DAY 7

Epilogue

What Don Elkins, Carla Rueckert, and Jim McCarty did with their incarnations was by my measure, and I think by most measures, extraordinary. And to extraordinary things and extraordinary people we turn with questions and desires to know more, to ask of them who they are, what they did, and how we might learn from their successes and their failures.

We also, and perhaps more fundamentally, turn to them to satisfy some basic curiosity. Inbuilt into our natures is the need to look to one another for cues, signals, and information about who we are, how we are, where we have been, and where we are going. So much of what we understand, or think we understand, comes by way of other humans, whether through the physical sciences, religious affiliations, metaphysical studies, literature, arts, culture, or the great tangled morass of opinion that bombards our senses from our first breath outside the womb. Excepting those rare instances in human history and prehistory when our higher-density friends walked the surface, or floated slightly above it, or took one of us aboard their cosmic Cadillac, there is no one here but us to inform (or misinform) each other. Indeed since the dawn of self-awareness we’ve been incrementally breaking into the unknown, assembling the puzzle pieces, and figuring-it-out together.

Not a one of us escapes this context. Even those few among us who reach what’s known as enlightenment and transcend the illusion completely (aka: awakening from the dream) do so through their local, historical, cultural, and social context, a context into which is packed and embedded millennia of collective unconscious and conscious assumptions and principles; programming that, like it or not, shapes how we see ourselves and the world around us.

It is this same basic drive to learn from one another that motivated this brief [ahem], seven-day, 400+ question interview. What did you two do with your time here, Carla Rueckert and Jim McCarty? Why? And, given the unusual nature of your work, how? What does this philosophy have to say about the meaning, purpose, and nature of reality? How have you attempted to integrate and live these principles? What about your lives stands out as unique, and what can I recognize in your patterns that is universal to the human path, that tells me about who I am? And as I probe more deeply into what you and I have in common, what do I begin to see of the Creator-awakening-to-Itself peeking through your human faces and actions, and my own face and actions?

Two People, Three Words (or more)

Scaling down from the Big Picture for a moment to narrow the focus on these two humans, I asked myself how I would describe Jim and Carla if I had only three words. Immediately I knew that I would say disciplined, authentic, open-hearted.

Disciplined is one of the first to come to mind because they were so regular, ritualistic, and reliable in everything they did. I have joked at times how one could set their watch to where Jim was in his day. Any casual observer of modern life will soon recognize the hectic, busy, and variable nature of our days. We certainly have repeat appointments and regularly scheduled activities, but how difficult do we all find it to implement certain disciplines and stick with them. Carla and Jim were amazing in that regard. Though they both felt the stress of too much to do in too little time, they functioned according to consciously chosen rhythms and built their days ensuring that time for the Creator and the spiritual work was included year after year, decade following decade.

The word discipline also draws attention to that which they wielded so strongly, that which Ra described as the “great conduit to the Creator”: the will. And in that regard the discipline was reserved not just for the day’s schedule, but more importantly in disciplining their minds to do the work of processing, analyzing, balancing, and forgiving the day’s catalyst. I’ve never met any others with so crystalline a life of discipline.

Authentic in the sense of being always true to themselves, night and day. I’ve seen them in nearly every type of setting they entered from 2003 onward, both in and out of Louisville, with and without other people, and in no case were they ever other than themselves. Per my modicum of understanding of psychology I’m sure that they had some layer of persona and mask, but if so it was so subtle, consistent, and not-other-than their spiritual hearts that it was practically invisible to me. They operated with little pretense and great humility, offering themselves as they are regardless of their audience. (When a person is authentic at this level they tend to radiate qualities of light, peace, presence, kindness, etc., so people reliably reacted favorably to them.)

One among many ways I witnessed this authenticity was the way they would so unhesitatingly and unapologetically speak about their shared life’s work through L/L Research (including the particular roles they played as channels) to others who had no frame of reference for understanding. When asked, of course. Personally I feel a desire to hide this portion of my life from someone not already interested due to some knee-jerk aversion to the potential of rejection. Not Carla or Jim. They knew who they were and stood strongly but humbly upon that ground. And even in the context of meeting devoted readers of their material, they never elevated themselves to anything but an ordinary fellow human and seeker.

Open-hearted because they did everything they did with basic compassion and kindness, but more fundamentally and philosophically, with a desire to support the free will of others, without, generally speaking, attempting to impose their will. This was borne out countless times in my own relationship with Carla and Jim as they sought to find my preferences and, if at all possible, accommodate accordingly. Though not without expectations about the way such and such should be done, by and large Carla and Jim’s modus operandi was always to respect and support the free will of others. They were consciously ethical and conscious of the need to make decisions within a framework of the highest ethic they could perceive.

And while the above three qualities speak of great will, they knew and practiced the other side of that coin: faith. Whatever the disciplined activities and intentions enacted by the steady power of will, Carla and Jim chose reliably at the end of the day to surrender that will to the Creator, attempting and usually succeeding to release attachment to outcome and trust that, however the cards fell, all was well.

And then I realized more words would be needed, including light-hearted, devotional, service-oriented, perseverant, great-with-a-pun, cheerful, optimis-tic, music-oriented, dancers, lover-of-vodka (in Carla’s case) and so forth before I applied the brakes lest I run out of alphabet letters in my soup.

I will speak to just one more: the quality of perseverance. This was illustrated to me most pointedly when watching Carla type. If you were to see Carla’s hands you would notice how very warped they were from decades of very painful rheumatoid arthritis. Her four knuckles were one big undulating bulge, her fingers crooked, and her hands so generally misshapen that she couldn’t type on the keyboard with all ten fingers like most people. Instead she had to employ what’s known as the hunt ‘n’ peck method whereby she operated two fingers only, one on each hand, to press the keys. Though a fairly slow way of going about things that would frustrate many people, Carla kept at it until she had written her emails of the day and, quite literally, entire books. Will is best expressed, I think, not in a moment of great, grunting strength (though that too), but more so in its steady and sustained application over the long run. Through sheer persistence Carla showed me will at that level.

Yet I cannot release this section without highlighting one more quality I admire, this one demonstrated by both Jim and Carla, but most nearly perfectly, I think the word is merited, by Carla: basic cheerfulness. Vibrating an attitude of good cheer, good will, and simple optimism is a difficult virtue to sustain and manifest for even those in perfect physical health. That Carla was able to serve others in this way while experiencing profound depths of physical pain and torments of medical hardship continues to astound me. You could walk into her room at any moment (as she lay confined on her hospital bed with an open wound on her back that never healed) and she would greet you with a smile and light in her eyes. In myself I witness daily modes of seriousness, withdrawal, unhappiness, despondency, irritation, and so forth that I absolutely marvel how effectively and potently Carla let no consideration of catalyst or circumstance extinguish her glow. She was so natural in this regard that it would be easy to think it was effortless and subsequently attribute that quality to nature alone, but any investigation into her psyche would show how, through will and faith, Carla worked at this mode of being through inner disciplines of prayer, tuning, offering thanksgiving, forgiving, and turning to the Creator through her beloved Jesus the Christ.

These things were important to investigate, also, because it is out of these and other qualities that their organization, L/L Research, grew. These qualities, however, have no copyright claims by Carla, Jim, their organization, or anyone. They are manifested uniquely in these two but are only one example among infinite ways any seeker may make use of will and faith.

Even in light of these glowing terms, their work, as with everyone’s work, was and is never finished. This was just a snapshot in time of where they happened to be upon their journey of evolution that has no end. Jim, for instance, lived with a subtle inner armor or barrier that kept others somewhat distant for nearly the entirety of his life. It wasn’t until 2015, just months after Carla’s passing, that he witnessed those dissolve as a consequence of the transformation we will explore in Appendix B.

A Sunlit Scene

This interview sought to document these sorts of things along with every other that crossed my mind in order to capture a biography, a life story. While I believe it did a fairly comprehensive job, it did not plumb as deeply into the nature of another person as is possible. We didn’t dive into what you might call their human flaws or what the Confederation might call the distortions that elicit learning—that portion of experience which, if examined more thoroughly, would have rendered an even fuller, 360-degree picture.

Lest the four people who read this book in its entirety walk away from it with the impression that they have just read about saintly beings, I want to convey that the subjects of this interview, Elkins included, were and are imperfect, so far as we would use that term in the relative world. Their natures were all too human, all too just like you. Over the years I had witnessed small moments and exhibitions of jealousy, anger, pettiness, hypocrisy, inconsistency, or making what I would call dumb decisions (I would know because I’ve made a few myself). Seldom were these moments as acute or visible as is the great variety of human drama on this planet—Carla and Jim attempted always to treat others with generosity and compassion, even if that meant keeping opinions to themselves, and Don, as you have learned, hardly expressed any opinion or emotion. But in an interview already a bit big for its britches I chose not to make a focus of basic human shortcomings.

Acknowledging the presence of less-than-ideal behaviors and attitudes, how should they be understood and situated? Picture a beautiful painting of an outdoor scene—country or city, to your preference. However well-lit that scene, and beautiful its proportions and colors, there will be shadows. To remove those shadows would be inauthentic and would diminish the aesthetic and vibrancy of the picture.

Each of us is a natural scene, some of us with more shadow, some with less. Let there be no doubt that Jim and Carla (and Don Elkins) had small shadows around the corner of their buildings, or underneath the awning, or cast upon the ground by the sunlight filtering through the lattice tabletop; but letting the eyes roam the remainder of the painting and, when finished, zooming out to take in the whole picture, at least enough to gain some meaning, it becomes clear what a sunlit scene theirs was; a scene where two people sought and strove always to walk the high road in the face of all distortions, whether theirs or others’.

And gazing upon the painting from that viewpoint, a variety of emotional responses may spring, ranging from congenial respect, to admiration, to awe, to tears, to gratitude, to a sense of love welling within the heart, especially as both the strident and subtle colors of service, sacrifice, and spirit in their lives come into view; especially when realizing that, no matter how extraordinary their work was, they remained remarkably humble people, presenting and sharing themselves as they are with little pretense and great transparency.

But describe that painting as I may, only you can be the viewer. Through their work and communications they have left—and Jim will continue to leave—the world many thousands of words. Through that communication with you and through the accounts of others and the example of their work, you have plenty of material to get a decent sense of who they are—insofar as any expression of the great mystery (such as a human being is) can be understood at a distance—and how this body of philosophy came into being. You can gain an inkling of what they were trying to do, and in that mirror perhaps you might see a reflection of yourself, and be inspired to remember what you are trying to do, and with what love you’re trying to do it.

And perhaps you will go even further and lift the vision so that your focus shifts from seeing three people, their work, their circumstances, their date in time and their place on earth, to beginning to see instead the only thing we are here to see.

Let us begin and end all our efforts in the One Infinite Creator.

We suggest the nature of all manifestation to be illusory and functional only insofar as the entity turns from shape and shadow to the One.

– Ra, an humble messenger of the Law of One