Ra: The Law of One

On January 15, 1981, in a house in Louisville, in the state of Kentucky, a woman was leading a channeling exercise with a student. It was an ordinary afternoon of work, the same work she had been doing for seven years.

And then a voice spoke through her, saying something no one in that room had heard before:

"I am Ra."

From what followed came 106 conversations, over three years, which today we know as the Law of One.

Before we come to the content, we need to meet the people. Because the way this material reached us is inseparable from what it says.

The physics professor#

The story begins two decades earlier, and it begins with a skeptic.

Don Elkins was a professor of physics at the University of Louisville. In the 1950s and 1960s, while he taught, he devoted his free time to investigating phenomena that physics did not explain: apparitions, memories of other lives, sightings of unidentified objects. Not as a devotee. As a researcher.

In 1961, the transcript of a channeling group from Detroit came into his hands. Don did not accept it as truth. He did what a physicist would do: he tried to reproduce the experiment. He gathered twelve physics students and formed a meditation group, with a declared goal — to establish contact with what those transcripts called the Confederation of Planets in the Service of the Infinite Creator.

Notice what he did. Faced with an extraordinary claim, he did not choose between believing and dismissing. He chose to test.

The librarian#

In 1962, a young woman joined that group almost by chance: she was the girlfriend of one of the students.

Carla Lisbeth Rueckert was eighteen years old. She had been born in Lake Forest, Illinois, on July 16, 1943. She graduated in English Literature from the University of Louisville in 1966, and later in Library Science, in 1971. She worked for six years as a librarian.

A fine résumé for someone who would become the instrument of one of the densest spiritual texts of the twentieth century. And perhaps that is exactly the point.

Carla was a devout Christian, of mystical and sincere faith, and remained so until the end of her life. She never abandoned her religion to embrace what she received. The two lived together in her without conflict, something this whole book seeks to defend.

She meditated in that group for twelve years without channeling anything. It was only in 1974, when the other students had already gone on with their lives, that she began. And, having begun, she did not stop: she channeled for thirty-seven years, until 2011, when spinal surgery prevented her.

In 1968, Carla and Don became research partners. In 1970, they founded L/L Research, which still exists today and distributes all the material free of charge.

The third#

Someone was missing, and no one knew it.

In 1980, Jim McCarty was living alone in a rural area of Kentucky, in a house he had built with his own hands. He heard Don and Carla in a radio interview. He sought them out. He ended up moving into their house to take part in the research.

Twenty-three days after Jim settled in, Ra appeared.

The three never treated this as a coincidence. And here is the first strange fact about this contact: it required exactly those three people. If one was missing, it did not happen. It was not Carla who channeled Ra. It was the three of them, together, who sustained the possibility of the contact.

Each had a role, and Ra named them this way: Carla was the instrument, the one who offered herself. Don was the questioner, the one who asked. Jim was the scribe, the one who recorded and sustained the group's energy.

Without a question, there was no answer. The material is, from beginning to end, a conversation, and its quality depended on the quality of Don's questions. Does that remind you of something? The Spirits' Book was written on the same basis: questions and answers.

The process#

Carla did not channel Ra awake. In all her other work over thirty-seven years, she channeled in a conscious state: she listened, formulated, delivered. With Ra, no. With Ra, she went into deep trance.

And deep trance, in the group's vocabulary, did not mean sleep or fainting. They discovered, in practice, that there is a difference between being unconscious with the mind/body/spirit complex present and the state in which that complex is simply not there.

Carla left. And Carla came back with no memory at all.

She only came to know the material that passed through her by reading the transcripts afterwards. She was an instrument in the most literal sense of the word: the violin does not know the music.

The preparation for each session was careful and always the same. Carla lay down, with her eyes covered and the microphone in place. Around her, the group arranged a virgin chalice of water near her head, the Bible open to the first chapter of the Gospel of John, incense in a censer never used before, and a white candle.

Before that, there was what they called the tuning. Prayer, singing, visualization of white light, inspired reading. The aim was not mystical out of whim: it was to raise and stabilize the vibration of the group, because the contact depended on it.

And there was the challenging of the source. Carla developed, over the years, the habit of demanding that any entity that presented itself declare that it served Christ. Not as a religious formula, but as a filter. She challenged in the name of what she loved above all else. Whoever could not sustain that standard did not pass.

This deserves attention. All the ritual care of that group existed for a practical reason: not everything that speaks from the other side speaks the truth. Discernment is not distrust. It is responsibility.

Ra described its own contact as narrow-band. A very thin band of attunement, which required purity of intention and was easily lost.

Every session opened the same way: "I am Ra. I greet you in the love and in the light of the One Infinite Creator."

And it ended when Carla's vital energy ran out. It was Ra who gave warning. Her body paid the price of each session, and the group learned to respect that limit, even when the next question seemed too important to wait.

Who Ra said it was#

Ra did not present itself as a person.

It said it was a social memory complex: not an individual, but the unified consciousness of an entire planet that evolved together, to the point that its memories became one. It placed itself in the sixth density, and said it had come, long ago, from the planet we call Venus.

And it said something more, which changes the tone of everything: that it had been here before, in Egypt, thousands of years ago, trying to help, and that it had failed. That its teachings had been distorted, turned into a cult, into hierarchy, into power over people. Ra considered this a debt of its own. The 1981 contact was, in its words, an attempt to repair that distortion.

Keep this in mind. A sixth-density intelligence admitting a mistake and coming back to correct it says more about the nature of spiritual evolution than many treatises.

The end#

The last session, number 106, took place on March 15, 1984.

Don Elkins had been in decline for about a year. He died on November 7, 1984. With him, the contact ended for good: there was no longer a questioner, and without the three there was no Ra.

Carla carried on the work for three more decades, alongside Jim, whom she married. She faced severe pain and long periods confined to bed. She passed away on April 1, 2015.

The three never charged for that material. It is available free of charge, in full, to this day.

The Law of One in a sentence#

In the first session, Ra said a sentence that sums up everything that would come after:

"You are every thing, every being, every emotion, every event, every situation. You are unity. You are infinity. You are love/light, light/love. You are."

Read it again, slowly.

It does not say that you are like God. It does not say that you have a divine spark within you. It says that you are.

And note the final verb, standing alone: "You are." With no complement. Exactly as we wrote in the chapter Being: God Is, and we Are.

The eyes of the Creator#

If everything is the Creator, why is there a creation?

Ra's answer is disconcertingly simple: the Creator seeks to know Itself.

A single, infinite consciousness has no way of seeing itself from outside. There is no mirror, there is no other, there is no distance. To know itself, it needs to become many, and to experience itself through each of those many.

You are one of the eyes through which the Creator observes Itself.

Every life you have lived, every pain you have gone through, every joy, every mistaken choice and every right one: all of it is the Creator knowing a facet of Itself that could only be known this way, from within, by being you.

This completely repositions the meaning of suffering. It stops being punishment and stops being a design flaw. It becomes harvested experience.

The three primal distortions#

Here Ra uses a word we need to examine carefully, because it is the key to this entire chapter.

Ra does not speak of imperfections. It speaks of distortions.

For Ra, there is undifferentiated unity, and there is everything else, which are distortions of that unity. Distortion, in its vocabulary, does not mean defect. It means an inclination, an angle, a particular way in which the One expresses itself. Like white light passing through a prism and becoming color.

Color is not a mistake of the light. It is light seen in a certain way.

From the original unity come, in this order, three primal distortions:

• The first distortion is Free Will. Before anything else, the freedom to choose. That is why the Creator does not interfere, does not correct and does not prevent. Not out of indifference, but because interference would cancel the experiment itself.
• The second distortion is Love, which Ra also calls Logos, the Creative Principle. It is Free Will gaining focus and direction. It is the intelligent energy that decides to create in this way and not another.
• The third distortion is Light, which is the material everything is made of. The matter you touch is light organized at a certain vibration.

Free Will, Love, Light. After these three, says Ra, all the other distortions are equal to one another in importance. None is worth more than another.

The densities#

Ra describes the evolution of consciousness in eight steps, which it calls densities. They are not places. They are states of perception, bands of vibration in which a consciousness is able to exist.

• First density is that of elemental consciousness: earth, air, water, fire. Matter taking shape.
• Second density is that of growth. Biological life appears and grows more complex. Plants and animals learn to move toward the light.
• Third density is that of self-awareness. It is where you are now. It is in this density that the Choice is made, which Ra calls "the axis upon which the creation turns".
• Fourth density is that of love and understanding. The beings who reach it form social memory complexes, consciousnesses that unite without canceling one another.
• Fifth density is that of light and wisdom.
• Sixth density is that of unity, where love and wisdom cease to be two things. It is where Ra said it was.
• Seventh density is the gateway, where individuality dissolves back into the One.
• Eighth density is at once end and beginning: the return to the central Creator and the birth of a new octave.

The Spirits' Book has its own scale, from imperfect spirits to pure ones, with reincarnation in ever more perfect worlds as the spirit purifies itself.

Third density is the density of the Choice#

This is the most practical point in the whole material, and the most uncomfortable.

According to Ra, third density exists for one single purpose: to make the Choice. And there are only two paths.

Service to others is the path of those who orient themselves toward care for their neighbor. Service to self is the path of those who orient themselves toward power over their neighbor.

Both evolve. This is the part that usually shocks. Ra states that both polarities lead onward, because both are conscious and sustained choices, and what does not move forward is the lukewarm, the indifference, the not choosing.

But the two paths do not have the same cost. To graduate through service to others, an orientation of just over half is enough. To graduate through service to self, almost the totality is needed. Loving is easier than dominating, and that is why the path of good is the natural path.

And there is more: in the sixth density, says Ra, the beings who chose service to self discover that they cannot learn the lessons of unity without opening the heart. And they change polarity.

In other words: the path of service to self comes, in the end, to a dead end. Everyone comes back.

Catalyst#

If everything is the Creator knowing Itself, what do we do here with pain?

Ra calls it catalyst.

Catalyst is everything life presents to you that demands a response from you. Illness, loss, betrayal, passion, injustice suffered and injustice committed. None of this is the lesson. All of this is the raw material from which the lesson is made.

Two people go through the same loss. One hardens, the other opens. The catalyst was identical. What differed was what each one did with it.

This gives back to you a power that the passive reading of suffering had taken away. You do not choose all the catalyst you receive. You choose entirely what you do with it.

What Ra confirms of what we have already seen#

Go back now to the word we examined a little while ago.

Ra does not say that we are imperfect. Ra says that we are distortions of the One.

And distortion, in the sense it gives the word, is not failure. It is light passing through the prism. It is the infinite folding itself to fit into an experience.

Notice what this does to the argument we built in the previous chapters. We said that God, being perfect, could not create anything defective, and that therefore we were created perfect, simple and ignorant. We said that evolution is not adding what is missing, but letting go of what no longer serves.

Ra says exactly this, in other words. There is no defect to fix. There are distortions to undo, until only the light remains, without the prism.

And this does not do away with the work. Third density exists for the Choice, and choosing — and sustaining the choice, life after life — is the most serious task Ra describes. Merit exists. Only it lies in choosing, not in fixing a being that supposedly came with a defect.

And when Ra states "You are unity, you are infinity, you are", it answers the question that opened this book with rare clarity.

What is the true nature of the human being?

It said it in two words.

You are.