DAY 6 · Part VI: Personal Biography
CHAPTER 27
Don Elkins’
Final Two Years
Author’s Note: In Book V of the original publications of The Law of One material Carla and Jim do exquisite and heartfelt work telling the story of the Ra contact, with special focus on one of that story’s most important aspects, that which brought the Ra contact to an end: the decline and death of Don Elkins. To the reader interested in knowing more about that tragic episode I would encourage reading Book V and using the following chapter of this book only as supplementary information. Book V is by far the more focused, intensive, comprehensive, and eloquent telling.
Yet, there was more that could be explored than Book V offered. I had had the privilege over the years of hearing stories about the great (and human) Don Elkins, stories that I lamented readers weren’t getting the benefit of hearing, including moments in these final two years that weren’t explicitly covered in the course of the fifth book. It took me about ten years of being in Louisville before I worked up the courage to sit down with Carla and Jim and ask them for a full account of that final and fateful day.
Carla and Jim were then, as they were with anyone who asked, open books. And just as they had given me the time on that day, they were very open to this particular interview, granting their permission the first, second, and third times I asked if it was okay. Though Don’s death represented one of the most traumatic and heartbreaking episodes in their lives—so much so that it broke Carla’s incarnation in two and sent her on a journey through a spiritual desert for seven years afterward—they recognize that it was a chapter in a larger book, a chapter inseparable from the story of their journey and inseparable from their extraordinary conversation with Ra.
As such, it has its place, especially, with respect to the reader, in terms of serving as a sign highlighting the dangers and pitfalls of this type of work, about which Ra says, “The missteps in the night are oh! so easy.” Hopefully this chapter may offer you a fuller account.
We can only say to you that the more you rest in trust and faith, the more room that you give coincidence to work for you. The stronger your belief that all is well, the more quickly patterns will smooth out and reveal that, indeed, all is well. And, conversely, the more a fear is fo-cused upon the more that fear becomes real, to the point where, as each of you has seen in the past, this self-fulfilling prophecy does occur and that which is most feared comes to be because it has been the focus for energy within the self, and it has created its own vortex and started to lay out its talons into your life. – Q’uo, February 4, 2002
Gary In this section we explore the final two years of the life of Don Elkins, 1982–1984.
I’d like to walk through the onset of Don’s descent into mental illness and the eventual end of his life. We can use the attempts to relocate to Atlanta as milestones in Don’s final two years.
You pinpoint the beginning of the difficulties that lead to Don’s death as happening in the fall of 1982 when you began searching for a house in Atlanta. What happened then?
Jim Let’s see . . . that was when we saw the hawk, after we got back from Atlanta, right? And we had seen a house that we thought was the place to be. I’m trying to remember which house that was, though.
Carla I think it was the one that I wanted to clean up the carpet on. It was only three miles from the airport.
Jim Anyway, when we got back, a big hawk with probably a four or five-foot wingspan landed in front of our house just after we had gone into the house from getting out of the car. It landed, and then it got up and took off. And it was just so big and so obvious. And Carla and I took that as a positive sign because hawks had always been confirmations of the line of thought we were on, or the thinking, or action we were anticipating—a hawk was a symbol of, yeah, that’s right.
But Don took it differently. He thought that since we had already decided that was probably the place we wanted to be, that the hawk for some reason—
Carla And the hawk had his wings down, Don said, rather than up. We didn’t see where the hawk had his wings, but, you know, we didn’t understand how it could be anything but confirmation, because that’s all it had ever been.
Jim He took it as a warning, though.
Carla Yeah he took it as, don’t do it. And he didn’t do it. He tried and tried, and he tried to get the Ra group to tell him.
Jim And soon as Ra saw that he wasn’t picking up the message, they just backed off, pretty much. They gave him two or three convoluted explanations of the value of the meaning of the hawk, and if you look carefully they were saying, “Yeah, that means do it.” But he would never pick up those connotations.1
Carla And they would never interfere with his free will. They went right to the bounds of free will and stopped cold.
Gary They said specifically, didn’t they, that any dwelling which this group chooses is permissible to us or can be made able . . . ?2
Jim Right.
Gary So you return from Atlanta. You see this hawk. You guys interpret it one way. Don interprets it another way. Was that the first instance that Don read the environment around him with so negative an interpretation?
Carla Yeah, I think that really marks the beginning of what we noticed as unusual reactions to everything.
Gary Why was it that you were searching for a house in Atlanta to begin with?
Carla Well, he was tired all the time. There’s no question about it—he didn’t make any bones about it—he was just flat weary. And Jim and I both felt that if he didn’t have this commuting . . . you know, he would get in the car and he would do a half-hour trip to the Louisville airport. He would get in a plane and fly for an hour and be in Atlanta. And then he’d be able to go to work.
Jim He was based in Atlanta. That’s where he started his work.
Carla That’s where he worked. So we thought, well, if he didn’t have that commuting to do, that would be one less thing.
So we were looking for a place close to the Atlanta airport, but Don always felt that every single house was unacceptable. It was unacceptable for this reason, that reason. He didn’t want to bring us into a small or dingy or . . . most houses that are inexpensive are in what Don called “the combat zone” where there’s a higher degree of crime than there would be at another place where there is a higher rent. And Don was afraid of putting me into any situation that he considered the combat zone.
And this was very unfortunate, because I have never had any fear in my life. I have walked around in the worst possible places in Louisville, Kentucky, when I was first married, and nobody ever bothered me. And the one time a guy did bother me, he couldn’t go through with it, and ended up dropping me at a bus stop and making sure I got home okay.
I was always taken care of. I was always safe, and I did not have any reason to encourage Don in this line of thought. Nevertheless, he had it. And he ended up getting a place that was like that—that was in a higher rent district that was all the way across Atlanta. After the Olympics were held there, everybody found out about how terrible the traffic is in downtown Atlanta. To get from the north side to the south side of Atlanta is excruciatingly hard.
Jim Took as long to fly from Louisville to Atlanta, ironically.
Carla Or longer. So we didn’t get any net gain by moving to Atlanta. In fact we really got a net loss because he was no longer in Louisville where all his buddies were.
Gary So this is a little bit ahead in our chronology. We’re still in the fall of ’82, the initial search for the house.
So your reasons were that it took him an hour and a half just to get to work: thirty minutes to drive to the Louisville airport, Standiford Field, then another hour down to Atlanta.
Prior to seeing the houses in Atlanta, was he initially enthusiastic about the idea? Or at least in favor of it?
Jim Yeah, he was in favor of it because he was hoping it would make it easier for him. It was obvious that he was worn out by all the travel.
Gary So he was signed on, and you three—as a unified group—thought this would be the best.
Jim Yeah.
Carla Mm-hmm.
Gary And then after getting there, then he starts showing signs of . . .
Carla Worsening illness. Yes.
Gary So you go to Atlanta. It doesn’t prove fruitful, and you can’t find a house that suits Don’s needs. This is somewhere in the Ra contact in the late 90s session numbers. So you return to Louisville. He hasn’t found a location that works for him, and he has various reasons for that, all of which seem to have a lot of anxiety and fear underpinning them. So you return, and Don sees the hawk that he interprets in a negative light. Can you walk us from that point until June of 1983 when he tried to purchase the house you were renting from its owner?
Carla I think it was just another attempt to try to buy a house and discovering, in each case after a lot of anxiety and discussion, that it just wasn’t going to work.
Jim Our owner of the house where we had the Ra contact wanted an extra $5,000 for the house that Don just couldn’t see paying.
Carla Well, you’re jumping ahead there a little bit. Luther wanted to sell the house—he was going to sell it either to Don or somebody else. So they agreed upon a price of $105,000, and $5,000 was put into escrow. Well, Luther wanted that $5,000, so he raised the price to $110,000. And this is after everything had been signed. Don thought that was sneaky and wrong. And it was. But Luther was getting away with it.
Don hired a lawyer and the lawyer did a lousy job, and I ended up, after Don died, having to give Luther $3,000 of the $5,000 just to get him off my back. I could have given him the whole five, but there was something in me that just said no. I’ll give him what I need to get him gone, but I’m going to keep some—that’s Don’s money.
Anyway, it was unfortunate in the extreme because that house was perfect for Jim, me, and Don. There was part of the house that had Jim’s office, Jim’s bedroom, and an outside door—so that was basically his little house. He was satisfied with that.
And then you went in to a screened porch that joined the two like an L, and the rest of the L was Don and me. There were four bedrooms in it, and a great big 32’ living room, a great kitchen, a great dining room, and everything that you could ever need for living. And we enjoyed our joined lives, Jim, and Don and me, beautifully, because Jim had a chance to be alone, and Don and I had a chance to be together alone. And then we would get together and be very companionable and have a good time watching TV or eating or whatever we did together—go see a movie. Jim would go back to his and we would go back to ours—it was just so easy and so right. And you don’t find too many houses that are organized like that; as a matter of fact, it’s hard to find one that is anything like that.
And we also had a huge amount of outdoors, compared to most people’s yards, which are less than an acre. We had—how many acres?
Jim Six.
Carla We had six acres, and it was sort of like shotgun six, which made it bigger, in a way, because you’d go back . . . there was the near garden, and then there was a fence. And then there was a pasture, and then woods, and I think even a creek. It was a quite a ways before you ever saw a neighbor. And Jim loved that; he absolutely loved that. He would disappear into those woods and fields, and he loved to take care of all that. It was just perfect for Jim to do hard physical labor, as Ra suggested.3 There was a lot of hard physical labor to do to keep up a six-acre place that, you know—things would happen to it. Limbs blow down, and trees die and stuff. So Jim was always doing something. And he was content. We were all so content and perfect there we should have just left it alone, but we didn’t have the eyesight—the foresight—to see that.
So, we kept thinking that it would be easier for Don in Atlanta. What we didn’t realize was that it was very, very expensive to rent or buy things in Atlanta. It was more expensive than here in Louisville. Almost anywhere that you would go was more expensive than what we were paying. Made us look, like, oh my god, we’re really gonna have to take a bite to do this.
And that was hard for Don. It wasn’t that he was a miser, but he always felt like he needed to save as much money as possible. His attitude was that you never knew what was going to happen.
Jim Eastern Air Lines was starting to fail then. He didn’t know how long they were going to be in business.
Carla Yeah, he was worried about even having a job. He was way ahead of his time; it took 11 years for Eastern Air Lines to fail after Don died.* But he could just see it coming. He had such clear vision.
So everything worried him. I guess you would say he was paranoid—that was what the doctors said—that he had some paranoid delusions . . .
Gary Later on.
Carla Later on. So it was a natural element of his personality, but it sort of got out of hand. It got worse and worse and worse and . . . there was no outcome that we could think of that Don felt was a good outcome. Everything was bad.
Gary So everything was going smoothly as far you could tell from outside appearances up to the fall of 1982 and that place on Watterson Trail suited all three of you—it was perfect—but you were willing to let it go in order to try to find some way to maximize Don’s experience and comfort.
Carla Mm-hmm. And when Don couldn’t reconcile with Luther over that other $5,000, he wouldn’t give it to him. He absolutely refused. So Luther decided he wouldn’t sell it to Don at all, he would sell it to somebody else. So he gave us notice that we had to get out of the house. So we had to move some place.
So it got to become a little bit more urgent that we find a good place. And Don was gone a lot besides his working time, just looking up places that might be okay to live and finding them to be unacceptable. It kept on this way for some time.
Gary In this mix there’s also the fear that the company that he works for, Eastern Air Lines, is going to go bankrupt and out of business. Why
* Clarified in Chapter 14.
would that be of such concern to him given his résumé—wouldn’t he be able to pick up another job working for another airline?
Carla You got me, chum. I never could figure it out. It didn’t make any rational sense at all. I mean, I never could understand why he wouldn’t just accept a job behind a teaching desk. You know, he was so good at teaching, and they were desperate for people to teach pilots. He was perfect but he never would consider that either. I never could figure out why. I think he was just tired of everything.
Gary So between fall of ’82 and June of ’83 when you attempt to purchase the home you were renting from its owner, was it basically just an overabundance of worry that was showing in Don in terms of outwards sign of something happening?
Carla Yeah.
Gary Were you concerned at this point?
Carla No, not really. I mean, it was very characteristic of him to be like this. I don’t know about you [to Jim] but I didn’t really see that it was over the top until quite a ways down the line. It was just Don being Don.
Gary No big red flags?
Carla No.
Gary And Don being Don, he’s not telling you what’s happening inside.
Carla Right, nothing of what’s happening.
Gary So you are evicted as a result of this conflict with the landlord and you have to get out . . . do you find some place in Louisville to stay?
Jim No, we continued looking for a place in Atlanta. Eventually we found one.
Gary That doesn’t happen until November of ’83.
Jim We weren’t evicted. He said he was going to sell it but he hadn’t sold it yet. So we had time to find a place. And we did.
Gary Okay. How did you land on a place in Atlanta that seemed to satisfy Don?
Carla He chose it. It was on a lake. It was out in the country. For some reason it suited him when nothing else did. It was expensive. It was fancy.
It was full of stuff we didn’t need, had no way to use. [laughs]
Gary Would it not have been your first choice?
Jim It was a summer cabin—a glorified summer cabin. 17-foot ceiling in the kitchen, living room; in the winter the heat was all up there. It was chilly.
Carla Actually I got a couple of places on my toes that were because my feet had been frozen on that cement floor under the carpet. I have a tendency to walk around in my socks and I didn’t realize it but my feet weren’t just cold, they were frozen. [laughs] They were frostbitten. I got ulcers on my feet, on my toes.
Gary So you guys could see the downsides to this particular choice but didn’t—
Carla Yeah even though it was beautiful. We never did unpack. We made a wall out of our boxes—
Jim A pile.
Carla And we blocked off about half of this huge living space so that we could have some feeling of a room—a home, you know, sofas and furniture—a room like we were used to. We coped, you know, but shoot, it was out in the country. There really wasn’t a good Mom and Pop nearby.4 We were desperate looking for a place to eat so that Jim didn’t have to cook—Don still wouldn’t let me cook. And it was not that easy, let’s put it that way. I had it the easiest of anybody—I found a place to sing, I found a church, I found a jazzercise group—all in the first week. And that was my life pretty much, you know, going to church, singing in the choir, or creating a choir, as it turned out.
Jim Yeah, you were the choir.
Carla Yeah, I was the choir! I was the member of this little church—
Jim Little church.
Carla —for the time that we were there. Tiny little church. It could hold 50 or 60 people. It was a mission church, and it was a beautiful place to worship out in the country. Anyway, so I just went on with my life, doing my routine, walking my walk, doing my jazzercise, getting my exercise done, going to church and singing in this little singing group, and basically surfing sort of on the surface of things, making all of that be okay.
And it was okay—as long as I was with Don, I was fine. I was with Jim, too, and he was wonderful. And Jim was much more of a companion to me in Georgia than he’d ever been before, because Don hived-in more and more, and the two of us, Jim and me, would want to go out like to eat, or just to drive around, or just to get out of the house, and Don wouldn’t want to go. And that was so incredibly unlike his usual behavior—he was the one that was restless and would just go out and drive around.
Jim He had to call in sick on some of these trips for the first time that I’d ever seen when we were there.
Carla And we couldn’t really see that he was sick. He didn’t act sick, but he acted . . . oh, unhappy in the extreme—just so sure that everything had gone to pot, everything was wrong and never would be right again. It was hard—hard to hear and hard to live with.
Jim So that’s when you said that you would be the strong and decisive one, and he could be small and foolish, and that’s when the deleterious energy exchange happened.
Carla Yeah.
Jim Which is very mysterious and quite significant in what happened to Don.
Gary Why is it that your belongings remained all boxed up?
Jim Because we were ready to move at any moment. He said we’ve got to move as soon as possible.
Carla Every single month Don would say, “This is our last month. Tell the landlord that we’re leaving by the end of the month.” I would do so. He was the boss. And then by the end of the month I would have to call the landlord and say, “Well looks like we’re not moving yet!” And the landlord is getting really tired of this and finally is like, “Look, my family wants to be there in the summer. You’re gonna have to move.” Here we go again! [laughs]
So we were off hunting for houses again to move out of the house we’d moved into four or five months before. So I don’t know how fast you want us to go but that continued unbroken until Don picked the house that we were in now.
Jim We had one Ra session there, number 106. Don and Carla both were able to ginn themselves up† and get in good enough shape to have a session. We had a really nice room up on the second floor, and we had a session.
Gary So we haven’t left your time period in Atlanta yet but to backtrack a moment: The search for the house in Atlanta had begun in fall of ’82. June of ’83, the conflict with the Louisville landlord began. November of ’83 you move to Atlanta, but during the course of 1983 you had five sessions. I know a lot of that was due to the frailty of Carla’s health, but did the instability with the housing situation also play a part?
Jim No.
Gary Was it Don’s mental situation that played a part?
Jim No.
Gary So it was just strictly Carla’s health and—
Carla They were terribly worried about me, more so than I was, for sure.
Gary So you felt that long spans of time were needed for Carla to recuperate before she had the strength to do another session.
Carla Yeah, they would make decisions. It would drive me crazy. I didn’t want to put off the sessions, but, you know, I wasn’t the one who was looking at me from the outside in. Both of the men made that very clear to me that I needed to give to them the power to choose when to stop me from having a session because I had no sense. And it was true! I just wanted to have sessions and see Don happy again. To me that was everything.5
Gary Given what you’ve described of your dynamic and your desire to make a home for him, to make him happy, and here’s the single-most thing that brings him totally out of that melancholy, or as much as he can come—
Carla [lamentingly] And I’m not allowed to do it.
Gary So you move down there and discover that you’re on the north side of Atlanta, the airport’s on the south side, and it takes him even longer to
† An expression that means, roughly, to get oneself into shape; to motivate or enliven oneself for the task at hand.
commute to the airport from that Atlanta house than it would have from the Louisville house.
Carla Plus the fact that unlike Louisville, which is almost always drivable, Atlanta was prey to ice storms and there were many a day in the winter that you really couldn’t drive on the streets.
Jim And the traffic by itself in the best of weather was just horrendous.
Gary So Don’s state of being poised to move at any month caused everything to remain in boxes.
Jim Not everything. Some things we had had to have.
Carla About half I guess.
Jim But most of it, yeah, it was still in boxes.
Carla Uh-huh. I got to the point where I was so allergic to the boxes that if I saw one, I freaked out.
Jim Afterward, once we had returned to Louisville, if she saw one of those little blue moving labels on a box it had to go. [laughs]
Carla I said, “Ah! Get it out of my sight!”
Gary This house in Atlanta, is this the same house that you arrived at midnight or so and did the salting ritual, Jim?
Jim In a U-Haul truck, yeah, with our first load.
Carla It is, uh-huh, with these incredibly high windows that he had to crawl around in at midnight, dark of night.
Gary So even before the deleterious energy transfer, Don is worrying more and more that there’s going to be a bad outcome in some way.
Jim Ra mentioned in that one session that we had6 that Don was undergoing an initiation. I think, just my personal opinion, that the initiation had started a few months earlier judging by his behavior. He was worrying about Eastern Air Lines, worrying about supporting us, and worrying about Carla’s condition. All of that was playing on him. I think that it was something to do with his initiation that was causing him to respond as he did.
Gary Speculation only, of course, but could you guess what that initiation entailed, or why it was there?
Jim No, no, but I know that with the initiation in mind, with the fact that there was this deleterious energy exchange that made it more difficult and probably a lot of targets of opportunity for our negative friend of fifth density. That must have given that fellow all kinds of targets to hit. I just couldn’t imagine Don being able to survive that. Looking in hindsight, I think he did well to last as long as he did.
Gary Was he vocal about his worries at this time?
Jim Oh yeah.
Carla “This is the worst day ever.” We heard that every day.
Gary That was already happening when you were in that house in Atlanta?
Carla Yeah, in Georgia.
Gary You described waking up to him sitting at the end of your bed. That happened in Georgia as well?
Carla No, that didn’t happen until we got back here in Louisville. I don’t know, for some reason that galvanized him—he got back to Louisville and we thought, oh, this is so great, he’s found the best house in the world, it’s so gorgeous, it’s wonderful, and shoot, we can fix it up, you know, we’ve fixed up stuff before, it’s not a problem.” And other than that we just thought it was wonderful.‡
Well, Don was freaking out, we found out, because he couldn’t see out of any of the windows to see who was coming. The only place in the house, you know . . . the only bedroom that he could look out the windows from was the one that looks out over . . .
Jim Yeah, the one that Austin’s in now.
Carla Yeah, the one that he stayed in, that David stayed in when he was there, and that you were in for a time. That one. Austin’s in it now.7 And you could see out for some way, but you couldn’t really see a satisfactory view there; that wasn’t the money view that was looking out on one of the neighbors, but at least it was clear of trees and you know, all the rest of it. I think he had bought it when everything was bare, and when we came back in April, the leaves were all greening out, and he
‡ Carla is speaking of their current home that Don purchased in the fall of 1983.
couldn’t see through the leaves in summer time. I mean take a look out these windows. There’s just nothing but green.
I thought that he’d choose this room that we’re now in, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, and I thought, well, then he’s bound to pick the one upstairs with that big closet and more room than any other of the upstairs rooms. No, he picked the one where he had a clear view, and it was a small room. It wasn’t like him to pick a room that small.
And he wanted to live in it with me. And that absolutely terrified me because that was so unlike him, he always demanded—must have, absolutely must have—his own room. Did not want to be in the same bedroom with me. You think it would make me happy, but I didn’t want him to change. I wanted my baby back. I didn’t care that that was the way he was involved—being a loner and having his own room; that was Don, that was fine! Go get your room. And it terrified me to have him sitting on the bed in my room saying that he wanted to move in with me. That wasn’t like him. I didn’t see Don in there. I was having a whole lot of trouble just making it all okay.
Gary While in Atlanta he’s expressing this worry, this is the worst day ever, etc., did you guys try to speak to that in any way, and encourage him otherwise?
Carla Well, sure, we’d say, “We don’t see why you see that, we see it differently.” And we’d try to get him out of the house and feeling better and pepping up and so forth, and we didn’t have a prayer.
Gary So no amount of rational analysis or emotional appeal . . .
Carla [to Jim] Do you remember ever being successful?
Jim No, his frame of mind was not amenable to rational or logical arguments; he had his feeling and his thoughts, and those had always been first and foremost in his mind and actions. In the past it had worked just fine, but now he was, like I said, he was under this initiation. There had been a problem with the transfer; our negative friend was having his way, so it was just harder to communicate anything positive to Don.
Carla I think he thought in his heart of hearts, too, that I might be drifting towards being fonder of Jim than I had been. I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word jealousy because he was too noble a guy for that, but I think that that kind of feeling was in there in the mix somewhere. And I never knew about it; I never guessed about it, because it would never occur to me that I would be anything but his baby—that was always our unspoken relationship. I didn’t think that you had to speak about it. I didn’t know. If I had known I would have been glad to reassure him, but this was Don—he didn’t need reassurance. But I have a feeling looking back on it that, somewhere in there, he just started being paranoid about Jim and me, too.
Gary While in Atlanta we haven’t discussed how your next, and still current, home came to be. You received a surprise call from Don, right?
Jim You got the call, right?
Carla Yeah, he called and he said, “Well, I bought a house.”
Jim [laughs]
Carla And I said, “Don—!” I couldn’t believe it. Because he had always wanted to live in that area. He had often driven around the streets here and asked me how I felt about it, and I always felt really good about it. I thought it was a very beautiful place, you know, lots and lots of trees—sort of like living in a park. If you had a little house, you still had a lot of land. If you had a big house you might have a farm. There were a lot of wealthy people, and then there were the people who had smaller homes and not so much money, like us, but we all were sort of mixed in there together, and everybody was from the same town. Nobody made any distinction.
Gary So this was completely unlike Don to be so impulsive . . .
Carla Completely unlike—he had never bought a house in his life.
Gary And there was no consulting with you two prior to—
Carla Oh no.
Gary —he just all of a sudden, you know, you’ve got a new home.
Carla It was fait accompli.§
Gary According to my memory of your previous description of this in personal conversation, this purchase further accentuated and exacerbated his mental illness because he feared being tied down by a mortgage—he
§ fait accompli: noun: something that has been done and cannot be changed.
feared the financial constraint, and feared having others dependent on him. Did all that come into play with the purchasing of the house?
Jim Yeah. But he went ahead and did it.
Gary And then immediately afterwards has kind of a buyer’s remorse, he’s regretting it, thinking, I’ve done something terrible I shouldn’t have done.
Jim Yeah. We’re gonna have to move again as soon as possible.
Carla Yeah, we’ll fix it up and we’ll sell it after we fix it up. So we were fixing it up to sell. But neither Jim nor I wanted to sell it. We were aware that he had gotten a real deal on the house and that the rent that we were paying was no more than the rent that we were paying in Atlanta and yet we were buying a house. So it was really a good deal.
Gary So April of ’84 you move in, you have this beautiful home . . .
Come to think of it, you must have had the session (#106) in Atlanta after Don had purchased this home. Because you’re asking about this home and Ra even says to you that it’s especially blessed with, for lack of a better term, angelic presences.8
Jim Hm-mm.
Gary But you get here and he’s just—.
Carla The first time I ever saw him throw food away, he threw his hamburger in the waste basket in our little motel room and said, “We’ve made a terrible mistake.”
I’m going, “What?” And I finally I dig out the reason—that he couldn’t see anything but trees, so he didn’t feel like it was a good house because he didn’t have a good view.
Gary And you could sense the beauty and the angelic nature—
Carla I saw the angels! I would sit up there for an afternoon in that little brown loveseat that’s up there and commune and just . . . the sun would be streaming through . . . you know how it does late afternoon and, oh, it was just heaven.
[to Jim] You remember me sitting up there?
Jim Mm-hmm. Sure.
Carla Having a wonderful moment. And I was very happy there and just, you know . . . I was able to go back to my church and my friends were there. I mean it could have been the same thing with Don. You know all his friends were in Louisville, but somehow he never got out to see them like he always did before. He just stayed at home and moldered. That was tough.
Gary So he wants to move and despite your love of this place, you tried to meet that need.
Carla Yeah, I was looking for a house that we could move into from this house with every fiber of my being. The paper would come in the morning and I’d be on it. And it would occupy my attention until I checked out every single entry.
Gary And still no matter what alternative home you turned up, he would reject everyone in fear-based, worry-based thinking.
Carla I never knew why sometimes. There was this one house I remember I found . . . it had two stories and the owners had made the upper story into an apartment and rented it out so it automatically had two places to live—one for Don and me, one for Jim. And it was in Crescent Hill where I had grown up. Lovely neighborhood. And it was $15,000 cheaper than this house, so we would have had a cheaper mortgage most likely. I never knew what was wrong with that house. I never knew what was wrong with half of them. I mean, he’d make something up sometimes, he’d just, “No. No. No. Unacceptable.”
Gary I remember you telling me about a moment when, I think he’s signing the papers here, and you’re trying to communicate with him that it’s alright, we don’t have to do this.
Carla Mm-hmm. Yeah, he looked at me and there was such pain in his eyes and I think I even said it aloud, I said, “Don, if you don’t want to sign this, let’s go, and we’ll handle it, it will be okay.” Then he went down and signed it.
But it was agony, you could see it. Everything was agony for Don. Nothing was easy. Oh. My heart goes out to him just thinking about it.
Thank God I have spent many, many a time tuning for doing my channeling work. As part of my tuning process, I ask for the Holy Spirit and then I see who comes through the door for the male and female part. And Don started coming through the door soon after he died. So I was able to see him well and still being part of the work, still working with me in the channeling. His mother started coming out too, so I had Don and his mother as the two aspects, male and female, of the Holy Spirit during my tuning process. What could have been more beautiful than that? So I have lots of positive memories of Don that are more recent that reassure me that all is well with Don. But it was a very hard way to live the last year of one’s life, as miserable as he was.
Gary To pause for a moment, I’m sensing that the energy of the group is waning. Do you guys want to continue or do you want to split it off and resume tomorrow?
Jim I’m ready to go.
Carla Might as well finish. I don’t know how much more you’ve got. Might as well finish this part. No, all is well. We’re just talking about a really sad subject.
I mean, I’m not sad; I’m telling you about a sad subject. I’m okay.**
[pause]
I guess I want to make clear to you, because we just paused a minute and you asked me if everything was alright, and I want to reassure that I was telling you about a very sad part of Don’s life but I’m okay. I’m happy. I’ve worked out in my mind the rightness of all that had occurred, and I know that my beloved Don ended his life in the most noble way a person could: really intending to give his life in order to make me safe and happy for the rest of my life. That kind of wholehearted sacrifice is just, oh, it takes your heart, and I look up to this guy more than ever. He’s my hero. I just think so much of him; he’s a wonderful guy. But I have found a way to lead a wonderful life with Jim, and gone on to the second . . . really, it’s a second incarnation of my life. When Don died he really, basically, ended the first, so my life is split into two incarnations—very different incarnations.
Gary So you move to Louisville and Don’s descent into mental illness accelerates all the way up until November. What sorts of things happen during your time together?
** This is indeed sad even tragic subject matter, but the tone of the discussion itself was buoyed with the light heart despite its seemingly serious presentation.
Jim Well, he did consult a psychiatrist, and he was admitted to the mental ward of Norton Hospital—the seventh floor—and he had a psychiatrist there, Dr. Jess.
Carla Jessie.
Jim Jess Wright. And he went on vacation as soon Don got there. For the first three weeks of Don’s stay there the psychiatrist was on vacation.
Carla He was gone and nobody else handled it.
Jim So he’s just hanging out there. We went up and visited him a few times and eventually, I don’t know how long . . . how long was he there, maybe four, five weeks? It’s hard to remember.
Carla He was . . . wasn’t he there five weeks?
Jim Something like that. And then he—
Carla And he gained weight. I mean, prior to entering the hospital he had lost a lot of weight because he wasn’t eating.
Jim He realized there was something going on with him, too, so that’s why he was amenable to seeing the psychiatrist and checking himself into the hospital.
Carla But the psychiatrist was a totally null, worthless human being.
Jim But he was gone for the first few weeks.
Carla But when he was there his visits with Don constituted him sitting down and saying, “Well, would you like to talk today?” And Don would say, “No.” And he’d say okay, and he’d get up and leave. And that was the session. That was all that ever happened. Don told me that.
So he just hung out. He called me as often as he could. I couldn’t call in to him but he could call out to me, and we went to see him whenever we could—we maximized our ability to see each other. But the problem with that was that he was so far gone at this point that he cracked my ribs when I saw him and I had to be more careful after that, because he did have the capacity to hurt me!
Jim He was hugging for the first time, which was strange.
Carla Yeah, he was hugging me and he didn’t know his own strength. And he really hurt me and I just couldn’t believe it, but I realized that I had to be a little bit more careful. It broke my heart. I mean, everything about the situation was not my best day. I did not know how to deal with any of it. I was doing my doggonedest, and it was a lousy job. I look back and I think of so many things that I wish I could have done or not done, said or not said. You know, I think we all have that, but I had that in spades, with a take-home bag. I mean it was just . . . it was overwhelming, I think for not just Don but for me too.
Jim maintained his balance throughout. It was remarkable. He just went on doing what he always did: keeping the schedule he always kept and being the Rock of Gibraltar for both Don and me.
So the psychiatrist was making noises like I should stay away from Don because Don had to make this decision to help himself, or it would never work. That was the one thing that broke Don’s heart—I was trying to follow the psychiatrist’s instructions not to spend a lot of time with him. I had to ask him to do things on his own that the psychiatrist had asked, including stuff like going outside for fifteen minutes at a time and then extending it to thirty and then forty-five, and then being able to go out as he normally did. He wouldn’t, and after a while he wouldn’t even get dressed.
And he lost so much weight. I didn’t realize this but he didn’t really have any clothes. Why I didn’t tweak to that I don’t know because I was always very careful to make sure he was dressed. But it just didn’t occur to me. I was overwhelmed, let’s put it that way. And I wasn’t the sharpest cat in the world, at anything! But it was just a tough time, all around. I wrote a lot of poetry at that time. It was the only outlet I really did have.
But I went to church. I sang in the Louisville Bach Society. I did things that made me stay sane and helped me get a sense of what balance I had, but I really didn’t know how to take care of Don any more, how to nurture him, how to help him out. I didn’t know how to help myself out. I had this horrible feeling that I’d lost him. I looked for him in the person that was . . . I mean, his eye color changed, his face changed. He didn’t look like himself or act like himself.
I told him once, I said, “Don I really miss you.” He said, “I do too.”
And that’s the situation.
Gary He really missed you or missed himself?
Carla Missed himself. It was heartbreaking.
Gary Was he diagnosed with any particular condition?
Jim Let’s see what was it . . .
Carla It was psychotic . . .
Jim Psychotic depression with paranoid features. Something like that.
Carla Yeah, at one point he became convinced that the CIA was at it, or the FBI—
Jim Some governmental agency.
Carla Some government agency was spying on us because they thought that he was running coke, or was it—?
Jim Some sort of drug.
Carla Some sort of drug. Anyway, Don, I, Jim—none of us had ever seen hard drugs.9 Where he got this I don’t know. But it was typical of the kind of thing that was going through his mind. He was totally convinced that our phones were tapped, and we were being spied on and all this totally bonkers stuff, you know. And then he’d turn around and be as sane as you and I, and very much there, very much in there.
Anyway, I couldn’t put a foot right. I couldn’t do anything to make the situation better. I was increasingly ill. This got to my body, naturally.
Gary You had some nervous breakdowns, didn’t you?
Carla I really had a nervous breakdown, but I, unlike Don, I wanted help. I asked for help, and I got help. I had a wonderful psychiatrist who talked with me for I guess about three years, longer than that maybe. And she really stuck with me and helped me to regain my sense of balance and my sense of being me. And of course, you know, when Don died she was especially helpful.
Gary You described once to me a moment where he shows up at your exercise class, or your singing—
Carla Well, he was supposed to be taking me to and from exercise. It was something that was very odd, another odd thing. He had never wanted anything to do with my daily routine, but he ended up liking taking me places just because we got that time together in the car. But he lost the car in a huge parking lot out at the mall, and it took him forty-five minutes to find the car. I came down with a royal chest cold because I’d been exercising and breathing deeply, and then I was outside without really enough to wear, waiting for the car, not knowing. I couldn’t go back in because it was not a glass door; I would have had to close the door and he wouldn’t see me then, so I had to stay outside.
So anyway it was borne in on me that, you know, I really couldn’t trust him to take me anywhere. I became increasingly distant from him because of the way things happened. After I got sick from waiting for him to find the car, I didn’t really want him to take me anywhere because I didn’t want to have that happen again.
Whatever the details are, the simple fact was that he was slowly losing his ability to function in the consensus reality world.
Gary Jim, what was your strategy during this time? How did you seek to relate to Don and help Carla?
Jim Well, I tried to talk to him too. I mean there’s not much else you can do when talking doesn’t work because he doesn’t communicate on the same rational level that you do. You just try to make him a meal that he likes. Hang out.
Gary And how about Carla, how did you, what was your relationship with Carla like?
Jim Well, we walked together and talked, tried to figure out what to do. You know we were scrambling, trying to keep up, realizing we weren’t really up to the task and didn’t know how we could possibly help. But we were going to try for all that we were worth.
Carla We never gave up, but we never had a clue. I don’t think we ever felt like we were succeeding in helping him.
Jim In the last two weeks before he died I think you finally had to move in with your mom and dad because it was just too much for you to hang out here. So I made the trip back and forth between here and where Carla was. And—
Carla Don was the one that urged me to make that move. He could see that I was beginning to be just too nervous, jumpy, and—
Gary Did you go catatonic sometimes?
Carla I did, I did once. It was . . . where was I? I was just lying on the couch or something and looking at the—
Jim At the ceiling.
Carla Looking at the ceiling and neither of the men could get me to react. All I remember was that I was enjoying looking at the way the wood was joined together at that corner of the entry from the office into the living room. I was just looking at it and looking at it and enjoying it, thinking it was beautiful, and I thought my sense of time passing was not much at all, five minutes, but apparently it was over an hour. I snapped out of it after a while. I don’t know what caused that, but I mean I was losing it. And I did better over at Mom and Dad’s as far as not losing it to that extent, without the catalyst of Don’s face at the door saying, “Alrac,†† it’s worse than ever, this is the worst day ever.” And it was always the worst day ever.
Gary It was when he would wait for you to wake in the morning. Sitting on the end of your bed.
Carla Yes, he would be sitting on the end of my bed waiting for me to wake up, so he could tell me that this was the worst day yet.
Gary So this just overwhelmed your system and capacity to cope?
Carla Finally it did. Finally it did. I had to let it all go, and you know I didn’t want to, but I was falling apart.
Gary Feeling his pain as well.
So the final two weeks Carla moves out and how do events proceed from there?
Jim Well, let’s see. In my conversations with Don I knew that he had taken his collection of guns out into the country and thrown them away, so I knew that he was cognizant of the fact that he was a danger to himself and that he was trying to do something about it. But at one point toward the end of the two weeks, he mentioned that he was considering killing himself. And I knew that that was the only way that we could ever have him readmitted to the hospital against his will—if he had mentioned that he was going to harm himself.
†† Don’s nickname for Carla, her name spelled backwards.
We very much did not want to do that. We don’t like infringing on any-body’s free will, ever. But at this point we didn’t see any other way to get any type of help for Don. He wasn’t getting any better here. Things were getting worse.
So we went down to the City Hall and up to the sheriff’s office, and I signed a “mental inquest” warrant. And that gave them the right to come here and to take Don to a mental hospital. And it was at that point that Carla and I were in the house, they knocked on the door, the police chief at that time—who now cuts grass here, I see him here all the time on the street—was at the door along with the people from the hospital, and he said that they were here for Don. So I went upstairs to let Don know that they were here, and that we were hoping that he would go along and take this one last chance to find his balance again.
He did not want to go at all. He went into the closet and found . . . he had a .38 Special in there in a sack.10 So he has this gun and he put it to his head and said that he wasn’t going to go. So, we came down the stairs, and Carla started to come up the stairs to give him a hug at the landing there.
Carla Yeah, I thought maybe I could talk to him, and open my heart, and say, “Look, this is our last chance. Just give it a try. I’ll wait for you. It will be okay.”
Here was this poor, sick puppy of a man who had been such an elegant, wonderful guy, and was reduced to this little wisp of a boy who was so miserable he had a gun to his head. So I got half way up the stairs, and he had the gun to his head at the top of the landing, and it shocked me. I paused, and the police lady came up behind me and dragged me down the stairs. She wouldn’t let me go any further.
Jim So we exited the house, and the last I saw of Don alive he was at the door with the gun to his head. There were an increasing number of policemen showing up outside. They had their crime bus, their central communications—
Carla We counted thirty-nine who came and answered this call. This poor man, alone in a house—what threat was he to anybody but himself? And thirty-nine guys—and women, police women—swarmed to him.
Jim So eventually we retired to the house next door, which, at the time, was owned by a nice, old lady—she was about 88 years old, I guess—and so her son lived next door. We had a large pow-wow in the kitchen there where the phone was. That was the means of communicating with Don. Don was upstairs in what was now Carla’s bedroom, talking on the phone to the police. Carla got to talk to him once, and I got to talk to him once. And we tried to talk him out of the house, and to give himself up, and eventually the police took the phone back and wouldn’t let us talk to him again.
Carla I mean, yeah, they wouldn’t let me be real with him. You know, I was saying, “Don, let’s put the gun out. Come on out. We’ll take a walk. We’ll work this out. We’ll make our plans.” And Don says, “Well, you know I’m gonna have to go to the hospital.” And I said, “Well, yeah, that’s part of it—” And the phone was grabbed away from me, because I was being real with him.
Jim Don’t tell the truth.
Carla Yeah, don’t tell the truth and psssttt, that was so silly. I mean he might have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid, I think is the way the cliché goes. But that was so true. He knew that he was in for some therapy back in Norton, and I wasn’t going to deny that, but that’s where I failed. And they took the phone away, and never would let me talk to him again. That was the last I talked to Don.
Jim So the standoff lasted about five hours. And we’re all over at the house there while it’s going on, and our neighbor’s son was saying, “Well, why don’t you just let him go to sleep and sleep it off, and in the morning let’s see what happens then. Why do you have to do anything—?” because the police were getting nervous that he wasn’t coming out, that he had a gun.
Carla They were focused on that gun like, you know, he has a gun!
Jim So they eventually shot tear gas into the house. That drove Don outside, and he shot himself outside: one shot to the temple and he was immediately dead. The emergency technicians came around and attempted to revive him—
Carla Half his face was blown off, there wasn’t—
Jim Carla’s dad and I eventually cleaned up the next day. There were all kinds of syringes and things on the ground there. They were trying to help him, but they couldn’t. So they took him down to the morgue and did an autopsy.
He had lost 70 pounds. He was normally 210 pounds. He was 6’6”. He actually shrunk some, too; he didn’t measure at the same height. Anyway, shot himself and so we were . . . Carla and I were at her mom and dad’s that night, comforting each other, and making plans for the funeral. I think it was about two days later, before the funeral, we were in front of the fireplace here one evening—we had just made love, and the fire was burning—and Carla saw Don in a waking vision, and he was golden, and he let her know that all was well, that he was well—
Carla He was laughing—
Jim And that . . . and he looked at . . . we had just made love, he said, “I can’t believe I missed that my whole life long.” [laughs] He had a different point of view then.
He said things turned out the way they needed to, you’re not going to understand why while you’re alive. You’ll have to have a larger point of view—after you pass from this life as well you’ll see.
And I think you [to Carla] had another waking vision in which he told you basically the same thing.
Carla Very reassuring and immediate: I wasn’t left thinking that, oh something terrible had happened to him after death. Well no, not so, he was just fine—laughing, happy—and I’ve seen him that way when we do our work together in spirit in my workroom before I finish tuning for a session, that’s the part where Don and I work together. It’s very reassuring.
Jim And so when they were working on Esmerelda and couldn’t figure out how to end the book, they knew somebody was going to die.11
Carla Guess what? It wasn’t me.
Jim It might have been that you couldn’t see the ending because it was going to be Don, and that that would be an infringement on free will for that to be shown clearly. So that’s very likely why they couldn’t end it.
Carla We just rejected it. We didn’t feel that it was possible. It was silly to think that, of the two of us, Don would be the one that died. But he was the one that, you know, needed to open his heart. He opened his heart in the hardest way a person ever could, and he did get it opened.
Jim He got a short course in the last year.
Carla He got it opened, and I think he did all the service he came to do. He learned the lesson he came to learn. He had a very successful incarnation. And he was of service to others the most he could possibly be all his life. If he had a relationship with somebody, which he really did with me and almost nobody else. He was very responsible in that. Bless his heart. You know I miss him to this day, Don. Jim and I—I mention it frequently that we miss Don.
Jim Yep.
Carla We wish that he were here. We look at something, and we’ll say, “Don would love that!” You know.
Jim NCIS. Don would love Gibbs.
Carla He would love NCIS, and Gibbs.
Jim He is Gibbs. [laughs]
Gary I’ve heard you express that before.
Final details questions concerning sequence of events, and then a handful of questions reflecting on them.
You had gotten a warrant, was it?
Jim Mental inquest warrant.
Gary Mental inquest warrant as a result of him saying he was going to kill himself, but prior to that point there had been a series of moments where he said was going to go get help, but then he would renege on it at the last second. Is that right?
Carla Do you remember that?
Jim Well, he had a number of times where he talked about dying. He’d once mentioned how he wondered if it were possible to make a deal with our negative fifth-density friend—him for Carla. I have no idea if he ever intended to carry that out, fully, but he didn’t mention it again.
He asked me once if I would help him kill himself. I said, “No. Think of something else.”
So he had mentioned the possibility, but he had never before said, “I am going to kill myself.” So that was the difference, that was the key, and that was the only way a mental inquest warrant could be taken out to have him taken away against his will.
Gary That was the point that led you to that action.
Honest communication from Don may have resolved so much and probably, I should retract the word probably, may have prevented the tragic end to his life. But Don was not a communicator of his inner reality, and Don could have only been Don, of course.
Can you comment on how communication’s absence affected the situation, and what you would have to say to other groups regarding the necessity of communication?
Jim Well, communication is possible for those who are balanced in their mental capacities; I don’t think it was possible for Don then. I think that the initiation, the energy exchange with Carla, and our negative friend intensifying things made clear communication impossible. He was living in a world of fear. He didn’t have his native armor because of that exchange of energy with Carla—he didn’t have his native armor to deal with psychic greeting of the potency I’m sure he got. He was having to deal with it with Carla’s small and foolish attitude of, what the heck. It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay.
So I don’t think clear communication was possible. Yet clear communication is always recommended; it always helps a great deal, but you have to have the ability to do it. Toward the end of his life I don’t think he had the ability to do it. The world he lived in was a very different world—it was one that was very challenging. Just to survive as long as he did was quite a feat.
Carla Yep, I really don’t have anything more to say but how obvious it is that if you can just talk about it you can get through it. You can get through anything if you can talk.
Gary I’ve worked with and encountered people that have varying degrees of irrational mindsets that don’t respond to any amount of rationality, any amount of evidence to the contrary. Maybe even I have encountered people with mental illness. All these years later do you have any insight into helping people with mental illness—reaching in and finding some kind of bridge of connection?
Jim No, I’d have to have special training. No, if it happened again I’d be just as befuddled.
Carla I don’t think so. I have never felt that I gained any insight at all except to realize how noble he was in his own mind.
Gary Befuddlement is my response when encountering people of that nature, because you can’t build a bridge in to their world. It’s very—
Carla Right. Just not there.
Gary This is reflecting on what Jim had already mentioned, but with a different question. When you and Don received, as it were, the story of the Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater, the one thing you couldn’t see was the ending, and through the function of your own free will, then, you wrote that ending so that the character representing you, Carla, was the one that died at the hands of the bad guys through the choice of the martyr, whereas the character representing Don lived.
Because of that book’s ending, coupled with the realistic assessment of your very frail body during the course of the Ra contact, you had assumed that if anyone died as a result of that contact it would be you. As we know, however, the opposite was the case.
Carla Indeed.
Gary In my limited opinion, so much of this unanticipated twist of fate hinged on the energies of faith and doubt. You clung to the former, and Don to the latter. And you each experienced very different outcomes.
In an intensified situation such as Don experienced—the magical nature of the Ra contact, the fifth-density negative greeter, the initiation he was undergoing, the deleterious energy transfer, the doubts about his connection with you—it seems that doubt was a seed which, when continually watered and energized, warped the situation, and led Don to a negative or self-destructive outcome.12
This isn’t a qualified psychological analysis of the situation, just a human attempt to gain some perspective.13
To leave the memory with you when it was most vivid in your minds, you left yourselves cassette recordings of the events leading to Don’s suicide.
Carla Jim did. I’m not sure, did I say anything? I know Jim made a tape. I don’t know if I cooperated in that or if I didn’t know about it.
Gary You had a couple of letter tapes afterwards that reflected a bit but that you didn’t set out to—
Carla I didn’t sit down and make a tape. Jim did that because he had lived through it and he wanted to get it all down while it was still fresh in his mind. There were so many odd little details so I think that’s why he did that.
Gary Back to the point of the question. Those cassettes hardly mention the Ra contact. Rather, they are focused on the health and well-being of your soulmate and friend and companion, Don Elkins. And that’s an important point I want to make here. In the readers’ minds you may become simply functionaries, existing only insofar as you brought Ra into the world, but while the significance of that contact with Ra can’t be overstated for those of us who love this material, the Ra contact was not the end-all-be-all of who you were.
Carla Not at all.
Gary Can you comment on that statement?
Carla Well, I remained a woman in love with a very real, a very beautiful man. And the loss of him was almost the loss of me. I didn’t know how to live without him. I had given everything up so that I could help him, and I didn’t have a lot left. I think codependent is what people slap on relationships like that, and you can call it that. It was the only way Don could have a relationship at all, and so that was what we did—that was what I thought was the right thing to do. And I still do. I would do it all again! And the 16 years that I had the care and feeding of Don Elkins were golden in my life. I loved taking care of him, and I loved him. And this was what he needed, so we had 15 wonderful years and one tough one. I’d call that a pretty good deal.
Gary Final two questions, I’ll just ask them both at once. What were the short-term effects of Don’s passing and the long-term effects?
Jim Well, short-term, the Ra contact ended immediately and we lost a dear companion. We had to regroup ourselves, and get ourselves back together so that we could continue doing what we’d always done which is, you know, the Sunday meditations and channeling and getting the word out. We were still working for Don.
Long-term effects: we became familiar with another path, as a couple, not as a threesome.
Carla Yeah, it took us a long time to settle down into that, but we eventually became a real couple, realized that we were going to spend a life together. I guess it’s kind of obvious when you say it but, you know, to us it wasn’t obvious until we accepted it.
Gary Personally, I have undying gratitude for what Don did, what he gave. I wouldn’t be where I am without his efforts and his sacrifice. And I’ve heard many other readers express the same. Even if they don’t say it specifically to Don Elkins, any time they express love of this material, they’re thanking Don and his pursuit of the truth as well.
I send my thanks to Don Elkins, and I thank you both for allowing me to ask these questions.
The energies of reaction to change, which may include much panic, and feeling of loss, and the stumbling effect of not knowing the path ahead, can be mitigated. The simple trust that all is well, and that your experience, whatever it may be, is valuable, worthy of attention, and worthy of your best effort, is very helpful in smoothing and regularizing the process of change that is inevitable and desirable. – Q’uo, September 7, 2003
When at last you don’t mind free-falling, you shall have arrived at a reasonably comfortable metaphysical stance from which to gain a somewhat more accurate view of the rhythmic beating of destiny. You cannot make a mistake, metaphysically speaking, for your lesson and your destiny shall follow you wherever you are moved to go. Yet to co-operate with that defined destiny is often to allow the little world to die away that the greater self and the greater will might be presented more clearly. – Q’uo, May 18, 1997
Notes
[1] Jim wrote in the June 18, 2015 Camelot Journal entry: ↩
I did our Morning Offering and then got myself ready for the day. A number of times in the last few days, after I have finished recording a Ra session for our Audio Book Project, I have found myself overcome with tears of gratitude for this contact and for Don and for Carla. This morning, in session #97, I had a very frustrating experience because it was in this session that Don asked about the significance of the large hawk that landed just outside our door after we returned from Atlanta. We had gone there to look at a prospective new home to which we thought to move in order to be closer to Don's work and make it easier for him since he was based in Atlanta as a captain for Eastern Air Lines.
Since Ra was associated with hawks through their Egyptian contact, replacing Horus, the hawk-headed god of the sun in the eyes of the
Egyptians 11,000 years ago, Carla and I saw the hawk as an obvious affirmation of our move to this new house which was close to the airport in Atlanta. Don, however, felt that the hawk signified a problem with this choice since he was prepared to move to this house before the appearance of the hawk.
In the previous session Ra spoke to Don's first question about the hawk with a clear affirmation of the [rightness of the] sign, clear to Carla and me that is. In Don's second question in that session Ra refused to answer because Don was not sure and Ra didn't want to infringe on his free will. Now in this session Don asked twice more about the hawk and Ra tried with every fiber of their light-filled being to give a coded message of the affirmation of this sign regarding our planned move. But Don could not see it, and this session marked the beginning of Don's problems with his job, where we were to live, and how we would continue the Ra contact. This made me so very sad, even after 31 years.
The Camelot Journal, Jim McCarty, June 19, 2015, www.bring4th.org
[2] For instance: ↩
QUESTIONER After the suggestions are accomplished with respect to cleansing of the property, does Ra anticipate that our contact with Ra will be as efficient with respect to the location parameters in that particular place as they are in this particular place?
RA I am Ra. All places in which this group dwells in love and thanksgiving are acceptable to us. 95.17
[3] The needs of the scribe: ↩
QUESTIONER Finally, of the preliminary questions, one from Jim stating, “For the last three weeks I have often been at the edge of anger and frustration, have had a nearly constant dull pain at my indigo-ray center, and have felt quite drained of energy. Would Ra comment on the source of these experiences and any thoughts or actions that might alleviate it?”
RA I am Ra. As in all distortions, the source is the limit of the viewpoint. We may, without serious infringement, suggest three courses of behavior which shall operate upon the distortion expressed.
Firstly, it would be well for the scribe to engage, if not daily then as nearly so as possible, in a solitary strenuous activity which brings this entity to the true physical weariness. Further, although any activity may suffice, an activity chosen for its intended service to the harmony of the group would be quite efficacious.
The second activity is some of your space/time and time/space taken by the entity, directly or as nearly so as possible to the strenuous activity, for solitary contemplation.
Thirdly, the enthusiastic pursuit of the balancing and silent meditations cannot be deleted from the list of helpful activities for this entity.
We may note that the great forte of the scribe is summed in the inadequate sound vibration complex, power. The flow of power, just as the flow of love or wisdom, is enabled not by the chary conserver of its use but by the constant user. The physical manifestation of power being either constructive or destructive strenuous activity, the power-filled entity must needs exercise that manifestation. This entity experiences a distortion in the direction of an excess of stored energy. It is well to know the self and to guard and use those attributes which the self has provided for its learning and its service. 99.5
[4] Mom and pop: a local small store or business, often family-run. ↩
[5] The instrument’s lack of wisdom in offering herself for the contact with Ra was also . . . disconcerting to Ra: ↩
RA Meditation and contemplation are never untoward activities. However, this activity will in all probability, in our opinion, not significantly alter the predispositions of this instrument which cause the fundamental distortions which we, as well as you, have found disconcerting. 60.2
See the Chapter 7 “Your Dynamics” for more on this interesting subject.
[6] Jim is speaking of the final session of the Ra contact, number 106. The only one to happen in Georgia. The first 105 sessions transpired in Don, Carla, and Jim’s Louisville home. ↩
[7] The room is currently unoccupied. After Carla’s passing Jim resumed solitary living. ↩
[8] Blessed with angelic presences: ↩
QUESTIONER How about the metaphysical quality of the house? Could Ra appraise that please?
RA I am Ra. This location is greatly distorted. We find an acceptable description of this location’s quality to elude us without recourse to hackneyed words. Forgive our limitations of expression. The domicile and its rear aspect, especially, is blessèd and angelic presences have been invoked for some of your time past.
QUESTIONER I’m not sure that I understand what Ra means by that. I’m not sure that I understand whether the place is metaphysically extremely good or extremely negative. Could Ra clear that up, please?
RA I am Ra. We intended to stress the metaphysical excellence of the proposed location. The emblements of such preparation may well be appreciated by this group.
QUESTIONER Would the cleansing by salt and water then be necessary for this property? Or would it be recommended, shall I say?
RA I am Ra. There is the recommended metaphysical cleansing as in any relocation. No matter how fine the instrument, the tuning still is recommended between each concert or working. 106.7–9
[9] As the studious reader may recall, Carla twice had the opportunity to take LSD early on during the Ra contact. Carla’s statement in this chapter regarding “none of us had ever seen hard drugs,” then, may mean one of two things. Either a) she didn’t take her earlier two adventures into account when making that statement or b) she doesn’t include LSD in the category of “hard drugs.” I think b more likely. Though it is a very powerful substance, many people would not slot LSD under the “hard drug” category, reserving that title for those substances with little to no spiritual value, those that commonly lead to abuse and self-destruction. Either way her point still stands that the group didn’t have contact with, or access to, that which Don had developed delusions regarding. ↩
[10] The following portion of the interview has been allocated to an endnote: ↩
JIM Later on after everything was done and he was dead, I found a . . . it used to be a Bargain Mart—before the internet, there was the Bargain Mart magazine here in Louisville where people went in and found all kinds of things that you could buy, anything you wanted you could buy there, including guns—and I saw where he had a couple possibilities circled, so I know where he got the gun.
[11] See the Chapter 2 “Don Meets Carla” for more information on The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater. ↩
See also, The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater for more information on The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater.
[12] Now and then a reader of L/L’s work will learn of events as described in this paragraph, and/or learn of the reality of psychic greeting, and become subsequently concerned, even fearful in the worry that similar may befall them. While each path unfolds according to one’s free will, it may be well to consider that most spiritual seekers on the planet, in this or any age, will likely never experience these circumstances and intensities, for the same reason most of us will never experience the challenges that astronauts face when blasting through the atmosphere, entering orbit, and traveling in space, like enormous g-forces and zero-gravity environments. It is a circumstance of exceptional, special, and extraordinary nature. ↩
[13] The two paragraphs to which this endnote is connected were added after the interview in order to help clarify the brief reflection on the role of doubt and faith. Don Elkins’ diagnosable decline of mental health is a complex and multi-faceted situation beyond my understanding. I don’t pretend to encapsulate the entire thing in a pithy summation. ↩
At the same time, I think this general dynamic (between doubt and faith) did play a critical part in his demise.
I don’t know what the roots of that doubt were, or how exactly they played out in his mental processes, or whether or how they could have been overcome or balanced, only that constant indulgence of doubt worsened and darkened a situation that desperately needed the light of trusting that all was well, trusting that the universe was not conspiring against him, but was ultimately offering Don the material and opportunity for his own growth, even if, on the surface of things, that material was unpleasant, undesirable, or suffering-inducing.
Change is not easy; spiritual death and rebirth is even less easy. Don was undergoing the death of an entire way of life as his heart was cracked so suddenly open for the first time, due in part, or in full, to the deleterious energy exchange he experienced with Carla. After decades of being a rational-minded observer, practiced and skilled at the art of turning off, or armoring against, feeling and emotion, he felt emotions and experiences that rushed upon him like a tidal wave. How bewildering and disorienting that change alone must have been. How painful is such a process of transition. But into that recipe were added the other aforementioned elements, including intensive negative greeting (on a level most spiritual seekers will likely never experience) that bred a poisonous doubt.
A healthy dose of doubt, consciously applied, can serve positive functions, of course. If one thinks he has become Zeus, and his decrees have become infallible, or his physical body immortal, perhaps it is well to doubt such grandiose claims. The capacity to subject one’s conclusions to scrutiny, analysis, questions and contrary evidence—not protecting them from challenge by assuming one’s cherished conclusions are impervious to criticism—is vital upon the path of discernment.
The doubt that Don experienced, however, wasn’t a mere matter of scientifically or systematically challenging the veracity of certain truth-claims with contrary evidence, or simply second-guessing his thoughts, it was rather something deeper and corrosive, something beyond his conscious direction that choked out the light and imprisoned his mind in a seemingly inescapable cell of suffering. Moments, events, and situations common to the whole group, which were viewed through Carla and Jim’s eyes in a positive light—and thus eminently manageable—were turned into dark and tortured versions when run through the filter of Don’s eyes, eyes which were increasingly consumed with fear, worry, and doubt.
Consider a few of Carla’s reflections from Book V:
• I cannot express how much agony and suffering he sustained in this time. The concrete walls that were so very strong and had protected him always, fell away as if they were never there, and he felt everything. And how he loved! He could not watch television, even the sitcoms, because there was too much suffering.
• He tried, over and over, to explain to me just how bad the situation was. This one thought was uppermost in his mind, always. The sheer horror of what he was feeling wiped him fairly clean of most other emotion, and he was unable to remain collected for long around me.
• The crises in his head were not real to me, or to Jim. Only he had the awful sense of impending economic doom. Don made a comfortable salary. His expense for all three of us and the kitties cost him about half his check, usually, each month. But Don lost all hope, and truly that being that he became was living in hell.
That’s what is meant by stating that Carla and Don experiencing such different outcomes. They both experienced the same basic events. Carla perhaps even more intensely then Don, as Ra indicated she bore the “brunt” of the greeting and the wearying effects of the contact. But her mental health remained clear and joyful. Until, of course, things went south with Don, and she faced increasing challenges to her mental well-being. But even then she never relinquished her backbone of faith, and stood strong in her hopeful perspective and positive interpretation of catalyst.
When, in Chapter 12 of this book, Carla was presented a list of the multiple ways she was psychically greeted and then asked how she held up under the assault, she replied:
CARLA Well, as it occurred. I tried to stay in the present moment, and I knew that my strong point was faith and fearlessness, and that those were renewable resources, as opposed to my physical, which wasn’t as easy to beef up. Faith is absolutely renewable—you just go to spirit and ask. You get a big woof and you’re fine again. There’s no end to vital energy if you have faith—and I did; and if you have will—and I did; and if you don’t tend to worry about the future—and I don’t, ever.
So I just stayed in the present moment and dealt with things as they came up. Or went down. [laughs]
If Don’s situation had been clarified with the eyes of faith—that faculty which interprets catalyst in a way commensurate with what Ra says in 95.24:
RA The seeker which has purely chosen the service-to-others path shall certainly not have a variant apparent incarnational experience. There is no outward shelter in your illusion from the gusts, flurries, and blizzards of quick and cruel catalyst.
However, to the pure, all that is encountered speaks of the love and the light of the One Infinite Creator. The cruelest blow is seen with an ambiance of challenges offered and opportunities to come. Thusly, the great pitch of light is held high above such an one so that all interpretation may be seen to be protected by light. 95.24
Then he may have been much better positioned to assess the situation, to see clearly, to make discerning choices, to measure things, to root out misunderstanding and falsity . . . or perhaps to move through and simply survive the challenging ocean of confusion and change.
These things can only ever be subjects of conjecture, of course. As with most human situations, there is much more happening beneath the surface, far from view. L/L Research always encourages seekers undertaking metaphysical (and especially magical) work of a positive nature to always do so in a group or a community; one grounded in principles of love and harmony, mutual support, and open, honest, clear communication—one where troubles are shared, support is offered, and the hands linked together in mutual service and seeking.
RA Harmony, thanksgiving, and praise of opportunities and of the Creator: these are your protection. 33.2
RA Continue in love and praise and thanksgiving to the Creator. . . . Love is the great protector. 63.5
RA We salute the opening of compassion circuitry in the questioner but note that that which is being experienced by this group is being experienced within an healing atmosphere. The healing hands of each have limited use when the distortion has so many metaphysical layers and mixtures. Therefore, look not to a healing but to the joy of companionship, for each is strong and has its feet set upon the way. The moon casts its shadows. What shall you see? Link hands and walk towards the sun. In this instance this is the greatest healing. 102.21
RA We encourage the conscious strengthening of those invisible ribbands which fly from the wrists of those who go forward to seek what you may call the Grail. All is well, my friends. We leave you in hopes that each may find true colors to fly in that great metaphysical quest, and urge each to urge each other in love, praise, and thanksgiving. 99.11