Post by Lena on Jun 30, 2006 17:54:43 GMT -5
Today I felt a little impatient with myself, and my progress. For those of you who feel the same sometimes, I'd like to share this article with you, that I found, browsing different spiritual teachings today. This is by the author of RA: The Law of One books Carla Rueckert.
An initiatory method is necessary to provide the mind, the body and the spirit for service in the Creator's work. Why would that be necessary? You know how it is, we all want to get things done quickly. And in the spiritual life we are not on the world's time, we are on God's time. And in God's time, as opposed to worldly spiritual things, there is no schedule. So there are lots of unscheduled moments of waiting.
And a lot of initiation, let's put it this way, a lot of skill in going through initiation is to be able to sit with it and to wait, through the discomfort, through the sleeplessness, through all that your body is throwing up to you to explain to you that something important is happening. That is what waiting is. You can't push it. You can't rush it. You can't slow it down. What you can do is cooperate with it. And a lot of times that means waiting and feeling like nothing is happening.
Song:
His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour,
The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.
Trust the timing, trust the inconvenience that it seems like there is in your worldly life. Just get up, and go to bed, for a while, and when you look back you will discover, "Oh! I have now seeded that information. How nice! And now I am on another learning curve and I am much more comfortable." And then you will get uncomfortable again, as it is an unending cycle.
The thing of it is, you have to live your belief system. The temptation is to walk the spiritual supermarket with a cart, putting stuff in your basket and putting it back on the shelf because it doesn't engage you. Shopping some more and trying this and trying that, and then going back and shopping some more. And so you end up with a lot of groceries, but no food.
You have to search until you have these moments where you know what it is you know. And you can't explain it, you can't rush it, but there are these transcendent moments where you think, I think I see where my feet are now. I think I see where the ground is beneath my feet. I think I could stand here. And, at that point, it is a very helpful thing to move from the intellectual appreciation of the excellence of certain thoughts, to the nitty-gritty of trying to figure out how to live that.
And when you try to live absolute ethics in a profoundly relativistic consensus reality, it does bring you many an interesting challenge. And it enables you to do a lot of work in defining for yourself where the polarity lies, and then refining your response, until you feel that that is your true, honest response.
The important thing is not to be a "goody goody" at all. If you see yourself going there, do yourself a favor and go have fun for awhile. Just have a ball and get your light touch back and lift up and lighten up. Because really, "lighten up" does mean, invite the light and open the self and don't be stiff about anything. Because this is a very fluid reality. Spirit is like water. The things that you do, other people will know about half-way around the world. I don't know how that happens, but we all create these endless ripples, and you just have to trust that.
The function of the spirit, says those of Ra, is to integrate the up-reaching yearnings of the mind and body, with the down pouring and in streaming of infinite guidance.
Let me work with this picture a little bit, because I had trouble myself, trying to envision what this is. But it is a shortcut if you have looked at the kundalini model at all, in which you are inviting the spirit down into the energy body, and where your own body energy meets it is what makes that kundalini rise. So the kundalini is a child of your desire and your will to focus, and then your asking, you know, seek and you shall find, ask and it shall be given unto you. Knock and the door shall be opened. Look out what you ask for, you will get it!
Song:
Humbly I adore thee, verity unseen
Who thy glory hidest 'neath these shadows mean
Lo, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed.
Tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.
Taste and touch and vision to discern thee fail.
Faith, that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil.
I believe whatever the light of God hath told;
What the truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold.
"The prerequisite of mental work is the ability to retain silence of self at a steady state when required by the self. The mind must be opened like a door, the key is silence." (p. 87, Law of One, Book One)
The value of silence in my life cannot be overestimated. I yearned for it. I longed for it, and I sought it as a child. I was very solitary and took myself on rambling walks. I found Don Elkins, because I was seeking more silence than my church practice offered me. The Episcopal Church is not huge on having silent retreats, and I was just really looking for a group to meditate with silently. That is why I didn't channel until Don put it to me as, you know, as a personal favor to me, "Would you please learn to channel?"
I didn't want to, I just wanted to listen to the silence or to the channeling. I am not one to go, "Oh, I can do that!" When it comes to something like that I have always been, and still am, a reluctant one to channel, in that I don't look forward to it. It is a matter of it being an honor/duty for which I do a great deal of preparation. I would say that if you are just starting out with a silent practice, don't do too much of it, since it is powerful stuff. And expect your body to revolt. Expect whatever hurts to hurt. Expect yourself to develop headaches, stomachaches, visions, anything to distract you.
Think of how we live. How many times do we sit and not process, not do something, not multi-task even? How many times do we just sit and have zero function? For me, I have to make that time. It doesn't come to me. I don't get to sit in my chair and go, "Isn't this nice! Let's see what shall I do? I am so bored!" It doesn't happen, I have so much good work to do that there are never enough hours in the day.
So, invite the silence, save ten minutes a day to begin with. Don't expect anything, but that you are going to stop talking. And let whatever happens, happen. It doesn't matter how many thoughts you think. I am a lousy meditator. Thoughts come into my mind and I just let them go, you know, and another one comes and I welcome that one too. Just enjoy yourself and continue moving back into the silence. If you don't get involved in your thoughts then they have nowhere to go and they arise and they die. And that is the nature of this illusion. It is full of moments and they rise and they fall away and they rise and they fall away. The grass grows and withers, the sun rises and falls, everything is in cycles.
Getting back to a theme. Taming the wolf. What is psychic greeting, what is the being of the self? I love Caroline Casey's solstice talk that she gave last winter. I heard a tape of it a friend of mine sent me from California. She is on the radio there as an astrologer, but it is astrology, cum political-savvy, cum guests from the whole spectrum of activism. And she invites everybody, she invites people on the right, she invites people on the left. She is trying to get at the truth. And she has this wonderful way of saying, "Did you know that...?" and telling you something wonderful.
She was talking about the wolf within in a very special way. She said that the story of Scheherazade, which is a story she wanted to share with everyone.
[The microphone slips. Carla: "It could be said I have a leaning towards the left!" (laughter)]
Her thesis basically is that this is the hour of the salvation of the world, and that that salvation will come through welcoming, inviting and becoming the feminine principle. It doesn't matter if you are male or female, but of course it helps to have the outer form of a female in terms of identifying yourself with that feminine principle.
This is why I have started wearing costumes that are very beautiful, and that move beyond the western paradigm of physical beauty in the United States today. This [business garb] is the working outfit for many, many people. And it has its own beauty. But what we women have released, in order to be more functional, is that utterly useless beauty of the embroidery and the decoration and the embellishment; that energy just to be beautiful. What we need in this world is love, beauty, intimacy, emotional safety. We need to listen to the story of Scheherazade because she tamed the male principle.
What is the story of Scheherazade? In brief, it is that there was this oriental king that felt that women were utterly beautiful, but utterly debased in terms of their ability to withstand temptation. They had no ability to withstand temptation. Only their virginity kept them from being sluts. You may be familiar with this [bias] in other forms, we have it in this culture also. There was this virgin/slut thing going on, so he wouldn't even let his partners for the night live the next day. At the dawning, he had despoiled them, they were no longer virgins, so he killed them, because then they could not be faithless. He didn't want the pain of them being faithless. He removed them.
Scheherazade was in line for this glorious tasking. The dawn was coming, and she decided that maybe she would tell him a story. So she started telling him a story and charming him and delighting him and wooing him with soft images and sweetness. And he let her live so he could hear the end of the story. And, of course, she finished that one in the middle of the night, and started another story and she went through a thousand and one stories. By this time they had three children, and he decided to let her live.
This is what we need to do. We need to tell our wolf our stories. We need to tell the murderer within our stories. We need to share with all of the shadow self, all of that 360 degrees, 180 of them are in the darkness. Right? Face it. We too are negative entities because the light and the dark together make us up. The darkness is like the strength, the grip, the will. When it is tamed, when you have wooed it and asked it to become your knight in shining armor and give you its strength, it will give you a tremendous amount of strength.
Song:
Lord of all kindliness, Lord of all grace,
Your hands swift to welcome, Your arms to embrace,
Be there at our homing, and give us, we pray,
Your love in our hearts Lord, at the eve of the day.
Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm,
Whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm,
Be there at out sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts Lord, at the end of the day.
Principle #6: Investigate and develop methods of service to others
We all come here with outer gifts. The first thing we want to do is share those outer gifts, but I tell you what, that is the second thing. The first thing is the ministry of being. That is our true gift. We are all crystals. We are all vibrating in a certain complex pattern that is our signature in the metaphysical world. Nobody needs to know our name - that's our name. We are just sitting there, being.
And there is not a whole lot you can do in one day to alter the vibration of that being. There is not a lot you can do in a decade or even in a lifetime, but you can change it a bit. You can keep nudging at it, and working at that, and identifying places where you feel your energy is blocked. Gradually begin to come more into an awareness of your own being, and the power and the magic of that being, because each one of us is a spark of the divine flame. Each one of us is that holographic picture thrown out by the one infinite Creator that remains one infinite Creator, plus all of our distortions, all of our colors.
And we are all wonderfully colored beings with wonderfully complex energies that we offer to each other. And people don't exactly get what it is about somebody that they like, or that they don't like. You can't put your finger on it. It's the colors. There are some people that whose colors really enhance the aura. There are some people that seem to infringe. See what you can do to become an aura enhancer, by just appreciating your own self, and being easy with yourself, and being comfortable within your own skin. I think that is the thing that you need to do before you can get to the outer gifts and then using them.
Then, of course, it is wonderful to use the outer gifts, but don't expect life to give you a ministry according to your outer gifts. Matter of fact, I almost think the definition of spiritual work is being given things that you can't do and being told, "Well, you do it with those gifts. Let's see what you can do to apply your gifts to this situation." There is a connection, trust it or it wouldn't be in your life. See what you can do to offer the gifts that life is asking of you."
Song:
Oh God of love, to thee we bow,
And pray for these before thee now
That closely knit in holy vow,
They may in thee be One.
Those of Ra say, in the case of only one individual acting, that that individual must be purified of all flaws to move a mountain. But in the case of a mass understanding of unity, each individual may contain an acceptable amount of distortion, and yet the mass mind could move the mountain. We in this circle can change the story that the Earth tells to those that come after us. Today, just a little, just a nudge, but its spreads you see. It is the start of a ripple.
So, as you sit here in this circle, you can imagine energy moving clockwise around the circle. And each time that you visualize that, add to it. Visualize that, add to it, spin the energy, give it your own shot and get the thing really going. You'd be surprised, there is a column of light, I have seen it sometimes in visions, a column that extends way up into the heavens. And the angels are thick around us, clustering and praising that beautiful light that is being generated by those of us within the veil. Because we do it by faith alone, we have no reason to believe it is working. Except that wonderful, very subjective process of coming into an awareness of woo! It is not just working, it is working big time. It is working in my life, constantly, unceasingly.
And it is calling us to work. To work for the good, to work for what we believe in, to work for what we think is good. To share the best we know how. It is time to work, while we have life, while we have breath, while we have being. We need to find out what it is we have to say, and we need to say it. We need to be ministers. We need to realize our priesthood, that we are a sacred and holy people.
Song:
Come labor on.
Away with gloomy doubts and faithless fear,
No one so weak but may do service here:
By feeblest agents may our God fulfill
His righteous will.
Principle #7: Become a responsible co-creator
The moment contains love. Consciously, see that love. That is the lesson of this illusion, or density, and the first attempt is the cornerstone. Upon this choosing rests the remainder of the life experience of an entity.
Consciously see that the moment contains love. I like to put it as a question: "Where is the love in this moment?" It is really obvious in this moment, everywhere. Some moments are not so obvious and you really have to look, but there is always a place. There is always a place for love to stand, even if it is the place of a beatitude, even if it is a place of blessing those who spitefully use you. Of being poor in spirit, of being humble, of being a peacemaker, of being a person who mourns. These are blessings.
They don't have the barometer of the world's popularity as blessings, but nevertheless, the beatitude is the best blessing of all as far as I am concerned. It is where I try to live. I see myself as above all things, an honorable and ethical person. Call it being a knight. I try to keep my armor polished. There are always chinks in the armor of light. I have many; I make many mistakes. I am so devastated when I find out about one of them. You know silly me, why would I be upset because I made a mistake? It's what we do here. I am hard on myself. I think we all are.
Thanks.
This is a transcript of a seminar. You can find a full version here: www.scottmandelker.com/TGS/SemTrans/Carla.html
An initiatory method is necessary to provide the mind, the body and the spirit for service in the Creator's work. Why would that be necessary? You know how it is, we all want to get things done quickly. And in the spiritual life we are not on the world's time, we are on God's time. And in God's time, as opposed to worldly spiritual things, there is no schedule. So there are lots of unscheduled moments of waiting.
And a lot of initiation, let's put it this way, a lot of skill in going through initiation is to be able to sit with it and to wait, through the discomfort, through the sleeplessness, through all that your body is throwing up to you to explain to you that something important is happening. That is what waiting is. You can't push it. You can't rush it. You can't slow it down. What you can do is cooperate with it. And a lot of times that means waiting and feeling like nothing is happening.
Song:
His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour,
The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.
Trust the timing, trust the inconvenience that it seems like there is in your worldly life. Just get up, and go to bed, for a while, and when you look back you will discover, "Oh! I have now seeded that information. How nice! And now I am on another learning curve and I am much more comfortable." And then you will get uncomfortable again, as it is an unending cycle.
The thing of it is, you have to live your belief system. The temptation is to walk the spiritual supermarket with a cart, putting stuff in your basket and putting it back on the shelf because it doesn't engage you. Shopping some more and trying this and trying that, and then going back and shopping some more. And so you end up with a lot of groceries, but no food.
You have to search until you have these moments where you know what it is you know. And you can't explain it, you can't rush it, but there are these transcendent moments where you think, I think I see where my feet are now. I think I see where the ground is beneath my feet. I think I could stand here. And, at that point, it is a very helpful thing to move from the intellectual appreciation of the excellence of certain thoughts, to the nitty-gritty of trying to figure out how to live that.
And when you try to live absolute ethics in a profoundly relativistic consensus reality, it does bring you many an interesting challenge. And it enables you to do a lot of work in defining for yourself where the polarity lies, and then refining your response, until you feel that that is your true, honest response.
The important thing is not to be a "goody goody" at all. If you see yourself going there, do yourself a favor and go have fun for awhile. Just have a ball and get your light touch back and lift up and lighten up. Because really, "lighten up" does mean, invite the light and open the self and don't be stiff about anything. Because this is a very fluid reality. Spirit is like water. The things that you do, other people will know about half-way around the world. I don't know how that happens, but we all create these endless ripples, and you just have to trust that.
The function of the spirit, says those of Ra, is to integrate the up-reaching yearnings of the mind and body, with the down pouring and in streaming of infinite guidance.
Let me work with this picture a little bit, because I had trouble myself, trying to envision what this is. But it is a shortcut if you have looked at the kundalini model at all, in which you are inviting the spirit down into the energy body, and where your own body energy meets it is what makes that kundalini rise. So the kundalini is a child of your desire and your will to focus, and then your asking, you know, seek and you shall find, ask and it shall be given unto you. Knock and the door shall be opened. Look out what you ask for, you will get it!
Song:
Humbly I adore thee, verity unseen
Who thy glory hidest 'neath these shadows mean
Lo, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed.
Tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.
Taste and touch and vision to discern thee fail.
Faith, that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil.
I believe whatever the light of God hath told;
What the truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold.
"The prerequisite of mental work is the ability to retain silence of self at a steady state when required by the self. The mind must be opened like a door, the key is silence." (p. 87, Law of One, Book One)
The value of silence in my life cannot be overestimated. I yearned for it. I longed for it, and I sought it as a child. I was very solitary and took myself on rambling walks. I found Don Elkins, because I was seeking more silence than my church practice offered me. The Episcopal Church is not huge on having silent retreats, and I was just really looking for a group to meditate with silently. That is why I didn't channel until Don put it to me as, you know, as a personal favor to me, "Would you please learn to channel?"
I didn't want to, I just wanted to listen to the silence or to the channeling. I am not one to go, "Oh, I can do that!" When it comes to something like that I have always been, and still am, a reluctant one to channel, in that I don't look forward to it. It is a matter of it being an honor/duty for which I do a great deal of preparation. I would say that if you are just starting out with a silent practice, don't do too much of it, since it is powerful stuff. And expect your body to revolt. Expect whatever hurts to hurt. Expect yourself to develop headaches, stomachaches, visions, anything to distract you.
Think of how we live. How many times do we sit and not process, not do something, not multi-task even? How many times do we just sit and have zero function? For me, I have to make that time. It doesn't come to me. I don't get to sit in my chair and go, "Isn't this nice! Let's see what shall I do? I am so bored!" It doesn't happen, I have so much good work to do that there are never enough hours in the day.
So, invite the silence, save ten minutes a day to begin with. Don't expect anything, but that you are going to stop talking. And let whatever happens, happen. It doesn't matter how many thoughts you think. I am a lousy meditator. Thoughts come into my mind and I just let them go, you know, and another one comes and I welcome that one too. Just enjoy yourself and continue moving back into the silence. If you don't get involved in your thoughts then they have nowhere to go and they arise and they die. And that is the nature of this illusion. It is full of moments and they rise and they fall away and they rise and they fall away. The grass grows and withers, the sun rises and falls, everything is in cycles.
Getting back to a theme. Taming the wolf. What is psychic greeting, what is the being of the self? I love Caroline Casey's solstice talk that she gave last winter. I heard a tape of it a friend of mine sent me from California. She is on the radio there as an astrologer, but it is astrology, cum political-savvy, cum guests from the whole spectrum of activism. And she invites everybody, she invites people on the right, she invites people on the left. She is trying to get at the truth. And she has this wonderful way of saying, "Did you know that...?" and telling you something wonderful.
She was talking about the wolf within in a very special way. She said that the story of Scheherazade, which is a story she wanted to share with everyone.
[The microphone slips. Carla: "It could be said I have a leaning towards the left!" (laughter)]
Her thesis basically is that this is the hour of the salvation of the world, and that that salvation will come through welcoming, inviting and becoming the feminine principle. It doesn't matter if you are male or female, but of course it helps to have the outer form of a female in terms of identifying yourself with that feminine principle.
This is why I have started wearing costumes that are very beautiful, and that move beyond the western paradigm of physical beauty in the United States today. This [business garb] is the working outfit for many, many people. And it has its own beauty. But what we women have released, in order to be more functional, is that utterly useless beauty of the embroidery and the decoration and the embellishment; that energy just to be beautiful. What we need in this world is love, beauty, intimacy, emotional safety. We need to listen to the story of Scheherazade because she tamed the male principle.
What is the story of Scheherazade? In brief, it is that there was this oriental king that felt that women were utterly beautiful, but utterly debased in terms of their ability to withstand temptation. They had no ability to withstand temptation. Only their virginity kept them from being sluts. You may be familiar with this [bias] in other forms, we have it in this culture also. There was this virgin/slut thing going on, so he wouldn't even let his partners for the night live the next day. At the dawning, he had despoiled them, they were no longer virgins, so he killed them, because then they could not be faithless. He didn't want the pain of them being faithless. He removed them.
Scheherazade was in line for this glorious tasking. The dawn was coming, and she decided that maybe she would tell him a story. So she started telling him a story and charming him and delighting him and wooing him with soft images and sweetness. And he let her live so he could hear the end of the story. And, of course, she finished that one in the middle of the night, and started another story and she went through a thousand and one stories. By this time they had three children, and he decided to let her live.
This is what we need to do. We need to tell our wolf our stories. We need to tell the murderer within our stories. We need to share with all of the shadow self, all of that 360 degrees, 180 of them are in the darkness. Right? Face it. We too are negative entities because the light and the dark together make us up. The darkness is like the strength, the grip, the will. When it is tamed, when you have wooed it and asked it to become your knight in shining armor and give you its strength, it will give you a tremendous amount of strength.
Song:
Lord of all kindliness, Lord of all grace,
Your hands swift to welcome, Your arms to embrace,
Be there at our homing, and give us, we pray,
Your love in our hearts Lord, at the eve of the day.
Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm,
Whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm,
Be there at out sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts Lord, at the end of the day.
Principle #6: Investigate and develop methods of service to others
We all come here with outer gifts. The first thing we want to do is share those outer gifts, but I tell you what, that is the second thing. The first thing is the ministry of being. That is our true gift. We are all crystals. We are all vibrating in a certain complex pattern that is our signature in the metaphysical world. Nobody needs to know our name - that's our name. We are just sitting there, being.
And there is not a whole lot you can do in one day to alter the vibration of that being. There is not a lot you can do in a decade or even in a lifetime, but you can change it a bit. You can keep nudging at it, and working at that, and identifying places where you feel your energy is blocked. Gradually begin to come more into an awareness of your own being, and the power and the magic of that being, because each one of us is a spark of the divine flame. Each one of us is that holographic picture thrown out by the one infinite Creator that remains one infinite Creator, plus all of our distortions, all of our colors.
And we are all wonderfully colored beings with wonderfully complex energies that we offer to each other. And people don't exactly get what it is about somebody that they like, or that they don't like. You can't put your finger on it. It's the colors. There are some people that whose colors really enhance the aura. There are some people that seem to infringe. See what you can do to become an aura enhancer, by just appreciating your own self, and being easy with yourself, and being comfortable within your own skin. I think that is the thing that you need to do before you can get to the outer gifts and then using them.
Then, of course, it is wonderful to use the outer gifts, but don't expect life to give you a ministry according to your outer gifts. Matter of fact, I almost think the definition of spiritual work is being given things that you can't do and being told, "Well, you do it with those gifts. Let's see what you can do to apply your gifts to this situation." There is a connection, trust it or it wouldn't be in your life. See what you can do to offer the gifts that life is asking of you."
Song:
Oh God of love, to thee we bow,
And pray for these before thee now
That closely knit in holy vow,
They may in thee be One.
Those of Ra say, in the case of only one individual acting, that that individual must be purified of all flaws to move a mountain. But in the case of a mass understanding of unity, each individual may contain an acceptable amount of distortion, and yet the mass mind could move the mountain. We in this circle can change the story that the Earth tells to those that come after us. Today, just a little, just a nudge, but its spreads you see. It is the start of a ripple.
So, as you sit here in this circle, you can imagine energy moving clockwise around the circle. And each time that you visualize that, add to it. Visualize that, add to it, spin the energy, give it your own shot and get the thing really going. You'd be surprised, there is a column of light, I have seen it sometimes in visions, a column that extends way up into the heavens. And the angels are thick around us, clustering and praising that beautiful light that is being generated by those of us within the veil. Because we do it by faith alone, we have no reason to believe it is working. Except that wonderful, very subjective process of coming into an awareness of woo! It is not just working, it is working big time. It is working in my life, constantly, unceasingly.
And it is calling us to work. To work for the good, to work for what we believe in, to work for what we think is good. To share the best we know how. It is time to work, while we have life, while we have breath, while we have being. We need to find out what it is we have to say, and we need to say it. We need to be ministers. We need to realize our priesthood, that we are a sacred and holy people.
Song:
Come labor on.
Away with gloomy doubts and faithless fear,
No one so weak but may do service here:
By feeblest agents may our God fulfill
His righteous will.
Principle #7: Become a responsible co-creator
The moment contains love. Consciously, see that love. That is the lesson of this illusion, or density, and the first attempt is the cornerstone. Upon this choosing rests the remainder of the life experience of an entity.
Consciously see that the moment contains love. I like to put it as a question: "Where is the love in this moment?" It is really obvious in this moment, everywhere. Some moments are not so obvious and you really have to look, but there is always a place. There is always a place for love to stand, even if it is the place of a beatitude, even if it is a place of blessing those who spitefully use you. Of being poor in spirit, of being humble, of being a peacemaker, of being a person who mourns. These are blessings.
They don't have the barometer of the world's popularity as blessings, but nevertheless, the beatitude is the best blessing of all as far as I am concerned. It is where I try to live. I see myself as above all things, an honorable and ethical person. Call it being a knight. I try to keep my armor polished. There are always chinks in the armor of light. I have many; I make many mistakes. I am so devastated when I find out about one of them. You know silly me, why would I be upset because I made a mistake? It's what we do here. I am hard on myself. I think we all are.
Thanks.
This is a transcript of a seminar. You can find a full version here: www.scottmandelker.com/TGS/SemTrans/Carla.html
Yes, sometimes I feel like that too, picking up different spiritual teachings, keep looking for the next sensational book. I'm crazy about books like that, I want to read all the ones I don't have. It does keep me learning, but sometimes I feel like that, too much info, not sure what I believe in anymore 
