Don Elkins started asking the big questions about life when he was in junior high school. Amidst the everyday reading, writing, and arithmetic he was thinking to himself: What is the meaning of life? How big is the universe, and how does it work? What don't we know? That desire to understand and put the puzzle pieces together would persist unabated throughout his incarnation.
In his professional life Elkins would go on to become a professor of both Mechanical Engineering and Physics, and in his personal life a determined investigator of UFOs, reincarnation, and other areas of inquiry that might be cobbled together under the heading of the paranormal.
He realized that modern science fell short of revealing the fundamental workings and purpose of the universe, so he turned to these fields for answers that science could not provide.
Carla L. Rueckert was a person gifted since childhood with a soaring intellect and a profoundly deep and personal faith. On the latter point she called herself a "cradle Episcopalian" and, eventually, a mystical Christian.
On the former, Carla was a precocious child who excelled in school, mastering any test offered her. And most centrally, despite tough circumstances growing up, Carla vibrated with a love of life. She lived to dance, to sing, to interact with nature, and to embody a life of devotion and service.
She was so committed to the loving viewpoint that people often took her as innocent or naïve, compelling from some a desire to protect and guard Carla against a world they felt was less pure than she was.
In late 1961 Don was given a small, brown volume, creatively titled The Brown Notebook, which had been compiled by Walt Rogers of Detroit, Michigan, a fellow who previously experienced a face-to-face encounter with a UFO entity.
After the encounter, Mr. Rogers displayed "lingering telepathic contact" with this entity, a phenomenon that frequently was reported in similar encounters from the 1950s. Rogers's compiled brown notebook contained information about the metaphysical nature of reality from alleged extraterrestrial sources.
It also described how a group of people who meditated together on a frequent basis could receive this sort of information via telepathic contact with extraterrestrial entities.
Elkins was so thoroughly impressed with the correlations between the channeled material in the notebook and his own work that, based on this information, he decided to try an experiment with a dozen of his physics students in Louisville, Kentucky.
News of that reached the ears of a girlfriend of one of those students. She had recently developed a driving interest in silence and love of meditation, so she asked to attend. Her name was Carla L. Rueckert.
Don didn't tell the group what might happen, only that something interesting could possibly occur if they meditated together. He was actually attempting to conduct a scientific experiment to see if the students would receive extraterrestrial telepathic contact without prompting.
After some time had elapsed, and no definitive results were produced, Walt Rogers visited the group and channeled from his source, Hatonn, the entity with whom he had experienced the face-to-face encounter. Hatonn said that they had been trying to channel through some of Don's group, but the students were not aware that the impressions they had been receiving-but not verbalizing-were from extraterrestrials.
Elkins felt that this event nullified the scientific validity of the experiment, but it did begin producing results. After this visit everyone in the group, except Carla, learned how to channel; she preferred silent meditation.
Carla's and Don's respective courses after this meeting took them on different paths for some time, but they would eventually reunite and officially join together upon a shared mission of research and seeking in 1968. Two years later they would form the L/L Company, changing its name to L/L Research in 1976.
And it was in 1974 —twelve years after Carla attended Don's first channeling experiment— that Don asked Carla to take up the channeling service herself. Not coincidentally this was the same year that Elkins began to actually preserve (not throw away or recycle) the cassette recordings of the channelings.
The messages took a qualitative leap forward thanks to Carla's aptitude in channeling coupled with the refinements she made to Don's rudimentary channeling protocols. Among these refinements, Carla developed the crucial procedures of tuning the instrument and challenging the contact that became hallmarks of L/L Research's style of channeling.
In 1978, Jim McCarty was living off the grid in a log cabin that he built on his 132 acres of land in the woods of central Kentucky. One evening, while he was listening on his battery-powered radio to station WKQQ broadcasting from Lexington, Kentucky, he heard an interview with Don Elkins and Carla L. Rueckert on the topic of UFOs.
Fascinated, Jim hoped to meet them one day. A year later, his wish came true when he was introduced to Don and Carla by fellow homesteaders who knew them. After driving to Louisville each Sunday night for a year to attend their channeling meditations, Don and Carla invited Jim to join them to help with their research. Jim moved in with them on December 23, 1980.
Prior to this session all of Carla's channeling had been done consciously, but when serving as an instrument to channel Ra, she went completely unconscious. In a way that was never fully understood by Don, Carla, or Jim, she left her body for the Ra contact. Ra was then able to remotely and mechanically operate Carla's vocal chords to produce replies to Don's questions.
For every subsequent of the 105 sessions following the first one, Carla would slip into unconsciousness, completely unaware of what was coming through her. It wasn't until session 23 that Don began showing her the transcripts of Ra's words. He had previously kept them from her to preserve the scientific viability of the contact.
The Ra contact was such a quantum leap forward in depth of insight and breadth of vision that Don, Carla, and Jim devoted themselves completely to this contact for the next three years and two months. *
การติดต่อสื่อสารกับ ราห์ นั้นเป็นการก้าวกระโดดครั้งใหญ่ในเชิงลึกของความเข้าใจอย่างลึกซึ้งและวิสัยทัศน์ที่กว้างไกลในเรื่องที่เกี่ยวกับความจริงของจักรวาล ซึ่ง Don, Carla และ Jim ทุ่มเทอย่างเต็มที่ให้กับการติดต่อสื่อสารนี้ในอีกสามปีกับสองเดือนข้างหน้า*
[* To read a more in-depth account of the events that led up to the contact with Ra, see the Resource Series.]