DAY 1 · Part II: The Ra Contact
CHAPTER 5
Reactions to the
Ra Contact
Gary We’ve already learned that Don was quite excited to have Ra on the line—he was pacing around the room when you came to after the first session, and he saw the possibility of fulfilling the work he wanted to do by creating a book of Ra’s answers to his investigative questions. Did Don convey anything else about this new prospect of communicating with Ra?
Jim He always looked forward to the next session; he always loved talking with Ra. He was the one who came up with most of the questions. The night before we would usually have a meditation and talk over potential questions for the next day, and he would write a couple of those down. Frequently, though, he would only get through one or two of them and then Ra would give a response that would be so intriguing that he’d have to go in another direction. All the questions kind of went by the wayside for a while, then, as he followed the new train of thought.
Carla Yeah, he would get distracted. And he always apologized for it, but Ra never expressed that he needed to, or that it was [not] okay, or anything. Ra just ignored that.
Gary It would have to be so difficult. Any given sentence, much less paragraph or multiple paragraphs that Ra has to offer is rich with so much that can be mined, so many different directions you could explore.
Carla And I don’t know how he understood Ra, because Ra didn’t have a lot of expression in his voice—its voice—whatever.
Jim No expression.
Carla It was just zzz—it was like Nebraska.1 [laughter]
Jim You really couldn’t tell where the end of a sentence was. You had to listen very carefully. You’ve heard some of the tape. But he was able to hear and think about it and respond to it, which always amazed me.
Carla Yeah, and some of those things that Ra said—as you’re reading a single sentence you think, what did he say? And you’re reading it, you’re looking at it, you’re going back and reading it again, and you’re still not there—it takes time to really adjust and process that answer, but not for Don.
He was so intelligent. Now I’ve aced so many intelligence tests. I’ve gone off the edge on intelligence tests. They’ve never been able to give me my IQ because I aced the test: I slid off the end and they couldn’t score me. Don was about three times as intelligent as I was. He was a whole other unit going on here. I very much valued and honored and respected that, and that’s all that enabled him to keep up because that’s what he did: he kept up.
The only thing that Don did that he considered wrong happened when Ra would drop these little gems that would seem to answer something that Don had been asking about on the side for years. Don would have to ask, he would have to follow the new lead—he couldn’t just stick to his routine and ask the questions that he’d planned. So he kept getting off track.
But he was so excited to be talking to Ra; I’ve never seen anybody look forward to communication the way Don looked forward to talking with Ra. That was all he wanted was that next session. He really, really wanted that.
Jim When I was transcribing the Ra sessions in the office, Don would be pacing around the office waiting for the next page to come out of the typewriter. [laughter]
Gary So he would take his page, and you would continue working, and he’d wait for the next one. He was a junkie for Ra, it sounds like.
Ken * Can I ask a quick question? You mentioned that the pacing was really different from a lot of the other channelings. For those that haven’t had a chance to hear some of the Ra contact recordings, can you give a rough idea of how the pacing was so much different than the other channelings?
Carla Don just didn’t express his feelings.
Jim No: Ra. How Ra was different.
Carla How Ra was different? Ra had quality and depth.
Jim Ra . . . . . . would . . . . . . speak . . . . . . like . . . . . . this . . . . . . and . . . . . . make . . . . . . no . . . . . . in--to--na--tion . . . . . . for . . . . . . any . . . . . . word.
Carla Yeah, the expression was—oh, you wanted me to talk like Ra talks.
Ken Just an idea for those who haven’t had a chance to hear.
Carla I . . . . . . am . . . . . . Ra . . . . . . we . . . . . . co--mmu--ni--cate . . . . . . now . . . . . . the . . . . . . reason . . . . . . that . . . . . . you . . . . . . are . . . . . . here . . . . . . is . . . . . . to . . . . . . share . . . . . . love . . . . . . for . . . . . . each . . . . . . other . . . . . . there . . . . . . is . . . . . . no . . . . . .
Jim Actually, you’re going too fast. [laughter] Really, Ra was very slow—
Carla And soft.
Jim Yes, and occasionally, the . . . . . . end . . . . . . of . . . . . . words . . . . . . would . . . . . . be . . . . . . ac--cen--tu--a--ted. [Jim accentuates the end of the word “accentuated.”]2
Gary And no extra spacing between sentences to indicate—
Jim No. It was like they were releasing pulses of energy that happened to be formed in words that we could understand, and they were released at a set pace.
Carla Yeah, what did they say, “Our information is at a set pace given”?3
Jim Right.
* The videographer filming the interview, Ken Wendt, occasionally contributed a thought or question.
Gary There are a few instances in the text where Don interrupts them giving an answer, because he thinks they have completed the answer, and apparently they weren’t done.
I’ve transcribed you guys when you’ve channeled in a conscious manner; you naturally speak in paragraphs and sentences. It’s real easy to tell where a paragraph break should be, or an exclamation mark is, or a period.
I was going to ask you about transcribing the Ra sessions. Did that pose an extra difficulty for you?
Jim No, it made it very easy. They just happened to be transmitting at the same pace at which I could type, which was at that time roughly 40 wpm, I guess.
Gary So maybe had you been faster at typing it would—
Jim Maybe it would have been quicker. It was a happy coincidence. [laughs]
Carla Well, maybe they set the pace of their talking by checking out you typing in the other room.
Jim Possible, but not likely. Carla didn’t have much physical energy, so after a while we discovered that if we had sexual relations the night before contact, that contact was longer than if we did not have; so sexual energy exchanges increased the length of the Ra sessions.
Carla Elkins always made good and sure that we had plenty of time to do that [laughter]—to make sure that we were all set up. “Are you ready?”
Gary Carla, you said that you’ve never seen somebody so excited to communicate. One thing that you didn’t specifically say, that I heard previously, was that Don was a very melancholy man, but this was different. The Ra contact lifted Don somewhat out of that melancholiness.
Carla Oh yeah, he was joyful; he was thrilled to death.
Gary It was the first time that you’d really seen that in the almost 20 years—
Carla I had never seen him happy until talking to Ra. I was so grateful to be able to give him that. People, through the years, have said to me things like how generous and noble it was of me to channel Ra sessions when I knew I was in a lot of danger of just croaking, and wasn’t well at all. I always knew that there was a chance that I could die, and if it gave Don one more session, that was fine with me to give him that happiness. That was the depth of my . . . I adored him.
Our devotion was so deep. Most everything in my life had been heavy on communication. Don never communicated. But I always knew that he was devoted because I knew if he weren’t incredibly devoted to me, he’d be out of there. He didn’t like a lot of things that had to do with being around women. He didn’t like my tendencies to buy clothes. It really offended him that there were things that I wanted, and yet he stuck, no matter what.
Now, he never criticized me, and he never praised me. Those were the two things that sort of balanced each other out. He never gave me a hard time, and he never gave me credit.
Jim Up until the Ra contact, his idea of the balanced human being was one who was not swayed by any emotion up or down. He made that choice when he was 26 years old—that basically this world was a crazy place and if you wanted to survive it, you need not to be swayed by it. You needed to look at it with a level mind, a level keel, and keep your emotions at a distance.
It was a spiritual practice for him not to become swayed in any direction, so he didn’t give compliments, he didn’t give criticism. He was . . . in his own words he was indifferent. And later on, during the Ra contact, we discovered that was not the best type of balancing to do; but up to that point, it was a pretty strict and successful spiritual discipline, because he was very wise. He never jumped into anything. You couldn’t sway him one way or the other. He needed to gather more data, and he would think about things for a long time, and then he would make a move, and it was almost always the right one.
Carla Uh huh.
Jim So we really appreciated his nature. But during the Ra contact we discovered the balancing process, which is a more correct way of using catalyst. He didn’t use catalyst; he just let it slide away.
Carla His heart was protected in reinforced concrete up until the Ra contact. Somewhere near the middle of the Ra contact he started losing that protection. Oh, I guess I know what it was: it was when we had that unhappy exchange of energy, and he was not ready to have an open heart at all. He was so different. It was scary.
Gary So we know Don was quite excited, and, Carla, you just said that you were happy to make Don happy. So was your reaction to the beginning of the Ra contact similar to his in that this Ra provided a means to fulfill your desire to know, or was your reaction more, Ra provides me a means to make Don happy?
Carla It was the second. Don was the one with the burning desire to get all the questions answered and make all the puzzle pieces fit. I was a lot easier going, by nature, than Don. I was interested in all the new information that we got—
Jim But you couldn’t read the sessions until like the 21st or 23rd session, because Don wanted to keep it as a scientific experiment. So she didn’t know the quality of information coming through. All she knew was that it made Don happy.
Carla Yeah, but even after I read it I was impressed by it. I was grateful to have it, and I saw nothing to bother my Christianity in it. So there wasn’t any reason that I would have any trouble with it. It was all so logical to a person that loves philosophy. It was the only seamless philosophy that I’d ever read. There wasn’t any reason to say, “Well, there are problems with it in the area of . . .” There weren’t any problems—it was logical, all logical. Ra never contradicted himself. It’s incredible to have a system that doesn’t contradict itself somewhere.
Gary Yeah, it’s a pretty amazing feat, considering the scope that it covers.
Carla Really, yeah. Don had a great ambition, and he really felt that this information from Ra was going to put all the puzzle pieces together. And shortly before he died, during a period when he was definitely sane, he thanked me for helping him achieve his life’s work. He was satisfied with it. And I was thrilled to hear that.
Gary How about yourself, Jim: What was your reaction to Ra?
Jim I felt like I was on the mountain top—that all my life previous to that, I’d been climbing this mountain, and now I was there. It was just so obvious. The information was more than I could ever hope for.
Gary So how did that information and the experience of the Ra contact affect the conscious channeling experiment that had been ongoing since the early ’60s (and was still happening during the Ra contact)?
Carla It didn’t. It didn’t as far as I’m concerned, anyway. I was still working with the same skill and art that I had achieved before. I never had any conscious awareness of what was going on in the Ra contact, so it had no effect.
Gary So it just continued on, uninterrupted?
Carla Yeah. Don didn’t understand why I wanted to continue the conscious channeling when I could talk to Ra. We had a big, healthy group and they wanted to get together every week and have a meditation. Did I say, “No, I won’t do it anymore”? Of course we continued to meet for conscious channeling.
Gary That was actually a later question of mine I was going to ask: What was your thinking in terms of continuing the conscious channeling when you had Ra? So it was you that wanted to continue the conscious channeling; Don would have otherwise let it go?
Carla Probably.
Gary And you wanted to do it for reasons of community, to support others who came to the meditation?
Carla Yeah, plus it continued his experiment on another level. I always valued the conscious channeling more than he did after he got the Ra contact.
Gary Did he still participate in the conscious channeling at that point?
Carla Yeah. Unless he saw somebody coming in that he had to leave because of. [laughs]
Gary Did Don communicate what was happening with Ra to other people, or did he keep a tight lid on it?
Carla Oh yeah, he’d talk to anybody that wanted to hear it, and we didn’t really know how to advertise it, how to publicize it. We were just such innocent babes—we had no idea. We put some ads, some very small ads, in some magazines. We put one in Fate—I remember we had one in Fate that went on for quite some time. It was just very small and it said, “We have information that you might enjoy as a serious seeker. If you are interested, write us and we’ll send it to you for free. If you value it, you can pay us. If not, just send the book back.” We seldom got the book back but we often got donations.
Gary Did you receive any responses or feedback from other people who were able to see it prior to the books being published?
Carla Yes, and if they were people that we respected, oddly enough, they respected the material—they valued the material and could see value in the information.
What kept it from being published for a while—as far as a publishing company buying it—was that it was so different, and it wasn’t good English in terms of modern-day English. And we would get these rejections replete with explanations of how we could edit it and make it a lot better, [that] it was basically good material but it was so hard to read and there was no need for all that.
Gary I have the paragraph that you published in Book V, quoting the reviewer or the editor from New York City [coming up] in these questions. It was quite interesting feedback you got there.
Jim He wrote us three pages, single-spaced, telling us why it wouldn’t work.
Gary So it had an impact on him too; just not the hoped-for one.
So we’ll get into this in more detail later, but for now I’d like to ask briefly: During the first year of your conversation with those of Ra, you had 75 sessions. The following year, 1982, you had 27 sessions. What accounted for the drop-off between the first and second year?
Jim Wisdom. We were going too hard and fast in the beginning. We were so excited about having the Ra contact that we had to learn the hard way that it was wearing on Carla’s physical vehicle. So after a while we began slowing down, plus toward the end, both Don and Carla were having more physical problems, and that made things more difficult to take care of in order to have a session. So it was a combination of our desire not to be so hard on Carla’s body, as well as both Don and Carla suffering physical difficulties.
Carla It was just a lot harder for all three of us to come to a session on time, ready to go.
Gary And then the trend continued even more dramatically: The following year, 1983, you had 4 sessions. The final year of the Ra contact, 1984, you had one last session. Did years three and four continue the trajectory of years one and two?
Jim Yeah, pretty much. Carla was having more problems with her body. It was just something that we had to deal with. We had gone too hard in the beginning, sometimes two sessions a day, and her body was just taking too much of a beating.
Carla A lot of times I’d get right to the meeting time, and I would have been trying really, really hard to allay everyone’s worry, and Elkins would take a good look at me and he’d cancel. I guess, in all of his desire to have that conversation, he just didn’t want to lose me.
Gary So you would have a session scheduled and he would cancel sometimes.
Carla He would cancel. Right. Remember that? Right at the last.
Jim A couple of times, yeah.
Carla That was sad—poignant for me.
Gary Had to be a very difficult for him to do, with his overwhelming desire for contact with Ra.
Carla Very difficult.
Gary At the time, as this information was coming through, what impact, if any, did you think it might have on the world?
Jim Not a lot. [laughs] Even Ra suggested that there were—they gave general figures for about how many people on the planet were interested in Confederation philosophy, in general, and that was about 67 million.4 But for the Ra contact they said it was about 352,000, which is not a lot.5
Gary So you knew from the get-go that this was going to appeal to a very small demographic?
Jim Right.
Carla I think from the very beginning I realized that the seeking, the search, was a good thing. People found it because they were seeking something; so I knew that if you had something that required you to search for it, it was never going to be a big bestseller because then people wouldn’t have to search for it.
Jim I think Ra felt it was a treasure to have the contact—they mentioned that, simply because if one person was illuminated, it was reason enough for the contact, because we’re all one.6 I think the principle there is that once it’s been introduced into the consciousness of the planet, maybe it won’t be utilized right now, but it will be there for other experiences, other times.
Carla Yes, and it has turned out to be that way. It’s in the general vocabulary and consciousness of people who search out UFO stuff for sure, and spirituality. You see the phrases coming up that people have copped and are using, including “densities.”
Gary “Polarity” and the idea of “service to others” and “service to self” being those that you see repeated across the channeled world nowadays. They were probably really introduced through the Law of One.
Carla Agreed.
Gary Regarding the idea of introducing the ideas into the consciousness, if you see the collective mind as a system that is somewhat closed and self-contained, then Ra was able to inject information into that system from the outside. And once inside, even if it’s not used or widely known by the whole, it’s available, at least in potential.
And fast forward to now—tens of thousands of people have read this, so each time they read it, each time they internalize and contemplate it, they are bringing it more and more into the collective mind and experience, I would think.
Notes
[1] Nebraska is a state in the Great Plains region of the United States noted, by some, for being particularly flat and featureless. ↩
[2] Ra’s propensity to accentuate the end of some words lead Tobey Wheelock to add grave accents, as they’re called, to certain words in the Ra Contact text, including “markèd,” “wingèd,” “blessèd.” The accent indicates that instead of pronouncing the word wingd, as English dialect typically dictates, Ra pronounced it as wing-ed. You may now mark this day upon the calendar as one in which you have learned something important. ↩
[3] About the pace of Ra’s replies: ↩
RA We communicate at a set rate which is dependent upon our careful manipulation of this instrument. We cannot be more, as you would say, quick. Therefore, you may ask questions speedily but the answers we have to offer are at a set pace given. 15.1
[4] In 12.27 of The Law of One material, Ra says in 1981 that there were 65 million incarnate wanderers. This would be roughly 1% of the then-total planetary population. This percentage may or may not have increased since that time; though in light of everything Ra said about the harvest, the desire to lighten the planetary vibration, and the intensive, special opportunity available for spiritual evolution at this time, the number of wanderers has presumably increased. ↩
Whatever the number, not every one of those wanderers would be interested in this philosophy. Ra actually guestimates the percentages of wanderers at that time who could, as they say, “make sense” of this material.
QUESTIONER Can you tell me what percentage of the Wanderers on Earth today have been successful in penetrating the memory block and becoming aware who they are, and then finally, is there anything that we can do to make the instrument more comfortable or improve the contact?
RA I am Ra. We can approximate the percentage of those penetrating intelligently their status. This is between eight and one-half and nine and three-quarters percent. There is a larger percentile group of those who have a fairly well defined, shall we say, symptomology indicating to them that they are not of this, shall we say, “insanity.” This amounts to a bit over fifty percent of the remainder. Nearly one-third of the remainder are aware that something about them is different, so you see there are many gradations of awakening to the knowledge of being a Wanderer. We may add that it is to the middle and first of these groups that this information will, shall we say, make sense. 36.24
[5] The number who, as a result of the Law of Squares, is personally calling Ra. See 7.6 and 14.24. ↩
[6] See 2.1 for Ra’s verbose explanation about how to serve one is to serve all: ↩
QUESTIONER I’m guessing that there are enough people who would understand what you are saying, interested enough, for us to make a book of communications with it and I wondered if you would agree to this, us making a book, and if so, I was thinking that possibly a bit of historical background on yourself would be in order.
RA I am Ra. The possibility of communication, as you would call it, from the One to the One through distortion acceptable for meaning is the reason we contacted this group. There are few who will grasp, without significant distortion, that which we communicate through this connection with this mind/body/spirit complex. However, if it be your desire to share our communications with others we have the distortion towards a perception that this would be most helpful in regularizing and crystallizing your own patterns of vibration upon the levels of experience which you call the life. If one is illuminated, are not all illuminated? Therefore, we are oriented towards speaking for you in whatever supply of speakingness you may desire. To teach/learn is the Law of One in one of its most elementary distortions. 2.1