DAY 1 · Part II: The Ra Contact
CHAPTER 4
The Start
Gary In the story of L/L Research, we come to the Ra contact.
Jim moved in on December 23, 1980. Up until that point all of your channeling, be it from Don, Carla, or other channels, was undertaken consciously; that is, the instrument was always fully conscious and aware of what was coming through them (with one small, brief exception on Carla’s part that we will dig into a little bit further on). Then something happened. On January 15, 1981, 23 days after Jim moved in, you were surprised to receive an entirely new contact identifying itself as Ra. Can you describe the events of that day?
Carla Well, I’ll do it because Jim was out getting groceries when it happened. Don was home and he said that he would act as battery. I had a teaching session set up with Leonard, who had been a student for some months and was doing pretty well. He was channeling well and taking it seriously. I was going to teach that day, and I was about halfway through the session when there was a very powerful sort of knock-knock-knock on my inner door. I said, “Is there a spirit that wants to work through me?”
I kept getting, “I am Ra.” I’m thinking, “I don’t want to talk to a Ra,” because the only Ra I knew was from mythology, Egyptian mythology, and it was a fairly negatively oriented entity—it was god of war, Horus the hawk-headed god and all that, not something I wanted to encourage.
So I challenged with every ounce of energy in my little body (at that time it was little), and I kept saying, “Do you come in the name of Jesus the Christ?”
They were indignant. It was like, “Do you think that you’re the only people that have Jesus? Do you think you’re the only planet that has Jesus? Come on—of course we come in the name of Jesus the Christ. Of course. What else is there when you’re talking about love? We come in the name of Jesus Christ, no problem. Get on with it, girl!”
I challenged three times and they were very strongly affirmative: “Yes, of course, we come in the name of Jesus the Christ. We come in the name of love.” I thought, “I can’t go wrong with that,” so I said okay.
I opened up to them and they gave what was for them a fairly long dissertation, at least a page long, typed. It was the longest thing that they ever did, because it wasn’t an answer to anything; it was just—I don’t think they ever again simply spoke. They always waited for us to ask them. They would say, “We communicate now,” and then Don would ask a question, and that’s the way they preferred to have it. But this time, to get things started, I guess, they explained briefly who they were and what they wanted to offer us, and I was very impressed. Well, when I read it I was very impressed; I didn’t see it right away because I had somehow gone to sleep.
Gary Immediately to sleep?
Carla I don’t know, I guess, yes, and so I was . . . They tried to channel through the others, but they couldn’t get anything going, and they would always come back to me. So Don asked a few questions, and when I came to after the session, he was pacing (which he always did when he was excited) and making the sound that he made when he was looking at something particularly good to eat. [Carla makes the sound.] He was so excited and he says, “We’re gonna have to write a book, Alrac.* This is it!” I said, “Great.” [laughs] But he wouldn’t let me see it right away.
I am told, and you can hear it, that halfway through, Jim comes in manhandling the groceries—the door opening, bags rustling and everything.
Jim It was right at the point that Don was asking about the coming Earth
* Don’s affectionate nickname for Carla. It is Carla’s name backwards.
changes when I came in the door. You’ll see in the text: “We must pause and deepen this instrument’s contact.”1 That was because I had disturbed the first Ra contact.
Carla So that was the only one that Jim wasn’t right there at the beginning of. After that, he was johnny-on-the-spot.
Gary So Don knew you had something special on the line?
Carla Absolutely, right away. He was so excited—never saw him more excited.
Gary You just described the way Ra responded to your challenge. Was that unique in the responses you had received to your challenging?
Carla I never got indignation before, [laughs] but I had had the gentle suggestion that Jesus was a galaxy-wide presence and not simply a person on this planet—that the energy of love was the energy of Jesus, and that Jesus was an energy that was elsewhere as well as here.
Gary Beyond their unique response to your challenge, did you perceive them distinctly from the other Confederation sources you had channeled previously?
Carla Only in the strength of their contact. It was like having a laser go into your head rather than the generalized buzz kind of a feeling that the others tended to give you.
Gary Would you say you felt it in a pinpoint sort of way—very localized?
Carla Yeah, not pinpoint, but certainly something close to that.
Gary How old were each of you on that day of January 15?
Carla Let’s see, I was born in ’43, Jim in ’47 . . .
Jim You were 37 and I was 33.
Carla Thank you. [laughs] I’m not that good working it out in my head. Yeah, we were both in our 30s, but I was ending mine up and he was just beginning.
Gary And Don was much older . . .
Carla Don was 14 years older than me—he was born in ’30.
Jim Don was 51.
Gary We know that you slipped into trance. Going into the second session, did any of you know what would happen?
Carla No. Was it the second session where they set up the routine—the ritual at the beginning?
Jim I believe at the end of the first session they gave the ritual, and we used it for the second session. And it was at that time that we decided to dedicate one room in the house for nothing but the Ra contact. The first contact was in the living room where we always had our Sunday night meditations, so we decided that there was one room that wasn’t being used for anything else—it was a bedroom. We decided that would become the Ra room. It had a little bathroom off of it that Carla could use afterward.
No, I don’t think we knew exactly what was going to happen. I certainly didn’t. I hadn’t been at the first one, so I was, “Okay, what are we doing here?”
Carla No. I didn’t realize then that I was going to go to sleep every time, but that’s what happened.
Gary So you thought that your slipping into a trance state might have been a fluke or . . . ?
Carla I thought I just went to sleep, but it was a deep state of concentration, and I just went from there to sleep. That’s what it felt like to me—it never did feel any different than that.
Gary Did Don have any sense of alarm that in order to channel Ra you had to be in a trance state?
Carla I don’t remember.
Jim No, he never expressed any.
Gary And this was long before you became aware [of the danger inherent in the process of channeling Ra].
Carla But he always put me in a bed in the Ra room; there was always a bed that I lay on rather than sitting, so I guess he kind of knew it was going to happen that way.
Gary In the first session (1.11), Ra said, “We have good contact with this instrument because of her recent experiences with trance.” Were they referring to the trance channeling that you did for your friend Tom Flaherty of his recently deceased wife, Elaine?
Carla That’s right. Not too long before she had her final illness. She had been ill for a long time with juvenile diabetes. That’s a nasty disease. Not too long after that her kidneys failed, and she went into her final illness and never got up.
Jim And she told Tom that she would give him some indication that she survived death.
Carla Right. Tom had always been a little panicky, saying, “How am I going to know you’re okay?” So she said, “I will let you know.” Tom felt—they both felt—that this was time to investigate that.
She might have been already in the hospital . . . do you remember?
Jim That happened while I was in Oregon.
Carla Ah. I don’t remember, but I have a feeling she was already in the hospital. Anyway, I had agreed to do it with both of them and I knew I was set up to do it, so after her passing, Tom asked if I would just go ahead and do it, just one night. I did and I went to sleep.
It was the same feeling, but it was a very heavy feeling, and I just felt awful when I got up. It was like having—I don’t know, I’ve never had a hangover—but my tummy hurt, I felt like I was going to throw up, and my head hurt something fierce. I just didn’t want to do it again.
So they got me to do it one more time for, I guess, evidence—Elaine was going to give him evidence, and he hadn’t gotten it yet. I think it was in the second time that I was channeling, and I said something, and it was so like Elaine that they both swore that it was like she was in the next room and she was talking to them. And I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what she said or how she said it—I was just channeling. So they did get their evidence then that she was going to be okay.
He was at peace when she died, and he knew that she was okay. But I did not want to do it anymore, because I felt that he had already gotten his assurances and that was very hard on me. And he agreed. He didn’t want to make it hard on me.
Gary So you didn’t want to have anything to do with trance after that?
Carla No, not interested. And then, boom, here it happens again.
Gary One hundred six more times.
Carla But I did have better support. I don’t know exactly—it was hard on me then too. I didn’t have any symptoms like I did when I was doing it for Tom, but I had an enormous need to go to the bathroom. I finally got a chance to ask Ra about that: How come, when I wake up from these things, I just have to dash to the bathroom and I pee, and I pee, and I pee, like there was no tomorrow? I’d been saving up!2 [laughs]
And they said that I had no understanding of how to produce the ectoplasm that was necessary. So instead of having a very smooth production of ectoplasm, and then you release the ectoplasm (it looks like cigar smoke), and it comes out of the body, I was using my body to produce it. The by-products of that process were being stored in the body as urine, and that’s why I had so much extra. So I was actually using part of my body every time I channeled, and I would lose somewhere between two and three pounds—sometimes it was two and sometimes it was three—but there was an enormous amount of peeing that would produce that much urine. It was amazing. It was just amazing, and I didn’t regain the weight: I kept losing and losing and losing. I got down to what, about 80 to 83 pounds?
Jim Eighty-four is what I remember.
Carla And Don said, “You’ve got to eat more.” I was eating and eating like a mad fool and not gaining, but I stopped losing. I didn’t actually look thin, or emaciated, at that weight because I have very small bones. I’m built like a bird. I have flexible, long, thin bones. But I looked slender, that’s for sure, and the big worry, I think, was that I didn’t have a lot of weight that I could lose, say, if I got sick.
Gary Didn’t have a big margin for error.
Carla I didn’t have a margin, yeah, of safety. So after I stopped channeling Ra, I gained back up to my normal weight, which at that time was between 110 and 120.
Gary Your body, from what I’ve read, took quite the beating. We’ll definitely dig into some of that as we go further on.
Carla It did, yeah.
Gary How would you define trance—at least the trance that you experienced during the Ra contact?
Carla Well, I guess basically what they do is they define it in terms of where your brain is vibrating at—whether it’s asleep or whether it’s alpha. What do they have, four different states? And I guess trance is when you’re in one of those two bottom states and you’re still able to talk.
Gary Theta or delta are the two deepest—
Carla I think, but that includes, I think, two different forms of channeling, and yet both of them are unconscious. I would just say that I wasn’t conscious, and, unfortunately, we never had anybody there that had a machine on us that could tell us what exactly was happening.
Jim It was a type of trance where the instrument (you) left your body. Not all trances are like that.
Carla Right. And I never had that happen when I was channeling elsewise. [In conscious channeling] I didn’t ever know exactly what had been channeled because you just can’t remember that much stuff, but I knew more or less where we’d been, what it was about in general. I remembered doing it, but it seemed like it took much less time than usual. But then, you know how it is to go into a channeling session—you can’t believe that that much time has passed when you get the 45-minute signal on the tape recorder, and you go, “Well, I’ll be darned, it didn’t seem like that long.” It never does.
Gary So it felt like going to sleep, and the next thing you know you wake up and have no awareness about what information came through.
Carla No, I just had Don’s voice in my ear going, “Alrac . . . Alrac . . . Alrac . . .”3 over and over, [laughs] trying to make sure I was awake and would respond.
Gary Did you dream at all during that state?
Carla No.
Gary Did you come to with any impressions?
Carla I did not have a feeling that I’d been out. It seemed like a moment. I started it, and I conked out, and then I woke up. I had to go to the bathroom, and I knew that the session had ended, but I had no feeling that any time had passed—no dreaming, no sense of time passing, even in that manner.
Gary And it sounds like no sense of resting either.
Carla No.
Gary As opposed to normal sleep where you wake up and you might feel rejuvenated, you woke up and felt exhausted.
Carla Right.
Jim Ra said it was the equivalent of a day’s work for her.4
Carla Physical labor, he was talking about.
Notes
[1] Jim was paraphrasing, actually. It went like this: ↩
QUESTIONER Can you say anything about the coming planetary changes?
[Background noise.]
RA I am Ra. I preferred to wait until this instrument had again reached the proper state of depth of singleness or one-pointedness before we spoke. 1.9
[2] More information on the physical and metaphysical processes involved in the trance state: ↩
QUESTIONER Is the necessity for the instrument to go to the bathroom several times before a session due to the psychic attack?
RA I am Ra. In general this is incorrect. The instrument is eliminating from the body complex the distortion leavings of the material which we use for contact. This occurs variably, sometimes beginning before contact, other workings this occurring after the contact.
In this particular working this entity is experiencing the aforementioned difficulties causing the intensification of that particular distortion/condition. 63.4
QUESTIONER A question I didn’t get to ask the previous session which I will be forced to continue at this time is, is the trance state the only condition from which a mind/body/spirit positive entity may be lured by a negative adept to a negative time/space configuration?
RA I am Ra. This is a misperceived concept. The mind/body/spirit complex which freely leaves the third-density physical complex is vulnerable when the appropriate protection is not at hand. You may perceive carefully that very few entities which choose to leave their physical complexes are doing work of such a nature as to attract the polarized attention of negatively oriented entities. The danger to most in trance state, as you term the physical complex being left, is the touching of the physical complex in such a manner as to attract the mind/body/spirit complex back thereunto or to damage the means by which that which you call ectoplasm is being recalled.
This instrument is an anomaly in that it is well that the instrument not be touched or artificial light thrown upon it while in the trance state. However, the ectoplasmic activity is interiorized. The main difficulty, as you are aware, is then the previously discussed negative removal of the entity under its free will.
That this can happen only in the trance state is not completely certain, but it is highly probable that in another out-of-body experience such as death the entity here examined would, as most positively polarized entities, have a great deal of protection from comrades, guides, and portions of the self which would be aware of the transfer you call the physical death. 69.3
Ra indicated that the instrument stopped relying on the transmutation of physical material into energy for the contact in Session 83:
QUESTIONER Could you please tell me why the instrument gains weight now instead of loses it after a session?
RA I am Ra. To assume that the instrument is gaining the weight of the physical bodily complex due to a session or working with Ra is erroneous. The instrument has no longer any physical material which, to any observable extent, must be used in order for this contact to occur. This is due to the determination of the group that the instrument shall not use the vital energy which would be necessary since the physical energy complex level is in deficit. Since the energy, therefore, for these contacts is a product of energy transfer the instrument must no longer pay this physical price. Therefore, the instrument is not losing the weight.
However, the weight gain, as it occurs, is the product of two factors. One is the increasing sensitivity of this physical vehicle to all that is placed before it, including that towards which it is distorted in ways you would call allergic. The second factor is the energizing of these difficulties.
It is fortunate for the outlook of this contact and the incarnation of this entity that it is not distorted towards the overeating as the overloading of this much distorted physical complex would override even the most fervent affirmations of health/illness and turn the instrument towards the distortions of illness/health or, in the extreme case, the physical death.
83.2
[3] Some of the audio recordings of the Ra sessions contain Don calling Carla back to her body at the conclusion of the session by gently repeating “Alrac . . . Alrac . . . Alrac . . . “ until Carla vocally responds, her voice heavy with exhaustion. ↩
[4] As Jim and Carla mention, the energy drain was so intensive that it was the equivalent of “many, many hours of harsh physical labor”: ↩
RA The distortions caused by this working (which are inevitable given the plan chosen by this entity) are limitation and, to a degree consonant with the amount of vital and physical energy expended, weariness, due to that which is the equivalent in this instrument of many, many hours of harsh physical labor.
This is why we suggested the instrument’s thoughts dwelling upon the possibility of its suggesting to its higher self the possibility of some slight reservation of energy at a working. This instrument at this time is quite open until all resources are quite exhausted. This is well if desired. However, it will, shall we say, shorten the number of workings in what you may call the long run. 60.4