DAY 7
CHAPTER 29
Jim McCarty
Gary When and where were you born?
Jim I was found under a catalpa leaf at the age of twenty-seven, fully grown, by my mother and father, in Lexington, Nebraska.
Gary [laughing] I knew there was something to the story!
Jim I was born on May 10th, 1947. Kearney, Nebraska. The doctor who delivered me was Dr. Jester.
Gary Is that true?
Jim It is.
Gary That suits the way you have described yourself.
What would you describe of your childhood, growing up in Nebraska?
Jim Pretty normal. Pretty hooked into school, going to school. I was a good student—not great. I always got two As and three Bs no matter whether I was in grade school or graduate school. I went out for sports. That was about the most important thing that attracted me to school. There were sports there. Carla thinks it was my dancing nature that made me go out for sports because there was no place to dance in Lexington, Nebraska, town of 5,000, in the ’50s.
Gary I know that you interact with the world, whether in your own bedroom or whether out cutting grass or whether working with stones, in a way that you feel as if you’re dancing, moving in rhythm with the world. Was this something you were conscious of at a young age?
Jim No. I just couldn’t help it. Everything’s got a rhythm. So I just try to keep time with the beat. Everything has a certain pace at which you can do it comfortably. And I’ve been focused on doing things. I’ve been a doer, big muscle use, for all my life. So when you’re doing things, it’s good to get a rhythm. I think that’s why the chain gangs and the slaves had the songs and the rhythm to work to, because it was all a hard day of work. And it really does make it easier if you get into a rhythm. Your muscles get where you have an automatic muscle memory that comes back a lot easier than if you’re just doing without a rhythm; staccato, shall we say.
Gary Did you find that growing up, as with Carla, that you desired to volunteer, offer your help in some way?
Jim No. As far as helping people out I was pretty unconscious about anything spiritual or service-oriented until about the age of twenty-one. I was a late-bloomer in that regard.
Carla Tell about what you did, you know, the loner thing, wandering, and arrogance.
Jim Oh! [chuckles] When you [Gary] drove past Lexington, Nebraska, last year on Interstate 80, you might have noticed you were following the Platte River. So when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time out at the Platte River. I’d either ride my bicycle out there or my mom and dad would take me out and drop me off and pick me up at the end of the day. They’d drop me off at noon or so and pick me up at five or six o’clock. I’d hike around the river. And then there was a sand and gravel company that was pumping sand and gravel out of the river, and they would create sand pits that were full of fish, carp. I’d go fishing and hiking and looking for arrowheads or fossils or pretty stones. I had a drawer in my chest of drawers at home that was nothing but stones. It got to be pretty hard to get it out after a while because it was heavy. I like rocks. I’ve always liked rocks.
Gary So before working with stones you were seeking stones.
Jim Yeah! Yeah, I liked their color. I liked their shape.
Gary So your solitary nature showed up all the way back to the earliest stages?
Jim Yeah, well, I was an only child, so I guess it started off there. My mother commented that she noticed when I was a baby that I got along okay with the other kids but I was happiest off by myself.
Gary Did that remain true through your school years?
Jim Oh yeah.
Gary So you didn’t have many social activities on weekends either?
Jim No. I never did. I didn’t date. I went to my senior prom by myself and came home at nine o’clock after the meal, because I just had a track meet that day, and I was hot and sunburned and tired. So that was my social life. [laughs]
Gary Did you get along with the other kids?
Jim Yeah, I got along fine. You know, it’s like I said, I was a good student, and I was a likable person. People liked me. And I went out for athletics. I was a big fish in a little pond. Couldn’t ignore me.
Gary So how would you describe your parents?
Jim Good people. Simple people. They came through the Depression. Neither graduated from high school because each had to go to work to help support the family. My dad was born in a coal-mining town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and he quit school, I guess, at his sophomore year in high school and went to work at a grocery store and delivered newspapers to help support the family. His dad had died when he was ten, so he had four other brothers and sisters that his mother needed help supporting. And they worked very hard. She took in laundry and did housecleaning to help support the kids.
My mom was from a similarly poor family in western Nebraska. Dad was raised, by the way, in a log cabin. Mom was raised in a sod house. So she not only had the dirt floor that Dad had, she had dirt walls and dirt ceiling too, and goats on top eating the grass.
Carla Pioneers in the twentieth century. It was unusual. Both of them grew up in far different places, but had the same pioneer experience and the same values, pitching in to help the family.
Jim Mom rode a horse to school; it was about five miles. All the kids rode horses. If you lived too far away, there wasn’t any other way to get there. Either a horse-drawn wagon or a horse. Or you went on a walk, you know, take a few days. It took two days to get to town in the horse-drawn wagon. So, by the time my mom was graduated from the ninth grade, which was the country school, she would have to go to town to go to high school, and they couldn’t afford to send her to town, because it took two days to get there and she’d have to have a place to rent. So Mom was sad about that. Her younger sister was fortunate enough they moved after a while and got closer to town so that she got to go through high school and actually went to college, and is a teacher to this day at eighty-four. She’s now a substitute teacher.
So when Mom and Dad met and married, they decided that they wanted to give their child everything they didn’t have when they were growing up. Which meant [chuckles] they were probably trying to spoil me, and they probably did a pretty good job.
But they were very simple people. Mom hardly ever talked much. She still doesn’t! Very simple conversation. She’s the cowboy. “Yep,” “nope,” and “maybe.” You’d have to pry information out of her.
Dad was more gregarious. When he quit high school he started working in a grocery store and stayed with that profession for the rest of his life. When they were in Lexington, Nebraska, where I was raised, they both worked together in a grocery store called Jack and Jill—you know, like the nursery rhyme characters. But that was part of a chain owned by the Nash Finch company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Dad was the manager. Mom was a clerk, and she kept the books. And then when they were home they cooked meals together, they did the housecleaning together, and they did the yard work together. I thought that was the way everybody did it. Turned out it wasn’t because Mom was liberated; it was just because that was how they were raised. They had to work together to make it. You know, everybody had to pitch in. The times were just too tough. And that made an impression on the Depression-era children, which is what they were. They were teenagers through the Depression.
And they met in Kearney, Nebraska, where I was born. There was an Air Force base . . . well it was the Army Air Corps at that time1. So Dad was a quartermaster. He gave out the uniforms, the shoes, all the equipment. As it turned out, (I think it was probably planned by him before incarnation), a box fell off the top shelf and hit him on his clavicle and broke it. He was deemed unfit for battle, so he never made it out of the United States during the war. And I have a hunch he’s a gentle soul that did not want to kill anybody—that’s just my guess. So anyway, they worked together all their lives up until the time he died. He was 79 years old. He was still managing a little convenience store.
Carla He was doing a great job of it. He wasn’t just feebly going to work. He managed. He hauled boxes, he made deals. He was wonderful. And they were both healthy as horses.
Jim Yeah, Dad died at 79, and Mom’s still alive at 96 and a half.2 I hope to go back to see her again for her birthday, which is in the first week of December. I always try to go back and see her. And I guess that’s pretty much it. They always came to my athletic events. They were big supporters. They always drove a car. We didn’t have a bus when we were in high school, so parents would get together and then take four or five kids in the car with them. And we’d go to wherever the game was.
Gary It sounded like you were headed in the direction of describing how your parents met when you were talking about your dad’s experience in the military.
Jim There was an Army Air Corps base there in Kearney, Nebraska, and Mom was working as a waitress in The Tasty Tearoom. That was about 200 miles from where she was raised in western Nebraska, because Kearney’s in central Nebraska. She and a girlfriend came to Kearney seeking their fortune [laughs] I guess, trying to get jobs and also send more money back home. So, she was working as a waitress, and Dad and some of his buddies from the Army Air Corps came in and she was their waitress. And he got to know her and they started dating, and decided to get married, and did.
And then they moved from Kearney to a little town about nine miles outside Kearney called Odessa. It was about 75 people in the town but right then it was on highway 30. That was before the interstate system was built in this country, so it was the main east-west artery connecting Boston and San Francisco. And it was almost exactly in the middle, 1,733 miles from both, which is a curious little fact. And they lived in this combination home, grocery store, and filling station.
So when truckers would come through, they would stop there and get their gas, and they would most frequently pay for their gas with silver dollars. And my mom and dad, whenever they got a silver dollar, would put it aside for my education, my college education. So they got a couple thousand dollars, I guess, that way, which at that time was a lot of money. These days would buy you about twenty minutes of class.
But I remember—I was about two or three years old—my first memories are sitting in the kitchen sink with little dots all over me: chicken pox. And I was getting a bath. And the next memory I have, is—there’s a little gravel street on the side there that cut off of Highway 30 and went over to the school yard. I remember little purple flowers that I would pick; I loved these purple flowers. And I remember walking down the road there in my pants and feeling the roughness of the blue jeans against my skin because I just wet my last pair of diapers. So those are my first memories. [laughing] Then after that they moved to another town and got to working for this company, Nash Finch. Then they moved to Lexington and started managing the store there.
Gary You had a lot of experiences in the grocery store growing up, didn’t you?
Jim I was raised in a grocery store. On Saturday nights when I was in grade school, the store closed at 9 o’clock. After the store closed, I was usually at a movie at the theater across the street. Or I might decide to take a nap in the cardboard boxes that were stacked by the registers to put people’s groceries in. Some were large enough for me to fit in.
I went to a movie almost every Saturday night. There were two movie houses, one was right next door to the grocery store, one was right across the street. So I saw all the movies that came through town. And I would sit in row seven, and I would get so totally involved in the movie, with everybody, not just the hero. If there were stressful things happening, I was so engrossed and captured by it—I was taken by it. And I was so glad to get outside and realize it was only a movie, because it would take me away.
Carla [laughing] It’s not real, thank god!
Jim And if I’d already seen the movies then I would hang around the store and frequently I’d get sleepy and . . . up front where the checkout registers were they put a bunch of boxes. They get cereal and other things in the store in boxes. They cut them out, stock the shelves, then they would take the box up front and put groceries in it. So you had a big pile of boxes before you went out the door. I would crawl back in there and find a big box and go to sleep in it. So if they couldn’t find me they knew where to look for me. I was hiding out in the cardboard boxes.
Gary So, you said when you went to the movies you always chose row seven.3 So this is—
Jim I’ve no idea why. [laughing]
Gary It’s an indicator of your disciplined, habitual, ritualistic way. You chose something and then you tend to do it that way in cycles, again and again.
Jim Yeah, you’re right.
Gary So, if I were to ask you what sort of values, you inherited from your parents, I imagine one would be hard work, the need to work hard.
Jim Oh yeah. And it’s not that they taught that and said, “Now, you’ve got to learn how to work hard and be diligent.” I just watched. They were both hard workers. They had to be their whole life long. Mom and her dad would hand-milk 27 cows twice a day. I don’t know if you’ve ever milked a cow, but you need a pretty good grip. [chuckles] So they were good at working hard and long, so I just did my part. And I didn’t realize it—I was a really good worker until I started working with other people.
Gary Would you say you inherited any other values from your parents?
Jim Honesty. They were just as honest as could ever be. They would never do anything that even had the shadow of doubt upon it. They just had high integrity. At the time I thought, you know, I could see their lack of education in their speech patterns. They used incorrect words here and there, tenses on verbs and things. And for a while I was ashamed of that, but I outgrew that. And later as I got older—which happens with most kids, they discover how intelligent and wise their parents were, the older you get. So, yeah, fidelity, faithfulness, and just being good people.
Gary You said that they were very supportive of you, especially given the deficiencies in their own childhood experiences. They wanted to compensate for those and give to you what they didn’t have.
Jim Right.
Gary Were you ever in conflict with them?
Jim Not so much as a kid. I remember when I got to be a teenager, it was the time of the hippies and I grew my hair longer when I was in college. My dad and mom really didn’t like that very much. I remember my mom saying, “You were a real good kid until you got to be about twelve years old.” [laughing] But yeah, I really didn’t have conflicts with them. I remember maybe two spankings in grade school. And I remember I did something at the dinner table one night and my mom reached over and whapped me. I think that was the only time she ever hit me. She tried one other time but I ducked, I saw it coming. [laughs] But, you know, no real conflicts. Just what happened when kids go off to college and become hippies and protest against everything their mom and dad ever believed in. [laughing] Not everything, but the government, the war, and so forth. The Vietnam War folks at that time.
Gary Did that sense of support continue when you embarked on this new adventure with L/L Research and you were doing these—
Jim They supported me in everything I did. Even when I lived on the land with no electricity, no running water, kerosene lamp for light, wood stove for heat and cooking, except when it was hot, and I cooked outside over an open fire. You know they grew up under those conditions. They were hoping never to see them again! [laughing] They came and visited me and stayed in my little cabin and used my outhouse. And it was fairly familiar to them, but they supported me totally. Didn’t understand me a bit [laughing], never understood me, but always supported me.
Gary We worked so hard to keep you away from these conditions. And now you return to them.
Jim Yeah. We’re trying to give you everything we never had.
Carla Mmm-hm. The first thing that they ever asked me, or his mom asked me, she says, “What is prompting him to do these things when he can do so much more?”
And I was trying to explain to them that they did really wonderfully, because when you go to college you are furnishing your mind so you can actually think better. And you do: you think more the more you read, the more vocabulary you have, the more different people you’ve run into that think differently that have new thoughts that you have to grapple with. It all matures your mind, and they gave him that. It didn’t matter what he did to earn a living. He was completely using his college. We all use our college regardless of what we do as far as jobs. She never could get that. You know, apart from jobs, what was it, what was the point of going to college? She didn’t have the idea of just educating your mind and that being a good thing in and of itself.
Gary In their unconditional support, as you went about your unusual journeys from protesting, to hippie-hood, to being on the land, to channeling with L/L Research, were they ever inquisitive about what you were doing?
Jim Well, they would ask questions, and I would try my best to answer. But I could see that the answers weren’t really satisfying them and getting through, so there weren’t a lot of questions. They were just very good at just accepting me and loving me no matter what.
Carla Except for the beard.
Jim Yeah. [chuckles]
Carla It was a small, a very small thing.
Jim When I was graduated from college I had a goatee, and of course with a mortarboard* on top, I looked very Jewish. They didn’t have anything against Jews but this kid with a beard, you know . . . Dad was ready to move out of town so he’d never have to be seen again. [everybody laughing] If word got around . . .
Gary It was a small town too.
Jim Very small town.
Gary So you described them as simple people. I presume then that they didn’t have a strong spiritual or philosophical way of thinking. Did they have a religious belief system?
Jim They went to church every Sunday. We started off I guess as Baptists for a few months till they found the Presbyterian church. And they went until Dad died and Mom would still go if she could. She got her fifty-year membership years ago. So they really didn’t have spiritual beliefs. They were, like I said, just good common folks, and they went to church. And Mom was part of a Bible study group, and did things with the ladies.
* The academic cap with a square top and accompanying tassel that one wears upon graduation.
They were all ladies in the study group. They went to each other’s houses and cooked and brought food and so forth but . . .
Gary This sounds as if it was more of a cultural, social thing than something indicative of strong religious conviction per se.
Jim Yeah.
Gary And you attended church with them on Sundays?
Jim I did. All the way through high school and a little bit in college.
Gary How did you relate to what you were hearing at church?
Carla [giggles]
Jim Didn’t really think about it. [laughing]
Gary Just went through the procedure and got it done?
Jim Yeah. Like I said, I was pretty unconscious until I was 21. I sang in the youth choir until I was twelve and my voice changed. Then I remember: [laughing] I was singing, and this guy in front of me turned around real slowly and looked at me like that—[Carla laughing] And I thought, Oo-oo! Something’s the matter with my voice.
Gary So you leave to go to college upon graduating. What degree did you pursue and earn when you went to college?
Jim My first majors were business and economics. And after four years when I got my degree, I thought, there’s no way in the world I want to pursue these things. Because that was part of that automatic pattern that I was following. I was expected by my mom and dad, and the company officials from Nash Finch, that I would go to college, get a degree and join the company. They had plans for me. And even through college, I went home in summer, and I worked my dad’s grocery store from age of thirteen on, which is a little younger than you’re supposed to start for social security. But—[laughing] I came home in the summertime, and I worked as a produce manager. I liked the fruits and vegetables; that was about the only thing I could really get excited about in the grocery store.
So the Nash Finch folks figured that I’d be a good candidate for a division manager in their company over produce. And I would go around to the other stores and other towns in the summertime, and fill in for produce managers who were going on vacation. So I got to know a lot of folks in the company that way.
But after the four years, I finally became alive. The hippie generation woke me up. Drugs, sex, rock and roll, and all of a sudden things didn’t make as much sense as I’d been taking for granted. And I decided that I didn’t want to pursue either business or economics, so I went back for another year. I’d got enough sociology in my undergraduate degree that one solid year of sociology also got me a sociology major. And one of my professors was impressed enough with me that he got me a graduate assistantship at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. And so when I got done with my sociology major, I thought, no, I don’t want to do that ei-ther.
And so I passed up the graduate assistantship and went to Gainesville, Florida to join Teacher Corps, which was a cooperation between Health, Education and Welfare on the Federal level, and the local educational department at the University of Florida. Dr. Leonard Kaplan was the head of the department, and they had a new idea. The Head Start Program had been going on for some years, but a lot of kids that went through Head Start weren’t keeping their head start; they were losing it. So this was called a follow-through program. It was for grades one through three. And the idea was to maintain that head start that the kids had gotten. And usually these were—like I say, in Gainesville, and Jacksonville especially, we were working with inner city kids, which were primarily, but not all, black. And they were hoping that we could make a difference.
We got our own classrooms and eventually we got the “incorrigibles”: the ones that nobody else wanted. So we were trying to figure out how to do this and—I think it was Jean Piaget who was one of the theorists we were studying. Herbert Kohl and his Open Classroom, Montessori schools—the different ways of approaching education to try to get the educational process more internalized so that the kids are really interested in what they’re doing, and they, at some point, can take over more of their direction of learning. So, we did that—and this was also a master’s program. Once you finished it, after two years, you got a master’s degree. So this was still the time of the Vietnam War and hippies and so forth, and we got to protest what our professors were doing because we had better ideas, we thought, and got a degree and got paid at the same time. It was an ideal situation. [chuckles]
So, that was 1972 when I was finally graduated from the University of Florida. And I decided I didn’t want to go on with an educational degree. Came to that same point again: that I really didn’t like public schools, and I didn’t really like working with kids, unfortunately, because they take a lot of energy. If you’re going to do it right, they need a lot of energy from you. You can’t just get in there and impose discipline and say, “Ok, we’re all going to do this at once.” It’s not that easy, so I thought, I don’t want to do this.
So one of the books that we used in formulating our setup in our own classrooms was called The Raspberry Exercises: How to Start a School and Write Your Own Book, and in the back they had their bibliography of the different sources they used to write their book and start their own school. And one of their resources was a fellow in Colorado: T. D. Lingo and The Adventure Trail Survival School. He was teaching a course of how to really release the dormant brain potential. It was his theory that, if you were able to remove the handful of blockages that are enculturated in everybody in almost every culture, the brain would then naturally circuit energy forward into the frontal lobes. There’s three-eighths of your brain, from your ears to your eyes, that scientists are only beginning to discover what’s there, what it’s for, because you can be a normal human being and not use your frontal lobes. Most people don’t use their frontal lobes.
There was a book written in 1963 called The Machinery of the Brain, by Dean E. Wooldridge. He talks about Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a railroad worker back in the 1800s. He set off a dynamite charge as a part of his job that blew a four-foot tamping rod an inch thick through his frontal lobes. He survived! He was more docile afterward, he was more easily manageable, but he was still alive and still kicking and still carrying on. And that’s even with his frontal lobes totally destroyed. So the theory that Lingo was following was, if we could just get rid of most of the blockages that people have, that the frontal lobes would be the home of creativity and of contact with, as he called it, advanced intelligence. And a lot of times, after the students had been through the course, they began making contact in their preconscious state, which is the state you go through on your way to sleep and come out of on your way out of sleep. It’s the equivalent of the alpha state of meditation.
So a lot of the contacts that kids got, or people got, were very interesting, very inspirational; a very high quality of philosophy and ability to write that was beyond what they were capable of previously. One of the techniques we used was essaying. When we discovered there was some sort of a blockage that we knew about in our lives and where it came from we would use essaying as one tool for getting it out, talking about it, discovering it. So we knew what we were each capable of writing because we’d read our essays to each other in the morning around the breakfast campfire. So when they started reporting their contacts with different source of entities—names like [spelled phonetically] Ramord-tary, Ganodzle, Bimbleshack, [chuckling]— these contacts were of a very high nature. They were interesting. And so that was part of what came out of the course there with Lingo.
He had been doing this since he got out of college in 1957. (He’d been in World War II and was able to use the G.I. Bill4 to go to college.) The thing that got him interested in starting the Adventure Trail Survival School was, he served under General George Patton in the Battle of the Bulge at the end of WWII. Sometime after that battle, they got into Germany and began liberating concentration camps.5 And at that time Hitler was calling up the old men and the young boys, because Germany was obviously defeated but Hitler was not going to give up. So at one point as they were marching through Germany, Lingo came around the corner of a farmhouse, and there was an old German soldier. Turned out it was a grandfather (he didn’t know it at the time) so Lingo bayoneted him in his gut, and before the soldier died, he and Lingo sat together on the front porch. The soldier pulled out his billfold, and as he was dying, he showed Lingo pictures of his children and his grandchildren. So the result of this for Lingo was he had to ask himself why he had to kill his brother. You know, why did people kill each other?
So he went to the University of Chicago during what was called The Golden Age. Robert Maynard Hutchins was the university president at that time, and his policy then was to find the best minds in every field of study, and require them to teach freshmen. So they had Mortimer Adler in psychology and David Riesman in sociology. And Enrico Fermi had just split the atom underneath the football stands at the University of Chicago. And one day, informally, Fermi was addressing a group of students outside the classroom, just talking in the hall, and Lingo was on the edge of the group. Fermi said, “I have split the atom and released the energy of the atom. And it is a terrible energy. One day one of you will split the brain atom.” And he pointed right at Lingo. So that became Lingo’s driving force.
He went back to Colorado. He had a guitar, three chords and six folk songs and he got on the Groucho Marx show. Groucho Marx was a comedian, one of the Marx Brothers. Well, Groucho had a show called You Bet Your Life and he had interesting people come on. They had to answer questions, and if you got a number of questions right, you got money. Well, Lingo played his guitar. And some producer in Hollywood saw him and said, “I want that guy.” So they did a summer series with Lingo. He got to do eight shows for $2,000 a show. Back in the mid-fifties that was a lot of money. So he took that $16,000, put it in two grocery sacks, gave one to the IRS, and he bought his mountain with the other one.
So he was living at 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains outside of Blackhawk, Colorado when I met him. And he started there when he was—I guess he was probably thirty-four or -five in 1957, and he started getting his first classes there. He also worked with inner city kids. He would use the money that he charged kids like me, the fat urban rich kids [laugh-ter]—FURKies, he would call them—and he paid for the inner city kids with money from the FURKies. He had a lot better luck with the black kids and the inner city kids than with white kids that were rich because the kids that were poor realized that there may not be another bus that comes along. Whereas white kids had a mindset of, if I don’t make this bus, there’ll be another bus. You know, they were used to luxury.
So, that was what drove Lingo, and he was successful. A lot of students came through there were able to make contact with their frontal lobes, and I was fortunate enough to be able to do that too.
On July 12, 1972 I was in my lean-to—we all built our own lean-tos, that was part of what you did—
Carla Jim’s very good with dates.
Jim Yeah. So, my body was in my lean-to and my mind was in the preconscious state, and it also just happened to be not quite sunrise. The sun was just starting to come up. And I felt my brain—[chuckles] Hmm. There was something circulating in my brain. It was like it was made of Jello or something, and all of a sudden, right here [points to a place on the forehead about an inch above the center point between the brows] there was a click.
Lingo said it was the amygdala. The amygdala is a little switch in there where, when choices are made, it operates in a different fashion.
Carla Fight or flight.
Jim Yeah, fight or flight. So, I felt this click, and I felt my frontal lobes come alive and there was—like an orgasm went off in my brain. And after that I guess I had two, three hundred of those experiences while I was on the land. I would feel this pulsing in the frontal lobes. I’d feel that circulation again. And I’d feel that explosion of pleasure and pressure. Frequently there would be visions and voices that I didn’t quite understand, never really understood.
But I believe that was the beginning of the work with the indigo ray—the opening of the indigo ray, is what I’m thinking it was. What it did for me was to make me much more creative and be able to solve problems on a basic level.
Lingo had the philosophy—he wanted each of his students that came through there to go out and start your their schools. “Each one teach one” was his saying.6 This planet needs a little bit of help. We’re trying to blow ourselves up with atomic bombs. We need to set off the brain bomb. We need to get people’s frontal lobes going. Because once you get that going, you don’t want to kill people. You realize you’re one with them. You’re one with the entire planet.
So I went to Kentucky and found my land and started my own school. And—like I said, there I didn’t have any electricity, so I used kerosene lamps for light. And I cooked with wood, and I heated with wood. And in summer when it was too hot to cook inside I went outside and cooked over an open fire. I built a fire pit—a couple fire pits: one for bonfires and one for cooking. And I had a couple of classes of students that came through before I discovered Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert.
Probably other questions in between there too, but I zipped along at warp speed.
Gary I think that’s the most I’ve ever heard you talk at once!
Carla I asked . . .
Jim I promised Carla I’d go into detail.
Gary [laughter] Thank you, Carla.
Carla You’re welcome. I told him it was only the once; we’d never get this chance again, so go ahead. Interestingly enough, when my eye turned into my brain, it was the amygdala into which it was shoving.
Jim She is constantly meditating, I think, with half her—well probably all her consciousness, just half her eyes.
Gary Lingo said that the reason we cannot access our frontal lobes is due to blockages. What are these blockages?
Jim Well it’s something that usually gotten in the enculturation process, usually from parents. It can also be from teachers or neighborhood folks; authority figures of one kind or another.
When we are young and impressionable, from zero to seven years old especially, is usually when it happens. We get enculturated with ideas that are—Lingo said they are anti-life, basically. War is one of them. They differ for every person though, and there’s usually no more than a handful, three or four large ones. Sex is usually one, self-image is usually one— people lacking in self-confidence because they’d been made to depend upon those outside themselves and they haven’t grown their own authentic self.
We used dream analysis to try to figure out what these were. Once you let your subconscious know that you’re willing to work with it, and that you want to use dreams to work with it, it’ll shoot out a bunch of garbage dreams to start with to kind of get the pump primed, and maybe you won’t be able to make a lot of sense out of it. But after a while you’ll start giving your dreams in symbolic form. There’s a kind of a dream language as Ra started to talk to us about. We just barely started asking questions there. But each person can determine his or her own dream language, and once you start working with your dreams, they give you some real good clues as to what your blockages are. Those are the first things I want to do.
The body is a mechanism that heals itself continually on every level, if it’s able to, if we give it the ability to do so and make it a good thing to do so. We don’t value dreams in this culture. Not many cultures do value dreams. But they can teach us a lot. So once you get your subconscious working with you and feeding you these dreams, then you can find out what some of your blockages are. Once we were able to do that, like I said, we started using things like essaying to get more understanding. While you’re writing, a lot of things come to you that you weren’t thinking about before you started writing. It’s like a channeling, but you’re channeling from yourself and your own subconscious.
And once we got a better understanding of that, then we used what are called neurodramas. I think this is sort of like neurolinguistic programming these days. But neurodrama is where you remember specifically where you were and when and by whom you were programmed. And it’s usually mom or dad or both. And if you can remember the exact time, then you’d attempt to relive it. When you went through it the first time you were just a kid. You didn’t know you had rights. You didn’t know you could stand up for yourself. And it would be a good thing if you did overall, but at that time if you stood up for yourself you are liable to get knocked down. So, in the neurodrama, we learned how to stand up for ourselves and to claim our identity, to claim the rights that were taken away from us when we were kids. So it’s just—it’s another type of therapy. So many of them, then and now, I’m sure, utilize more of a participatory part for the person being therapized, shall we say.
I remember at that time Janov’s “Primal Scream” was big.7 John Lennon was into the Primal Scream with Yoko Ono at that time. Well, we used that too. Whatever would get the energy out, to circuit forward. It was Lingo’s philosophy that the neurons in the brain were usually configured in such a way as to hold the energy of that poor programming in place. He called this the energy of neurosis. And once you could free that energy through the dream analysis, through essaying, through neurodrama, Primal Scream, whatever, then this energy of neurosis was released and you had extra energy. This energy could now flow forward in a natural fashion into the frontal lobes. So, that’s kind of in a nutshell what I learned and what I went back the second year to teach.
So in ’72 I started looking for places. After writing to four or five dozen real estate agencies, I picked out four or five that sounded good and I traveled around in Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee. I was looking for my piece of land where I could start my school. And I didn’t have much luck. Everything I found . . . [laughter] . . . this one guy in Liberty, Kentucky, took me out to his place. We were hiking up the side of the hill here, and he was pointing out the boundaries to me. So I said, “The boundary down there is where the hill starts, right?” He replied saying, “Over there, where it starts, and it comes over here, to the south—,” “So it’s the side of this hill, right?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s basically it.” [laughing] “Okay, thanks anyway.”
So I looked at the map, I was in central Kentucky, and Nebraska was a thousand miles away, and I said to myself, “I’m going to stop in, unannounced, to every real estate agent I see.” My plan was to tell them what I’m looking for and see if I could get better results. Turned out the first one I stopped into had the piece of land I was looking for.
Eddy Deep took me out to a little place between Gravel Switch, Kentucky, and Bradfordsville, Kentucky, on the Jones Fork—Joner, as it was called by the local people. After you drove down the two-lane blacktop road, it became a one-lane blacktop, then a one-lane gravel, then two ruts [laughter] in the road, and it turned off into a creek. And that was my access road, the running creek. And it was rocks all over—you know what creek bottoms look like around here: they’re all limestone, their full of rocks. That’s why I named my school “Rock Creek.” I didn’t realize there were other places that were called Rock Creek here in Louisville, like Rock Creek Riding Club.
Anyway, we drove up the creek bottom and it was 132 acres of land. Six acres were bottomland where you could grow crops and you could clear, and I was hoping that eventually I could raise crops there. And on both sides the hills, knobs. They’re called ‘knobs’ if they’re too big for hills, too small for mountains in Kentucky. So “knob land” is what I bought; it was unimproved. 132 acres for 6,000 bucks, which was a really good price; nowadays it would be $1,000 an acre.
Carla At least.
Jim So I bought the land and the first night on the land I had a very unusual experience. It was August, and the creek was dry, which was common for the creeks to go dry in Kentucky in the fall. So I put my sleeping bag in the creek bottom, and it was about twilight; there was still enough light to be able to see fifty or so feet away. I was ready to go to sleep and all of a sudden this gray fox is walking down the creek. He stops at the bottom of my sleeping bag and he looks over at me. I look at him. Outgoing and gregarious, I said, “Hi, how are you doing?” And he grabbed the bottom of my sleeping bag and started shaking it like a dog. And I thought, this isn’t right. Foxes don’t do this. And so I backed off a bit and I got a rock and I threw it and it exploded under him. He didn’t move. And I thought, yep, he’s got rabies. So I just let him go.
And the next day it turned out that a gray fox—it was tobacco harvest season and right down where the road went off into the creek and my land started, there was a barn where they were hanging tobacco. They were up on the tobacco wagon and a gray fox foaming at the mouth came biting their tires. So I got to meet a rabid gray fox [laughter] first night on the land. And I never really took any great message from that other than there are going to be challenges and you’re going to be dealing with a lot of crazy people [laughter] but you’re going to come through it just—in good shape, fine shape.
Gary One more question about the T. D. Lingo experience, and that’s that, in order to remove these blocks, you did dream work and essaying and neurodrama, which has elements in common with a lot of know yourself, accept yourself sort of therapies. But what specifically about that linked that work to the frontal lobes. What caused—
Jim Why did it work? Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because it’s a very important point. It’s done in the primal nature environment. Lingo said that the brain gets overloaded in the urban environment. There’s too much information. And it begins to back off and to shut down in certain areas, the frontal lobes being one of them. So this type of therapy doesn’t work in the city. You have to be in the primal nature environment, because in the primal nature environment you’re receiving a normal or an organic level of input. And in this nature environment the brain is able to come out of its shell, shall we say, with a little help from you. So, the reason that it works with the frontal lobes is because of the body and the brain want to work naturally and normally. They just need a little help, and if you can do that in the primal nature environment then success is much more likely.
Gary And perhaps as that was one of, if not the, objective of the whole undertaking, that kind of set an intent, set a framework for precisely that result to manifest.
Jim Yeah, that was the intent for sure. Around the clock. We used our sleep too. [chuckles]
Gary You said that one of the reasons for activating and unlocking the frontal lobes was for creativity and communication. Was there any other reason for doing that work?
Jim Well it seemed to be the natural thing, a natural outgrowth of service to others. Lingo looked at the old brain as being the competitive consciousness in our capitalistic society, where a few people are in charge of a whole lot of people and tell them what to do. It’s like a corporation or military the way it’s formed; a pyramid, from the top down. And it’s competitive. But competitive consciousness doesn’t produce results as good as cooperative consciousness. Cooperative consciousness is automatically released with the circuiting of energy into the frontal lobes. So he was hoping that if enough people could do that, that we would get away from the type of consciousness that could destroy this planet. And that was his thing, is that he had been to war, he had seen war and he knew the next war could be the last war. So that was his motivation.
Gary So increased awareness, development of consciousness and—he may not have used this terminology, but—opening the heart.
Jim Right.
Gary Any speculation as to the origins of the sources being received and the communication aspect of frontal lobe development?
Jim Are you talking about the people who are doing research into that area or people who are experiencing it or—?
Gary No. You named some like, strange, like, Harry Potter-sounding names.
Jim Oh, the name of the people channeling through; yeah, the contacts. They said that they were extraterrestrials. They said they were in spaceships parked on the other side of Saturn.
Gary [laughter] That set the stage.
And a quick question before we return to your experience on the land. You participated in the counterculture while in college. Could you describe a little more about that?
Jim [laughter]
Gary In terms of how you participated in newspapers and . . .
Jim Oh. Yeah, well, ok. Where do we start? [laughter] In college there was a fellow, a priest, a Catholic priest by the name of Father John Scott. He was the head of the Newman House, which is usually where Catholic students go to live. This particular Newman House is where the radicals went to live. We had a newspaper called The Scorpion. (You could see our attitude at the time.) I was the columnist for the paper. We had various demonstrations on campus, everybody did—it was the “in” thing to do!
And we were not about to be left out.
So when the incursion into Cambodia occurred, we had a demonstration. Throughout the country college campuses were being shut down. So we thought, we need to do that here too. So that was going to be our goal, but the president of the University—well let’s see—now it’s the University of Nebraska at Kearney; at that time it was Kearney State College—and the president wanted to see if he could talk us out of it. So he and a couple of the trustees met with us at his house and talked to us about what did we want?
The particular thing we were demonstrating about at that time—the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Incursion were certainly the basis for it, but—one of our group from The Scorpion was student-teaching at the time and he was dismissed from student teaching altogether because he was participating in writing columns for the paper. We thought that was an abridgment of his free speech rights. So that was the particular reason, in conjunction with the general reason, of why we were there. So we were attempting to get him reinstated and also to see if we could get some classes on educating people concerning the Vietnam War. And so the President said, “It sounds reasonable. We’ll see what we can do to help you.” And so they did. And from that point on he and I were friends! He handed me my diploma and gave me a good, hearty handshake. And that was what happened at Kearney State College.
Then I went on to the University of Florida and didn’t partake in so much structured demonstrations or things at that time—more of the concerts and the happier side of being a hippie: drugs, sex, rock ‘n roll. But our activism was—we were expressing that in Teacher Corps, in our classes. We talked to our professors and it got certain things through and done so that we could get our own classrooms. We could try some new ideas and see if there could be another way of approaching the educational system because we had all been part of that educational system. Basically we thought we survived it, we didn’t thrive there. We were able to survive it. We were looking for another way of doing things. That’s pretty much it. [laughter] There were other details but, who cares?
Gary Like Forrest Gump says, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
So your experience on the land. We know what you did to earn income. You hired out your labor on tobacco farms.
Jim Farm labor in general, tobacco specifically, yeah. That’s where I got most of my money.
$1,500 to $2,000 a year was all I needed to support myself. You have to remember this was the seventies! Inflation has taken a toll.
Carla He ate a great many beans. [laughter]
Jim Yeah. Beans. And chapattis. That was pretty much my diet.
Gary How much of what you needed for survival came from the land itself, and how much did you need to purchase with actual money?
Jim Well I did raise my own food, most of my own food—vegetables anyway, and dried what I could. I didn’t need to purchase a lot in the way of food. And I think I still have clothes that I wore down there. Gas and insurance, repairs on my truck, and tools are mostly where I spent my money. I did need some canned goods from town, and I needed to buy some of the grains that I couldn’t grow, like corn. I could buy corn and wheat berries. So I could grind my own corn and grind my own wheat and make bread. And in the winter when it was cold enough, I could make yogurt and just keep the yogurt starter over in the corner because it never got warm enough for the cabin in the winter to kill the yogurt. I ate pretty simply.
Gary So you had had some preparation prior to going to the land through T. D. Lingo’s school because it wasn’t just about activation of the frontal lobes, but it was also about learning the skills of survival.
Jim Right. And how to survive on the land long term, not the type of survival Outward Bound taught: Oh our plane crashed! We’ve got to survive until we get found. Not that kind. Long-term survival. Raising your own food. Storing your food. Making your own cabin. Doing it all yourself.
Gary Did that adequately prepare you for your six years?
Jim Oh yeah. Well like I said a few times, I did build my own log cabin. And the last thing I built before that was a shoe-shine kit in 9th grade . . . and I got a B. [laughter]
Carla It was beautiful. And it was so completely useful. Everything that he needed was on a shelf somewhere that was fitted exactly for the can that held it. It was all labeled. It was a librarian’s delight. I looked at that beautiful, tiny home that he had and I loved it. Just loved it.
So completely organized. Very clean. And very useful. Everything was useful. And the usefulness was its art. He saw the beauty of all that. So, we were very much in sync.
Gary So you were utilitarian in the construction of everything—
Jim Right.
Gary —and all your possessions had a function.
Jim They were all hanging on the wall, just like here. [chuckles]
Gary How would you spend your down time on your land?
Jim My process was to get up in the morning and look beside my bed see if I’d written down any dreams because I may or may not remember doing that. And then the first thing I guess was I’d make some tea. Yes, I was an inveterate tea drinker then, and go over to my easy chair—I had a chair much like that [points to chair in the room], over-stuffed and comfortable—and I would look at the dream I had, and I would write, and I would try to figure out what the dream was telling me.
So I’d do some writing, and I’d do some reading, and I’d make some breakfast. Of course I’d meditate. And I did that until noon. I didn’t do physical labor until noon. Mornings were sacred time. And I learned that at Lingo’s too. When you get up out of bed, you got your best chance at doing your therapy and doing your most creative work, mentally and spiritually. So that’s what I did then. Then in the afternoons I worked from about twelve until about eight in the evening—because, in the summer, there’s enough light—and put in a good day’s work. There’s gardening and building other cabins and building the road up out of the creek to my cabin and so forth. There was always work to do.
Gary At then 8 pm onward?
Jim Then I would take a bath. Every day—I had a galvanized steel tub, kidney-shaped, a long tub. And I would cover it with a piece of plastic and a ten-speed bicycle inner tube that held the plastic onto the tub with the inner tube.
Carla Filled it first from the pump.
Jim And there was water in there. And I’d let the sun heat it up. So by the end of the day it was usually about 105 degrees. So I took a nice hot bath. Even if it was 95 degrees outside, I took a 105 degree bath because I didn’t want to get out of that bath—95 degrees felt cool.
Gary How about winters, when you, I presume, couldn’t work as much as there was less daylight?
Jim Yeah. Well the morning routine was the same, and I would probably extend it some to the afternoon. But there was still work to do and I had things . . . while I was there I built, let’s see, three other cabins and an adult playground—
Carla And a big root cellar.
Jim Oh yeah, the root cellar.
Carla Which is very labor-intensive.
Jim So I was working on those things and then I was usually trying to cut some sort of wood. If I needed wood for another cabin I would cut it in the winter when there weren’t any leaves on the trees. It was a lot easier to deal with if the sap was down, which meant the logs were lighter, because a whole lot of the weight’s in the sap. A whole lot more reading time; a lot more down time. I spent a lot of time reading. Drinking tea.
Gary So you carried forward a lot of that work you had learned from T. D. Lingo in terms of reflecting on yourself, doing dream work, essaying. Did you gain a lot of insight into yourself during that time?
Jim Oh yeah. See those—one, two, three, four, five, six—six three-ring notebooks—yeah, right there. All of those are the essays I wrote while I was there.
Gary Very extensive.
Carla And they’ve never been digitized.
Jim And they’re not going to be.† [laughter]
Carla I’ve tried repeatedly to get him to.
Jim Those are therapy. Those are . . . to the bone. Those are blood and guts.
Gary So would you say that after six years on the land, you left the expe-
† Much to the dismay of the interviewer, Jim threw these journals away the following year in 2015.
rience different than when you began?
Jim Oh, yeah. Sure. I mean I’d be different no matter where I was, but the land was a great catalyst. I thought I was going to live there for my whole life and die there and be buried there. But then I met these folks from Louisville, Kentucky who spoke to my heart.
Gary Threw a wrench in the whole program.
Jim [chuckles] Yeah.
Gary In what ways would you say that the land changed you, if that can be identified?
Jim Well it gave me a whole lot more confidence. When I bought the land, it was August, and I wanted to explore it some and see if I could find a cabin site. And like I said, my little tent was down in the creek because it was clear. The rest of the bottom land was grown up with weeds; they were eight feet tall! And so, I had to cut a path to where I could see over there on the side of the hill through those weeds about 200 yards, and that was the first thing I had to do, so I knew it was going to be a lot of work here. So being able to do the work just gave me a mountain of confidence because I did it by myself.
Gary Did you begin with anxiety, trepidation, fear?
Jim [Carla and Jim laughing] Oh yeah!
Carla Your rating system. Tell them that.
Jim Almost forgot that. Part of my writing in my journal was to give a numerical value to every day. Zero to plus 10 was I want to stay, I want to be here and I love it. Zero to minus 10: I want to leave! Well I started out minus 9.5. [laughter] It was thirty-five days until I got to positive numbers. I had a lot of anxiety. I mean, it’s the primal nature environment, and you know, there are rattlesnakes and copperheads around. And I saw them. [laughter] I took a bath over a couple copperheads—didn’t know it until I emptied the tub—there they were! Sorry! Hope I didn’t squish you. And I didn’t because you know, uneven ground underneath. So I knew it was going to be a whole lot of work subconsciously.
So that’s where I got—I’m going to blow your order of questioning here again. One night in the tent, I had a friend with me at the time. She had traveled with me from Jacksonville, Florida out to Lingo’s, and she took the course too. And on her way back to Colorado she came to visit me, and she had her dog, Sugarbear. He was a three-legged German shepherd.
And in the middle of the night in our little tent there he’s eating dry dog food out of a plastic bowl, and it woke me enough to get me into the preconscious state. I wasn’t awake and I wasn’t asleep. So that’s when I got that message from my guide that named itself Angelica. And the message was, “The key to your survival”—and I was very much worried about my survival—”comes indirectly through nervousness.”8 And I always took that, later, to mean that my attention to detail and my fear of failure, the nervousness part, would ensure that I wouldn’t fail, that would be my key to survival. And do everything that I could think of doing and anything extra in building a log cabin and building a fire pit and whatever I did, try to do it as well as I possibly could because my survival might depend upon it someday.
Gary So don’t let that fear overwhelm you. It’s actually of aid to you because it’s keeping you moving, keeping you getting the job done.
Jim Right. Yeah. It kept me moving. Doing a lot of moving.
Gary Did that happen within that 30-day window that you received the message?
Jim No, that happened before I moved to the land permanently. It happened in the first visit there. After I bought it I got word to her that I’d gotten land and she came by to see it because she knew what I was looking for.
So I bought the land in August of ’72 and then went back to Nebraska to earn some more money because I spent everything I had on the land. It was $6,000 and that was all I had. So I went back to earn some more money and I worked some—yeah, in fact, ’72, ’73, I’m getting all these dates . . . you know after 40 years you forget things. [laughter] I worked some for my father in the grocery store. That was okay but then I was looking for something that would be—that would pay better, for one thing.
And I found a job working as a rough-in carpenter in construction. In Nebraska a lot of the income comes from grain and growing grain and corn and wheat and barley and rye and oats and so forth. So there are grain elevators in every town. And about 20 miles down the road in Gothenburg, Nebraska, Young Love Construction Company was setting about building new grain elevators. So I got a job with them. $4 an hour at the time was really good. In the grocery store I was only working for $3 an hour.
So I went and worked down there, and after we got the forms made—this was going to be a concrete grain elevator—we had to build wooden forms that would make a wall around all the separate little bins for different types of grain that would be in the grain elevator. There were probably 50 or 60 of these and they were—some of them were about the size of this room, 10 feet by 12 feet, some were maybe 8 feet by 12 feet—generally that shape. So after all of the woodwork was done and the forms were made, then they began jacking it and pouring concrete. They had jacks all the way around it so it could be jacked 24 hours a day. And the concrete could be poured 24 hours a day. So this thing was slowly rising into the air as a mass.
And it was my job to go around to each of these little bins—where there was going to be grain—and to crawl inside and get what amounted to a swing: two rebar came down on the sides, and a piece of wood went across there and I would have to reach out and do the finishing work because when the concrete came out of a form, it was pocked, it was honeycombed. And you couldn’t have these honeycombs with grain, or the grain would catch in there and rot and destroy the whole batch, so it had to be smooth. And it was my job to take grout and to smooth all of that around. And even at night there was a little light in there so you could see.
And they were continuing to jack it up and even at 20 degrees below zero they were able to pour concrete by putting enough lime in the concrete that it wouldn’t freeze immediately. So they were jacking and jacking, and finally, after we got up to about 105 feet, it was 20 below zero and I was looking down and I was thinking, I’ll bet I can find a better job. [Carla laughing heartily]
So I did. And the end of winter—I guess it was the middle or end of January I got a job with farm implement construction, farm implement manufacturer, and I was a welder. I started off doing stick welding. Welding parts together. They would bring a whole bin of parts with a forklift. There would be, maybe 2,000 of this part over here (all the same), 2,000 of this part over in this bin (all the same). You’d put them in a jig and put them together with a—
Carla Exactly the same way.
Jim Yeah, put them together, and then weld them together. So, I did stick welding. I did that, and I did that well enough that they put me in wire welding, which is a spool of wire that comes off. And actually I could probably still weld, but I couldn’t tell you at what temperature to do that because the foreman did all that. He came by and he set the welder at the right temperature for whatever kind of metal we were using, whatever thickness of metal. So I really would have to have somebody do that for me, but I’m sure I could still weld.
It was really good meditation, because as you’re looking through the visor—if you look at the welder without a visor, you’ll go blind—so they got the visor there with the really thick glass, and as you’re welding you can see the flame. And you see the two pieces of metal and you go very slowly, but all you really see is what’s happening right around the flame. It’s great meditation! So I’m welding/meditating all day long, eight hours of this.
And after that spring I finally got enough money to move to Kentucky and to cut timbers. That was spring of ’73. I was ready to start building right after cutting the timbers. They had to season for over the winter so I went back to Nebraska for another winter’s worth of work. I think I worked with my dad then; couldn’t find a better job. So, that’s how I got the money to pay for the land and live on it.
Gary So speaking of your experience with welding, you describe how you could see the flame, see it melting the metal, welding the metal?
Jim Yes, melting it.
Gary Melting. That implies really intense focus, because there’s nothing else you can look at, nothing else you can see, no other sensory input, really, except what’s happening right there. That focus and presence of mind is something that you had to exercise also when serving as the battery for the Ra contact.‡ You were present, and you continually, as you described, visualized energy moving through Carla’s system as she’s lay unconscious on the bed. Would you say that you’ve always had presence of mind, free of distraction, which could be brought to such intensive focus?
‡ Save for moving to flip the cassette at the 45-minute mark, Jim also sat completely motionless throughout each Ra session.
Jim I’m not really aware of having had that throughout my life.
Carla He’s a great focuser. It’s deep in his body. He doesn’t think about it; it’s the way he is.
Jim Well athletics, you know, going out for the various sports was a place where I think I first got my focus, because you have to focus on what you’re doing. Especially in pole vaulting: focusing on the runway, planting the pole, and what’s happening after that. You have to be paying attention.
I would say that that’s where I got my focus. And I didn’t learn it as, I’m going to learn how to focus. It just happened, because I was doing sports. In various sports you need to learn how to focus. When you’re batting in baseball, the ball is coming at you; in high school, probably eighty to ninety miles an hour is as fast as you see it. But that’s pretty quick, so you have to focus on that. And in football I would hand the ball off to somebody or pass it down the field. I have to be paying attention to what I’m doing so I have to be focusing.
Gary I think that’s a quality or capacity that people possess less and less nowadays due to the great ocean of stimulus bombarding all of us.
Carla Over-stimulation. Everybody has got ADD.
Gary Yeah. And also I think that capacity for sustained attention is absolutely critical and key if you’re going to do the work in the higher chakras of penetrating the veil.
Carla That’s so true.
Gary A quick question or two before we move on from your six years on the land. Did you have much social contact while you were there?
Jim Yeah. Just down the road about half a mile, Eric Swan, the fellow that you know who now lives in Lebanon, Kentucky. There was another couple of folks that lived close. I moved there at the time when the Back to the Land movement was a big deal. Usually college-educated urban kids, hippies usually, were wanting to simplify their lives according to Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify” dictum, and so we were moving all over the country to the countryside.
Everywhere people went they wanted to get together and to help each other. So we had a community group. We’d go around once a week to somebody’s house that was a member of the group, and do some sort of work. Whatever work they had, we’d do it. And then we’d all bring food and we’d have a meal together. And then some of us got together a meditation group, and we got together to meditate every now and then. That’s how I met Don and Carla; a couple of folks on the other side of the county were from here in Louisville, and the Louisville meditation group, and they told me about Don and Carla. §
And then there was a food buying co-op. We belonged to a co-op, Federation of Ohio River Co-ops (FORK). It was based in Columbus, Ohio. It covered a five-state area. I think it was Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. We would get together at least once a month and place our food orders and then we would—when the truck came in, and it was delivered at a certain location, a centralized location, for each food co-op, then we’d get together and split up the food. So that’s where I got a whole lot of food too, rather than at Kroger’s or Houchens at the time.
And a funny little aside here. Every two months, FORK would have a meeting somewhere in that five-state area, all of the 150 co-ops that belonged would send representatives, at least two representatives. They would decide on the policy, and it was governed by consensus. And there was a feather, and if you had the feather you could talk; if you didn’t have the feather you couldn’t talk. So that’s how it functioned, that’s how we governed ourselves and made the bylaws. It was a very inspiring experience because people here doing that were very far-seeing as far as how to organize socially, and how to get groups of people together to do things for themselves rather than trust the corporate structure that they were raised in and very familiar with.
So, one of those meetings was held on my land, if you can imagine people from 150 different co-ops driving their vehicles—
Carla Thrump, thrump, thrump.
Jim A Jaguar XKE is the one I remember most coming up out of the creek [laughter] and pulling out onto my land. And so for a weekend we
§ As discussed in Chapter 3, Jim first heard Don and Carla being interviewed for a Lexington, KY radio program on his battery-powered radio while living alone on the land. Subsequently members of his regional food-buying co-op, who were also members of Don and Carla’s meditation group, offered to introduce Jim to Don and Carla.
had everybody there. And they were gathered in one area where I’d built the adult playground with seesaws that were—a seesaw that was way over-size (so when you’re on one end of it up in the air, you’re 8 feet in the air) and a huge sandbox and a great big—let’s see, what did I have?
Carla A swing?
Jim A swing, a big swing. Yeah, that was what I had. And your feet wouldn’t touch the ground on the swing. It was high enough up that definitely your feet would not touch the ground. So we met over there, and I had the first presentation. There were no outhouses. There were slit latrines. I gave a demonstration of how to use a slit latrine, [Gary and Carla laughing] to 150 city folks that had never used one before.
Gary Is this a hole in the ground?
Carla Slit trench.
Jim Well sort of. It was a long hole in the ground, so that as you did your business you covered up that part and kept moving backwards. And there’s a certain way you do it. You always point your feet down the hill. Don’t put them sideways or up the hill or you’re going to tip over. And so forth. So I gave the demonstration and got everybody off to a rollicking beginning.
Carla Don’t use smartweed to wipe!
Jim Oh, yeah! [laughter] Smartweed is a weed that’s common in Kentucky, and some people just go out in the woods and grab whatever weed. Well if you use smartweed your rear end is going to be burning for a long time. So yeah, we provided toilet paper. They didn’t have to worry about running into smartweed.
Gary 150 people. So Homecoming is small potatoes compared to that.
Jim Yeah, we fed them all.
Carla And everybody cooked over fires.
Jim Everybody in our food-buying co-op helped; and they were all cooking and serving and doing whatever people needed.
Gary So there’s co-ops, there’s elements of spirituality, there’s also some philosophy in the movement of moving back to the land. Did the social movement continue beyond your time on the land?
Jim Yeah, as far as I know there’s still a fair amount of people, but you know, I think most of them have moved back to the city, curiously enough. For example, the group that Don and Carla first started, Eftspan, that bought 360 acres on the other side of the county, there were at least 30 or 40 in that group, and I think there may be someone who started a house there and may still be living next to the land. But that’s indicative of what really happened. It was a movement. It was a movement that had its beginning and it seems to have had an end, but some folks stayed. Some folks stayed and are still there. But others went on to other things, and we all have steps on our journey and people just keep taking steps. That’s a good thing. Although I missed the land a lot.
When I first was here with Don and Carla, I remember having a dream one night. I just ached to be back on the land. I hadn’t really realized that I missed it that much. But it went away. And now I realize that this is where I want to live for the rest of my life.
Gary You hear Don and Carla speak on a radio program, and through your meditation group you connect with them. Later on you’re given an invitation to join Don and Carla after helping them to move and getting to know them, but you don’t accept the invitation, you go all the way out to Washington, right? Oregon?
Jim Oregon. Right, yeah, for about five years, the last five years that I lived on the land, I was taking a newsletter from Cosmic Awareness Communications, and they were based in Olympia, Washington. Paul Shockley, who was their channel and who was supposedly channeling the same source that Edgar Cayce channeled—that is, the Akashic records of the planet—lived in Yamhill, Oregon, which is a little town, a little itty-bitty town about 30 miles outside of Portland, Oregon. So he would travel the two hours up to Olympia, Washington, on a monthly basis, and stay there maybe for a weekend and do the channelings that they would use in their newsletter. They would invite people to write in with questions and of course they had their own line of questions, and they were very much involved in conspiracy theories as well.
So they kept asking Paul a lot of questions about conspiracies, and they got some very interesting stuff. I got onto people who were into conspiracies on the inside level, that had been involved in the International Monetary Fund, for example, in very high positions, and had the ability to know certain things that other people might not. So there was a lot of interesting stuff that happened, but I think one of the things that also happened was that his information got detuned after a while because he was being asked these questions that were basically transient; they really had only any importance in the moment or for a few years. They weren’t dealing with spiritual principles. However, he did have a whole set of channelings that were done on nothing but spiritual principles—that were, I thought, very high quality. And that was what I was really going after.
I got pulled into the conspiracy because it was “in the air.” [laughter] I was breathing the air, and I was thinking for myself after 21 years of not doing that, and I wanted to know about it. So I investigated it.
Besides Cosmic Awareness Communications—which is located in, like I said, Washington—Shockley also had a group called the Aquarian Church of Universal Service that was located in Portland. I went to their services on Sunday and there was a fellow there from Vancouver, Washington, who was dealing with diatomaceous earth. They were mining it both in the United States and in Canada. It was fossilized remains. Little tiny creatures’ fossilized remains that could be used for a number of things. Storing dried foods for example. If you would put that in with your food it would keep much longer. And if you brushed your teeth with it, it was an excellent abrasive. There was all kinds of things you could do with it, so it was valuable.
And he offered me a chance to make a bunch of money; he offered me the position of the U.S. general manager, and offered me a $100,000, which is a lot of money anytime, and back then it was like a million dollars now. And I was puzzled. I didn’t have anything against money, but that’s not why I went out there. So I decided to take the weekend out. I was staying in this old dilapidated trailer close to the Windsong School of Awareness—called Tootsie Roll because it was all rusted on the outside—and I decided to take the weekend out and meditate and try to figure out what I should do. Because it had me puzzled, and I knew that Don and Carla had invited me to come back to Kentucky. And it was a standing invitation, so I decided to take the weekend out and meditate.
And so, thirty seconds into the meditation I got the very clear message: “Go back to Louisville. Join Don and Carla.” So I thought, well, what shall I do with my weekend? And I packed up [laughter] and I said thanks to folks, and I told them I had a wonderful time. And I did, it was a great time. I enjoyed every one of them, and that’s where I brought a kitty cat back with me, Chocolate Bar.9 I believe [one of our three current cats], Pickwick,10 is the reincarnation of Chocolate Bar, who was the reincarnation of the cocker spaniel I had when I was in fourth grade. That’s just my idea. You know I might be all wet, but that’s the feeling I’ve always gotten.
Carla I think it’s right.
Jim So Chocolate Bar was a Himalayan. The kids at the Windsong School of Awareness made money by selling the kitty cats that came from these two Himalayans. A big, old male with long, dark hair and this beautiful female with long whitish hair, colored like Siamese cats. And so Chocolate Bar had this beautiful long hair and Siamese coloration, and I litterbox-trained her all the way back, 2,500 miles. Whenever she was ready to go to the bathroom I’d grab her and put her in the litterbox which is over on the passenger’s side floor.
So I brought Chocolate Bar back, 2,500 miles, introduced her to Don. He held her in his hand (at that time she was still a kitten) and said, “Beautiful.”
That meant [unenthusiastically] another cat. They already had two cats. [chuckles]
Carla That was one of his swear words.
Jim It was “beautiful.”
Carla That and “schmierkase.”
Jim Schmierkase. That’s German for “pickle.”
Carla No, for cottage cheese.
Gary What would that translate to in the expletive world?
Jim For whatever. [laughter] He didn’t use swear words, but he liked the idea. “Oh, schmierkase!”
Carla He said he didn’t use swear words because they were words of power, and he thought that it was very important to measure your power and use it only when necessary. He did not feel there were events necessary that called for using words of power. And he never did. I never heard him swear.
Gary So thirty seconds into your meditation you got that message. Was it the same type of message receiving that you had experienced when you first moved to the land?
Jim No. I didn’t hear a voice, I didn’t see words. I just had the real strong feeling: Go back to Louisville. Join Don and Carla. It was unmistakable.
Carla [laughter] What a surprise. It was incredible.
Gary You moved out to Washington. You said you wanted to investigate Cosmic Awareness and the Aquarian Church of Universal Service. That was the catalyst that prompted you to sell the land? Because you wanted to work with a channeling group?
Jim Right. But I didn’t sell the land yet. I still had the land.
Gary So you were undecided about whether you would keep the land but you were taking a hiatus from that.
Jim Yes. I sold it once I came back and joined Don and Carla.
Gary Okay. So what first took you off of the land was desire to work with a channeling group. You just weren’t sure which one.
Jim Right. I had been involved with Aquarian Church and Cosmic Awareness Communications for five years. I’d more recently met Don and Carla, and I really liked them. And I enjoyed all the channelings, but I just felt this prior commitment—I had it in my mind I was going to do it that way. And I do a lot of things that way. I discover . . . well I went through college that way! [laughter]
Carla He’s an honorable guy
Jim I got this degree, but I don’t think I want to use it. I did that three times. [laughter]
Gary Well you never know until you try. And then you try and then . . .
Jim Each step was very helpful and necessary along the way. I didn’t waste any time.
Gary In the early 2002 you started your own business that you named Jim’s Lawn Service. Why was that?
Jim When Don died in 1984, the insurance—life insurance and pension—from Eastern Air Lines provided Carla and me enough capital to invest with a lady who’s now become a real good friend, and we’re still with her. And we could live on the interest. Back in the late eighties interest rates were between 10 and 13%. So that’s probably the best they’ve ever been. As we moved along through the nineties and into the early 2000s interest rates went down drastically, and we were not able to live on our income anymore. And we were starting to take out of the capital. And if we did that too long we wouldn’t have anything left. So Jim’s Lawn Service was born utilizing my love of working outdoors, my love of big muscle use, and my love of pretty much working alone, except on Fridays when you, Gary, would help me. I like to use my big muscles and I liked to be in charge of what I’m doing.
So cutting the grass was just perfect because in this town most people—the majority of people pay to have their grass cut. And it’s a beautiful area; it’s like a park, like Carla said. And so I thought, hey, let’s do that.
I had been prior to that—I started back I guess in 1992 just working part time because I liked it, I liked doing it. And I had four or five customers: Don’s aunt and uncle, and then two of their neighbors over off of Poplar Level Road close to the Watterson Expressway. And then there was a lady out here in Crestwood. You went and helped me out there. She had the family cemetery there that went back to 1804. And there were a couple other folks around that I worked for, and I did that maybe two days a week. Very relaxed and only in the afternoons because I still, at that time, still had my habit of working in the office and doing inside work—spiritual, intellectual, mental work in the mornings, and physical labor in the afternoon. So I’d already got a start made on lawn service work and I knew that I could do that and do a good job. So Jim’s Lawn Service was just a natural outgrowth of that.
Gary So you carried that scheduling dichotomy through a lot of decades: spiritual, mental, intellectual stuff in the morning, physical labor in the afternoon, beginning with the T. D. Lingo experience.
Jim Right, yeah.
Gary Do you find that your experience with Jim’s Lawn Service was a teacher in the way that the land was a teacher?
Jim Well, not so much because I was pretty sure I could cut grass. [laugh-ter] I didn’t have to worry about rattlesnakes or copperheads.
And you hardly ever see the customers, and when I did I had a good time talking with them because I made them all friends. Most of the time it’s a solitary job. I was out there on my mower or with a blower or with trimmers and just working on my own. And I really liked that, and I loved being outside. So it was a teacher in that I needed to keep a schedule. People got cut on a certain day of the week unless there was rain. And then I either cut early to avoid the rain or later to recover from the rain. So it taught me keeping a schedule and getting up earlier than I wanted. And the last couple of years I also needed to blend it in with helping Carla. We were fortunate toward the end to have a lady here to help us so that I didn’t have to do as much during the day, so I could go out and work during the day. And what I learned from Jim’s Lawn Service? I learned how to make money, and—
Carla Did it really well.
Jim —did a good enough [laughter] job of it that it was able to supplement us enough to keep us going. And fortunately two years ago, Larry11 was a gem in giving us enough of a donation that I was able to retire and take care of Carla full time, which was very handy because starting last year she needed full time. Well she needed full time for a while, but we no longer have our helper/caregiver. So I’ve been very blessed. Been able to work with Carla and be with her for 24 hours now for two years.
Gary And being able to devote your time to L/L Research has been invaluable.
Jim Yeah, it’s great to be here and be able to do whatever we can. We are happy to do whatever we can for L/L Research, but we both realize that you and Austin are now the working part. You’re the wheels, you make the ship—no it can’t be a ship—you make the car go! [laughter] Of course if it’s an amphibious car it could have wheels too. We know that the days of us both being in the office are over. Those are halcyon days. We’re happy and so thrilled to have you and Austin there because you guys are doing a wonderful job. Whatever we can do to help you do the job or to be here and help others, we’re glad to do.
Gary I will note about Jim’s Lawn Service as having watched you, for years work though Jim’s Lawn Service and having worked alongside of you that it was yet another expression of the way that you see life as a dance, because you saw even the cutting of the grass and the weed-eating and the blowing as a dance.
Carla Working with nature spirits.
Gary And it was also an expression, among other things, of your rock-solid nature. I would tell people that if Armageddon itself happened and the world was consumed in war and conflict that Jim would not let that alter his grass cutting. [laughter] You would be out there; nothing stopped you. Even sickness.
Jim That’s right. Lingo tells a story along that line. It’s sort of poignant. As they were liberating the concentration camps in Germany they came upon one and as the German guards saw these American soldiers approaching, they all took off, and left only the prisoners there. And when Lingo and some of the other soldiers got into the offices—a lot of the prisoners were used in the office to do work, like sweeping the floor and making food and doing the laundry and ironing and all that—and even though the prisoners knew the guards were gone, and they’d been liberated by the Americans, they had to finish their job. Because before, if they hadn’t finished their job, they may have died.
[pause]
I didn’t have that feeling I was going to die. [laughter] I’m just dedicated to getting the job done.
Gary Yeah. So we have a couple more questions. 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?
Jim Well I guess it started back around ’78 or ’79 when I was in Reno, Nevada with my girlfriend at the time. She was also into spiritual things, and we would go down to Carson City, Nevada to the Family of Man. Marsha Mossman was the channel there, and I think she was a pretty good channel. She was one person that gave me a reading and she mentioned that I was from elsewhere and then went on with some other details about “there are others from elsewhere and they are here to serve.” And I thought, well that’s interesting.
And then when I was in Oregon I got a reading from Paul Shockley that was much more specific, and he used the term wanderer. And then when I came here, I think even maybe before I left for Oregon that we’d had a channeling where wanderers were talked about and it was just you [refer-ring to Carla] and Don and me and maybe somebody else and the concept of wanderer came up and mentioned that everyone present was a wanderer. And then of course the Ra contact—we had that confirmed.
So relating to being a wanderer: it was kind of an unreal feeling because I don’t think about it. I don’t think about my—I think about myself as being a dancer, really. In the heart of my being I see myself as being a dancer. If I’m from somewhere else and I’ve come here to be of service—great. But whatever the case is, I’m here to be of service. And I’m glad for every step I’ve made along the way, and I’m looking forward to hanging with Ruckaduck, my nickname for her, for the rest of our lives.
Gary Do you find now that you look back and miss the land?
Jim No. I don’t miss the land now. I look back and feel very good about the land and think, how in the world [laughter] did I do that? Good thing I was young and dumb! You know I was 27 years old when I first got to the land, and thought I could do anything. And fortunately I was able to survive on the land, yeah.
Gary You’ve been a caretaker and support person to Carla since very early on, maybe even in past lives as we’ve discussed. This role has intensified in recent years as Carla has been bedbound—in what was previously your bedroom—for over three years now with a large open wound on her back from a spinal surgery. How have you processed this catalyst as the years have gone by and would you say that you have grown as a result?
Jim Oh, of course. [chuckles] There’s no way not to grow, but yeah we’ve had some great growth together. Look at this room. Imagine this is my heart. I open my room, and my heart, to Carla.
When I first joined Don and Carla, everybody had his or her own room. And we continued that until Carla had surgery. Her bedroom is upstairs on the other side of the house. My room was always right here. So when it became obvious that she was going to need some help, it just made sense to get a hospital bed, and move it in here. So the whole process, since 2010, which would make it four years now, has been making room for Carla and her things. I move my things aside and make room for her in the closet, hanging her stuff up on the doors, whatever she needs for medical supplies are all around. So this is—I do everything symbolically. [chuckles] I think everybody does the same thing.
Opening one’s heart, for me, is symbolized by opening this room to Carla. And as I’ve been able to open the room, I’ve also been able to open my heart. And what has happened is that I feel a great deal more love and absolute, total dedication to taking care of her. And each morning before I get out of bed I pray that I can take care of her to the very best of my ability. Do whatever she needs. And so I know that we’re both in exactly the same place, learning things that we need to—exactly right here, where we need to be. There is no accident; there’s no mistake. The fact that she’s having to undergo a wound and a slow healing of a wound in order to bring this all about, is just the means by which it all occurs.
Notes
[1] Beginning in 1941, the Air Force was a component of the Army known as the Army Air Forces (AAF), a combat arm like the infantry. Six years later, in 1947, it was split into its own branch of the military know from then to today as the United States Air Force (USAF), equal to the Navy and Army. ↩
[2] Jim’s mother, Atta McCarty, passed five months after the interview in January, 2015. ↩
[3] Jim didn’t mention in this interview that not only did he sit in row seven each time, but always in the same seat. ↩
[4] The G.I. Bill was a law signed into effect by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that provided various benefits to returning vets from WWII, including financial assistance for college tuition. Millions of vets used this to go to earn degrees upon returning. ↩
[5] “My story unfolds with me as a spearhead infantry scout for General Patton's army in World War II. The war was horrible on the front lines. My group was one of the first to arrive at Hitler's death camps to liberate the remaining survivors.” ↩
“TD Lingo and The Dormant Brain Research and Development Laboratory,” NeilSlade.com, accessed February 17, 2016, HTTP://WWW.NEILSLADE.COM/ART/BRAIN/HISTORY.HTML.
For further reference:
A 1979 documentary about Lingo and his work, TD Lingo Brain Lab 1979 Docu-mentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1yBWvROBY0
Wikipedia article, “T. D. A. Lingo”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._D._A._Lingo
[6] About Lingo’s life and his “each one teach one” philosophy, Jim writes: ↩
Lingo was one of the two great men I have known in my life. The other, of course, was Don Elkins. Both wanted with all their being to help save planet Earth. I will always be infinitely grateful for studying with Lingo. He was a most important step in my own growth.
I looked at some of the other information about Lingo below the Wikipedia entry and was saddened to learn that after he died in 1993 his estate was in such disarray that his 240 acre mountain top retreat was passed on to his adopted, estranged, drug-addicted son who sold the land for $3 million to developers.
His creed for all students who came through his school was “each one teach one.” He hoped that each student would find his/her own wilderness land and start a school like his to spread the word about how to do self-therapy in nature and circuit into the dormant frontal lobes. To my knowledge I was the only one who ever did. And my classes only lasted two years—until I met and joined Don and Carla.
I think Lingo would have been amazed at the Ra contact. I made one attempt to share it with him in the early‘80s, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears as I believe he was significantly miffed that I was no longer teaching brain self-control. I wonder how he is doing now.
[7] “Primal therapy is a trauma-based psychotherapy created by Arthur Janov, who argues that neurosis is caused by the repressed pain of childhood trauma. Janov argues that repressed pain can be sequentially brought to conscious awareness and resolved through re-experiencing the incident and fully expressing the resulting pain during therapy. In therapy, the patient recalls and reenacts a particularly disturbing past experience usually occurring early in life and expresses normally repressed anger or frustration especially through spontaneous and unrestrained screams, hysteria, or violence. Primal therapy was developed as a means of eliciting the repressed pain. . . . “ ↩
Wikipedia, s.v. “Primal therapy,” accessed July 5, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_therapy
[8] Ra speaks to this moment in the following two Q&As: ↩
QUESTIONER I have a question from Jim about an experience he had when he first moved to his land in which he was told, “The key to your survival comes indirect, through nervousness.” The entity was Angelica. Can you give him information with respect to this?
RA I am Ra. Yes.
QUESTIONER Would you please do that?
RA I am Ra. As we have noted, each mind/body/spirit complex has several guides available to it. The persona of two of these guides is the polarity of male and female. The third is androgynous and represents a more unified conceptualization faculty.
The guide speaking as sound vibration complex, Angelica, was the female polarized persona. The message may not be fully explicated due to the Law of Confusion. We may suggest that in order to progress, a state of some dissatisfaction will be present, thus giving the entity the stimulus for further seeking. This dissatisfaction, nervousness, or angst, if you will, is not of itself useful. Thus its use is indirect. 54.2–3
[9] Jim adds: ↩
Chocolate Bar was a Himalayan cat, which means that he had the dark colorations on his nose, ears, tail, and paws that a Siamese cat has, but he had the long hair of a Himalayan. Those dark points are frequently referred to as “chocolate” in color. Rather than call him Chocolate Point and be real literal about his color and name we called him Chocolate Bar, suggesting that he had the dark points of coloration but was a very sweet cat.
[10] To read a short bio of the three cats, see the endnote in Chapter 1. ↩
[11] A generous donor contributed significantly to L/L’s budget for two and a quarter years. It was enough that Jim was able to retire from his mostly one-man lawn service outfit, Jim’s Lawn Service, and devote himself full time to L/L Research. Which also freed his time to focus on Carla’s care during the final two years of her life. Carla and Jim considered it one of the greatest blessings of their lives to have received this gift of being able to be together at the end. ↩