if you look closely while it’s all still fresh in your mind. You can just penetrate a little bit why this worked or why this didn’t work, why this wasn’t a good question, why this wasn’t a good answer, etc.
I was a researcher—I am a researcher—and I wanted to not just to do it, but to do it as well as possible. A prayer that Jim offers every day really gets to it. Can you repeat that part of it that has to do with, “help me to be as close to you as possible, by doing the things that I do as well as I can”.
Jim “Lord, please be with us today which you always are. Help us to see your face in everything that we do, and help us to glorify you by doing everything that we do the best that we can.” You know what? I’m going to have to write it down! [Jim and Carla laugh] It’s the basic thing of: “Help us to do the best we can and to glorify You by doing everything to the highest of our ability.” That’s not exactly how it goes, but I’m not in the right frame of mind to—
Carla —to do it, yeah, I know what you mean, but that’s the sense of it: honoring and doing the best we can. I wanted always to do the best I could. So I would examine the process to see, well, maybe this is true, and then I’d try it out. Then I could see if it was true or wasn’t true. So it was gradual. It was over a period of months, but it didn’t take too long because it was so obvious. For instance, when you allowed a specific question, you could feel right away the energy change. And everybody thought, we’re going to get some good stuff now, but it wasn’t the energy that you wanted in a metaphysical session—it wasn’t what I wanted. I don’t know why other people haven’t come to the same conclusion independently, actually, because it really does work.
Gary Did you see a discernable improvement or change in the channeling once you implemented these measures?
Carla Oh, yes, I certainly did.
Gary Have either of you ever doubted your own channeling?
Carla I answered that before. I said you do the very best you can, and then you’d be a fool to doubt that because that’s the best you can do. So what are you going to do? It’s the best that you can do, that’s it. The doubting stops right there. Or you don’t do the work. One or the other.
Gary What would you say makes a good channel?
Jim Talent. Natural ability. And Carla has that. Just like anybody can pretty much learn to play chopsticks on a piano, anybody can learn how to channel, but doing it well is the real trick, and using the challenging and tuning are very necessary. But then there’s also a talent, and like Ol’ Satchmo says, “Some got it and some ain’t.”
Carla [laughs] He’s so kind to me.
Gary I think, Carla, you already answered this question, so to rephrase and ask if that’s correct: in terms of how you perceive what you were receiving, you perceive a “concept ball” that is not given to you in words, precisely, but that you clothe in words. You translate it and give it words.
Carla Right. A channeling session to me feels like a game of catch—catch the ball, throw it; catch the ball, throw it; catch the ball, throw it. If you don’t throw it within seconds after you get it—if you don’t speak it out—you lose the contact. You have to keep the energy going—catch the ball, throw it. You can’t catch the ball and then give it some words and then contemplate it some more—you don’t have that luxury, or you’ll lose the rest of the contact. So it feels very patchy. It feels very jerky from the inside out, and on the tape it comes out smooth as silk.
Gary So instead of it being a continuous stream, you perceive it in distinct packets, an on-and-off function. The way you’re describing it sounds like there’s no time for reflection of the message or analysis of the message, you just need to let it out.
Carla Right, none whatsoever. You do not think about it. You catch the ball, you throw the ball. You do not think about it. That would be death to the contact right there.
Jim Analyze it when it’s done, later.
Gary Did you guys find yourselves trying to think about it and ask yourselves, as it was coming through you initially: Is this right? Is this wrong?
Carla That’s part of the learning process. Everybody does that. It was a couple of months before I could do the channeling because I got so blown away by the energy. You’ve done enough trying to do it that you’ve probably felt that energy come in, right?
Gary I did perceive some conditioning, I don’t know about—
Carla Did it blow you away?
Gary No, I hadn’t reached that point.
Carla When I first got the energy of Hatonn, [makes a sound of being blown away], I could not think, I could not speak, I couldn’t possibly work with it. I felt it, but it took me a long time to be able to bear it, it was so much energy. I was very sensitive to it, it turned out. So it took me a while, and once I was able to receive it, and not get blown away, then I was able to start using it, translating things I got out of it.
Gary So whereas some people feel in channeling like they’re flying blind, in a way, in that they don’t know if there is something actually there, in your case, you’re feeling something very distinct and palpable due to your sensitivities.
Carla I am. Yeah, and we had a nurse sit next to me one time—this was at Wooded Glen in 1995, was it?
Gary 2005.
Carla Well I was a decade . . .
Gary You got a five in there.
Carla And she sat next to me. I don’t know if you remember this, but she had a little gadget that she put on my finger that read out some data, and when I got the contact, my blood pressure and everything changed. My body smoothed out actually—it helped—and when I released the contact immediately my body changed back. So there was a perceptible effect that the contact had on me as far as body processes.
Gary Yeah, it would have been so fascinating to have measured your biometrics, your EEG, blood pressure, heart rate, to see measure any changes, and have that documented.
Carla She just sat next to me. We didn’t document it, but she told me that was what happened.
Gary Especially for the materialist. Not that you’re setting out to prove anything to anyone, but for the materialists you can say that—
Carla I have never wanted to try to prove it to anybody. It’s not possible, basically, to prove it to anybody. Even though you can be logical and think that you’ve been very evidential in what you’ve had to say, a person who doesn’t want to believe will not believe and will find all kinds of reasons why. So unless you can prove it with “measure and pen,” as Ra said, don’t even try. Don’t waste the breath, because it’s just not possible to convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced about something that cannot be proven.
Gary And that gets to the heart of why channeling is chosen as a means of communication for those higher density entities that wish to offer service to those of Earth: they want to guard the free will of those who receive the messages. Channeling provides a means whereby the content can be evaluated on its own merits, and either accepted or rejected therein.
Carla Uh-huh. You’d be right.
Gary In the case of conscious channeling, I have always perceived the instrument, whoever he or she may be, somewhat as the stained glass window. That is to say, the instrument, as the window, necessarily colors the light moving through it no matter how clear and clean that stained glass window.
To what extent would you say that conscious channeling acts as a filtering or coloring mechanism? That is to say, how much of what comes through is influenced by, or a result of, the instrument?
Carla Probably a third, something like that. A lot.
Jim Didn’t the Confederation say that their ideal was about 70% them and 30% the channel. Because they wanted to use your experiences, your sensibilities and so forth in order to make the message universal and human.
Carla And apt for the group that it’s being given to. Every group is different, every day is different, and you can ask the same question lots and lots of times and you’ll get a different answer every time because it’s a different group every time and they have different needs. They want to hear different things, and you can answer in a million different ways. But as Ra said, it’s “always and ever the same,”4 in terms of what the basic message is: love, love, love.
Jim Again, this is true for conscious channeling. This wasn’t the way the
Ra contact worked. No part of that contact was the instrument.
Gary One of the things that made it unique.
Carla Yes, it was unique to us anyway, for sure.
Gary Yeah, one reaches the conclusion when reading large quantities of the conscious channeling is that it’s the same principle; it’s just infinitely repackaged in different ways, session by session.
Carla described receiving these packets that she had to translate. Did you perceive the same process or was it different in your case?
Jim Mine seemed to be more a sentence by sentence sort of thing. I was looking for more—we call it control, or conditioning, or evidence that it wasn’t me, so I wasn’t so able to “hang my ass over the line,” as she says. I wasn’t as fearless. I wanted to make mine more solid and know that it’s not me.
Gary So did you perceive that the sentence was almost already formed for you and you just had to relay it?
Jim Sort of, yeah.
Gary I think this question might help illustrate the degree to which the conscious instrument affects the content coming through, so I would ask: What characterizes the differences between Carla’s channeling, Jim’s channeling, and Don’s channeling?
Carla There’s an energy that’s unique to each of us. Don’s channeling used a lot of repetition and stayed with very simple concepts when he was doing the metaphysical type of channeling. Jim’s channeling to me has a tendency to be terser, shorter, clearer, and mine has a tendency to be more poetic.
Gary In examining the answer to that question, it helps one to see just how much a conscious instrument affects the information, what they bring to the table, and it helps delineate the difference between surface features and appearances versus the deeper heart of the message. The heart remains the same, but there are all sorts of surface variability and permutation of that essential message.
Carla Yes. That is so true. And you can always have your favorite channel and your favorite source.
Gary Listening to Stephen T. channel, one can hear a style that is more philosophical, more elaborate—
Carla “. . . therefore, and this goes to prove that.” Yeah, it’s almost a teaching duel.
Gary And that is a consequence of his orientation as a philosophy professor.
Carla Right, he’s been teaching philosophy for 30 years.
Gary So the message is going to be clothed in a particular way that’s unique to him.
Carla It’s wonderful, and I’m always thrilled to listen to him. It’s a joy. He and Jim are my best students definitely.
Gary There have been a multitude of Confederation groups that have spoken through you and other instruments in a conscious state, including Hatonn, Oxal, Latwii, and Q’uo. Do they have distinct presences?
Carla They have distinct energies, and then they come into the head in distinct ways.
Gary So say, they didn’t identify who they were, you could determine who was coming to you based on how they feel where they enter in?
Carla You really have a tendency to be able to do that, yeah. [Carla asks Jim] Have you ever received Oxal? Zings right in up here at the top, whereas Hatonn I experience as a more general all over, like a big cat.
Gary Just on a whim, Jim, did you feel that there was any connection between your frontal lobe work and channeling?
Jim No.
Carla That’s interesting because they both have to do with feelings that—
Jim Well, there were sensations that come in there in the frontal lobe area, but I think that’s true for everybody.
Carla Yeah.
Gary There’s an aspect in serving as an instrument called conditioning whereby, prior to receiving information and channeling it, the human instrument feels a conditioning in some sort of way. How have you two experienced conditioning? And what is conditioning?
Carla Well, you just said what conditioning was. It is some sort of reassuring flip of the tongue or movement of the mouth opening wide. That’s very common. It just lets you know that there is a presence there that wants to speak. And some people get the conditioning throughout the message, other people just get it at the beginning. I would get the rush that I was explaining to you before at the beginning, and then it would settle down and that would, I guess, constitute my conditioning. I didn’t ever really perceive the need for some kind of reassuring [makes a sound]. Don always had that little bit [makes clicking noise] before he began, and I don’t remember if you—[to Jim] what have you done in the way of conditioning?
Jim I would feel it in my jaw, my mouth, sometimes in my sinuses, the frontal lobes area up here would be activated and then I know that it was time for me to speak, that they were there. But again, this is for conscious channeling. There was no conditioning from Ra. Ra said that due to their limitations, they could offer no conditioning. We never questioned as to what their limitations were, but since Carla was asleep it wouldn’t do any good to give her conditioning if it were Ra, so that had something to do with it.
Carla Well, I think Ra’s limitations had to do with the narrow band.
Gary Think they could have rung the doorbell or something to give some kind of clue.
Carla [laughs]
Gary During my one attempt to channel at the 2008 Channeling Intensive I did feel pretty intense conditioning, a strong stimulation right around the third eye region. That’s as far as I made it in the process.
Carla Well, good. You were doing a good job then.
Gary What would you say is the difference between channeling and the experience of those people who hear voices in their head, so to speak?
Carla Well, I guess channeling is much more regularized where you are able to use it for the benefit of others, hopefully.
Jim There’s a discipline that goes with channeling so that you use, hopefully, the challenging and tuning, and you’re responsible about what you do. People who hear voices probably could speak those voices and they’d probably have something to say. But I don’t know if I want to hear it, because they’re not usually in control. They’re not usually using any kind of discipline, and they’re usually at the mercy of the voices that they hear.
Gary So we’ve talked about entities of the higher densities using the same light regardless of what polarity they are, as mentioned here:
QUESTIONER This question may be meaningless but would a fifth-density entity of the Confederation who was positively polarized transmit on the same frequency as our negatively polarized fifth-density companion?
RA I am Ra. This is correct and is the reason that the questioning of all contacts is welcomed by the Confederation of Planets in the Service of the Infinite Creator. 89.6
You’ve seen a lot of channels come and go over the years, and some of their contacts became unwittingly corrupted. How does a channel become de-tuned?
Jim Well, they think they can recognize their contact without doing any challenging or tuning. They may not even know about challenging and tuning, and they think they know the contact just because they’ve done it so many times; but because a negative entity of the same relative potency or density channels on the same wavelength, you can’t tell. You have to say, “Who are you? Do you come in the name of____?” And so forth, every time.
Carla Every time I have given an honest opinion saying “you need some help” to someone asking my opinion, the channel felt that I was being unduly critical, and that I was dead wrong. Whether it was expressed in tears, or in anger, or whatever, that was the end of our [chuckles] productive discussion of channeling. People don’t like being told, “Let’s do some work. Let’s clean it up.”
Gary For those positively oriented channels who intend to channel positively oriented information but eventually get a mixed contact, it seems that mixed, de-tuned contact is a consequence of failing to challenge, failing to tune, failing to live the message, or all of the above.
Carla There’s some sort of ego involvement. One very common theme is the desire to answer every question. If you try to answer specific questions, you’re inevitably going to get a service-to-self contact that is very happy to replace the service-to-others contact, because service-to-others sources do not tend to have any interest in specific information or even find themselves able to give it. Their area of expertise is the infinite, the eternal, and not prophecy of the future or something like that.
So what you’re doing when you start getting into very specific discussions is you’re basically telling the positively oriented source to get lost. You’re not going to use that source anymore; you’re going to use a source that can answer specific questions.
Or other ego things have to do with, I always know my source. I’m familiar with my source, I could not possibly be mistaken. Or, I want to make money with this contact. There are all kinds of ways to get tempted, and I think temptation is a good word—to look at what’s tempting a person.
Yet another way to mess up a contact is to have fear. People have messed up one contact after another fearing what’s to come. Oh my God, it’s all going to splat on the windshield of life. We’re bugs, we’ve had it. Sometime down the road we’re toast. So you ask about that and you start getting information like, be sure to include a cow among your group so that you’ll have a source of milk when everything else falls apart.
Jim And pack diapers. For the kids.
Carla Yeah, I’ve seen both.
Jim Ra said it wasn’t the specificity of the questions that was the problem, it was the importance placed on the specificity. Every now and then we got specific information just because we had a question along that line, but we didn’t pursue it and think it was really important.
Carla Very good point.
Gary So, you began to respond by saying that if it’s the desire to answer those questions, it’s the instrument wanting to answer those questions. That seems to suggest that there’s more human volition, and more human, say, on the part of the instrument than would otherwise seem is the case.
I would think that the human instrument, for the most part, is kind of standing out of the way and allowing the source to determine whether or not, and how, the source will answer that question.
Are you saying that in that equation, the human is saying “yes” or “no” to the question as well?
Carla I think that in a lot of cases, the human is over identifying with the channeled source. When the channeled source says, “I don’t know,” it has no bearing on the instrument at all, but I think there have been many a channel that felt that it did, and that it would reflect on how good a channel they were. If you were a really good channel, you would always get an answer.
It never bothered me if I got, I don’t know. I blatted out, “I don’t know,” and that was the end of it.
Gary So the instrument, hearing the question, can actively and simultaneously desire an answer, even if the source doesn’t have it, and thereby—
Carla Absolutely. And the instrument, when it’s got opinions—one particular person I’m thinking of had this problem repeatedly. I was unable to affect it at all. And again, the instrument felt that I was being very critical, and unduly so, when I said that its desire to express its own opinions about politics and the state of the world was getting in the way of his channeling because it came out as channeling, and it never would be. It was not a pure channel at all the way it was coming out. It was almost like a psychic reading on the near future, very specific and very political. It just took away from the purity of the channeling. It lowered the vibration of the channeling overall to the point where I could not work with this person after—I think I tried three times to channel with the person and I had to give it up.
Gary Would you say, during the process of your own channeling, that part of your brain is assessing and evaluating the merit of the question being asked, or are you stepping aside completely and allowing the source to make that determination?
Carla Oh, honey, I wish I could say I never do that, but I do. I’m such a critic and I really have to watch it every moment of every day to make sure that it’s not Carla the Critic that’s stepping up to the plate instead of Carla the Supporter, Carla Who Could Channel, Carla Who Could Teach, or whatever. Because Carla the Critic is just mean. I don’t mean to be mean, but ruthless.
Gary Say it how it is.
Carla Say it how I think it is anyway.
Gary So even for a seasoned channel with many years of experience under her belt, there’s still difficulty in keeping yourself completely out of the equation?
Carla Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Not that I don’t do it; I think I’m pretty successful, but the temptation is always there.
Gary Have you guys ever knowingly channeled a negative entity?
Carla No.
Jim No.
Gary In the early 1990s I believe, you initiated a series of Channeling Intensive Workshops designed to teach others to channel Confederation sources, but you brought those to a close for a long time. Why was that?
Carla [to Jim] Why was that? Do you remember?
Jim I think we were having some problems with people not listening to what you had to say: not to try it on their own without any group around, without an anchor channel. You were the one who was the anchor channel, the experienced channel, and we had a couple of people go off on their own and try to do it.
One up in the upstairs room that you used to be in had a fugue and went into this state of consciousness where he was blathering this, that, and the other. We all had to go up there and sit with him and settle him down and calm him down and—
Carla It was physical—lay hands on him and pull him back into himself. It was a scary half hour or so. It could have gone worse.
Then there was one that committed suicide eventually, and then there was another one that ended up in a mental hospital. And all of these people had started to practice channeling on their own.5
Gary The first individual that you mentioned who didn’t follow your protocols and channeled on his own and was blathering, what sort of content was coming through him or her.
Carla Aggrandized to himself, “I will take care of everything, you’ll never have to worry again in your life, I will take care of you.”
Gary I thought I recall hearing about an incident where someone was saying some really aggressive, negative things.
Carla Well, that was another case. There was another case that was like that but that’s not the one I was thinking of when we talked about the fugue. [to Jim] Can you think of anything this guy said other than what I suggested?
Jim No, he was into the Japanese culture so he was trying to mimic the accent that comes with the . . . there was a certain contact that we used to get—
Carla Oh, you mean Yada! I Yada. Yeah.
Jim Anyway, he was mimicking things that he’d heard.
Gary My memory, and it’s been a while since I’ve heard about that, was that you were a bit spooked by what transpired so you shut down the effort to teach channeling.
Carla I just felt that if people wouldn’t listen to me, that I was introducing temptation into their lives that they couldn’t handle, and that it might snap back and hurt them. I did not want to hurt people. It took me a long time to get over that fear and begin to trust again that it was okay to run through my little teaching effort. And it has been okay since then. I’ve had—how many cycles have I had, four? Four times that I’ve done the workshop?
Gary At least six or so individual workshops, or seven. I’m not sure how many cycles it was divided up into.
Carla Anyway, at least four different groups, maybe more.
Gary I asked that question also to highlight that there are very real dangers with channeling with very real consequences when not doing it properly.
Carla Yeah, I think the guy that you’re thinking of was the one that ended up blasting me, right? Messed up the radio, every time he walked past the radio, it’d go shh—have all this static.
Gary I don’t remember hearing about that. He was the father of a female friend of yours.
Carla Oh, the father. Yeah, that was the one that was in the fugue.
Gary I thought I remember hearing about somebody writhing around on the living room floor saying, “We’re going to get you,” or—
Jim It could have been. It’s hard to remember after all these years,
Carla Long life, but this [particular] guy was writhing on the floor but he wanted to take care of us. It’s funny, you know, that really is an extremely positive thing—the desire to help somebody, the desire to make things okay, the desire to let somebody know that you think they’re worth protecting, that you think their job is good. It ends up being scarily negative simply because it’s so out of control and harmful to the person doing it.
Gary It’s an enhancement of the instrument’s identity. It’s saying I’M going to do something.
Carla Right. This source had completely obliterated the person that was channeling. It had taken over completely and that’s a scary thing. I’m so glad that we were able to bring him back. He’s a wonderful guy. Couldn’t be a nicer fellow, couldn’t be a more intelligent person, but intelligence has its own problems because then you think, well, I don’t need to listen to what she’s saying. She’s wrong. I can handle this. I can work on my own. That advice is not meant for me because I am too smart and too clever and too with it to have to be limited like that. It’s not true. No matter how smart you are (and I’m smart enough), no matter how clever you are (I won’t say I’m clever), but no matter what wonderful things you’ve got going for you, the negative entities involved in staying close to a group like this, looking for an opportunity—I would not give that entity opportunities because they can hurt you.
Gary Your intellect is not what’s guarding you.
Carla No. There’s a difference between fearing it and acting appropriately, and I think acting appropriately in a world of light and dark, positive and negative, is to follow the protocols that I suggest: stay with a group. Stay with a group with an experienced channel that has a certain measure of protection for you. Any kind of a group evens out your vibrations, makes you all better than you are. That’s the beauty of a group.
Gary We probably already covered this question, but in the event that there’s anything new to glean here, what’s the difference between the “narrow-band” channeling that typified the Ra contact, and the conscious channeling that forms the vast majority of L/L’s channeled work?
Carla Well, as near as I can tell, it’s the way that energy comes in. I guess it’s characteristic of each density that there would be a certain . . . from here to here [indicates a distance between her hands] . . . that much of a difference possible in the bandwidths, and then fourth density like this and fifth density more like this, and then sixth density, narrow. It’s just that sixth density is different enough from third density that you have to filter out a tremendous amount of third-density stuff in order to be able to pick up sixth-density information.
Gary In the case of channeling sixth-density entities, at least Ra, the instrument, you, were completely out of your physical body.
Carla Apparently I couldn’t have done it consciously.
Gary So it’s essentially as if Ra is in the room with you and you’re hearing Ra directly without human interference, without the passing through—
Carla Apparently Ra was just taking over my vocal apparatus and using it.
Jim They were not in her body. They were using it from, what we would say, a distance.
Gary So the body was very much an instrument—a radio, a microphone for them. By contrast in the conscious channeling the instrument is aware of what’s coming through them.
Carla Yeah, and in conscious channeling you can shut it down at any time if you don’t think it’s going well. I have been known to do that.
Gary And in both cases there are still the requirements to live what’s coming through you and to do the challenging and tuning. Actually you didn’t do the precise same methods that you did for the Ra contact.
Carla I’m not saying you have the responsibility of mimicking them—you just need to be your own self and take in that which you can and express that as it pertains to you.
Jim Whatever your best effort is, is the effort you need to make.
Gary And you should definitely take credit for what is coming through you.
[laughter]
Carla Never.
Gary What is the difference between outer planes and inner planes channeling?
Carla Well, the difference is between channeling from the Holy Spirit, channeling from the spirit within, inner planes, staying within this density; and outer planes channeling energy from elsewhere, which could be from different densities, probably would be from densities other than our own.
Gary Is internal vs. external applicable?
Carla Yes, that’s fair.
Ken So it doesn’t have anything to do with the planet? Like inner planes doesn’t just mean within the Earth and outer planes means from out—is there a physical boundary to that or is it more of a metaphysical, or both?
Carla Well, yeah, there’s a physical boundary to Earth’s inner planes. They’re all within third-density Earth.
Gary So inner planes—you can still be channeling outside of your personal mind/body/spirit complex, but still within the Earth’s inner planes.
Carla Oh, very much so. A lot of people channel other entities that have been wonderful and inspirations within their own lives and then they’re channeled by someone and that channeling is valued. I’m trying to think of a good example. A lot of Indian gurus are channeled by their students after they die. Is it Maharshi that has had so many that feel that he’s been their guru even though he passed on long ago?
Jim You mean Yogananda?
Carla Yogananda? I don’t know. There are quite a few of them that the people that are their students feel that this is their guru and the guru has long since departed the physical. But he’s very real on the inner planes to the student and in effect, is channeled.
Gary So you could almost say that there are inner-inner planes that include your higher self, maybe your guidance system?
Carla Yes.
Gary Then there are the inner planes that are part of the Earth’s inner planes, but still very local to you, you might say.
Carla Right, and safe, which the outer planes’ channeling is not. Safe because you’re within the Holy Spirit which protects you as a soul. You have a spirit within—whatever you want to call it. I call it the Holy Spirit because I’m a Christian, and I feel and know that spirit as an individual essence that is able to express very helpful thoughts to me. As a matter of fact, all my channelings from the Holy Spirit are from Holly, my name for the Holy Spirit.6
Gary Highlighting another difference: the outer plane contacts require a minimum of three people in the group. Inner planes can be done on your own.
Carla Yeah. Jim and I did the Holly channeling. That was when I was practicing tuning and challenging and I’d tune and then I’d challenge and then I’d have the Holy Spirit. And it just seemed rude to say, “Well, thanks.” So I’d say, “Give me a thought for the day.” So the Holy Spirit, Holly, would share a thought for the day, and some of those channelings from the Holy Spirit are really beautiful. So we had, what, close to 500 or 600 of them because I’d been doing this for three or four years before I decided that I’d gotten everything out of it that I could. We picked a year’s worth, plus a day because of leap year, so we have 366 readings in that little book—one for each day. So you can take it and start on January 1 and just go through the year letting that be your companion for a year. Many people have told me that’s the way they’ve used it, and they’ve found it helpful. It’s just neat. You can also do an I-Ching and ask, “What’s my advice for the day?” And then open it at random and see what you get.
Gary What would you say constitutes transient information?
Jim Material that doesn’t have any lasting value. It’s only good for the moment. Ten thousand years from now it won’t mean anything to anybody.
Carla Crude examples of it are who’s going to win a horserace or who’s going to win a football game or where the next Earth change is going to take place—whether it’s a tsunami or earthquake or what. All those things matter until they don’t matter and they’ve happened and they’re old news. That’s transient. Here today, gone tomorrow. Eternally useful wisdom, the eternal wisdom, remains the same always, and that’s the realm of Spirit.
Gary And if you find that you have a desire for what is termed transient information you should not be seeking that from outer planes sources.
Carla I think a person who is really hungry for transient info probably ought to work with the astrology because of the fact that the stars do have an effect on us, and if you’re a good astrologer you can really read a lot in a reading specific to one person to one time for that person. You can do readings for people that are very helpful.
Gary In the first question of session 22, Ra says:
RA Each time, as you would put it, that we perform this working our social memory complex vibrational distortion meshes more firmly with this instrument’s unconscious distortions towards service. Thus we are becoming a part of this instrument’s vibratory complex and it a part of ours. This occurs upon the unconscious level, the level whereby the mind has gone down through to the roots of consciousness which you may call cosmic. 22.1
Do you think after multiple decades of channeling these sources that the “meshing” Ra describes continued, creating a blending of identities between the sources you channeled and yourself?
Carla Yes, I do.
Gary Not of course that you can take credit for that information but there’s still that—
Carla I do feel the presence of unseen friends, let’s put it that way.
Gary Do you perceive that you have improved in channeling over the years?
Carla I’ve done a certain amount of improvement. I know I’ve got more improvement to go if I can just open to it.
Gary So you’ve always maintained a beginner’s mind?
Carla That’s right. I’ve always retained that. I have never been satisfied with my work. Every single time I finish a channeling my first thought is, I just missed so much.
Gary So it feels like you’re just scraping the surface of what you’re receiving?
Carla Yeah, there are things that are so worthwhile, and I just take the surface up and go on.
Gary If you could plumb deeper into what you’re receiving, how do you think you would achieve that?
Carla If I knew how, I would do it.
Gary So if you guys discovered a genie that could answer any and all questions that you had about how channeling works and what happens during the process of channeling that you haven’t previously known, what questions would you two ask about channeling?
Carla How can I do it better?
Jim Yeah.
Gary What she said?
Jim What she said.
[laughter]
Notes
[1] Jim retired his vocal channeling service on September 7, 2003—in the midst of a Sunday meditation, actually. However, after Carla passed in April, 2015, Jim and a good friend, Stephen T., resumed the channeling service in order to keep the flame alive. And as is discussed elsewhere in this chapter, Jim’s assessment of his own channeling was not that, shall we say, objective. ↩
[2] The inability of the instrument to take credit for the working is similar to that of the healer: ↩
RA It is not by example that the healer does the working. The working exists in and of itself. The healer is only the catalyst, much as this instrument has the catalysis necessary to provide the channel for our words, yet by example or exercise of any kind can take no thought for this working. 5.1
[3] Occasionally in this book I supplement Carla’s viewpoint with an alternative in order to give the reader more than one perspective to consider. This is one such case. What precisely happened in this situation is completely unknowable to me and is best known to Carla. Yet I wonder if this little boy’s effect on Carla may not have been a consequence of being a skilled negative entity, but rather and simply a concentration, on his part, of intense negative feeling that had some sort of psychic impact on Carla. Food for thought. ↩
[4] The “information which is ever and always the same”: ↩
RA We have watched your group. We have been called to your group, for you have a need for the diversity of experiences in channeling which go with a more intensive, or as you might call it, advanced approach to the system of studying the patterns of the illusions of your body, your mind, and your spirit, which you call seeking the truth. We hope to offer you a somewhat different slant upon the information which is always and ever the same. 1.0
[5] Jim believes that the individual who committed suicide and the individual who ended up in a mental hospital happened in the 1970s, before Jim had become close with Carla and Don. He doesn’t know exactly what happened, only that he had heard of the incidents. He cannot speak to the strength of connection between their attempting to channel on their own and their eventual fates. Likely attempting to channel unsafely only exacerbated preexisting conditions. ↩
[6] Carla stresses how safe it is to channel inner planes entities. To the best of our understanding it is indeed quite safe to channel ones higher self or personal guidance system. In fact many third-density entities likely and often tap into these sources without quite realizing it, whether in moments of creating art, or feeling inspiration, or experiencing a deeper connection. Due to the safety of this type of channeling, the requisite precautions for an outer planes contact (e.g.: a three-person group, challenging, etc.) may not be so necessary. ↩
In Carla’s reply, however, she seems to indicate that it is also just as safe to channel any source within the inner planes which is outside of one’s personal guidance system. Given that the inner planes are populated with a great variety of intelligences, both positive and negative, we would caution anyone attempting to channel an inner planes source to engage in some precautionary safety measures. Always challenge the source. Always tune. And it is probably helpful, if possible, to channel with the support of a group.