"Many people do not need to listen to my voice because they listen to the voices of the oak trees and the birds, and to the voices of their own being. I am a poor imitation of the voices of your own psyches to which you do not listen. I will be unneeded, and gladly so, when you realize that the vitality and reinforcement and joy are your own, and rise from the fountain of your own beings; when you realize that you do not need me for protection, for there is nothing you need protect yourself against...."You were born into a state of grace. It is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in a state of grace whether or not special words are spoken for you, or water or oil is poured upon your head. You share this blessing with the animals and all other living things. You cannot fall out of grace, nor can it be taken from you. You can ignore it. You can hold beliefs that blind you to its existence. You will still be graced but unable to perceive your own uniqueness and integrity, and blind also to other attributes with which you are automatically gifted....
"Now, each of you is a part of All That Is, highly individual and unique, like no other; and that like no-other-ness will never be taken from you. You will not melt into some great golden bliss in which your characteristics will disappear. You will not be gobbled by a super-god. On the other hand, you will continue to exist; you will continue to be responsible for the way in which you use energy; you will expand in ways now impossible for you to understand. You will learn to command energy of which you now do not know. You will realize that you are more than you realize you are now, but you will not lose the state of which you are now aware." Seth.
I’ve been reading the Seth material on the internet.
Seth, in case you’ve not heard of him before, is a disembodied being of indeterminate origin (is he a god, or a ghost or an angel?) who was “channelled” by the poetess Jane Roberts between 1963 and 1984, and whose regular sessions were recorded and then transcribed by her husband Robert Butts to make up a very large body of material: over twenty books altogether, along with video recordings and tapes.
I must admit there’s a strange kind of comfort in receiving the disembodied communications of an inter-dimensional being over the internet late at night. That’s what communicating on the internet feels like most of the time anyway - like communicating with disembodied beings - the difference being that Seth, according to his own testimony, never had a body in the first place.
When I first read the material I was annoyed. Seth struck me as a pompous know-it-all. Unfortunately he is almost impossible to argue with. I mean, who are you arguing with exactly? He’s from another dimension of reality. He may be a know-it-all, but he‘s an extra-dimensional know-it-all. How can you argue with someone who hasn’t ever been stuck in a traffic jam?
His fundamental philosophy is that you make your own reality.
Seth: "You create your reality according to your beliefs and expectations, therefore you should examine these carefully. If you do not like some aspect of your world, then examine your own expectations."
That makes a certain amount of sense. You can wake up in the morning full of exuberance ready to take action and to enjoy your life upon this earth. Or you can wake up depressed, woeful, pessimistic and with low expectations, merely hoping to survive another day.
You can see your problems as challenges to be overcome, or you can see them as annoying obstacles getting in your way.
The approach you take to your life is obviously a part of your reality.
But Seth goes much further than this.
You make your own reality, including your physical reality. The very fabric of the universe is made up of your beliefs and expectations. There is no such thing as an accident. Nothing happens in your universe without your consent, and this applies equally to everyone.
So - say - I have an attack of piles. Do I make my own piles? According to Seth I do. I make my own reality, therefore I make my own piles. Everything in the universe has meaning. The problem then is trying to work out what, exactly, the meaning of piles might be.
You could go mad thinking like this.
Or again, more seriously: do the people of Africa make their own reality? Do they make their own poverty? Do they make their own hunger?
Isn’t there some sense in which in large parts of the world one set of people are having other people’s realities imposed upon them?
The trouble with this view is that while it makes a certain amount of sense to take responsibility for your own life, the same philosophy when applied to other people can also lead to an annoying form of self-satisfaction.
So you make your own reality. So if you are well-off, comfortable, with a nice home and a nice income, then it must be because you deserve it.
And by the same token, if you are starving, in a war zone, without shelter or clean water or clothes upon your back, then you deserve this too. It’s obviously due to some fault in your belief-system.
Personally - disembodied being or not - I simply will not accept this.
My solution is as follows. When it comes to aspects of my own life I accept that I have responsibility and hope to do my best to make the best of it. When it comes to another person’s life, however, no one has any right to judge.
It’s as simple as that.
5 comments:
This is a really interesting topic. It all depends, I suppose, on one's definition of 'reality'. What would that be for me? Reality is something unattainable in my life - as my I begin from a premise of not believing - so nothing is real, or factual, until proven beyond doubt. Real = factual? Reality = fact? I'm not sure.
You did create your piles, in a way, if you sat on a cold stone, and I can imagine you have done a lot of sitting on cold stones or rocks - didn't you listen to the old wives' tales? But are your piles a reality? That's the important question.
Only in as far as they fit a description laid down by another man or men, can you recognise them as being piles.
So our reality is shaped, not only by what we are seeing and experiencing, but by what other people have seen and experienced.
Seth is a nihilist - we are born, we make our choices, we make our fate, we die. But we don't do any of that in isolation, everything is dependent on connections outside of ourselves, of reflections and meanings and history. And every person's reality is quite different to every other person's - there is no way to quantify reality therefore.
If you accept that you create your own reality, you cannot claim that others do not also make theres. The universe, if it has any underlying order, could not have such a contradiction. I believe, as Seth says, you do make your own reality, but that "you" is much more than the conscious ego.
Hi CJ Stone,
In answer to your questions:
"Do the people of Africa make their own reality? Do they make their own poverty? Do they make their own hunger?"
The answer is yes, they also create their own reality.
Think of it this way, you know what it is like to live comfortably, with enough food, water, etc. That is YOUR reality. You feel compassion or some discomfort for the people in Africa because you know what they are 'missing out' on.
Now if you were in the shoes of someone living in poverty of Africa, you would not know anything outside of your own reality.
Your wanting for someone in Africa to live like you would be greater than their own desires, as they are not consciously aware of anything different.
Their desires may be completely different to your or my desires.
The fact is that yes all those starving Africans create their own poverty and famine. Just as individuals have their own quirks of character so is it with ethnicities and races. The point is that it is the reality that many of these people accept.
However note too that according to the seth cosmology these people we observe as starving are only one particular manifestation of an infinite number of probable selves. That is, there is literally another universe where these people are not starving and we are starving.
The thing about the Seth philosophy is the deeper you go an d the more you think about it the more 'real' the possibility becomes that indeed there may just be something to it...
We are all psychopaths then, as we all mistake our beliefs for reality.
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