Practice
What the material asks, and what it does not
The Ra Contact spends most of its length on how things are and comparatively little on what to do. What it does give is a training in four areas, one daily method, and a great deal of caution. This page gathers all of it in one place so a reader does not have to assemble it from nine essays.
Four disciplines, and what each one is for
These are the material's own areas of work, in its own order, with the essay that takes each seriously.
- The mind
- Called the most demanding part, and not because meditation is hard. The mind has to become an object of its own attention. The disciplines of the mind
- The body
- Described far more narrowly than a wellness reader expects, in terms of balance rather than regimen. The material has little interest in the body as a project. Three domains, and why one practice is not enough
- The spirit
- Where the first two are said to connect. The material’s image is a magnet with an upward pole and a downward one, meeting in the middle. The shape of healing
- The personality
- Threefold, and the third step is the one nobody can take for anyone else. This is the area the material calls white magic, and it attaches a harder caution to it than to anything else. Magic, and the discipline behind it
The one daily method the material gives
It calls it balancing: a review of the day's charged moments, done every day, with the opposite of your reaction given equal weight rather than a smaller share. It is unglamorous and it is the whole of the practical instruction.
01
Recall the day’s charged moments, while they are still warm.
02
Name the reaction honestly, without the explanation that makes you look reasonable.
03
Let the opposite be true, and give it the same weight rather than the smaller share.
04
Extend the same attention to one other person, from the outside, without telling them.
05
Notice what remains, and hold all of it loosely. Next week’s reading of it will differ.
The materials we actually use
Wider than the source line on purpose. The material rewards a reader who reads around it, and discernment is a practice rather than a rule about which shelf to use.
Nothing on this list is sold, sponsored, or run by this community, and no link here earns anyone anything. Where something costs money, that is marked, because a reader deciding whether to spend doubts a list that hides it. Inclusion is not an endorsement of every claim a source makes. Prefer sources that show their working, and be suspicious of any account that makes the reader feel finished.
The primary source
Everything else on this page sits under this. The sessions are readable in full, and a reference in an essay here can be checked against them directly.
Free
The sessions in full, searchable by topic and by reference, in several editions. This is where to check any quotation you meet anywhere, including on this site.
Free and paid editions
The Ra Contact, published by L/L Research
The publisher of the transcripts and of the later Q’uo material, including the printed and audio editions and a concept guide compiled from the sessions.
This community receives nothing from L/L Research, and it is not the only line worth reading.
The material in a language we already have
Not a substitute for the source, and not a translation of it either. These are older accounts of the same territory, and Indian readers arrive holding some of them already.
Free and paid editions
The tradition this community finds closest to the material at the point that matters most, which is the nature of awareness before it has content. The Mahavakyas and the Upanishads are the primary texts.
Free and paid editions
Karma yoga in its own words, which is the nearest Indian account of what the material says about action and its fruit.
Free and paid editions
Two Tibetan traditions with a very precise account of the difference between the mind and its nature. Useful precisely because it is not our vocabulary.
Free and paid editions
A third system describing the same movement between the vessel and the light. Included because reading two unfamiliar maps teaches more about maps than reading one familiar one twice.
Frameworks that carry the material
The material describes a sequence of development and says little about what growing up looks like in a life. These supply that account, and are [training wheels](/library/frameworks-as-training-wheels) rather than doctrine.
Free and paid editions
Integral Theory and the developmental maps around it
The framework our sessions most often reach for when the material’s own vocabulary runs out, particularly for the stages that come after rational capacity.
Free
Systems and complexity writing
Useful for the parts of the material that describe feedback, emergence, and thresholds. It also keeps a reader honest about where a metaphor is doing the work.
Practice, and working in the subtle domain
A short list of what people in this community have actually used for practice. None of it is run, sold, or endorsed by the community, and none of it is required.
Free and paid editions
Recorded meditations from the material’s own publisher, and the community channel also collects guided sessions that members have found useful.
Free and paid editions
Kriya and subtle-body practice
Indian kriya practice works directly on the subtle body rather than the intellect. We name it because it is the tradition many readers here already have access to, and because the material’s energy centres are describing something in the same neighbourhood.
Paid
Sound-guided and hemispheric-synchronisation audio
The Monroe Institute’s recordings, and the lucid-dreaming and dream-yoga material of Andrew Holecek, are the two sources most often cited in our sessions for dream and subtle-state work.
Both are commercial programmes. Nothing here is a referral, and the material’s own dream instruction is a notebook rather than a course.
What this page is not
It is not a course, and there is no level to reach. Nothing here is a treatment, and none of these disciplines is offered as medical or psychological care. The material has no progress bar and this community has no ladder.
It is also not personal guidance. A question about what a passage means belongs in a session, where it can be turned over with other people. A question about what you should do with your life is yours, and this community will not answer it for you, which is a boundary stated in full on the community page.
If what you are carrying is heavy, the room you need is not this one.
Read next
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The material's account of how everything came to be anything — infinity, free will, love, light, and the descent into density — read alongside the sheaths Vedanta drew for the same descent.
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Some catalyst belongs to no one person, such as a failure a whole society lived through or a system that has gone wrong for decades. Individual light is not enough to digest it, and that is not a design flaw.
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The foundation before the work
It is possible to study the higher bodies for years without ever doing the one thing the material puts underneath them. And the rule-book version of service is the most common way to mistake training wheels for the vehicle.
Where practice happens with other people
Discipline is individual and it is easier to keep with a room. This community reads together, and it holds a group meditation. Both are free, and neither requires anything of you on arrival.