The following was pulled out of an upcoming book, a section deemed far too long an introduction by editorial helpers. It’s a long read and I don’t expect anybody to read it, but I thought it might be appropriate here. I’ll announce when the book is available; should be mid July 2024.
Long after committing to a lifetime of study and intentional practice of the Law of One, I realized how steeped my life had already been in channeling from its outset. I certainly recognized my family’s interest in the so-called “New Age” information out there—we were brought up with health food, alternative medicine, meditation, the whole nine yards—but the role it played in my upbringing was by no means dominant or decisive. I imagine few children for whom the religion or creed in which one is raised registers as more than background scenery, but it cannot be denied as the likely foundation for future seeking.
Yet, if you had told me thirty years ago that I would become one of these weirdos who let ghosts talk through them, I would never have believed you. Even a couple of years ago, I would have dismissed those who contributed to this lineage of extraterrestrial communications I draw upon as the most embarrassingly unhinged UFO wackos and hoaxers. Only in hindsight do the contours of a path achieve sufficient definition to enable a brief and minimally accurate accounting of where I now find myself.
My parents studied both Edgar Cayce’s material and A Course in Miracles, and I saw them at their most active and inquisitive when talking on these two topics, whether to me or others. On an intuitive level they seemed to realize the proper role spirituality should play in children’s lives: introduce them, demonstrate your own passion, and don’t brainwash them! I imagine some of my passion for spiritual seeking was learned through their example, which I am grateful for as not all children have this in their lives.
My father had some involvement with the Paul Solomon channeling taking place at the Fellowship of Inner Light in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and I recall him bringing up that information not infrequently. The Association for Research and Enlightenment was found in that same city, and my father visited it regularly to learn more about Cayce’s messages. So those two sources featured prominently in any spiritual upbringing I received in my early years. Cayce might be the most well-known modern channel, and his source was also the first to mention the Law of One as far as I can tell—I remember reading about the ancient Atlantean contest between the “Sons of the Law of One” and the “Sons of Belial”. Exciting stuff!
In my later childhood A Course in Miracles was the predominant spiritual framing my parents provided. Not the most social people, they nevertheless ran study groups for A Course in Miracles which, after all, articulates a quite unique, powerful, and intensive system of philosophy. Its dense style and philosophical rigor certainly would remind one of the strange diction and structured concepts those of Ra would provide. Exposure to these and other new age texts, especially Ray Stanford’s Fatima Prophecy and various materials from the Theosophical Society, gave me a wide range of data to process growing up, from symbolic interpretation to gnosticism to astral projection.
Gradually I synthesized an idea about what constituted the “chaff” and the “wheat” of channeled work. It’s a subtle response to information that is difficult to explain, but Confederation philosophy gets closest to my experience of it—it’s a resonance, a vibration that requires investment in one’s own seeking discipline. In my case, I stumbled upon it through sheer volume of exposure, hardly developing much rigor in my approach and having no idea what that would mean. Seeing recurring themes across channeled sources, finding patterns in the symbolic references, sifting through untold mounds of what I now recognize to be “transient” information–all of this reading, thinking, and reflecting must have cooked up a kind of heuristic in the back of my head. It was this mindset I brought to my first encounters with L/L Research’s The Ra Material.
My father’s Cayce connection brought him into contact with David Wilcock while I was in college. I became fascinated by David’s work researching alternative physics, the UFO phenomena, and spirituality, synthesizing data across fields as diverse as hard sciences, occultism, and economics, not to mention his connection to the “sleeping prophet”. My father paid him to do a reading for me; this was my first direct exposure to channeling. It ended up conveying very important information to me, and as I worked more closely with David I delved further into the material from L/L Research’s contact with Ra starting in 1981.
The Ra Material, as the transcripts were first titled in their mass published form, is without question the most important spiritual material I have ever encountered. In a series of 106 dialogues over the course of three years, the social memory complex of Ra gave these seekers the most elegant, consistent, resonant, and beautiful view of the nature of life and reality I have ever read to this day. The material serves as the gold standard of all channeling in my view and is the foundation upon which all of my seeking has laid for the past two decades.
Through moderating Wilcock’s burgeoning Ascension2000 Yahoo! group for a couple of years, I discovered that this Law of One philosophy seemed more resonant than any of the other areas I was exploring with David, and I tendered my resignation in 2005 to work more closely with L/L Research. I had met Carla Rueckert and Jim McCarty, the two surviving members of the trio who contacted Ra, at a 2002 conference where they shared the bill with David. Carla immediately made an unmistakeable impression on me in her presentation of the Law of One. Inspired by her example of innocence, purity, and passion for service (only quite recently did I realize her performance was definitely a form of channeling) I was very honored to begin a relationship with her and Jim’s organization that lasted until 2020.
That relationship required very little of me, it would turn out, and this was for the best for a time. For much of my life what I required from my spirituality was a metaphysics in which all paradoxes and mysteries could be summarily extinguished, leaving me free to pursue music, or radical politics, or just not seeking with too much dedication. Visiting L/L Research headquarters in Anchorage, Kentucky from time to time and maintaining a friendship with fellow seekers was all I required for the level at which I was willing to put the Law of One into practice. I dabbled in the philosophy, wrote some pieces exercising it, and went to their events. Certainly I drifted away during certain periods, especially as events like Occupy Wall Street intervened in my life.
After this long association with L/L Research and its director, Gary Bean, I was invited to be part of their new channeling training effort in 2016. My attitude at the time of the invitation was one of skepticism; I knew what channeling demanded of its practitioners and had always considered myself neither interested nor worthy of the honor/duty. Little did I know the degree to which it would transform my life and my seeking, almost in spite of what I thought.
I had been on an intense spiritual trajectory at that time for a couple of months, the most engrossing extended experience of my life that can cringingly but accurately be described as an “awakening”. An incident in December of 2014 shattered the container in which my values had been carefully arranged, prompting a fervent period of seeking. It was strange that it had such a profound effect on me, so I should explain.
While walking with a friend back from getting coffee in the middle of the workday, we crossed Broad Street with a “walk” sign indicating it was safe. A Richmond Police car pulled right up on me turning across the intersection, and I gave it a dirty look as a reflexive reaction. Apparently I hurt somebody’s feelings, because the cop turned on his emergency lights, blocked two lanes of traffic pulling over, and emerged from his car berating me for not showing him sufficient respect and deference. As a long-time anarchist and opponent of policing as a tool for social management, I knew my rights and didn’t engage his asinine questioning. I simply asked whether I was detained — so many times, in fact, that he threatened to arrest me without even attempting to articulate suspicion of a crime.
The encounter came to a head when he asked for my identification and I refused. He whipped out his handcuffs and asked if I wanted to take things downtown. Of course, since my little brother is one of the premier trial attorneys in Richmond, I should have taken him up on this offer. I probably lost a chance at a five figure payout!
Instead I caved and handed over my license, and he went to his car for five minutes with my driver’s license. When he returned, he promised I’d be hearing from him later, handed me my license, and then simply drove off. Of course, I never heard from him again, and such a petty display of bullying really irked me for a bit.
However, the more I reflected on the situation, the more my anger transformed into pity. Here was a guy who I, as an anarchist, think is unaccountably powerful to the point that he can kill people with impunity, given the deference law enforcement is afforded in our legal system. In my view he stands a crucial pillar of a bloodthirsty, authoritarian state apparatus that oppresses us all, where the rubber of state domination meets the road of human beings. And yet, the way he behaved, stamping his feet like a toddler and putting himself and the department in so much unnecessary liability, showed me how powerless he felt. I recognized within myself and all of us a similar helplessness and defensiveness.
This sort of broke my brain and kick started seeking on deeply personal terms. I’m supposed to hate cops, especially the ones who harass me! But I felt achingly sorry for him, and this unexpected empathy triggered deep reflection in me. Maybe my political beliefs were not meeting the actual human condition in which I actually lived. Perhaps there was more to the struggle for justice than just lining up with the good guys against the bad guys.
As this mulling over of my commitments continued into 2015, I felt as if doors below my level of conscious awareness were continually opened and left ajar, and a breeze I had never known was felt. Everything seemed fresh, vibrant, workable, even as some things seemed to be falling apart. Then I received word that Carla had passed, and traveled to Anchorage, Kentucky for the funeral. This was an opportunity to reconnect with Gary, Jim, and especially Dr. Stephen Tyman, longtime channel and accomplished professor of philosophy. Somehow, the grief of losing the greatest channel I had ever known, coupled with the sense of an ongoing project of seeking, pushed me into a kind of extended experience of greater connectedness than I had ever before experienced. It is difficult to explain how this would begin a series of events that would guide me towards joining the ranks of instruments serving the One Infinite Creator.
After a decade and a half of being satisfied with a fixed, if articulate, sense of the spiritual, satisfied with simply being around the folks at L/L Research as a kind of religious pilgrimage combined with extended friendship, I was once more an eager seeker somehow, reinvigorated in my spiritual practice. Drunk with intense curiosity about the nature and meaning of existence, I discovered for myself that life itself — not some ascetic or ideal version of life, but this life I’m actually living — is itself the very material of spirituality I had once thought myself to worldly to achieve. Instead of waking up to face another round of disappointment and amusement, life became a feedback mechanism by which I felt out the vibratory nature of the sensations and thoughts I had so dimly perceived as background noise. As Pema Chödrön puts it perfectly, it all became so workable.
I continued to participate as I could with L/L Research, and the 2015 Homecoming that Labor Day was one of the most sublime experiences of my life. At that event, Jim described how Carla’s death had prompted him into an intense heart opening experience, and I felt as if the same were occurring to me, with less grief to be sure but comparably arresting. For the first time in my entire life, the emotional terrain unfolded before me, a vast territory to be charted, explored, and most importantly walked as the pilgrim’s path.
This was where all the metaphysical energy everybody talks about actually arises — the woo-woo of spirituality was a superficial way to describe what at the end of the day is simply a life lived head-on, with open eyes and heart. The mere willingness to treat emotions with respect unlocked something deep in me, something profound for me but decidedly human, uncomplicated, and approachable. I began to realize nothing I was encountering made me special, and many people from all walks of life had experienced this initiation.
When the invitation to the new round of channeling intensives found me in the summer of 2016, nearly an entire year had removed me from those precious months of effortless splendor, when the Creator was something happening to me far more than something I needed to seek. At a party with my dear friend and Occupy comrade Kristen Bentley, who had some familiarity with my beliefs, I mentioned the invitation and asked her opinion. Before she could respond, a shooting star blazed across the night sky, directly above her head. After an additional confirming synchronicity immediately followed that moment, the choice felt like it had been removed from me, really; this was something once again happening to me.
The channeling intensive in fall 2016 was the first of a series of quarterly weekends I would spend at the L/L Research through April 2018. It consisted mostly of seekers local to Louisville, I being one of the two outliers traveling long distance to participate. The other was Steve, driving down from southern Illinois as he put the finishing touches on his teaching career. Since Carla passed, he regularly made this eight hour round trip to channel with Jim, Ra contact alumnus and president of L/L Research, as they forged ahead with the great work sans their beloved teacher. Now he was teaching the art of channeling alongside Jim to a new crop of instruments.
As the two travelers from afar at these intensives, Steve and I grew to know each other better, often staying up far too late into the night as Jim hosted us at the L/L Research house and headquarters. We discussed channeling theory, Confederation philosophy, and the ups and downs of third density life. I distinctly remember one night where he arranged the major arcana Tarot cards into a layout that demonstrated how he related them to one another that helped me greatly in thinking about the Archetypal Mind, an extremely mysterious but important subject only haltingly addressed in an introductory fashion towards the end of the Ra contact. The picture I took of the configuration of cards on my phone was preserved for future study session we would have in the group we would go on to form a couple of years later.
What I remember most about that first intensive weekend was the binder. We sat in a circle in the living room where channeling has typically occurred and read out of a three ring binder of printed materials Jim had sent us a month or so beforehand, round robin fashion. We discussed the different topics involved in spiritual evolution and channeling in depth, one of which was those essays we wrote before the intensive about who we are at a root level and why we wished to channel. I wish I could locate mine, because I’d like to know how I thought about being an instrument back then. It’s probably bouncing around in an old disk image somewhere on a computer.
Finally we did our first halting channeling as our last activity at that first intensive. Laitos, the Confederation’s typical teacher of channels, worked with each instrument to bring through a brief message. As we met for future intensives over 2017, we slowly improved on the coherence and length of these messages. I feel I was greatly assisted by having started my read-through of the conscious channeling library from 1972 to 2011. I felt that as I grew as an instrument, I was reading every morning of a group who was improving their contact. Immersing myself in so much quality material may have improved my ability to tune for similar content, or at least gave Laitos a variety of concepts from which to choose to speak.
Reading the old, more experimental sessions from the 70’s and 80’s showed me a time when channeling was much more about discovering what was possible. The L/L Research group would often switch between multiple contacts in a single session, including classic Confederation contacts such as Hatonn, Latwii, Auxhall (Oxal), and Nona. Often it was clear that many of the participants in the circle were attempting contact, not just Carla, Jim, and other usual suspects. There was also a greater variety of contacts, including seldom seen entities from the inner planes such as Mark Probert’s Yadda, Clyde Trepanier’s Yom (Yaum), and the George Hunt Williamson-esque Brother Phillip. Outer planes social memory complexes include Monka of Richard Miller’s “Space Tapes” fame, a newer one calling itself Oorkas (Orcas) tagging along with Hatonn, the mysterious Quanta, and later on the eponymous L/Leema (who may be related to the Kla-la of Miller’s work).
The more of the transcript library I read — especially those early years — the more I became inspired to think about how to follow in L/L Research’s footsteps. Their roots in projects like Eftspan demonstrated an experimental side facilitated by an egalitarian, inclusive and horizontalist approach to human instrumentality in which mystery and an intrepid sense of discovery, not a dogma and rules, were front and center. It was at least in part that rich beginning in group seeking that made the Ra contact possible, that built the energy of seeking and purity of calling.
In the Ra contact you had that quality of terse yet expansive precision in the prose; with conscious contacts it was more fluid, meandering, and gestural, at times poetic, at other times downright incomprehensible. Learning to channel gave me a first hand understanding of why this might be. In many cases I found that the choice of the words themselves augment or undermine maintaining a tuned vibration. Hence you may detect prolixity or brevity that, at times, seems unnatural, and yet it has to do with deeper affect and sensation, either in cooperation with the intended vibration or not. There’s an underlying rhythm to the contact that is your kind of carrier wave for the entire transmission, and it has much, much less to do with how “deep” you are. It has to do with how much you are in time with the rhythm of contact, how tuned you are, and therefore what variety of concentration, of focus in consciousness, you can bring to bear.
The Confederation often explains that they prefer the instrument play a role in the message, up to 30% (whatever that might mean). Our personalities can play a role, they just are subordinate to the message, the vibration. While it is valuable in channeling to “hang your ass over the line” and open up to completely unanticipated concepts and sentence constructions — I think it’s important to let yourself start sentences, the ends of which you cannot guess — I feel now, as I did then, that the tuning of one’s conscious awareness is more crucial than impulsivity. This tuning is something you work on daily, through honest self-reflection and giving yourself the silent space to notice the feeling shifts occurring during your practice. There’s no science per se; merely the accrual of more informed instincts and hunches that organize themselves into something workable.
The more I channeled, the more reliable tuning became for me, something I could return to instead of continually reimagining like the early intensives. The uniqueness of each moment reveals itself naturally in meditation, but what runs through each moment of contemplation, centering, or contact is what you begin to identify as your anchor, your carrier wave. At a certain point, I had a basic confidence in my ability to create content without applying the kind mindset that writing something like this introduction essay requires. It was something for which I prepared far in advance precisely because there was nothing else I could really do in the moment except surrender to surely being humiliated this time around! I continue to hone that art to this day, still feeling myself a novice.
Learning to channel is largely an exercise in learning to be fearless and attentive, and those two qualities are far more connected than I ever realized. It is in some cases our fear of the unknown that filters out all the signals coming into our perception that fit our “reality map” within. Conversely, it is often what we dare to take the patient time to truly observe that we learn not to fear.
I would describe the experience as learning how to increase your meditative functioning, in a way, because you’re trying to do more with the same essential state of mind. The difference is that you’re expending effort, and all the while you’re trying not to look directly at the consolidated product of your work. Balancing curiosity with patience, personality with deep feelings, recognizing one’s identity while also acknowledging its tentative nature as a stream more than a construct — all of these are tough balances, and require of the self much honesty. When one learns to channel, one learns to trust consciousness to handle the details; the instrument simply learns to faithfully, persistently, and purposefully hold that consciousness, that tuning.
Probably the biggest thing for the channel to get over is the hand-wringing of whose thoughts are whose. One is utterly at the point of a leap of faith here. My read-through of the archive was helpful as I ran into this passage:
I am Latwii, and I am with this instrument. We enjoy this communication very much, yet we find that the one known as D has constricted his channel because of the fear of misperceiving our words and speaking others. We encourage the new instrument to take the risk of misperception, for there is the difficulty of the rehearsal. It is distasteful, perhaps, to sight-read and to spend the long hours in moving slowly through passages. The concert at the end of that time seems far away, and the hours of practice do not seem to be so rewarding. Yet, when the concert finally comes, the student is ready.
In this analogy we mean to imply that the one known as D can make the mistaken notes, the errors in fingering, and all of the mistakes which would mar a perfect performance, for the entity is a student, only just begun upon a quite long course of study, a study in which learning takes place for many lifetimes, as quickly as the student acknowledges the need for further skill. Thus, we ask the instrument known as D to relax and allow thoughts to flow from within, questioning not once the tuning and challenging has been done, but merely accepting the gifts of the conceptual subconscious. We move through the conceptual subconscious, and our thoughts are indeed your thoughts; there is no perceptible difference in your or any instrument’s ways of realizing experience.
Latwii via Rueckert: September 7, 1987 L/L Research Conscious Channeling Library
One way to think about channeling is that one attempts to build a kind of personality empty enough that it at once does not care what comes through but also cannot hide its nature from you. This gives you a vessel to offer a contact, but the agency to regulate it at the source. But of course what even is the art of opening the heart but exposing it to this vulnerability?
Normally if the prospective instrument has some idea of the commitment to self-inquiry this role asks of him, they think twice. I know I did, but it aligned so much with the seeking I was already attempting that I fell in love with it. I truly believe that vocal channeling is a small part of being an instrument of the Creator, and that it is in taking our quotidian catalyst seriously that we become the best instruments in each moment we find ourselves, not simply in the meditation circle making contact.
Do the challenges and hardships increase, becoming more exaggerated, potent, and bizarre? Yes, but as those of Q’uo promise, so do the resources with which to deal with them:
My friends, we would suggest to you that there are two dimensions in which the effects will, indeed, inevitably be enduring. For you have opened a gateway to energies of an order higher than is common among your peoples, and this will change the way that your life is configured from within at a very subtle level. So subtle that, most likely, you will hardly be aware of it, but substantially enough that from our point of view, the change is fundamental.
Now, that will actually work in two directions at the same time. For one thing, you will have greater spiritual resources to draw upon, and we feel that each here is very well prepared to make use of those spiritual resources. You do, after all, have daily practices of meditation, and you have the practice of reflecting upon the catalyst that you receive for purposes of turning it to positive effect. Now we will also say that the second dimension of the changes that will inevitably have occurred relates to catalyst. And here the effect may not always seem so positive, for, in truth, you have undertaken a committed course of action that will inevitably have the effect of accelerating that catalyst.
Q’uo via Tyman: August 2, 2021 Other Selves Working Group Channeling Intensive 1
This creates the conditions in which our decisions bear more power as well. This is most visible in one’s relationships, as those of Monka remind us, and we attend to those relationships with maximal care and respect when we recognize that they do not trap us as much as we sometimes feel they do. We just need to draw upon those increased resources to meet those increased challenges:
…every moment you spend in meditation is a moment building a greater self to explore. Every moment you balance a hard feeling within, you heal something holding everyone back. It is so difficult, we understand, to take this responsibility seriously, and it is for that reason that we encourage you to faithfully, lovingly but honestly, reflect to each other.
Everyone is capable of hearing an idea. It is the creative nature of love within you that gives you the imagination, the ingenuity to express that love in the moment, in that relating, so that it is heard. It is up to the other to hear it, but you have many resources within. You are not limited to only certain ways of relating. This is what lies before you, each of you: the fast plethora of tools, energies, modalities of thought that make every relationship workable on some level. So if a relationship fails on one level, you have no reason to despair but, to be frank, your own laziness.
Monka via Weiland: January 15, 2023 Richmond Meditation Circle
From late 2016 to early 2018, I persisted in attending quarterly events in Anchorage while practicing contact daily during my morning meditation and prayer ritual. The protocols of channeling were the greatest gift I had received since the Ra contact itself, and they bound me in gratitude to my fellow seekers in the Anchorage circle.
However, simmering tensions within the organization eventually led to Steve’s departure from L/L Research after the April 2018 intensive. I was initially quite distraught, as Steve was a crucial intellectual and instructional leader for the group and a huge chunk of the remaining channeling legacy at L/L Research, having been trained directly by Carla in the 1980s. The surprise and impact of Steve’s departure on what I believed was our joint project in the channeling circle prompted me to look into areas where L/L Research’s administration were causing alienation, pain, and frustration in their volunteers, and I found enough examples to bring concerns to their attention in as gentle but firm a manner as I could. I would certainly admit to feeling disappointed in, and even angry at, the administration’s responses, and that old affect of helplessness and confusion reared its head once more in my life. After sticking around for a year or two to try to see if time could mend these wounds, I reluctantly joined most of those volunteers in parting ways with L/L Research around 2020.
One of many upsides of leaving was that we were now free to speak openly about our experiences and help others understand the downsides of working with organizations that appropriate volunteer labor without giving them a meaningful forum for addressing issues to the administration, let alone countenance their involvement in decisions surrounding their shared work. While the revelations we brought to light in 2021 on the Bring4th Forum (since removed from public view) caused a lot of embarrassment in some corners, I believe sunlight is always the best disinfectant. Accountability is not easy, but in the long run insisting on it is the healthy option for those who purport to be seekers of truth. No organization built around Confederation philosophy is more important than the careful preservation of that philosophy’s message, and scrutiny here ought to be welcomed as due diligence and not scorned as disloyalty. I would also add that any organization dispensing spiritual information has a duty to demonstrate it is not a cult and does not demand fealty or disciplining. Sadly, given the track record of the New Age scene, I do not believe we can responsibly give these groups the benefit of the doubt.
However, any manifestation of spiritual ideals will fail to perfectly live up to them, all the more when human politics come to bear on them. That is a reflection neither on the ideals nor the idealistic seekers who hold those ideals; it is rather the nature of the illusion to offer challenges and tests. I would be in a very different place in my spiritual seeking had L/L Research not generously made this information so dear to me available. It is because of their work that I have a calling in my life and the channeling skills to pursue inquiry into Confederation philosophy on terms that match my values, and I cannot but be grateful to L/L Research for preserving these arts for over fifty years. The great work of spiritual evolution simply continues, and time will tell whose organizing model was the most effective.
But now untethered from this spiritual home, with whom would I seek in this honest and strident manner? I contemplated the possibility that group work might be off the table for some time. From this point on, Law of One community would have to be built by my comrades and me from the ground up, collectively owned and operated instead of franchised from Kentucky.
, looking at the mirror and find it deeply satisfying afterwards too.
