No device in the record

You have found a device in the world you would like to believe in. It may be a book of dials, a pendulum, an orgone generator you saw on a website, or the idea that such a thing exists and you should acquire it before your working counts. You are not asking for a product review. You are asking whether the material at the centre of this community tells you how to make one, whether it tells you to buy one, and whether it tells you, more quietly, to leave the work to it.

This library answers you before it opens the transcripts, and it answers plainly: the Ra Contact contains no device for magical work. It does contain apparatus — a pendulum, a crystal — but what it hands the worker is the practitioner’s own body: the walk of the circle, the words of the sound complex, the breath driven from it. Nothing the worker holds stands between the working and the work.

Let me say how that claim is measured, because in this archive a claim without a scan is just a confident sentence. The contact, as built here, is 106 sessions and 2,632 records. A case-insensitive whole-word scan for ‘orgone’ returns zero hits; ‘radionics’ and ‘radionic’ return zero too. The word ‘device’, in either number, returns twenty-two hits across twenty distinct records, but every one of them names something that is not a magical apparatus: an astrological chart, a star upon the solar plexus, the yellow-ray body called a device that feeds back catalyst, an athanor for the mind, electrical devices controlling humidity, laws used as devices, a radiation-emitting device, nuclear devices, devices of non-fertility, a colour-therapy device, communication devices, the parent’s open-hearted beingness as a teach/learning device, a psychotronic group of devices, a nuclear device, and a healing machine. Not one of them is a wand, a dial, a box of crystals, or an accumulator. So the absence is not the absence of the word — it is the absence of the thing the word would point to. The pendulum and crystal do appear, but not under the word ‘device’. They are apparatus for healing and divination, not machines for magical work:

the weak back and forth motion indicates a partial blockage although not a complete blockage. The strong back and forth motion indicates the reverse of blockage which is over-stimulation of a chakra or energy center which is occurring in order to attempt to balance some difficulty in body or mind complex activity. This condition is not helpful to the entity as it is unbalanced.

This is diagnosis, not a device. It tells the worker how to read a back-and-forth, not how to build a machine to produce one.

Now the counter-position, and it is a strong one. Karl Hans Welz, writing Magic of the Future, puts the whole question into a different vocabulary. He says that action upon the extended universe, or action at a distance, is possible with the help of a structural link to the target — some thing that represents the target, hair and fingernails, a photograph, a doll, a written square, the setting of a radionics black box, or the visual imagination of a congregation. He gives this line its own paragraph, in caps: DISTANCE IS IRRELEVANT IN MAGICAL WORK. The disagreement is not about whether distance matters — it is about where the lever sits. For Welz, the lever is located in the distance: a structural link to the target, across irrelevant space, projected by a switched-on machine. For the corpus, the lever sits inside the rock itself, and the distance between operator and object is not the variable that is tuned — the worker’s attunement is. Welz’s account is a chain: an operator, a device charged with orgone — accumulators, the orgone generator, trend and target devices — structural links to target and to desired action, and the result projected across irrelevant space. The work happens because the machine is switched on. The Ra Contact’s one demonstrated working has no machine in it at all, and the mechanism it does give is, if anything, more demanding rather than less.

Consider the single most instructive working the corpus describes, session 62. The group walks the circle. The words are slightly off — the record calls it a slight irregularity in the verbalized sound — and into the opening comes an entity that begins to work upon the instrument in trance. The circle is walked again, and “the breath of righteousness” expels the thought-form. The circle is walked a third time. That is the entire working: orientation, words, breath, and a second orientation. There is no implement in the list. There is nothing in the list that you could purchase, that you could assemble, that you could be taught to hold. The worker is the apparatus.

And the mechanism the corpus gives for that working is not, on its face, an apparatus mechanism. Asked how blocks of rock were moved, the answer does not say “we used a machine.” It says the energy is intelligent and hierarchical, that each atom of a material such as rock retains a shell, a shape, a field, and the intelligence of the ascendingly intelligent or balanced body, and that when one can speak to that intelligence the finite energy of the rock is put in contact with the infinite power resident in the more well-tuned bodies.

In this way, that which is required is accomplished due to the cooperation of the infinite understanding of the Creator indwelling in the living rock. This is, of course, the mechanism by which many things are accomplished which are not subject to your present means of physical analysis of action at a distance.

There is a word in that sentence that does the most work, and it is not cooperation. It is indwelling. Whatever else is true — and I will not resolve the theology for you — the mechanism requires an intelligence already resident in the matter, and it requires the worker’s mind/body/spirit to be tuned enough to speak to it. That is not a thing you can buy at a shop in Woodstock. It is not a dial you set to a number and leave running. It is a discipline of the worker, and it is a condition of the worker’s own attunement.

You can see the shape of the divergence now. With Welz, the question is: is the machine switched on? With the corpus, the question is: is the worker tuned? One outsources the working to an instrument; the other relocates it into a person. Where a radionics operator asks the box to act across the structural link, the contact has you ask the rock’s intelligence — a different kind of link entirely, not a link to a target but a link within the thing being worked.

This is not a gentle difference, and I am taking a side in it. We in this library read the corpus as placing the whole burden of the working on the person who does it, and we read apparatus as a relocation of that burden away from the person. Welz himself frames it as relief from tradition, as getting out of the “strait jacket” that traditions impose — and he means the religious strait jacket, not a strait jacket on the machine. The corpus does not complain about any strait jacket; it complains, in its own register, about doing the work without the inner work. A device gives the operator a sense of having done the work, and the corpus gives the operator nothing of the sort — no device to hold, no box to leave running, only the question of whether the circle was walked correctly the first time.

Here is the claim that cuts both ways, and I want to state it honestly: the stance the corpus does name is not enough by itself to be a tradition, and it is enough to be a position. The phrase — a ceremonial magical stance — appears once in the entire record, in 42.16. There a seeker asks how to re-create a prior experience, and Ra describes the sought-after state as belonging to the roots of cosmic consciousness — an archetypal quality, not a procedure. The answer gives a stance: that such experience is best approached from that stance of ceremony and magic. This library reads the stance as an orientation of attention for meeting what arises — not a procedure, not a device, but a body-level readiness.

Your experience would best be approached from the ceremonial magical stance.

This is essay 71’s ground, and I decline to re-litigate it here: one phrase is a real distinction and it is nowhere near enough to be a system. But it is exactly enough to name what the corpus gives you instead of an apparatus — an orientation rather than an implement, a stance rather than a machine. The distinction between the two is the distinction between holding an attitude while you meet something and holding a device while it meets something for you.

Figure 02

The worker, and the worker without

You came in wondering whether the device was real. The more useful question is what the device is doing to you, and the more uncomfortable answer is: it is relieving you of the work. The moment a mechanism can be bought and operated, the worker’s condition ceases to be the measure of the working, and the whole discipline that the corpus presses you into — the study of one discipline, the mastery of it, the walking of the circle correctly, the expelling of breath driven from the self — slides out from under the work. The working becomes a transaction with an object instead of an event in a person. That is not an argument against objects. It is an argument about where the cause lives.

I have to say one thing about where I am not going. The question of why — why there is distance, why the mechanism indwells rather than projects, whether the cause is ultimately inside or outside or both — is a question the corpus does not answer by giving you a machine, and this essay does not answer it by guessing. That ground belongs to essay 54, and I decline it. What I can offer is a description of the two positions and a judgement about which one leaves the worker responsible. The description is fair to both sides: both grant distance a role — for Welz as irrelevant, for the corpus as the very thing the indwelling intelligence acts through rather than across. The judgement is ours, and it is this: the side that gives you a device also gives you an alibi, and the side that gives you a stance gives you only yourself.

The India context, for what it is worth: you have heard of devices in other systems here, from the yantras and the mantras, from the tools of tantric and Vedic practice. None of that is pasted here, and none of it is what the Ra Contact is. The material is what it is — an American contact of the 1970s, published by L/L Research, and it says nothing of a machine for magical work. What it does say is that the practitioner’s own body, properly oriented and properly worded, is the working, and that the cause of even a moved stone is the Creator’s intelligence cooperating with what is already there. If Welz is right that distance is irrelevant, he is not wrong. If the contact is right that the worker must be tuned, then no machine can tune the worker for them. The apparatus exists — a pendulum, a crystal — but the working is not handed to it.

Thus the circle was properly walked. The breath of righteousness expelled the thought-form and the circle again walked.

The circle was walked, the breath went out, the circle was walked again, and the instrument was left to its work. That is the whole record of a moved stone.