DAY 7
CHAPTER 28
Carla Rueckert
Gary When, Carla Rueckert, were you born? And where?
Carla I was born in Lake Forest, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago up on the North Shore, on July 16th of 1943, in the hour just at dawn, 6:42 a.m., I think.1
Gary You were born with birth defects and suffered from rheumatic fever at two years old. Did your parents think you were not long for this world?
Carla They were continually told that by the doctors. Doctors were sure I would die before I was a year old—a week old, because of birth defects being in the brain, and the eye being turned so far into the brain, that they didn’t think that I could survive. And then the rheumatic fever was a very severe case and affected all the organs in my body, including my heart. And again the doctors said, “She might get over it for a time, but she won’t be able to go to school. She’ll die before grade school.” So, yeah, they kept expecting it to happen. [chuckles] Obviously it was somewhat of an exaggeration!
Gary What were those birth defects? You said your eye was turned in on itself.
Carla My left eye was turned into my brain, and there were quite a few difficulties with it in addition to the extent to which it was crossed. But it was turned in so far you couldn’t see the pupil; you could only see the white. So trying to haul it back—you know, haul that muscle to be shorter so that my eye would be straight—was really hard. It was very crossed all of my childhood until I was eleven, and I had an operation that shortened that muscle because the muscles, by that point of my body’s growth, had gotten as big as they probably would get. It was possible to do it then because I was closer to adulthood. And they did a pretty good job, but when I’m tired, I still get crossed eyes.
Gary Did that impair your vision up to age eleven?
Carla Oh yeah, I was legally blind in my left eye for a long time.
Gary Did it affect your image of yourself?
Carla No. No . . . [chuckles] I didn’t really think about what I looked like. I was too involved and interested in the process of noticing what was going on and recording everything—it was a fascinating world to me. Everything was fascinating, and I think I was affected most of all by the reactions of my peers in terms of how I looked. And until I went to school, I didn’t really think about it. I was never treated as someone who looked unattractive. I was just—I knew that I was odd. My mother used to shake her head at me and say, “I’m so glad you have a good personality!” [everyone laughs]
That wasn’t something that would add to your self-confidence. [laughs]
Gary The birth defects—did the condition have a name?
Carla Golly, it probably did. It probably had several! [chuckles] But I don’t remember them.
Gary Did things like the rheumatic fever and the birth defects cause your parents to treat you differently?
Carla Well, they always treated me as a frail person and were more careful with me. And I was a very sensitive person. I was allergic to the sun, for instance. I couldn’t stay out in the sun without sneezing tremendously to the point where they’d have to bring me into the shade. But I was a hardy little thing, and I would get brown as a berry in the summer. I loved to swim, and I was very active and so forth. So that worked against any vision of me as being really frail.
Gary So then, just like now, you had bodily difficulties but you wouldn’t let your spirit—
Carla No, not at all.
Gary —do anything but shine.
Carla Mm-hmm.
Gary Don asked Ra about an experience you had one time:
QUESTIONER Can you comment on my and the instrument, if she approves, so-called ball of lightning experience as a child?
RA You were being visited by your people to be wished well. 53.23
Can you tell us what happened in this ball of lightning experience?
Carla Well, in my case, a ball of lightning, literally, came through the window. My mother and grandmother happened to be in the room watching it as it circled the cradle and went back out the window. [chuck-ling] They thought that was peculiar, and it became part of the family lore.
Gary Did they have a belief system that could—
Carla No, they had no idea why, and their belief system included the capacity for not knowing.
And in Don’s case, I think something similar happened. I think he was in a crib rather than a cradle and it didn’t circle the crib but it came in and then went back out after going close to the crib.
Gary Ra said, “ . . . visited by your peoples.” Do you know what that means?
Carla [joyfully laughing] Yeah, well, one can conjecture! And it’s a very pleasant conjecture.
Gary How would you describe your childhood growing up?
Carla Well, it was difficult. I was always trying to please my parents. They were performance-oriented. My father was a jazz drummer and my mother was a singer, a dancer and actress. They loved and lived for the night life and were not interested in taking care of children. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to, it was that they didn’t think of it. They were pretty much indifferent and just really pretty self-involved. And very, very intelligent; very much a product of that lifestyle of drinking too much, smoking too much, and having a great time staying up until the dawn with jazz sessions and so forth and then barely making it the next morning.
So I was trying to be little mama and take care of the household, and they left me in charge of my little brother who was sickly and very ill, actually, with . . . I guess he’d been hit on the head. His head had a dent in it and when that happens at birth, he became spastic and could only swallow two or three times every fifteen minutes, so that he had to be fed repeatedly all night, all day, twenty-four hours, every day. And this was very difficult. So the little kid was just crying all the time and a difficult child because of the fact that he was spastic, and he was hurting and sick. What did they do but leave me with him. Because I could talk early, I knew what I was supposed to do, but I also couldn’t pick him up, so I was, like, really frightened! And Mother kept saying, “Nothing will happen, I’m just next door. I’m just down the road. Give me a call . . . ”
Jim You were seven or eight?
Carla I was seven when this began. Yeah, too young. And, you know, it was a very big burden on me because I was so responsible by nature, and people really valued having home-cooked meals. There weren’t such things as take-out and stuff like that back in Louisville, Kentucky in the Fifties. So I would be trying to cook at an early age. I don’t mean that anybody held a gun to my head and said, “Cook!” but I was trying to help. But I was, you know, too young to do it.
So, again, it was a matter of asking too much of myself at too young of an age. So when my parents would react to it, they wouldn’t react to anything except that I didn’t do it very well, and they would be trying to explain to me how I could do it better. So I became convinced that I just couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t get it right, and that cast me down. That was difficult.
But then I had wonderful things about my childhood too. My grandmother would take me to dance at Noyes Camp. It was a wonderful form of dancing (it was a modern dance, sort of like Martha Graham), but it had wonderful philosophy behind it, which was very congruent with The Law of One actually: that everything was alive in nature, and that you could be anything in nature, because everything had a rhythm, and you could express that. So, even the exercises—instead of having plies and so forth and so on, you had the bear and the horse and the starfish and all these wonderful, evocative animals that you would exercise—that was exercise, but nobody said it was exercise.
I loved the dancing and the course at camp. There was swimming, and I loved to swim. I was just absolutely rubber in the water. You couldn’t keep me down; I bounced. I could float on my stomach, which most people can’t do, and just be there, on the stomach on top of the water. Most people have to dog paddle to stay on top but I never had to make a move, I was just that buoyant. And everything about camp pleased me down to the ground. I loved to run around and with my feet bare and my arms bare to the sun. And I loved to throw my little crooked pots and make crafts and all that. I loved everything that you could possibly do. I loved drama. I loved singing.
So for two months out of the summer I was just in alt. I was so happy. But then I didn’t really know how to get along with my cabin mates, either, so again I was on the outside a lot. And this was a theme throughout my childhood: not being on the inside of any group of my peers. I was thoroughly and universally rejected.
Gary I imagine a rather innocent Carla trying to communicate, trying to relate, but it seems like your classmates shunned you? Or said you can’t be a part of our group?
Carla Well, I guess I just looked different. I acted differently. I was a little spooky maybe. The things that I perceived included a lot of things that nobody else perceived —of any age, you know. [chuckles] This has always been so. They didn’t cut me a lot of slack, let’s put it that way.
I asked somebody once when I was thirteen. She was the leader of a big clique, the ruling clique at the church I went to, and I had a big church life. I went to church a lot. And I said, “Why don’t you like me?” and she said, “I don’t know.” You know, it was like that. There was something about me that ticked people off. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, and it sounds a little paranoid. But it happens to be true.
Now it did turn around the summer that I was sixteen, almost like, is it . . .? She’s sixteen? Okay. That’s it. It’s the time. Now she can be okay. And I was alright, and after that I got along with everybody. Everybody loved me. Go figure.
Gary So, while there was some pain involved in that, you nevertheless didn’t let that get you down.
Carla I never did, no. I was too busy having fun. I loved to read. You can always go back inside yourself and have your own life, if you have a lot of internal space, and I did.
Gary And so back at home, you’re volunteering, in a way—you want to be of service, but at the same time your parents are thrusting too much on you.
Carla Mm-hmm. Well they didn’t really mean to, it’s just that they let me. I would volunteer and they wouldn’t say no. They wouldn’t say, “No, go have a life.” They would be glad to have me. And they expected me to do my part. My father explained to me, whenever I might complain, that other people got so much per hour for babysitting. He would say, “Well, you’re part of a family. I work for eight hours a day so that we can pay our bills. What have you done lately?” You know, basically—
Gary Everybody has to carry their own weight.
Carla That’s right. Everybody has to be part of the team. You know, we’re a team here, we’re a family. And I really had nothing to do but say, “Okay.” I knew it wasn’t fair, but in terms of what everybody else got and what I was receiving, I wasn’t even receiving decent thanks. I was just expected to do this. And other people were “mother’s little princess” if they did stuff like that.
Gary Did you feel loved by your parents?
Carla Not particularly. I was though. I mean, I think I was very deeply loved by my parents. But they didn’t really have good ways of showing it. They just didn’t think to. My mother especially was perfectly capable of being lovey and huggy and so forth, but it wasn’t something that she would do much of.
Gary How about school? How did you do in school?
Carla Oh, I did great in school, unless the teacher thought that I was acting like a smart-aleck because I was trying to learn too much or trying to go too fast. And I had some teachers that actively slowed me down because I wasn’t going at the same rate as the other kids. And I was never allowed to tutor other kids, which I loved to do, and was glad to do, and was asked to do constantly because the other kids knew I could help them out. But the teachers did not want me to do that. They saw that as a form of misbehavior.
Gary You were fairly awake for a child, and that may have played a part in why you were kind of shunned by the main groups or cliques. Did you find yourself at school or in these social situations, explaining world views or explaining a certain magic to the world that they couldn’t perceive?
Carla Well, most people never even asked me about it. And of course I went to church, and in church it was much more acceptable to think about the inner life, and to think about Jesus and salvation and loving Jesus and all that kind of thing. So it wasn’t a real problem, except that I never felt that I really could talk to anybody about it. I couldn’t even talk to my parents about it, really. It was just something that was inside me, and that was really all I needed, was to know what I was feeling. And I loved the exploration of that feeling. And I had been settled in terms of my loving Jesus ever since I was a very small child, as I have described before.
Gary Did your parents have any kind of religious, spiritual, or philosophical bent?
Carla No, they were pretty much cultural Christians. I mean, I think later in life both of them tried to deepen their faith very consciously, especially my mom. We went to church every Sunday. It was expected that we would, by both Mom and Dad, so there wasn’t a problem between them. It was just what you did on a Sunday morning.
And I remember the joy of—there was this moment when you came home from church, and Mother always saved up so that we could have a roast on Sunday. She would put the roast in the oven on a very low temperature so that it would be cooking the whole morning. You’d come home and she’d flip on the library station and it would have a symphony. It was that time of day—I guess it was twelve o’clock, they would start off the symphony. So, that cluster of memory: the sunlight streaming in the window, the smell of the roast, which was delicious, the sound of the beautiful symphony in the background, and me taking off my treasured Mary Jane shoes—plop, plop on the floor—and loving that moment. Never forgot it.
Gary You described it elsewhere, but not in this interview so far as I remember. Back to your earliest memories, have you always had a conscious sense of being oriented in a religious or in a spiritual direction?
Carla Well, not really, and when I was oriented in that religious way I didn’t see it as religious.
I had never been able to sleep much during the day, and so when I was supposed to be sleeping, I was restless on the bed. And when I was about two, I put my little glasses on the venetian blind prior to getting ready for my nap. I was lying there sort of on the bed looking around, and I happen to notice that the glasses were focusing the sunlight as it came through the window. And there was this beam of light, and I looked at the beam of light, and I seemed to slip out somehow on that beam of light.
And I would be in a magical forest when I could do that. And I would always go to the same place. And this beautiful forest—the colors were very alive. They would flow and be, you know, alive, and the trees . . . all those things were alive and could talk to me. The animals could talk to me, and everybody was full of love, although I didn’t describe it that way at the time. But everybody was having a wonderful time. It was like we were all part of this wonderful party.
Well, Jesus was there, and Jesus and I would sit, and we would look into each other’s eyes. He never talked, but He would hold my hand. And I would look into His eyes. They were a beautiful golden color. And I would know what love was when I looked into His eyes. I don’t know how to say it better than that. And it evoked in me an immediate desire to follow this love, to be a follower, a servant of this love, and to find out and to express that love in my own life. So I was always wanting to be a servant to that love. And so I loved Jesus; it was as simple as that.
And I—mother tells me—told me (she’s been gone twenty years now) that she remembered that I told her about Jesus; she didn’t explain to me. But the problem was, when I told her about Jesus, and she realized that I was having these experiences, she and my father both told me that I was dreaming, that that wasn’t real. And after they told me that, I could never go back.
I’ve heard this from other people who had early childhood experiences. When their parents told them that they were all wet, then they couldn’t do it anymore.2 I guess that doubt had crept in. But from a very, very early age I was totally dedicated to serving Jesus.
Gary Does that experience with Jesus in your memory serve as a reference point for what love is—for setting the direction of your life?
Carla Yes, definitely. It has never changed. [pause] Pretty serious little kid, I know, but I was. That was just me.
Gary How old were you when the experience was happening?
Carla Two. Almost three.
Gary Two?
Carla I was a little toddler! And I was very intelligent very early. [laugh-ing] I’ve lost that mind as I’ve grown older. Think everybody’s passed me up now.
Gary When you were thirteen, your kidneys failed. Can you tell us what precipitated this event?
Carla Well, I can tell you that the doctors never figured it out. There’s no medical explanation. They couldn’t figure out anything that I’d taken that I could’ve been allergic to.
But I think, looking back on it, that there was this moment about six months before my kidneys actually failed, where I was so downhearted one day—you know how very serious teenagers can get—it was more intense than they ever get before or after—and I was very downhearted. And I thought I’ll never be able to serve anybody, and if I can’t serve, what am I doing here? So I prayed to die. I remember the moment, kneeling in the bathroom, putting my head down on the cold porcelain of the bathtub rim and praying: “Lord, just take me, because I can’t—I can’t serve.” And I think that that was very effective in bringing that opportunity to me to go on and leave this incarnation.
Gary What led you to the conclusion that you couldn’t be of service?
Carla Oh, just a constant being informed by my folks that I hadn’t done this right. I hadn’t done that right.
Gary So your kidneys fail, and what happens during this experience?
Carla Well, I died for about two minutes. My heart stopped beating, and they were trying to revive me. This happened in the hospital, and people were right there and they responded quickly. But my heart stopped beating, and I went from being in excruciating pain with the glomerulonephritis3 to having no pain whatsoever, no marks on my body. The glomerulo marked your body terribly with great big welts all over your body, and I had none, and I was completely free of pain and completely free of markings and I was bopping along—I was passing along a park-like rise of hills. And over this one hill I could see the dome of a temple. It was a white marble dome. And I somehow knew all my friends were there waiting for me, and I was just bopping along going for that—couldn’t wait to get there, couldn’t wait to see my friends.
And all of a sudden this voice speaks to me out of nowhere—it’s in the air kind of. I can see this air sparkling with every word. And the voice says, “Well, we don’t usually give anyone this opportunity, but you set a very difficult course for yourself in this incarnation, and you took on too much. And really, you could have done two incarnations and not had too much. So we’ll give you the chance. You can make your choice: either go ahead and die, and then you can come back for two separate incarnations to get done what you want to do, or you can come back into the life that you are now living and try to do the best you can to fulfill your goals in this incarnation, even though you’ll always be frail.”
So, I didn’t have to think about it ten seconds. I knew I didn’t want any more childhood. I was almost over this one and [laughing] I figured, let that be enough! and I said, “Let me go back and let me try in this life.” So once I’d made that decision, I was immediately back on the hospital bed looking up at several faces that were looking down at me because they were trying to get my heart started again.
Gary Is that a similar sort of environment to the one you experienced at age two when you would interact with Jesus?
Carla Well . . . yes. Yes. The colors were the same, you know, very alive and flowing and yes, it was very, very similar. I noticed more because I guess I was older and I was able to notice more.
Gary Any idea where, so to speak, you were?
Carla No, I have no idea. But it was a wonderful place. It made this whole experience look like a black and white movie.
Gary So you made a very real decision then, and then it changed the course of your life from then on it sounds.
Carla Well, it certainly deepened my resolve to serve Jesus. I mean, it didn’t change the set-up of my internal psyche, I guess you’d say, but it hardened my resolve. It firmed that up to the point where I would never again consider allowing myself to do anything but just keep on trying, one foot in front of the other.
Gary So, it sounds like it came as a confirmation: you have a service; you are being of service; you have work to do.
Carla I have work to do, and oh! what a wonderful thing it is to know you have work to do. You know, and that’s a marvelous feeling. You’re not working in a vacuum and pretty much you have to figure out what that service is. But I mean, that’s kind of a game you can play on a very deep level, a good game.
Gary So did this help to liberate you from the need from feedback from your parents?
Carla I guess so. It would have that effect. Plus, I was getting old enough that I could see that I was doing well whether or not I got the credit from my parents. There’s no question in my mind that I was doing well. My brother—and then when my mother had another child when I was fourteen, my two brothers—adored me, and you don’t get adored unless you’re doing something right.
Gary Did you have a sense of what you would like to do as a career, vocation, or passion when you were younger?
Carla I went around like kids do. I was going to be a statesman and make a difference in the world. I was going to be a nun . . . that was a very short one after I read Albert Schweitzer’s book and I thought, well that’s what I need to do: I need to join the religious life—so I could be supported, you know, while I’m doing this—then I need to go to Africa and help out there because it’s so desperately needed. Then I thought, I’ll be a doctor. [laughing] You know, I was just going around . . . a lot of times I thought, well, I just want to be a mom. I want to have six kids and raise them up. That’ll be my work.
Whatever I thought, it was never anything close to what happened in my life. It was an unpredictable one.
Gary So in what direction did you head upon graduating high school?
Carla I headed in the direction of statesmanship, hoping to work for the government in the state department or maybe politics, and so I went into political science and so forth. And then, I mentioned once before, I had an experience with [a now prominent politician]. He might not appreciate my remembering this. He was having a mock convention for electing—whether it was going to be Barry Goldwater or Johnson for president—it was a Republican convention, of course. And I thought, well that’ll be a good experience and I’ll work for him.
And so, at one point, I realized that he made a decision that allowed us to win, but it also was telling a lie, and I faced him with it. And I said, “You lied!” He said, “Well, yes.” He said that’s one of the tools you use as a political person, and if you can’t lie you might as well forget it. Well, I can’t lie. I honestly, physically can’t lie, not when it’s an important thing. And the more important it is, the less I am able to do it, and the worse I am at it if I try. And also, as I mentioned before, I really, really don’t like committee meetings, and there are an excess number of them always in politics. So in between those two things I realized I was going to have to move on. So I changed my major and thought maybe I’d be a college professor, do research into the language or something.
Gary And subsequent to that you determined that you wanted to be a librarian. Is that correct?
Carla [laughing] Subsequent to that, I married and had to figure out how to make a living, and was already working in a library. So my decision was very easy to make. So I just needed to choose a way to earn money at one particular point, and being a librarian was—I could get that job. I had that job, you know, so not a problem as to figuring it out.4
Gary Had you been a professor, you would have taught?
Carla English.
Gary Seems well suited to you. I believe it was during your university years that you were turned on to the theory and practice of silence.
Carla I wanted to explore silence. I never had, and I became interested in it doing reading. A lot of people that I really respected enjoyed silence. And I thought, well you know, I never—The Episcopal Church is wonderful but it’s a noisy church. There’s a lot of singing and there’s a lot of ritual and there’s . . . it’s all beautiful, but you don’t have very many seconds, even, of silence in the service. So I was looking for a meditation group that had silent meditation in it, and that’s when Don Elkins was starting his silent meditation group. So I asked if I could be a part of that.
Gary Oh, so it was Don’s group that was your first real experience with a more disciplined or formal sort of attempt of meditation.
Carla Right.
Gary You have identified as a Christian mystic. When did this begin and what does that mean?
Carla Well, I’ve been called a Christian mystic more than I’ve termed myself one.5 It seems obvious to other people that I’m mystical, and I’m not sure exactly what that means. But I think it means a dependence on your own intuition, your own internal clock, your own guidance system as opposed to being a linear person and wanting to write everything down and make a list of why—you know, what this is called and what the scientific name of it is. I’m not a scientist, so mystic seems to fit.
Gary Among the ways to describe mysticism that comes to my mind right now—versus a more traditional, religious mindset—is in terms of where one places authority. The mystic is seeking the authority within, the authority of their connection with the Creator or the source of life. Whereas the person of religious mindset is placing that authority outside of themselves, and investing the priest or the clergy with that authority.
Carla That never happened to me. I don’t think I’m a particularly religious person; I think I’m deeply spiritual.
Gary But you were drawn to the principles of Christianity.
Carla I was drawn to the principles and the expression of it in the Episcopal Church. There really isn’t any more beautiful way to worship than the Episcopal way. It has the very best of the Roman Catholic dogma—not the dogma, but the—what do you call the ritual?
Jim The creed?
Carla Ah [apparently dissatisfied with Jim’s answer], not going to get anywhere there . . . anyway, the method of expressing how, how you go about worship. There’s no more beautiful way, I don’t think, than the Episcopal tradition. It loves the entire range of music—both the older music and the newer. Anything that is oriented towards praising the Creator.
So you have this wonderful, wonderful bunch of music that you have at your fingertips from centuries of the very best composers in the world writing for the church, because, for one thing it’s the way they made their money, for another thing it was considered heretical up through the Renaissance for anyone to do any work that didn’t have as its aim something within the church. So that’s why there’s so much religious art and music and so forth; nobody wanted to be a heretic because that really didn’t go well.
So you have this incredible body of music, and if you’re a singer . . . You know, by the time you get to be a certain age—I’m talking to the videographer [Ken] at this point because he’s also a classical musician—and probably through the years you’ve had lots and lots of experiences with different parts of that great body of music that is of the Christian faith, because so much of that is what people wrote. And so, if you want to do something that’s classical, it likely has every chance of being religious.
So you become aware of it, and you’re part of that music. And in between being part of the most beautiful rituals in the world, I think—the rituals of the church, holy communion being chief among them—and the being able to sing that Christian music—golly—all kinds of reasons to want to be part of that. So it wasn’t just fitting in to the Christian principles, but fitting into the Christian way of worship.
Gary So among that which appealed to you about this tradition was that it offered you a means of praise, devotion, and worship, which is something you really need to do; as we were discussing earlier, it’s a means of nurturing your inner beingness.
Carla Mm-hmm, yeah.
Gary Did you have any difficulties with the content of the Bible itself?
Carla Well, you know, I did. And I was in an inquirer’s meeting at the height of my religious period—so-called, I was about fourteen, I guess—and I asked my bishop, who was holding these inquiry sessions, I said, “I don’t know whether I should leave the church, because I don’t believe the dogma.” I said I had especial problems with the virgin birth, and he said, “Yeah, I’ve had problems with that myself.”
I was really surprised. So I said, “Well, how do you say the Creed?” and he said, “In hope that one day in this life or the next, I will understand more about it.” He said up until then, “It’s just an article of faith. I take Him on faith. I don’t worry about it, and I just go on.”
And he said, “Don’t ever leave the church! You’ll never be able to talk to anybody about Jesus if you leave the church.” He was right, and I was very grateful to him. He was also very supportive of my channeling when I began channeling. He was a wonderful bishop.
Gary So that freed you up from the need to interpret the scripture literally.
Carla Right. I never worried about it one iota of an instant, and fortunately, the Episcopal Church is the haven of all civilized gentlemen, so you didn’t have to believe a doggone thing. You could just be inquiring forever, never having to settle on anything.
Gary So they welcome more liberal thinkers.
Carla It’s the haven of liberal thinkers in the church, no question about it. When you find a failed Baptist that’s still in the church, he turned Episcopalian.
Gary You mentioned that later on in life you shared your channeling with this bishop. What prompted you to share your channeling with the church?
Carla I didn’t know if I should be in the church. Again, it was a crisis of that nature. I didn’t want to shame the church. I didn’t want to be keeping secrets. I’m a very open person. So I said, “This is who I am now. This is what I’m doing. What do you think? Should I worry about leaving the church and doing this outside the church?”
And he read it. He took quite a few minutes and just sat and read for a while and he put it down and he said, “I see nothing negative here. I see nothing that would worry me.” He said, “Keep me informed. Send me a little sample of your channeling from time to time. And as long as it looks like this, you’re fine.”
Gary That’s remarkably open-minded.
Carla Remarkably so.
Gary And that wasn’t the only time in your life where you’ve shared your work with the . . .
Carla I shared my work with every bishop and every priest in my church because I wanted them to know who I was. I didn’t want to be a lie.
Gary And they’ve all, likewise, accepted.
Carla Well, you know, with varying attitudes of befuddlement or positive acceptance, but never anything less than tolerance.
Gary How would you say you have reconciled your Christian walk with your work through L/L Research?
Carla Just like that. I’ve never kept it a secret, but on the other hand, I’ve never felt the need to tell anybody about my channeling unless they’ve asked. It’s a touchy subject. Everybody knows I’m doing work for L/L Research and it’s dear to my heart. If people want to know what L/L Research does, I’ll be glad to tell them. Very few have inquired. Those that inquire are almost guaranteed to want to support me.
Gary Have you ever had any trouble, internally, reconciling these two?
Carla Oh, not at all. I’m a very logical person. I’ve read a lot of philosophy. There’s nothing in the Ra philosophy that wouldn’t square with the way I worship. And indeed, Ra specifically supported my way of worship. He called it a distortion—that’s fine. “Distortion” is not a nasty word to Ra. It’s just a description of something other than total oneness with the Infinite Creator. And the only way you’re going to avoid distortions is not to be here.
Gary A quotation just came to mind that I want to ask you about . . . let’s see . . . in 60.18, Ra is describing how there’s been a negative encroachment on the various religious systems around the planet:
RA This is in common with each of your orthodox religious systems which have all become somewhat mixed in orientation, yet offer a pure path to the One Creator which is seen by the pure seeker. 60.18
You are in a unique position in that you have continued to work within a religious system. Can you elaborate on Ra’s statement about the pure path to the pure seeker that’s still afforded in orthodox religious systems?
Carla Well to the pure, all things are pure, basically. That’s the cliché. But more specifically, and, I guess more cleanly answering your question: the things that Jesus actually said are far, far different than the things that the church says in dogma. Jesus was remarkably vague about anything to do with you will follow me or you need to found a church and keep it going through the centuries. There’s no career or corporate-mindedness. His idea was to have churches in people’s homes where everybody could gather and worship and also socialize, I think, and take care of the poor among them so that nobody was hungry, so that everybody was taken care of. That was His idea. It was basically communistic, and so everybody runs like crazy, [chuckles] including communists, from the Christian dogma or what the Christian message is from Jesus, which is to love each other. And that’s pretty much it: love each other. And He finds different ways of saying that.
And so, if you’re pure-minded and you simply focus on what Jesus said, and base your worship and Christian life on what Jesus actually said, there’s no problem whatsoever being totally pure. And if you try to follow all the dogma, you’ll make yourself crazy. I don’t know how a person can do that and stay totally pure, because there are some very troubling aspects, mostly including elitism and kicking people out if they don’t agree with you. That’s not something that Jesus would have ever done, and it’s certainly not something that I have a need to do. I’m very inclusive in the way I feel about . . . [chuckles] everybody in, basically. Everybody’s okay; all ways, they’re alright—for them, you know.
So I think if you’re a pure person, and you’re following that pure message of love and compassion and loving each other, there isn’t a problem being pure and staying religious because that was the epitome of Jesus. So it just needs to be an understanding of Jesus that is not vulnerable to priests explaining to you what Jesus thought. Even Paul re-worked things that Jesus said in order to allow things to be okay, like women being far different than men, and slavery being okay. There are things, even in the New Testament, that one would have great trouble with if one tried to justify them. But if you aren’t worried about trying to justify what somebody else said about Jesus, then you just say, “Well, different people have different interpretations of what Jesus said; my interpretation is this one.”
Gary So, as Ra is indicating, as is common with all orthodox religious systems, there are negative aspects. Like you were saying: elitism, exclusivity, bellicosity, fundamentalism, et cetera, that are wrapped up in the mix. So for the pure seeker wishing to work within an orthodox religious system, you would recommend not taking a literal interpretation and—
Carla Right. I’d recommend the mystical point of view rather than the dogmatic point of view.
Gary —finding the essence or the heart of the message, sticking to that, and excluding all the detritus.
Carla Well, just not addressing it. I mean, it’s not your business to address details of dogma. Let somebody else do that. That’s a game that is not attractive to the mystic. It’s just a distraction.
Gary So the mystic then proceeds forward in a manner that Q’uo would recommend, which is to take what resonates and leave the rest behind.
Carla Right, right.
Gary Prior to launching into the next type of questioning, is there anything you wanted to say in terms of the chronology of your life?
Carla Well, not unless you wanted me to go from where I was a librarian . . . well, actually, from where Jim and I started singing together—not this Jim McCarty, but Jim D.—and then got distracted from that. And I don’t know if I actually covered the fact that, you know, a series of necessities brought me back to Louisville, and that here in Louisville, finally, was where I settled on my life’s work.
Gary Yeah, those questions about your four-year detour with Jim D. were originally part of this bio section, but then we dug into that when we were talking about events before the Ra contact.
Carla Okay, so that’s all taken care of. No, other than that, there’s nothing that I would really think is unusual about my life. Really my life has been involved in serving however I could, wherever I was, doing whatever I did.
Gary That you served as a channel for a group of beings who say they came from elsewhere in this solar system, I think that by definition qualifies as unusual. But I grasp the humility that you are reflecting on your life with.
So, you’re a person with many types of gifts and talents, in my opinion, and many roads you could have walked in life, and some you tried. Yet, in each case, life seemed to steer you from one road to the next until you settled on working with Don, and then channeling as your primary outer service. Can you talk about the multiple decision points and twist of fate that led you to focus yourself primarily on L/L Research and channeling?
Carla All of these decision points had one thing in common, and that was that there was an ethical question at the bottom of that decision, as far as I was concerned. I have always been very interested in being a man of honor: that general description of an honorable person, a person who can be counted on, a person who can be trusted, a person who is loyal and who keeps his promises. So there was always a promise to be kept, or loyalty to pay attention to, or both. And at the heart of why I did what I did. And the other characteristics that the decision points seem to have had in common was that I picked the difficult and unpopular path that no one else in their right mind would have taken [chuckles]—according to my family, at least.
Gary What you would also call “the high road.”
Carla The high road, yeah. Take the high road. And I didn’t need to have to justify that to somebody else, because I knew what I was doing: something that was important enough to me to turn my life upside down to do it. Plus, mother would say, “You’re sacrificing everything,” being a woman of great drama, “Everything!” And I would say, “Hey! You don’t know what’s around the next corner. It might be interesting.” And off I’d go.
Gary What I didn’t ask you when we discussed your four years with Jim D., your journey to Chicago, and then to Vancouver was that during those four years we learned that Don was patiently waiting for you to return—he, possessing a sense that you two would be together. But on your side of that equation, did you have a sense during your four years with Jim D. that you needed or wanted to be with Don?
Carla Heavens, no. I had no idea. It would never have occurred to me that it would be possible. Don was so far above me. He might as well have been driving his car in some track along the sky, far away.
Gary So when you did return to Louisville, and Don goes from zero to sixty in a couple minutes . . .
Carla Color me surprised. And delighted! But very surprised.
Gary So, in the sense of being delighted, it felt like a gift, I would presume.
Carla Well, it took me about fifteen seconds to fall for Don.
Gary You wrote in Book V that, “I had had but one goal for a long time from 1968 onwards, and that was to make a real home, both physical and metaphysical, for Don.” I think we’ve probably hit that, but if you want to touch on that, how did you seek to do that?
Carla I felt that I needed to be there if he wanted me to be there. I needed to be at his beck and call. I needed to find out what it was that he liked in life, and see if I could do that for him. I took care of his food, and I made sure that he had enough underwear. [laughing] You know, I mean, just that the basic nitty-gritty of life. I made him a physical home in this world. He never again had to worry about stuff like that.
Gary You began to touch on this coming topic, but I’d like to explore it a little bit more fully. You’ve described Don’s passing as the ending of one life and the beginning of a new one. Can you explain this?
Carla Well, when Don died, psychologically I died. I had changed enough of myself that I was unfamiliar to myself unless Don was there. With him gone and the needs that he had for me gone, I had no job description, and so I had to start from scratch. And there was a big question for several years after he died as to whether I wanted to stay here at all. And during that time my body got really, really sick. That’s why I couldn’t even sit up, and every breath I took was an agony. And the arthritis was working its way through the deeper of my body systems, and it hurt to breathe. It was almost impossible to sit up. My shoulders had crystalized to the point where sitting up was too much for them, and the pain of that was incalculable. And needless to say I just didn’t do it.
So, I came close to death physically; I came close to death psychologically. And then one day I read something I had written, and I thought to myself, I like this person. And that was very cheering to me, that I actually liked—I had forgotten that I’d written it. And I found it. And I didn’t even recognize it when I read it, but I liked it. And I just basically decided I needed to kick myself in the butt and give it a go, you know, so I asked for the rehab, because I knew I could never get back up without it, and I wanted a vertical life if I could do it. So they tested me at—what’s the name of the place that I went for rehab?
Jim Frazier.
Carla Frazier. I went to Frazier Rehab here in Louisville. And first of all they tested me for nine straight days to see what I could and couldn’t do in terms of safety. And that about killed me [laughing] right there! But after they tested me thoroughly and decided what I could and couldn’t do, then I went back for three weeks into hospital rehab training. Training, mostly your thinking processes, but also giving you a lot of tools.
And I worked my way by the hardest: sitting up and getting up. It was very difficult. It was one of the hardest things I ever did. And I can remember sitting up in my wheel chair, just dying. “Jim, is it a half hour yet? . . . Oh.” You know, it would be five minutes, [chuckles] then ten, but you know, the goal was to sit up for half an hour a day. And I got to where I could do that, and then I used my love of cooking to get stronger. I would hold on to the stove because you can’t leave a white sauce before it’s done, you know? [laughing] Stir, stir. No, it’s not done yet; I can’t leave.
And I got stronger. I just physically got stronger to where I had a vertical life again. And then I had my choice of how to go about things, you know, and I described that before, it seems to me, in this interview. Did I want to be a church person? Did I want to be—? Was I able to take up librarian-ing again and make some money for the family? What could I do? And discovered, well now, I couldn’t make money for the family because I could never say I’ll be there at five days a week. Sometimes I just had a bad day or a bad week. Nothing I could do about it. So, and I didn’t like church work for some of the same reasons I didn’t like politics. So then it occurred to me that I could work for L/L Research and write. And so that started me on my course of making a life for myself: writing, teaching, channeling for L/L Research.
Gary So, six to eight years, roughly, that you went through a desert of sorts after Don passed away, thanks to some measure of self-condemnation. And then the transformation was precipitated by forgiveness of self—of falling in love with the self. Would you say that is correct?
Carla I think that’s accurate. It was unfortunate that I did condemn myself so thoroughly, but I’d be surprised if anybody close to a suicide ever escapes self-condemnation. You always think you could have done things better.
Gary When Don was alive he served as the natural leader of your small band. With his passing, you had to take up that mantle and assume those responsibilities. How did you transition into that role?
Carla Without any difficulty at all. I’ve never had any trouble leading. Jim has always been a partner that pretty much trusted my intuition and was glad to follow my lead. Jim does not have a desire to lead whatsoever. He just wants to be able to serve, as we’ve served together for so long. You know: take care of the yard, take care of me, and work for L/L Research. Simple as that. Jim’s a simple guy.
Gary People on a spiritual path tend to develop strict rules and ideas about diet. [Carla giggles] What role has diet played on your path?
Carla None whatsoever! I’m a fool for a good—
Jim You’ve tried them all.
Carla [laughing] Yeah. Give me salt. I have tried them all. And none of them seem to do a lick of good. So why bother? If nothing is going to do me any good, then I might as well enjoy myself, and I have. And mostly by eating comfort food and too much salt.
Gary It’s a large topic. In general I think it’s safe to say that probably many spiritual seekers feel that spirituality is incompatible with certain diets. That in order to be spiritual you must restrict, and limit, and choose only certain foods.
Carla Mm-hmm. [chuckles]
Gary Each, of course, must walk their own walk, and if they feel called to do so, to eat a certain diet, then by all means, more power to them.
Carla Yeah, I don’t have anything against other people thinking that.
Gary Yeah. But you—in your thinking I would imagine there’s no, like, one size fits all, there’s no prescription for you must eat this way in order to be spiritual.
Carla No. No, I don’t feel that. And nor do I feel that my way is the right way. What I’m saying about myself is that I really, honestly gave a good try to vegetarianism, to the macrobiotic diet. I really liked macrobiotics and I would have gladly stayed on it, but that was the point at which I started having horrible problems with my stomach, having to have operations, and things get taken out. So, macrobiotics—the rice, especially—did not agree with my system. I couldn’t eat it; it got stuck in the transverse colon and I ended up having to have parts of the transverse colon removed, along with the rice [chuckles], which stayed there and made its home and invited friends. Anyway, so macrobiotics didn’t work. I cobbled together a Cayce diet, and this was long before other people had done so, but I had this big thick book of Cayce readings, and I went through the whole doggone thing. And wherever he recommended something for rheumatoid arthritis, I wrote it down. So I had a diet that way. And I did that for about a year and a half. It didn’t work at all; I didn’t enjoy myself at all. So I let it go. And I tried something else . . . not remembering exactly what, but it was a stricter diet, and it didn’t—
Jim Low sediment.
Carla Well, the low sediment was the one I ended up with, and the one that I’ve more or less backed away from—not been so careful about. Now I was thinking of one of the diets that people who say things like Gary suggested, you know: well, in order to be a spiritual person, you’ve got to do something. It wasn’t veganism exactly but it was this diet where you had nine different food groups, and you need to have one thing from each of those food groups on the table at all times. Anyway, that was a hard one to follow because there was so much to prepare. But I did follow that for a while, and it did absolutely nothing, again, to help me. So, since it was not doing anything, and—I mean, I gave them at least fifteen months if not a year and a half or two years, each of these diets—I gave them a good try. I let them see if they would work, and they didn’t work.
So I ended up just shrugging, and like Jim said, the doctors had recommended low sediment diet, where everything has to be ground up. So I don’t eat salad, and I don’t eat rice, or especially brown rice, and—what’s the other one? I was supposed to stay away from oatmeal. I think popcorn’s the other one. I’ve ignored that. [laughing] I love popcorn! But anyway, I have more or less paid attention to that in the extremes, you know: I don’t eat big hunks of any red meat. I get it all cut up for me, and so forth. But for myself, I just saw the details as being ridiculous to pay attention to if they weren’t helping me. So I just go with my bliss and enjoy what I eat. I think my spiritual principle involved there is to enjoy what I’m doing, and if I’m not enjoying it, don’t do it.
Jim Remember what Jesus said about diet?
Carla Um . . . what did Jesus say about diet?
Jim “Man is defiled by what comes out of his mouth, not what goes into it.”6
Carla That’s true. He said that. Good one.
Gary At one point Ra says:
RA This instrument, feeling that it lacked compassion to balance wisdom, chose an incarnative experience whereby it was of necessity placed in situations of accepting self in the absence of other-selves’ acceptance and the acceptance of other-self without expecting a return or energy transfer. This is not an easy program for an incarnation but was deemed proper by this entity. 60.8
So my question is: How have you seen this dynamic manifested in your life? And how have you met this incarnational lesson?
Carla I think there isn’t a soul that’s not aware how there are some people in your life that just take and take and never give you anything back at all. And perhaps they’ve had the experience of loving those people and wishing that they were loved back but not feeling loved. And so they probably can identify with my disappointment at having someone in my life that was like that. And I’ve always had someone in my life that was like that. But as I have learned that lesson, the difficulty has gotten less and less hard, and easier to identify so that I know, oh, that’s the person in my life who’s not going to love me back. Okay, I got it.
So you just love that person and you don’t worry about getting anything back. And that is hard sometimes, because everybody wants to have, if not appreciation, at least acknowledgment. And there are people in this world that don’t do that.
Gary So, according to Ra, and according to your own understanding of the way your life works, you designed this as a central lesson into your life so that you would interact with this sort of person that wouldn’t give you love back, in order to help you meet and learn this lesson.
Carla Right, and I think that at the point at which I really do love myself tremendously, that, at least for the moment, has not been a big catalyst in my life for a while.
Gary So you’ve gone through those cycles enough—
Carla I’ve gone through a lot of cycles, yeah, and I seem to be at the point where, just a little touch up [chuckles] from time to time is enough.
Gary Yeah. So you’re not terribly daunted if you give love and there’s nothing in return.
Carla No. No, I’m not.
Gary You can love people as they are.
Carla I can.
Gary During the Ra contact, Ra describes your “arduous journey of worth in esse.” Can you describe this journey and your lessons learned along that road?
Carla Yeah, well I think that we all have a tendency to identify ourselves with what we do. And get our worth from being a good provider, or a good this, a good that—you know, you name it. And to be worthwhile in esse,* (which is just Latin for in and of yourself; just because you are, you’re worthwhile) is difficult to get into your mind, and thank God I had that lesson learned, for the most part, before I became ill enough that I was unable to do much outer work. I would be in a pickle right now if I didn’t think that I was worthwhile just sitting here.
But I do—I do realize that we’re all worthwhile if we can simply keep an open heart, and that I can. So I focus on the open heart. I let my worth be what it is. I don’t worry about it. I don’t obsess about it, and I accept the fact that I am worthy. And thank heavens that I have learned that. I would have had no peace of mind as an ill person—you know, what’s happening to me right now—if I hadn’t done that work beforehand.
Gary So this is a lesson that’s universal, it seems, for everybody—
Carla I think so.
Gary —who measure themselves through all sorts of different ways based on what they’re doing or what they’re not doing, or what they have, what they don’t have, where they’re going, et cetera, and the message here is that regardless of anything on the outer picture, you are worthy because you are.
Carla Right.
Gary And it seems you were able to learn this by consciously directing your attention to this lesson, and affirming its value, would you say?
Carla Well, I used a visual aid to fall in love with myself. Maybe I felt like I hadn’t been hugged and loved enough as a child, and that I really hadn’t had a childhood, you know, because I’d been working the way an adult works to take care of my brothers, to take care of the house, and put food on the table and that kind of thing since I was a child. And all through my childhood that was a theme, so I really didn’t have the kind of childhood that a lot of people had where they had no thought in their mind except to play. I didn’t have that, so I thought well, okay, I do feel bereft, I do feel that my inner child was deeply unloved.
So my teacher, Papa—I call him Papa. He’s gone from this world now.
* Pronounced eh-see.
He sent me a Raggedy Ann doll, and he told me that this was my inner child. He told me to love it until, you know, I’d healed. He said, “Heal yourself up. You don’t need this.” So I took that Raggedy Ann doll with me everywhere, day and night. I loved on it, I hugged it, I kept it with me, I talked to it. I went with it to lunch with my girlfriends. [laughing] I took it to the movies. I was pretty silly, but I was learning a lesson, and I didn’t let that silliness get in my way. I just went ahead and did it. I packed it up when I went on vacation. [giggles] Raggedy Ann needed to go too! You know? So, I did that for, oh, probably six or seven years, and it took a long time to really feel that I did love myself, and I was not any longer in need of healing.
Gary You had that doll when I moved in, too; I remember that distinctly. That speaks to the creative possibilities that are open to one desiring to learn a lesson. There’s no mathematical procedure for it . . .
Carla No, you need to be creative with it. Figure out what’s hurting and how can you heal it.
Gary Another, shall we say, arduous aspect of your journey has been the distortions of the physical complex. As you said, you’ve had a frail body since you were born. And it was that which became the primary target for negative greeting during the Ra contact. Those medical difficulties started at birth and have continued all the way to the present. Do you have any sense of the why behind the physical difficulties? Why you programmed this life for them?
Carla Not really. I sort of think that I felt that this would be a good way to learn to love myself, not to judge myself. And I’m not precisely sure how that works out, you know. I don’t know if it works out in any linear sense, but, I don’t know . . . [to Jim] Have you had a feeling about that? You’ve lived closely with me for a long time. You know what I’m saying in the first place, and if so, would you agree?
Jim Yeah, I think it had to do with interrelationships with other people, especially with me.
Carla And how especially with you?
Jim So I could take care of your needs, if possible, and generate a certain sort of love and open heartedness.
Carla That’s true. It’s a lot harder to allow yourself to be loved than to love, for me; I think for a lot of people.
Gary Of course you can only conjecture on this side of the veil, but this condition created a situation whereby you could accept the love offerings of others, specifically Jim, and where Jim could learn to give that love, or learn to take care.
Carla He was trying to open his heart, and so we fit together just like a puzzle. So often I think when there’s a relationship that really works, you look at the dynamics and you see that both are teaching both. Each is the teacher of each.
Gary So there’s a strong possibility then that, prior to incarnation, both of you got together, and you said, “I’m going to play this role, you’re going to play that role, and we’re going to work together so we can help each other learn these particular lessons.”
Jim Could very well be.
Gary Much encouragement was given by Ra for you to contemplate the acceptance of your physical limitations and medical difficulties, and much has been reflected in your own writing regarding that difficult task. Can you shine some light into this aspect of accepting limitations?
Carla There are two ways to look at limitation. Either it’s a limitation that is agreeable to one (you’re just as glad you don’t have to do that anyway), or you don’t want to accept the limitation. And you feel that you can do better than that, and more than that, and you want to press on. And so you don’t want to be limited. And I’ve always felt strong inside, but then I put my body into it, and I discover I’ve written checks my body can’t cash. [laughing] I’m so mad! No! I’m not going to get to do that!
That was most especially apparent in things like cleaning and cooking, which has never mentally or emotionally troubled me. I’ve always gotten quite a bit, actually, out of doing stuff—I mean, people say, “Well, who wants to clean the john?” Well, if you’re talking to the john, and you’re feeling the john say, “Oh man, you really got me clean! This is so great! I’m just shining!” [laughing] You know, and everybody’s happy. The john’s happy, you’re happy—you know? And you got a nice clean john! And I would get down on my hands and knees and do the floor, and it never bothered me. But then, it physically bothered me to where I couldn’t do it. And it just was aggravating.
And cooking especially was my dearest love. I loved to cook. I loved to collect recipes and try them out and fiddle with them. Not being able to cook is very frustrating. I still get to cook a little bit in that I pick the recipes and stuff, so I can sort of say, “Well, this would taste good.” It’s not really cooking. Even if you’re collecting a recipe and creating a recipe and changing a recipe, you’re thinking of it in your mind, but it’s not the same thing as doing it. Getting it all chopped up and ready, and then putting it all together and then watching people go, “Oh, this is so good!” and enjoying them enjoying your food. And really, I think people react to the love in the food. There’s something about a food cooked with love that just tastes better. That’s always been true of my food.
Gary So accepting your limitations sounds like it has tied into what we explored in a recent question about worth in esse.
Carla Right. You know, the lesson is not to identify with what you can’t do, but to identify with who you are. And I’ve done that. I’d still rather cook, but I’ve done that.
Gary Yeah, when you’ve described to it to me personally, before, regarding especially where you are now—three years in a hospital bed, unable to do a lot of what you want to do—you expressed an attitude of surrender, saying, “Well, if this is what the Creator wants, then I’m going to accept this, and love this, and—”
Carla And explore it. You never know what gifts something like this has in its pockets, so you want to put it on and take a look in the pockets.
Gary As a side question: it just occurred to me as you were describing toilet cleaning that you have had this attitude, when you interact with your environment, that your environment is alive and magical, whether it’s food or whether you’re cleaning the toilet or whether you’re weeding the garden outside. What effect would you say that this attitude has had in your life?
Carla Why, I think it’s improved it immeasurably. I’ve enjoyed myself more than most people because there’s more to enjoy if everything’s alive and reacting to you, and you’re a part of a dance. You’re always dancing. You’re always having a good time.
Gary Do you feel that what you’re interacting with, whether it is a chair or a flower or the wind, that you are psychologically projecting magic onto it, or that there is inherently aliveness and magic in everything around us?
Carla Oh, I think I am perceiving something real. I think there is inherently magic in everything, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if science didn’t bear me out on this eventually. It certainly had borne me out on the fact that everything is alive, you know, the string theory of physics and other things that. We’re just—this is such an alive universe, and it’s reacting to you being part of it. I mean, I can do my dance in bed here. Nothing keeps you from dancing if you’re dancing in your heart.
Gary Do you attribute any of the current wear and tear on your body to the contact with Ra itself? If so, what do you think are the long-term repercussions of that experience upon your mind/body?
Carla I think that there was a definite wearying effect that contact had on me. I wouldn’t say there were any specific effects it had on me.
Gary Those that know you are frequently struck by one startling fact: that despite the presence of chronic, deep-level physical pain, your spirit is indomitable. You remain a person of optimism, hope, faith, and good cheer, always seeking to serve others, seldom (if ever) complaining (or if you do it’s always with a light touch), and never failing a tuned attitude of praise and thanksgiving. What faculty within you has supported such dogged positivity? In other words, how in the world are you always smiling?
Carla I think faith is a renewable resource, and I think if you have the wit to go seek it, it’s always right there. Spirit is right there waiting for you to ask.7
Gary And it sounds like your life circumstances have necessitated that you consciously turn to that renewable resource.
Carla Yes, but that has been my habit for many years as well. I would be in a pickle of a learning curve if I had to learn it all right now. Uh! It’s a lot to learn. But I’ve had years, so . . . I’ve had time.
Gary This next question is sort of a reiteration of the previous one. The experts, doctors included, have expected your imminent death since age zero. [Carla chuckling] You’ve defied them and the odds all along. I personally feel that many others in your body wouldn’t have made it this far, myself included. To what do you attribute your outstanding longevity, all things considered?8
Carla Taking life easy. I think, you know, the easier you take things, the less stress you put on yourself, the more you’re going to be able to withstand the stress of illness. There is a certain stress involved with pain.
Gary You’ve also had a technique of “finding the caption.”
Carla Yes, I do, and I guess that it’s just a tick of mind, you know, but I always am pausing the camera, you know the bio-camera that is running over your shoulder at all times and saying, “Did you get that, George?” [laughing] “Wait a minute! Got to put a caption on this one!” [laughing] I don’t freeze it and then hold it, but I may freeze it long enough to appreciate it.
Gary You feel that you are a wanderer in the sense that your soul came to Earth from another density in order to be of service. When and how did you become aware of this and how have you related to this belief?
Carla I guess I became aware of it with the hypnotic regression, became aware of this coming from elsewhere. It felt right. I put it on, I tried it on; it fit pretty well. So, I thought, well, that’s probably true. And I just accepted it for what it was. You know, you can’t prove it. You can’t prove that it’s not so. So why worry about it. It looked like it’s true so you might as well just figure it’s true for you, subjectively.
Gary Well, thank you very much, Carla Rueckert.
Carla It’s been a blessing . . .
Now I’m going to enjoy listening to Jim! [chuckles]
Notes
[1] Sometime after being born in Illinois, Carla’s family moved to Anniston, Alabama. When that happened or for how long she stayed in Alabama is unknown at this juncture, but sometime thereafter her family moved again, this time to Louisville, Kentucky, presumably sometime around 1957 when she was 14 years old. Carla spent the remainder of her years in her beloved Louisville, the city that would eventually become the home of L/L Research. ↩
[2] The full English idiom is: wet behind the ears. A phrase meaning that one is immature, unknowledgeable, inexperienced, or just too young to understand. Carla is using a variant of the idiom here. In this case the more knowledgeable parents tell the less knowledgeable child that he or she is too young and/or foolish to know what they are describing and experiencing, thus it cannot be real. ↩
[3] “Glomerulonephritis is a group of diseases that injure the part of the kidney that filters blood (called glomeruli). Other terms you may hear used are nephritis and nephrotic syndrome. When the kidney is injured, it cannot get rid of wastes and extra fluid in the body. If the illness continues, the kidneys may stop working completely, resulting in kidney failure.” ↩
“Glomerulonephritis,” National Kidney Foundation, accessed July 4, 2016, https://www.kidney.org/atoz/content/glomerul
[4] Carla had earned her undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Louisville in 1966 and her master’s degree in Library Service in 1971. ↩
[5] Over the years Carla had, very deliberately, on multiple occasions, described herself as a Christian mystic. ↩
I emphasize that because it is said of true mystics that they speak the same basic language, regardless of their religious, cultural, or historical background. That language or message is universal and timeless, transcending, as it does, the dogmas of church doctrine. The Persian mystic of the thirteenth century should be mutually intelligible with the Chinese mystic of the sixth century BCE and the American mystic of the twentieth.
“Christian mystic” implies that Carla is rooted in the universal aspects of Christianity: a follower of Christ but not necessarily a follower in the particulars of church dogma.
This is not to denigrate religious ritual and belief. Both can and do certainly serve as a vehicle of worship, a conduit of particulars through which the seeker transcends limited human conceptions of the ultimate nature of things, but more often than not the religious institution or code is opaque to that which it seeks to represent. Dogma tends to add distortion, obscure truth, exclude and separate. Dogma tends to discourage critical thought and genuine self-exploration. It precludes the empowerment that springs from the inherent authority and primacy of the personal connection to the truth within, the truth of oneself.
Mystics see through and beyond this dogma in order to recognize the essence of the message contained within. As mentioned elsewhere in this chapter:
RA This [muddied polarity of religious understanding is] in common with each of your orthodox religious systems which have all become somewhat mixed in orientation, yet offer a pure path to the One Creator which is seen by the pure seeker. 60.18
[6] “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” ↩
(Matt. 15:11 [KJV])
[7] Jim writes more about this in the August 28, 2015 entry of The Camelot Journal: ↩
Tonight I read the November, 2006 entries that Carla made in the Camelot Journal. What strikes me most about all of her entries that I have read so far is her total dedication to being of service to others no matter what difficulties she faced. In tonight's entries she described painful spasms around her GI tract. So she went to her family doctor who referred her to a specialist in that area and they made a preliminary diagnosis of interstitial cystitis. To check this diagnosis they filled her bladder with saline solution and accidentally burst her bladder. Then they apologized for their error, gave her pain meds for the excruciating pain, and said that the test confirmed the interstitial cystitis which has no cure.
This meant that she would have the need to urinate urgently and frequently for the rest of her life. The healing of the burst bladder took much longer than anticipated and needed to be done without the pain meds because they made her stomach very upset and unable to take food. This kind of situation occurred many times throughout her life. It's as if she had pre-incarnatively decided to add a significant degree of difficulty in her ability to be of service to others to increase her polarity, inner strength, will, etc. She never let such physical crises stop her loving and her serving, and, most incredibly to me, they never stopped her happy heart from smiling and loving all those around her. In her frail little body beat the heart of a lion.
The Camelot Journal, Jim McCarty, August 29, 2015, www.bring4th.org
[8] I’ve never known another human body so frail and so wracked with difficulties as was Carla’s. I had long felt that Carla lived by spirit alone, a supposition shared by others. Ra echoes the same here: ↩
RA At this nexus it is well to encourage those activities which feed the vital energies as this instrument lives in this space/time present almost completely due to the careful adherence to the preservation of those mental and spiritual energies which make up the vital energy complex of this entity. 86.23
RA The vital energy may be seen to be that deep love of life or life experiences such as the beauty of creation and the appreciation of other-selves and the distortions of your co-Creators’ making which are of beauty. Without this vital energy the least distorted physical complex will fail and perish. With this love or vital energy or élan the entity may continue though the physical complex is greatly distorted. 63.17