by Austin Bridges with Doug Scott
Detailed Account of the Cosmogonauts Session #3 Presentation
Setting and Opening
The session convened on April 18, 2026, with all five Cosmogonauts present: Doug Scott, Austin Bridges, Danny Neese, Tim Merrill, and Matt Segall. Matt joined from Mérida, Mexico; Danny was preparing for travel from Dallas to Buenos Aires. The session was structured as a presentation to Matt—the first formal introduction of the Ra Contact material to the group’s guest of honor, a Whitehead scholar who had never spent sustained time with the Law of One.
Doug opened with a brief invocation addressing the One Infinite Creator, framing the gathering in language that wove together process and Ra Contact themes: “You transcend all things. You incarnate as all things. And you dwell within all things.” He spoke of every moment as “an event of You becoming more You,” and asked that the group’s emerging collective soul—their “little group soul”—bless the world “for the highest and greatest wholeness.” The invocation carried the hallmarks of Doug’s theological synthesis: transcendence, incarnation, and immanence held simultaneously, with the act of becoming itself as a form of divine self-knowing.
Doug noted the session was being recorded for potential podcast release. Austin then began sharing slides.
Part I: Austin’s Introduction — Who He Is and How He Holds the Material
Austin opened by orienting Matt to his role and posture. He identified himself as co-director of L/L Research, publishers of the Ra Contact material, with over thirteen years of involvement and fifteen years of study. His framing was careful: he holds the material with “epistemic humility,” positioned somewhere between literal belief and mythological engagement. He doesn’t claim it as ultimate truth, yet it has been “the core backbone of my spiritual seeking.” This tension—between investment and epistemic openness—set the tone for the entire presentation.
Austin emphasized his orientation as a steward, not merely a student. His excitement about Doug’s synthesis with process philosophy was explicit: he sees it as a potential “new inroad of research for Law of One students” and a way the material might “offer something to the world” beyond its existing community.
Part II: The Three Principals — Don, Carla, and Jim
Austin then walked Matt through the three people whose unique convergence made the Ra Contact possible.
Don Elkins was introduced as a UFO investigator, pilot, and physics professor at the University of Louisville. His path began when his friend and flight instructor, Captain Thomas Mantell, died pursuing a UFO as part of the Kentucky Air National Guard—a well-known case in UFO history. Don’s investigation led him through hypnotic regression and past-life regression work, then naturally into channeling: the idea that telepathic communication with the beings associated with UFO phenomena might be possible. Don gathered his physics students and launched a channeling experiment in 1962, making the inquiry participatory rather than purely observational. Austin characterized Don as “the questioner”—someone whose decades of generating questions became the very structure that Ra would eventually address.
Carla Rueckert was described as a Christian mystic—a “cradle Episcopalian” who had a direct mystical experience of Jesus at age two, which catalyzed a lifelong devotion to the church despite non-religious parents. Trained in library science, she became Don’s research partner in 1968. She didn’t begin channeling herself until 1974, when Don’s original student channels had moved on. Once she began, her aptitude was exceptional, and she became the “instrument” through whom Ra would eventually speak.
Jim McCarty came from an education and business administration background but had withdrawn to the Colorado wilderness, drawn by a school teaching that sustained engagement with untechnologized nature could unlock latent mental and spiritual capacities. He eventually started his own off-grid school in rural Kentucky, heard Don and Carla on a radio program, and joined their channeling sessions. In 1980, Don and Carla invited him to move in. Two weeks after Jim arrived, the Ra Contact began—the trio’s synergy was apparently necessary for the contact to occur. Ra designated Jim as “the scribe,” but Austin noted his deeper role was one of “sustained power and sustained focus,” providing protective energetic support through unwavering concentration during sessions.
Part III: The Nature of the Ra Contact
Austin described the Ra Contact as beginning in January 1981, lasting for 106 sessions over approximately three years, and being “incredibly unique” compared to all channeling before and after it. The distinction lay in the mode of transmission. Prior channeling through L/L Research had been “conscious channeling,” where the instrument remained somewhat awake and exercised interpretive influence over the incoming material. The Ra Contact, by contrast, operated through what they termed “trance channeling”: Carla was completely unconscious, her spirit displaced from her body, while Ra directly manipulated her vocal cords to communicate.
From Carla’s subjective experience, she would lie down, fall unconscious, and wake one to two hours later physically exhausted, with an entire session recorded that she had no memory of producing. The material’s distinctiveness was multifold: Ra’s use of language was jargon-heavy, consistent, and precise in ways unique to this contact; the ritual preparation was elaborate and exacting (Austin showed photographs of the setup); and the scope and depth of discussion far exceeded anything the group had channeled before. Don’s years of refined questioning allowed him to follow threads with a persistence and focus that drew out sustained, detailed teaching on specific topics.
Austin showed several photographs of the channeling setup: Carla lying down with three microphones (at least one or two recorders consistently failed during sessions), blindfolded and covered; Don measuring the “appurtenances”—ritual objects Ra directed them to arrange, including a chalice of water (“virgin chalice”), incense in a censer, a “virgin candle,” and a Bible opened to the Gospel of John, chapter one, connecting to Carla’s Christian mysticism. Jim was shown meditating behind Carla, his role during sessions being to sit in total focus for one to two hours, visualizing light flowing through her without wavering.
Part IV: Who Is Ra?
Austin then addressed the central question: who was the entity speaking through Carla?
Ra self-identifies as having originally evolved on Venus billions of years ago, when Venus had a habitable atmosphere. They are a member of the Confederation of Planets in Service to the One Infinite Creator. Austin described Ra as a “social memory complex”—a collective of beings evolved beyond individual mind into a unified field of shared consciousness, unified in purpose and motivation. He was careful to distinguish this from a hive mind: individuals within the social memory complex retain their own minds, but the barriers between individual and collective consciousness are completely removed.
Ra exists in the sixth density—several evolutionary stages beyond current humanity. Their history with Earth includes being the same Ra known to the ancient Egyptians, but their relationship with Egypt was one of attempted philosophical and spiritual guidance that went awry. They were received as gods rather than as equals offering information. Their teaching was distorted by Egyptian royalty and politics, and Ra eventually withdrew, subsequently being folded into the Egyptian pantheon as a deity—a misreading of their original intent.
Ra’s purpose, both then and now, is to offer spiritual and philosophical guidance in response to what they describe as a “calling”—a signal generated by Earth’s suffering that draws the Confederation to respond. They protected free will during the L/L Research contact by operating exclusively through a Q&A format, responding only to Don’s questions rather than proactively delivering a curriculum, and preferring that Don offer his own thinking before they responded.
Part V: The Density Structure
Austin briefly outlined Ra’s framework of seven densities—levels or cycles of consciousness evolution within an octave of experience. The term “density” refers to the density of light within the field of consciousness; Doug has described it as a “bandwidth of conscious awareness.” Each density is a discrete vibrational spectrum with a barrier between densities requiring effort to cross.
Current humanity occupies third density, characterized centrally by self-awareness. We sit on the cusp of fourth density—the density of love and understanding, corresponding to the heart chakra in the classical system. The energy of fourth density is arriving regardless of human orientation, but because it manifests through the people, the transition is chaotic. Third-density attitudes, distortions, and inability to open in love are causing what Austin called an extremely difficult delivery: “It’s like a new planet being born, but the delivery is going very poorly.”
Austin also noted Ra’s octave structure: an eighth density serves as the first density of a new octave, so the pattern is cyclical and regenerative.
Part VI: Doug’s First Intervention — Social Memory Complex as Whiteheadian Society
Doug’s first substantive contribution came here, and it established the bridge-building pattern that would characterize the rest of the presentation. Before diving into process thought, he addressed Matt directly, telling him what he sees in Matt’s vocation: someone instrumental in inaugurating the fourth density through his capacity to connect across topics and people, nurturing the fourth-density energy within collective consciousness to match the love/light now bathing the solar system.
Doug then translated Ra’s concept of the social memory complex into Whiteheadian terms. A social memory complex, he said, is an “organized singular plurality”—a formulation directly echoing Whitehead’s principle that “the many become one, and are increased by one.” The formation of a social memory complex is properly a fourth-density achievement, but it is prefigured in third density. The church, the ecclesia, is a seed form of what will become consummated in fourth density. Doug linked this to Teilhard de Chardin’s omega point—the noosphere coming online, the collective unconscious becoming collective conscious.
In Whiteheadian terms, Doug described this transition as “moving into a higher-grade society”—a society sheltered by the third-density framework until a metaphysical threshold is reached where the compass points definitively toward “surrendering our desire for bellicosity and projection, and entering into wholeheartedness.” This threshold is reached when inner work and outer work become the same dance—what Doug called a “perichoresis of inner work and outer work.”
Part VII: Ra’s Cosmology — Intelligent Infinity and the Primal Distortions
Austin then turned to Ra’s metaphysical foundations: the One Infinite Creator, or intelligent infinity, as the ground of all being. Everything is generated from the Creator’s desire to know itself, to have experience.
Austin distinguished two uses of the term “intelligent infinity” in Ra’s vocabulary. The first is absolute non-dual unity—undistorted, beyond name, unpolarized, full and whole. Ra called this “the macrocosm of the mystery-clad being.” The second is a more relational usage: intelligent infinity as the potential aspect of creation, paired with intelligent energy as the kinetic or manifested aspect. Austin quoted Ra: “Unity being activated or potentiated due to the catalyst of free will. Infinity became aware.”
He noted a passage where Ra described “the basic rhythms of intelligent infinity” as “totally without distortion of any kind. The rhythms are clothed in mystery, for they are being itself”—pointing to the paradox that even undistorted, non-dual unity somehow contains rhythm.
Austin then walked through Ra’s three primal distortions—the logical (not temporal) structure that gives birth to creation:
- Free Will (the First Distortion, also called the Law of Confusion): The awakening of awareness within infinity. “Intelligent infinity discerned a concept. This concept was finity. This was the first and primal paradox, or distortion, of the Law of One. Thus, the one intelligent infinity invested itself into an exploration of manyness.”
- Love/Logos (the Second Distortion): The creative principle, the one original thought. Austin described it as a focusing that creates patterns holographically—”an energy of an ordering nature” that generates intelligent energy from the potential of intelligent infinity.
- Light (the Third Distortion): The first manifestation. All that exists is light, organized by love. Ra referred to this as prana—the nature of light creating “the nature of the catalytic and energetic levels of experience in the creation.”
Part VIII: Ra’s Use of Logos
Austin devoted particular attention to Ra’s distinctive use of the word Logos, which Doug had identified as a key connection point between Ra and process thought.
The Logos in Ra’s framework is not static. It grows through what it generates—the creation’s experience becomes the nature of the Logos. The creative act of Logos operates as a nested hierarchy or fractal, repeating at every scale: Primal Logos → Galactic Logos → Solar Logos → Planetary Logos → Human Logos. Ra somewhat inconsistently used the prefix “sub-” for these nested levels, though the Solar Logos was consistently called a sub-Logos.
Each level receives the intelligent energy of its parent Logos and has the free will to further refine, iterate, and manifest its own creation. The engagement is participatory: the Logos gives refined intelligent energy to the creation, and the creation gives itself back to the Logos in the form of experience. The system of Logoi then harvests that experience and iterates. Ra’s own words: “Each Logos desires to create a more eloquent expression of experience of the Creator by the Creator.”
Austin identified a point that Doug’s work had helped him grasp: the process Ra describes at the macrocosmic scale—the generation of the universe—is also happening at the microcosmic scale, moment to moment. Every individual moment is generated through this same Logoic process.
Part IX: Doug’s Core Contribution — Teleopotentiation and the Nature of Intelligence
Doug took over for what amounted to the conceptual center of the presentation. He introduced teleopotentiation—the term he coined to name what he considers the universal creative principle underlying both Ra’s cosmology and Whitehead’s process thought.
Teleopotentiation, Doug explained, is the Law of Three in action: Affirming Force meets Denying Force, and through a Reconciling Force, a New Higher Arising is generated—genuine novelty, not compromise or rearrangement. Doug noted that this principle “undergirds the entirety of Whiteheadian thought. It is process.” He connected it to Gurdjieff and to Cynthia Bourgeault’s work on the Law of Three.
Doug grounded this in his clinical practice: when a client presents two contrasting forces creating tension, he knows with certainty that a Reconciling Force is “pregnant, gestating”—the therapeutic task is to identify that hidden third force and bring it into conscious awareness so that a genuine higher arising can occur.
He then offered his reading of Ra’s concept of intelligence. Where Austin had presented intelligent infinity as the ground of all being, Doug reframed what “intelligent” means in this context: “Awareness in motion towards more. Awareness as desire for gnosis.” He elaborated: “The will’s focusing act by which infinite possibility becomes potentiated probability, becomes manifested actuality.” Intelligence, for Doug, is not a static quality the Creator possesses—it is what the Creator does and what the Creator is. Being, having, and doing fuse into identity at the primordial level.
Doug then introduced the geometry of teleopotentiation: the torus. The toroidal field, he argued, is a three-dimensional rendering of the Ankh—Ra’s universal symbol. The Ankh in two dimensions captures infinity (the circle) manifesting itself, moving through dying and rising in a spiral fashion. The torus expresses this as continuous self-referential flow: yearning outward (the outward flow), longing to return (the equatorial turn), and rejoicing in coalescence (the central vortex where experience is distilled and a new cycle launches).
Doug read from his own work: “The shape of teleopotentiation—does it have a shape? It is a torus. It is the geometry of continuous self-referential flow. It is the shape that self-knowing takes.” He connected this to Ra’s description of intelligent infinity as “a giant heart beating outward, outward… inward, inward” and argued that the “rhythms clothed in mystery” that Ra identified as “being itself” are rhythmic precisely because rhythm necessitates three elements: silence, beat, and the return that integrates both. “It can’t be two, and it can’t be four. To have a rhythm, it has to be three.”
In Raian Process Metaphysics, Doug develops this geometry extensively, proposing that the torus is not a shape imposed on the primal rhythm from outside but the geometry that rhythmic self-knowing necessarily takes. The Ankh is its cross-section: “The circle at the top is the eternal: unbounded, complete, the source from which all flows. The cross below is manifestation: embodied existence extending through space and time. The Ankh shows the eternal experiencing itself through extended embrace—not hovering above manifestation but passing through it, transformed by it, enriched by the very suffering that cruciform existence entails.”
The primal rhythm itself carries affect—felt quality at its core. The outward movement is not mechanical push but yearning: the eager desire to go forth, to express, to become. The inward movement is not mechanical pull but longing: desire stretched across the distance that experience has created, the memory of home drawing consciousness back toward Source. Where the two meet—in the coalescence Ra describes—there is rejoicing: the joy of consummation, of harvest gathered, of the many becoming one and being increased by one.
Part X: Matt’s Response
Matt’s response was generous and intellectually engaged. He immediately recognized the Neoplatonic resonances—noting that the parallels with Plotinus’s emanation from the One “which cannot help but overflow itself” into various levels or densities were “quite striking.” He suggested this resonance could itself be evidence of Ra’s Egyptian teaching having seeded Plato’s own philosophical understanding, since Plato acknowledges Athens as “children in comparison to the deep wisdom of the Egyptians.”
Matt’s central observation: “None of this feels foreign to me. I feel very familiar. Different—slightly different languaging—but the concepts and the deep pattern of creation and manifestation, yeah, it feels intimately familiar.” He affirmed Doug’s suggestion that “Whiteheadian language may have helped Ra give voice to some of this in a way that the more noun-based and subject-predicate structure of English made difficult.”
Part XI: The Question of Don’s Death
Matt then raised a question that Austin acknowledged was “probably much deeper than you might realize”: What happened to Don Elkins? He knew Don had committed suicide and wanted to understand the relationship between Don’s death and the channeling project.
Austin’s response was both candid and layered. He explained that within the framework of the material itself—taken as literally true for the purpose of explanation—the seeking the group was engaged in generated what Ra called a “significant charge of polarity.” This positive magical charge attracted its opposite: service-to-self entities from the fifth density (the density of wisdom, but in this case wisdom deployed in service to separation and control). These negatively polarized beings could not create distortion on their own—they could only energize distortions already present. Don had pre-existing mental health vulnerabilities that were manageable under normal circumstances but became inroads for this negative influence.
As the contact deepened and Don’s relationship with Carla intensified, something “burst his heart open”—he became extraordinarily sensitive. This sensitivity provided pathways for the fifth-density negative entity to exacerbate his existing mental health distortions. The group sought professional help multiple times; Don checked himself into a mental hospital with a diagnosis of depressive psychosis with schizophrenic tendencies. But the mental health system failed him—his doctor was not adequately present, treatment was ineffective.
The ending was tragic in its specifics: Jim and Carla attempted to involve police to get Don readmitted to the hospital. Don had a firearm; police responded aggressively. An hours-long standoff ensued, ending when police tear-gassed the house, at which point Don exited and shot himself.
Austin was clear that L/L Research’s understanding is that the negative entities did not drive Don to suicide on their own—they took his existing vulnerabilities and amplified them to the breaking point. Because the trio’s unique synergy was necessary for Ra to speak, the contact ended permanently with Don’s death. They briefly considered trying to recreate it but concluded that Don was the driving force and the trio’s specific harmony was irreplaceable.
Doug added a clarifying note: the fifth-density negative entity Austin described operates at the highest level of service-to-self evolution—”a Sith Lord at the highest degree.” Fifth density is the ceiling for negative polarity; in sixth density (the density of unity, where Ra exists), no negative being can persist, because at that bandwidth of consciousness “one can no longer metaphysically ignore that you are indeed one with the other.” To progress, a negative being must leap to the positive path. But the fifth-density entity possesses extraordinary capabilities in black magic and manipulation—though crucially, it cannot create. Negative beings have cut themselves off from their own unconscious in order to maximize conscious manipulation of others, and this severance from the unconscious means they can only exacerbate what already exists, never generate something new.
Doug connected this directly to the group’s own practice of opening and closing with invocations: “We’re not operating from fear, but if you’re gonna go into a place with a lot of mosquitoes, you might want to bring some Off.”
Scheduling and Closing
The group agreed to reconvene on Friday, April 24, at noon, to continue the presentation—several more slides remained, plus time for fuller discussion. Danny noted he would be in Buenos Aires by then and might have internet connectivity issues.
Tim Merrill closed the session with an improvised benediction: “Out and within to all that is beautiful and noble, virtuous, all that is worthy of our best selves. And we express gratitude for this experience, for the catalyst that has brought us here together, and for the iron that we are forging. May it become gold, and the athanor of love. Amen.” The alchemical image—iron becoming gold through the athanor (the furnace of transformation)—captured the spirit of what the group is attempting: a transmutation of separate seekers into something more than the sum of their individual seeking.
Observations on the Session’s Character
Several features of this session are worth noting for the project record.
First, this was the first time Matt engaged directly with Ra Contact material in a sustained way. His response—identifying Neoplatonic resonances and affirming the “intimate familiarity” of the conceptual patterns—is itself evidence that the bridge Doug has been building between process thought and Ra’s cosmology has a structurally sound foundation. Matt did not need to be convinced that the concepts were philosophically serious; he recognized them immediately as belonging to a tradition he already inhabits.
Second, the presentation followed the general outline established in the Cosmogonauts Presentation Outline document, though it moved more slowly than planned—covering roughly the first three sections (Personal Introduction, Brief Origins of the Material, and the beginning of the Interpretive Framework) before running out of time. The deeper process parallels—intelligent infinity as Whitehead’s creativity, the primal distortions mapped onto phases of concrescence, the dipolar God, nested Logoi as Whiteheadian societies—were introduced by Doug in condensed form but await fuller development in the follow-up session.
Third, the question of Don’s death—and Austin’s unflinching account of it—brought into the room the weight and cost of the work the group is approaching. The Ra Contact is not merely an intellectual resource; it was generated through a process that destroyed one of its three creators. The Cosmogonauts’ own practice of ritual protection (the Banishing Ritual, the opening and closing invocations) is not ceremonial decoration. It is informed by the knowledge that this kind of work generates real polarity, and that polarity attracts real opposition.
Fourth, Tim’s closing benediction—improvised, alchemical, brief—continues to demonstrate his liturgical gift. The language of the athanor (the alchemical furnace) emerging naturally in a closing prayer speaks to the depth of formation he brings to the group’s ritual life.
Building 4th Cosmic Christ 