Seth on Susan Boyle

[Not really, but this is Seth on those with difficult life situations from birth, often genetic, saying that they set those as challenges in a previous life. I don't know about this. Maybe. It'd be nice, but... I don't know if I'm buying it. Personally, I think I'm going to call bullshit on this one.]

"Suppose the worst, that in this life you have the following background: you are poor, you are of a minority race, you are not intellectual, you are a woman, you have a severe physical defect and you are no beauty. Now you set these challenges for yourself in a so-called past life. This does not mean that you cannot use all of your courage and resolution to solve these problems. You set them in the hope that you will solve them. You did not set them like millstones about your neck, hoping ahead of time that you would drown.

All you have to do is realize your own freedom. You form the reality that you know, not esoterically, not symbolically, not philosophically. Some great oversoul doesn't form it for you — you cannot put the burden there, either. You have in the past, collectively and individually, blamed a god or a fate for the nature of your personal realities—those aspects, indeed that you did not like.

The personality is given the greatest gift of all; you get exactly what you want to get. You create from nothing the experience that is your own. If you do not like your experience, then look within yourself and change it. But realize also that you are responsible for your joys and triumphs, and that the energy to create any of these realities comes from the inner self. What you do with it is up to the individual personality."

(During break class members discussed fate and pre-destination.)

"Some evening I would like our lady over here to talk to me about predestination."

(Bernice M.: "I would like you to talk to me about it.")

"You are not 'programmed.' Nothing happens because it must happen. Every thought that you have now changes reality. Not only reality as you know it, but all reality. No act of yours predisposes a future self to act in a particular manner. There are banks of activity from which you can draw or choose not to draw."

(Bernice M.: "Do we make instantaneous decisions? For example, I was thinking of the Los Angeles earthquake today. A man walked out into the street and was killed by a falling brick. What made this one person in the entire building walk out?")

"This particular individual was quite aware of what would occur, on what you would call an unconscious basis. He was not predestined to die. He chose both the time, in your terms, and the method, for reasons of his own."

(Bernice M.: "Regardless of who chose, it was destined that he die.")

"It was not predestined. He chose. No one chose for him."

(Bernice M.: "But he had made the decision before.")

"Before when?"

(Bernice M.: "Before he was killed.")

"He knew that he was ready to go on to other spheres of activity. Unconsciously, he looked about for the means and chose those immediately available. This particular individual, three days earlier, had made the plan. There was no predestination involved. Because a tree branch falls, this does not mean that it was destined to fall in either the particular manner of its fall nor in the timing of the fall. There is a great difference between free choice and predestination."

(Jim H.: "Didn't you say earlier, referring to the woman who was born in a minority race, that here challenges had been set up by a previous personality, in our terms?")

"By the whole self."

(Jim H.: "The decision was made when that previous personality had returned to the whole self for a period of reevaluation?")

"You must realize, again, that we are speaking of divisions for convenience's sake, where none really exists. At the same "time," so to speak, that this personality is born into a minority race, in a completely different era it may be born rich, secure and aristocratic. It is searching out different methods of experience and expansion. Do you follow me?"

(Jim H.: "I understand. I thought you probably meant the challenges had been set up by the whole self.")

"Indeed. Remember, this is your entire identity of which we are speaking. It is only you who are presently aware of but one portion of it; and this portion you insist upon calling yourself. You are the self who makes these decisions."

(Bert C.: "What recourse would the poor individual who was born with all of these seemingly insurmountable handicaps have, were she to say consciously, at the ego level, 'I just don't want any of this. I would have much preferred to have been born aristocratic'?")

"The inner self realizes, however, that potentials are present that would not necessarily be present under other circumstances—abilities that can not only help the present personality but other individuals, and even society at large.

Your main point of contention is brought about by the emotional barriers that are caused by the difference in terms. It is as if you choose to work for a day in the slums. It would be ridiculous for you to choose to do this, and then say to yourself, 'Why did I choose to work in the slums? I would prefer to work on Fifth Avenue.'

You know the reason, and your entire identity knows the reason. You hide it from the present self simply to insure the fact that the present reality is not a pretended one.

A rich man who tries to be poor for a day to learn what poverty is learns little, because he cannot forget the wealth that is available to him. Though he eats the same poor fare as the poor man, and lives in the same poor house for a day—or for a year or five years—he knows he has his mansion to return to. So you hide these things from yourself so that you can relate. You forget your home so that you can return to it enriched.

Consciousness is not made up of balances so much as it is made up of exquisite imbalances, and the focus of awareness is to some degree the result of this state of excitability. In this state all elements are never known because new ones are always being created. I am not speaking of physical elements, but of the psychological characteristics of consciousness, for even those continually merge and change.

You are not now what you were ten minutes earlier. You are not the same being physically, psychologically, spiritually, or psychically, and ten minutes later you will be different again. To deny this is to try to force consciousness into some rigid form from which it cannot ever be freed, to apply rules to it that make a very neat psychological landscape."

from Seth Speaks