The Law of One, Book IV, Session by Session

The Law of One, Book IV continues the Ra contact. A channel is a person who speaks for another claimed source. Carla L. Rueckert is the channel. Don Elkins asks the questions. James A. McCarty signs the foreword with them.

I read this as a channeled record. Ra is the name the voice gives itself. The title page calls Ra an humble messenger of the Law of One. I do not treat that voice as checked testimony from a being outside Earth.

This review stays inside Book IV. The printed sessions run from session 76 on 3 February 1982 to session 103 on 10 June 1983. The contents list has no session 98, no session 101, and no session 102.

The edition I read

I read the official PDF from L/L Research, The Law of One, Book IV. The library page that offers it is The Law of One.

This file has 213 pages. The printed page numbers run through 213. The contents page is numbered iii. The title page and the copyright leaf have no printed number.

The copyright leaf dates the notice 1982 and names L/L Research, a subsidiary of the Rock Creek Research & Development Laboratories, Inc. It reserves all rights. It prints ISBN 0-945007-04-3. The 13-digit form of that ISBN is 978-0-945007-04-3. The publisher line is L/L Research, P.O. Box 5195, Louisville, KY 40255-0195. The same leaf prints Library of Congress Catalog Number 90-72156.

The foreword is signed in Louisville on 8 July 1983 by Don Elkins, Carla L. Rueckert, and James A. McCarty, and it prints the same post-office box. I have not held a physical copy. The 1982 notice, the July 1983 signature, and the catalog number 90-72156 can all sit on the page together. I do not turn the catalog number into a second publication year.

A note on printed page 191 names a website for the tarot deck. A website is later than 1982 and later than the 1983 signature. I treat that note as an addition in this PDF. I do not guess its year.

The book is in copyright. The free PDF is still a copyrighted file. The short quotations below are excerpts for review and study. The rest of this page is my paraphrase.

The foreword says these pages are an exact transcript of sessions 76 through 103, edited only to remove some personal material. The contents list does not match that sentence. It prints sessions 76 through 97, then 99, 100, and 103. I do not invent the missing three. A later volume of the series, the personal-material book, prints session 98 in full and prints sessions 101 and 102 among its fragments. This review does not depend on that volume. I only note that Book IV’s own contents skip them, and that the foreword does not say why.

Foreword

The foreword dates the start of the contact to 15 January 1981 and calls Ra a social memory complex. In this book a social memory complex is a group that shares one memory. It points a new reader to Secrets of the UFO and to the first seventy-five sessions, collected in the first three books. People who met the contact through the mass-market book titled The Ra Material are told that the long introduction in that book duplicates the subject of Secrets of the UFO.

Book IV is described as a beginning on the archetypical mind. That mind is called the mind of the Logos, the blueprint of the creation, and the means of evolving in mind, body, and spirit. A Logos, here, is a focus of the Creator that has chosen its own natural laws. Ra is said to have named three ways to study that mind: the tarot, astrology, or the Tree of Life, also called white ceremonial magic. The group chose the tarot, and especially the twenty-two images of the Major Arcana. In this volume they work mainly with the first seven, which they take as archetypes of the mind, and they also look for an overview of all twenty-two.

The foreword is frank about the questioning. The group says that if the contact were valid it would eventually outrun what they already knew, and that this happened here. They scrambled. The questions are more scattered than in the first three volumes. They say they knew no more than the reader before each question.

They also say the cards they first questioned could not be reprinted. The images in the book are the Major Arcana of the deck they found closest to that first deck: George Fathman’s The Royal Road, A Study in the Egyptian Tarot, Eagle Point, Oregon, 1951, Life Research Foundation. The first seven cards are assigned to the mind, the second seven to the body, and the third seven to the spirit. Arcanum XXII is called The Choice, the choice of service to others or service to self. The note on page 191 adds a further distinction. The deck actually used in the questions was C. C. Zain’s Church of Light deck, the 1960s printing of a deck first released in 1918. The first seven images in this PDF are redrawn by L/L Research from Ra’s answers. Arcana 8 through 22 are Fathman’s, because permission to publish the Church of Light images was not received. I do not reproduce any of those images.

Printed page 9, still in the foreword, names what the group considers a primary discovery of this book. It is the veil of forgetting between the conscious and the unconscious mind in our third density. Third densities closer to the center of the galaxy are said not to have had that veil, and so not to have forgotten any event of any incarnation. The questions move between the pre-veil archetypical mind and the post-veil one. A density is a stage of evolution. Third density is the stage of the choice.

Session 76, 3 February 1982

The first session of the book is 3 February 1982, a long gap after the October 1981 session that closed the previous volume. Don apologizes for the delay. Carla is described as in a state of physical bankruptcy that has already lasted some time, with normal vital energy and a strong spiritual complex. Continued contact is called deleterious if she spends vital energy with no physical transfer to replace it. With care, sexual energy transfer, magical protection, and thought-forms that energize her during the contact, Ra says there is no worsening. The dedication itself attracts greetings. Those greetings are called inconvenient, and not lastingly harmful if care is taken.

The Banishing Ritual of the Lesser Pentagram is said to have become more efficacious. Its effect is purification, cleansing, and protection of the place of working. The efficacy is still at the lower limit of the truly magical. Ra compares the group to students who have started several grades ahead, and tells them to do the elementary work. The being informs the working. The working does not inform the being.

Don asks the origin of the tarot. Ra gives two influences. I quote one sentence of the first, from printed page 11, and paraphrase the rest.

These forms were then made a regular portion of the learn/teachings of an initiate.

Ra, through Carla L. Rueckert, The Law of One, Book IV, Session 76, 3 February 1982, printed p. 11. Short excerpt for review and study.

The sentence before it says the forms came, in a distorted fashion, from priests attempting to teach the Law of One in Egypt. The second influence is from beings in the lands called Ur, Chaldea, and Mesopotamia, who had old data about the heavens. Astrology and the form were melded, with uneven results. Don asks whether the priests of Egypt constructed the tarot from knowledge first received from Ra. Ra says that is correct with the addition of the Sumerian influence.

The aim of the Egyptian teach/learning is then stated. It was not a course in archetypes as such. It was an attempt to bring mind, body, and spirit into an initiated state in which the person could contact intelligent energy and then teach and heal. The roots of mind, and the archetypical portion of those roots, are called an interesting and necessary part of that larger process. Three present-day studies are offered as equal doors: astrology with twelve signs and ten planets, the tarot with twenty-two Major Arcana, or the Tree of Life with ten Sephiroth and twenty-two relationships. The student should pick one, master it enough to feel the pull, and then move past the written form.

Don asks the length of the first and second densities on this planet. Before timelessness gave way, Ra says, there is no method of estimation. After the entry into constructed space/time, first density spanned perhaps two billion of our years. Second density is estimated at approximately 4.6 billion years, and the approximations are called exceedingly rough because a creation founded on free will develops unevenly. I report the figures as spoken estimates. I do not treat them as a geological paper.

The Egypt page on this site is a separate study. This session’s Egypt is a channeled account of priests, a teaching, and a pack of images.

Sessions 77 to 80, 10 to 27 February 1982

Session 77, 10 February 1982, asks whether Carla was under attack just before the session, what could protect her, and whether the tuning could be improved on days when the group is not in contact. The fifth-density negative companion, carried forward from the previous volume, is the figure in these questions. I do not copy protective instructions. The session keeps the cost of the contact in view before the philosophy resumes.

Session 78, 19 February 1982, opens on a ritual that had to be performed twice. Don asks what the misstep was and whether it harmed Carla. Her kidneys are asked about, and an experience that healed the time/space kidney is asked about. The archetypes return. This is the session block in which the veil becomes the working term. Before the experiment that extended the first distortion, the number of archetypes is asked. Don guesses nine, three of mind, three of body, and three of spirit. The veil is what makes the later, larger set necessary in this telling. I have not quoted the count Ra gives, because the point I can state without a table is the group’s own: the pre-veil mind and the post-veil mind are not the same diagram.

Session 79, 24 February 1982, asks whether a time of incarnation can be given in our years, how many archetypes there were before the extension of free will, and how energy transfer functions during a session. Carla’s condition and the risk of too much transferred energy are checked first. The Matrix, the Potentiator, and the Catalyst of the Mind begin to be the names on the cards. I use those names as Ra’s labels, explained once. The Matrix is the mind as it sits, ready. The Potentiator is what calls it into motion. The Catalyst is the experience that presses it. The rest of the card talk in this volume is a refinement of those three and of their mates in body and spirit.

Session 80, 27 February 1982, asks whether the fifth-density visitor has been less able to affect Carla, and what that visitor would gain by ending the contact. The fifteenth archetype, the Matrix of the Spirit, is called the Devil in the traditional list. Don asks why. The answer places that card at the door where the spirit can be drawn into an excursion that is not yet a choice. I do not moralize the printed name. In this book the Devil card is a diagram of a power, and the group is trying to learn which power.

Sessions 81 to 83, 22 March to 5 April 1982

Session 81, 22 March 1982, is about the cost of many sessions. Carla’s uninterrupted weariness is tied to the contact. Don asks whether the effect has peaked, and whether it touches the other two in the group. The creation questions widen. Don asks whether Ra knows the number of previous octaves, and whether the central original creations are what we call stars. A radial gradient of the original thought is asked about. I keep “octave” as the book’s name for a completed set of densities, after which another set begins. I do not number the octaves from memory of some other edition.

Session 82, 27 March 1982, asks whether planets near the center of this galaxy lived the unveiled condition, and whether such societies grew complex technologies or stayed simple. The veil is the hinge. Without forgetting, each incarnation would remain in memory, and the archetypical mind would be simpler. With forgetting, catalyst bites, and polarization can go further. That is the claim. It is a claim about a design, spoken in trance. It is not a report from those planets.

Session 83, 5 April 1982, asks why Carla now gains weight after a session instead of losing it. Earlier in the contact the sessions had cost her pounds. The change is noted and left as part of the maintenance. The veil is then examined as a plan. Disease is said to have existed in a small way before the veil, and Don asks the source of that earlier development. Societies before the veil are asked about. The veil is asked to be semi-permeable, and the planned methods of penetration are asked about. Penetration, here, means a lawful way of remembering or of reaching through, not a weapon.

The same stretch of questioning, in session 90 on 19 June, looks back at Maldek and Mars. I place the quotation here because it is the history sentence of this volume, and the reader of the cards will not meet it until that later session. Don says this Logos seems to have made a large percentage of beings whose distortion was toward warfare. There have been the Maldek and Mars experiences, and now Earth. Venus looks like the exception. He asks whether warfare was planned into the archetypical mind. Ra’s answer is printed on page 124.

It is incorrect that warfare of the types specific to your experiences was planned by the Logos.

Ra, through Carla L. Rueckert, The Law of One, Book IV, Session 90, 19 June 1982, printed p. 124. Short excerpt for review and study.

The sentence before it says the Logos did design the experiment for the greatest possible opportunities of polarization in third density. The next sentence says this form of hostility is an interesting result that apparently comes with the tool-making ability. The choice of a life-form with a grasping thumb is called the decision to which this kind of warfare may be traced. The Mars page and the Maldek page on this site are separate studies. In this volume the two names are examples in an argument about polarization. They are not given new dates.

Ra also says this Logos has a bias toward kindness, placed as a hint in the second-density environment and in the roots of mind, and that the hint does not change the requirements for harvest on either path. Other Logoi are said to have had greater negative harvests, and some to have offered a neutral background. This one did not. It allowed more of the love and light of the Creator to be visible. One further plan is named: the permeability of the densities, so that there may be communication from density to density and from plane to plane.

Sessions 84 to 87, 14 April to 12 May 1982

Session 84, 14 April 1982, returns to sexual energy transfer, which the earlier volumes had treated as a main catalyst. Don asks whether the direction of the transfer is a function of orgasm, and how one can tell which ray was transferred. The body archetype is coming into view. The veil, in this telling, is what makes sexual joining a potent and confused catalyst rather than a simple sharing. I do not copy the group’s private maintenance of that topic. The philosophical claim is the one that belongs in a review. The veil makes the body a place where the choice can be lost or found.

Session 85, 26 April 1982, asks the current situation of the fifth-density service-to-self companion and the nature of a crisis. Don also asks whether it would be magically bad to know that being’s name. I do not pursue the name. The book is already careful with it. Knowing a name is treated as a change in the magical link, which is why I leave the name out.

Session 86, 4 May 1982, asks what significant calls have been made on Carla’s vital energy, and how a dream is designed. The subconscious is offered as the scriptwriter of the dream. Dreams are one of the planned penetrations of the veil. I read that as the group’s working theory of sleep, spoken by the voice they are questioning. It is not a sleep-laboratory result.

Session 87, 12 May 1982, continues the fifth-density companion and asks how the power of that orientation is measured. A battery reversal and its root cause are discussed. The negative path is being set beside the positive path as two uses of the same archetypical machinery. Service to self, in this book, is a real polarity with its own discipline, not a slur. Ra has already said, in the warfare answer, that the Logos wanted both harvests. I keep that in view when the companion is discussed. The companion is a character in the group’s life of 1982. The polarity is the teaching.

Sessions 88 to 90, 29 May to 19 June 1982

Session 88, 29 May 1982, asks whether the fifth-density companion is still away, whether the censer is all right, and whether Carla’s recurring need for the bathroom before a session is the low vital energy. Don asks whether Ra used cards like the tarot in third density, and, if not, what Ra did use. The Egyptian transmission is described again. The same process was used later with the Egyptians as had been used with third-density beings of Ra. Those Egyptian teach/learners are distinguished from Ra’s own. A training course is asked for and deferred, because the instrument is at the end of her energy.

Session 89, 9 June 1982, asks how many of our years ago Ra’s third density ended, whether that ending coincided with the beginning of this planet’s second density, and whether Venus became a fourth-density planet at that time. The fifth-density visitor is asked about again. The cards come forward as objects. Don says the images the group has, copied according to their information from the walls of the large pyramid at Giza, may be duplicated in the book they are preparing. He asks whether those cards are an exact replica of what is in the Great Pyramid. He asks how the archetypical concepts were given to the priests of Egypt, and whether Ra had long since ceased to walk among the Egyptians by then. Ra says yes to that last point. The technique of transmission is the subject. I do not treat a wall in the Great Pyramid as a tarot gallery on the strength of this question. Don is checking a claim the group already holds. The Great Pyramid page on this site is a separate study of the building.

The first archetype, as given to the Egyptian priests, is discussed within the limits of the first distortion. Ra will not simply dictate a lesson that would override the student’s free will. That limit is why so many answers in this volume sound indirect. The indirectness is the teaching, by the book’s own rule.

Session 90, 19 June 1982, asks how particular fourth-density beings get here, and why, if the population now looks similar to fifth-density beings, the forms are as they are. The choice of the human form is tied back to the grasping thumb and the warfare answer I have already quoted. Don then asks what Ra wished to impart when Ra first planned to help the Egyptians. I quote the opening of the answer, from printed page 126.

We came to your peoples to enunciate the Law of One.

Ra, through Carla L. Rueckert, The Law of One, Book IV, Session 90, 19 June 1982, printed p. 126. Short excerpt for review and study.

The next sentence says they wished to impress upon those who wanted to learn of unity that in unity all paradoxes are resolved, all that is broken is healed, and all that is forgotten is brought to light. There was no teaching plan, in Don’s sense of a schedule. The intention, when they walked among the people, was to manifest what the learn/teachers had requested. The archetypes are then called the plinth of a structure, keeping the mind viable and available, not the whole of the building. Don had been trying to assign them a percentage of experience. Ra refuses the percentage.

Sessions 91 to 97, 26 June to 15 September 1982

From session 91 the book becomes a card-by-card reading of the first seven Major Arcana, with constant interruptions for Carla’s body and for the fifth-density visitor. I take the cards in a group so that a paraphrase does not turn into a second deck.

Session 91, 26 June 1982, sets the order of minds. The cosmic mind is refined into the archetypical mind, and that refinement is said to create the planetary or racial mind. Don asks the origin of that planetary mind. A microphone cord is moved and the contact’s clarity is asked about. The tools of the room are part of the metaphysics in this volume. A cord is not only a cord.

Session 92, 8 July 1982, asks what prompted the negative visitor to return, and whether anything can be done for Carla’s stomach. The Potentiator of the Mind is discussed as a source of preincarnative catalyst. The Significator is the card of the mind that experiences. I introduce that name here because the later cards use it. The Significator is the mind in the midst of its experience, after the Matrix has been potentiated and the Catalyst has arrived.

Session 93, 18 August 1982, asks the position of the fifth-density visitor and whether the tarot has any use besides study of the archetypical mind. The serpent on the third card is asked about. Session 94, 26 August 1982, is almost entirely the fourth card, including the strangely shaped skirt. Session 95, 2 September 1982, is mostly the new house: where to hang garlic, what else to do to the place, and the visitor. Session 96, 9 September 1982, asks whether the house can be transformed by painting and cleaning, how to bless the water that will be sprinkled with salt, what the figure on the card should wear on her head, and the ratios of the crux ansata. Session 97, 15 September 1982, asks about two small figures, one black and one white, and whether the coloring of the drawing is correct.

I do not describe each costume. The foreword already warns that the Egyptian costumes and the mythological creatures are a cultural clothing, and session 92’s neighborhood of answers says it is better to penetrate to the heart of the costume than to stop at the side-long face and the turned feet of Egyptian drawing. The working claim, repeated until session 97, is that these seven images are a resource for faith and will, not a complete and infallible series.

The note to readers on printed page 190 quotes session 97 to that effect. Ra does not want any mind/body/spirit complex to take the images as complete. They are a resource for the development of faith and will. The archetypical mind does not resolve the paradoxes. The student is told to look up from the inward work and behold the mystery of the one Creator. I paraphrase that note because it is the group’s own key to the volume. The images at the back of the PDF, through printed page 213, are the cards themselves. I do not copy them.

Sessions 99, 100, and 103

Session 99, 18 November 1982, compares an additional set of tarot images with the set already in use, and asks which is closer to Ra’s original intention. The contents list has skipped session 98. Session 100, 29 November 1982, reads the crown of three stars on a card as a possible balancing of mind, body, and spirit, and breaks off at a forty-five minute signal because of Carla’s condition. Sessions 101 and 102 are not in the contents. Session 103, 10 June 1983, is the last session printed in this volume. The digestive trouble is asked about. The fifth-density companion is asked about again. The Banishing Ritual has not been repeated regularly, and that lack is given as the reason for a lack of protection. Daily use in the room is called acceptable. A chariot card is guessed at, with wheels as the mind’s ability to move in time/space. Ra closes by telling the three to continue in support, one for the other, and to find the praise and thanksgiving that harmony produces.

The date matters. Session 103 is 10 June 1983. The foreword is signed 8 July 1983. The book was closed, on its own signature, a month after the last session it prints.

What this volume does with the old stories

Book IV is a channeled study of the archetypical mind, carried out with tarot cards, under a rule that the teacher will not finish the student’s work. Egypt enters as the place where priests, in this telling, turned a teaching of the Law of One into images, with an older Mesopotamian star-lore folded in. The Great Pyramid is the place Don believes those images were drawn. Ra agrees that the walk among the Egyptians was already over by the time the priests had the images, and states the aim of the visit in one plain sentence: to enunciate the Law of One.

Maldek and Mars are not retold. They are cited by Don as cases of warfare, and Ra says that kind of warfare was not planned, even though polarization was. Atlantis is not a subject of these sessions. The veil of forgetting is the new large claim. It is offered as the reason third density on this planet is harder, and more sharply polarized, than an unveiled third density nearer the galactic center.

The card images in the PDF are copyrighted pictures from identified decks, plus seven redrawn by the publishers. I leave them in the PDF.

Sources and copyright

The human authors, as the foreword signs them, are Don Elkins, Carla L. Rueckert, and James A. McCarty. The title page credits Ra. I cite the channel and the questioner so that a channeled claim is not mistaken for a finding.

I have not created a new source entry, and I have not attached this book to only one of the three people.

The copyright notice on the PDF is © 1982, all rights reserved, ISBN 0-945007-04-3, L/L Research, Louisville, Kentucky. The official PDF is https://assets.llresearch.org/books/the_law_of_one_book_4.pdf. The library page is https://www.llresearch.org/library/the-law-of-one. I did not add a shop button on this page.

The quotations above are short excerpts for review and study. The paraphrase is mine. The card images are not on this page.