Tim of Building 4th
Audio:
On the Mystery of Mystery: A Ra-Contact Conversation – The Building 4th Podcast
Opening
Doug offered an invocation acknowledging the group as the One Infinite Creator experiencing itself, emphasizing that living life through intention becomes the gift returned to the Creator—”giving back the glory.”
Core Teaching: The Nature of Mystery
Tim structured his presentation around Ra’s statement that “all begins and ends in mystery” (28.1), weaving together personal testimonies, Ra quotations, and contemplative reflection.
The Paradox of Third Density
Tim opened with a central paradox: Third density is explicitly not the density of understanding, yet we are compelled to seek understanding. Ra states:
“We are those who are of the Law of One. In our vibration the polarities are harmonized, the complexities are simplified, the paradoxes have a solution. We are one. That is our nature and our purpose.” (Ra, 1.1)
Yet for third-density beings, paradox remains unresolved—and this is by design. As Tim noted, “Seeking for understanding while we do not pass go, collect $200… somehow, we have to find mystery and flow with it while living life.”
Personal Encounters with Mystery
Members shared formative experiences of touching mystery:
Tim — At age 11, watching snow fall through a lamplight window in Utah. “What I felt was not conceptual… just pure experience. Almost just experiencing mystery or the stillness.”
Russell — A canoe trip in the Boundary Waters under starlight, feeling something supernatural was about to happen. “Was I about to be revealed in mystery, and I said no?”
Troy — Age 5–7, experiencing the strangeness of being: “It’s so strange to be me.” He had to reassure himself: “You are you, and that’s all there is to it.” He identified this as touching “the infinite mystery of beingness.”
Doug — His UFO encounter in first grade. Ra speaks of the Confederation using sightings “to evoke mystery” and call the viewer “into a deeper mystery” (53.3). Beyond this, Doug noted a chronic existential mystery: “Who am I in this situation?”
Nathan — A precognitive dream of a green-painted iron stake that manifested the same morning—an impossible puzzle piece that “rattled around my whole life until I found the Law of One.”
Clara — As a child running to her parents’ room during storms, she would see a picture of an angel with two children on a bridge. Years later, her mother insisted no such picture ever existed. “Somewhere I knew I was protected.”
Ra’s Teaching on Mystery and the Archetypical Mind (Sessions 96–97)
Tim traced Don Elkins’s attempts to “purify” the tarot by removing corrupted additions. Ra cooperated but then offered this correction:
“It is not possible to offer what you may call a pure deck… The removal of all distortion is unlikely, and to a great extent, unimportant.” (96.4)
Tim identified this as one of the most liberating teachings in the material. Don’s desire to “figure things out” mirrors our own seeking—yet Ra gently redirects:
“May we ask the student to look up from inward working and behold the glory, the might, the majesty, mystery, and the peace of oneness.” (97.9)
The archetypical mind, Ra explains, “does not resolve any paradox or bring all into unity. This is not the property of any resource which is of the third density” (97.9). The tarot, the mind complex, conceptual frameworks—none can deliver final resolution. What they can do is develop “the faculty of faith and of the will.”
Mystery as Self-Recognition
Troy’s childhood experience became the interpretive key. Tim observed:
“Ra makes it very clear that the mystery is our encounter with our true nature. It’s us learning and turning to see ourselves and kind of surprising ourselves.”
The One Infinite Creator knows itself through infinite perspectives. What we touch externally as “mystery”—snowfall, starlight, a strange dream—is actually recognition of something within. We are the mystery.
Ra states: “The rhythms are clothed in mystery, for they are being itself” (97.9). Doug’s earlier writing captured this: “We ARE the mystery… the wholeness of the sacred universe whose form is structured by sacred geometry exists inside of you and me.”
Mystery and the Limits of Understanding
Tim quoted a Talmudic saying: “Ain mazal l’Yisrael” — “For Israel, there is no fate.” Despite all astrological and karmic factors, we possess agency. The stars do not control our destiny; we can “play with the mystery however we want to manifest it.”
Ra’s teaching reinforces this. While the veil creates conditions of not-knowing, we retain the capacity for choice. The mystery is not obstacle but invitation.
Integration: Love, Light, and the Mystery
Doug offered a framework for understanding mystery’s relationship to love and light:
Mystery — Not something we cannot know, but something we can know infinitely without ever exhausting. Each new route to truth “enlightens and enlivens the core.”
Love — The energy to explore mystery. “The seeking, the luring… the hounds of heaven constantly barking to keep going further.”
Light — The consciousness, the gnosis, the “Eureka” of a moment where mystery unfolds. Then it “collapses back down into the next rung of the ladder, where we are now beckoned to explore the mystery in more complex ways.”
DeMarcus’s Synthesis
DeMarcus connected Hindu cosmology to Ra’s teaching:
“There’s an ancient Vedic scripture that says not even the gods and goddesses are able to understand the nature of Brahman.”
He noted that even sixth-density entities experience mystery, and eighth-density remains incomprehensible to those in fifth. “Mystery seems to be the great attractor… almost the reason for experience. It all begins in mystery, it’s what starts the creation, it all ends in mystery.”
Closing Reflection: Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri
Tim concluded with verses from Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem (Book 9, Canto 1):
Because thou hast chosen to share earth’s struggle and fate,
And leaned in pity over earthbound men,
And turned aside to help and yearned to save,
I bind by thy heart’s passion thy heart to mine.
Now will I do in thee my marvelous works.
When all thy work in human time is done,
In the heart of my creation’s mystery,
I will enact the drama of thy soul,
Inscribe the long romance of thee and me.
Troy responded: “One of the most beautiful bits of interaction with God and soul that I’ve ever heard.”
Closing Prayer (Troy)
“Holy One, Beyond all knowing, You stir the depths where words cannot reach. In stillness, we bow before your mystery—not to solve, but to adore. Open our hearts to wonder, that in all we cannot grasp, we may find you waiting. Amen.”
Community Notes
- Doug proposed that next week’s gathering include personal introductions—each member sharing who they are and what brings them to Building 4th.
- Tim emphasized that mystery unites us across time and culture, citing a 700-year-old Zen poem by Musō Soseki describing the same bone-chilling stillness he experienced as a child in Utah.
- The evening modeled the community’s practice: weaving Ra Material, contemplative poetry, and lived experience into collective seeking.
Building 4th Cosmic Christ 