Seth Classic: Practicing Idealist

Seth, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 873, p. 301,  08/15/79

Seth: In a manner of speaking, you must be a practicing idealist if you are to remain a true idealist for long. You must take small practical steps, often when you would prefer to take giant ones — but you must move in the direction of your ideals through action. Otherwise you will feel disillusioned, or powerless, or sure, again, that only drastic, highly unideal methods will ever bring about the achievement of a given ideal state or situation.

Life at all levels of activity is propelled to seek ideals, whether of a biological or mental nature. That pursuit automatically gives life its zest and natural sense of excitement and drama. Developing your own abilities, whatever they may be, exploring and expanding your experience of selfhood, gives life a sense of purpose, meaning, and creative excitement — and also adds to the understanding and development of the society and the species.

It is not enough to meditate, or to imagine in your mind some desired goal being accomplished, if you are afraid to act upon the very impulses to which your meditations and imaginings give rise. When you do not take any steps toward an ideal position, then your life does lack excitement. You become depressed. You might become an idealist in reverse, so that you find a certain excitement in contemplating the occurrence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes.

You may begin to concentrate your attention on such activities. You may contemplate the end of the world instead, but in either case you are propelled by a sense of personal frustration, and perhaps by some degree of vengeance, seeing in your mind the destruction of a world that fell so far beneath your idealized expectations.

None of the unfortunate situations discussed in this book have any power over you, however, if you understand that events do not exist by themselves. All events and situations exist first within the mind. At the deepest levels of communication no news is secret, whether or not you receive it by way of your technological gadgets.

Your thoughts and beliefs and desires form the events that you view on television. If you want to change your world, you must first change your thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. If every reader of this book changed his or her attitudes, even though not one law was rewritten, tomorrow the world would have changed for the better. The new laws would follow.

Any new law always follows the change in belief. It is not the other way around.

There is no civilization, no system of science, art, or philosophy, that did not originate in the mind. When you give lip service to ideas with which you do not agree, you are betraying your own ideals, harming yourself to some extent, and society as well, insofar as you are denying yourself and society the benefit of your own understanding. Each person is an idealist. I simply want to help you practice your idealism in the acts of your daily life.

Each person alive helps paint the living picture of civilization as it exists at any given time, in your terms. Be your own best artist. Your thoughts, feelings and expectations are like the living brush strokes with which you paint your corner of life's landscape. If you do your best in your own life, then you are indeed helping to improve the quality of all life. Your thoughts are as real as snowflakes or raindrops or clouds. They mix and merge with the thoughts of others, to form man's livingscape, providing the vast mental elements from which physical events will be formed.


© Laurel Butts

Seth: You Can Awaken from your Normal Waking State

Seth, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 830, pp. 149-150

Seth: Your world and everything in it exists first in the imagination, then. You have been taught to focus all of your attention upon physical events, so that they carry the authenticity of reality for you. Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary subjective--or somehow not real--and they seem to rise in response to an already established field of physical data.

You usually think, for example, that your feelings about a given event are primarily reactions to the event itself. It seldom occurs to you that the FEELINGS THEMSELVES might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to your emotions, rather than the other way around. The all-important matter of your focus is largely responsible for your interpretation of any event.

For an exercise, then, imagine for a while that the subjective world of your thoughts, feelings, inner images, and fantasies represent the "rockbed reality" from which physical events emerge. Look at the world for a change from the inside out, so to speak. Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of your own subjective reality. Forget what you have learned about reactions and stimuli. Ignore for a time everything you have believed, and see your thoughts as real events. Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to your own feelings and beliefs. For indeed your subjective world causes your physical experience.

In titling this Chapter, I used the word "mechanics," because mechanisms suggest smooth technological workings. While the world is not a machine—its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them—this involves a NATURAL mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence. Again, your interpretations of identity teach you to focus awareness in such a way that you cannot follow the strands of consciousness that connect you with all portions of nature. In a way, the world is like a multidimensional, exotic plant growing in space and time, each thought, dream, imaginative encounter, hope or fear, growing naturally into its own bloom—a plant of incredible variety, never for a moment the same, in which each smallest root, leaf, stem, or flower has a part to play and is connected to the whole.

Even those of you who intellectually agree that you form your own reality find it difficult to accept emotionally in certain areas. You are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that your feelings arise IN RESPONSE to events. Your feelings, however, cause the events you perceive. SECONDARILY, you do of course THEN react to those events.

You have been taught that your feelings must necessarily be tied to specific physical happenings. You may be sad because a relative has died, for example, or because you have lost a job, or because you have been rebuffed by a lover, or for any number of other accepted reasons. You are told that your feelings must be in response to events that are happening, or have happened. Often, of course, your feelings "happen ahead of time," because those feelings are the initial realities from which events flow.

A relative might be ready to die, though no exterior sign has been given. The relative's feelings might well be mixed, containing portions of relief and sadness, which you might then perceive—but the primary events are subjective.

It is somewhat of a psychological trick, in your day and age, to come to the realization that you do in fact form your experience and your world, simply because the weight of evidence SEEMS to be so loaded at the other end, because of your habits of perception. The realization is like one that comes at one time or another in the dream state, when suddenly they "awaken" while still in the dream, realizing first of all that they are dreaming, and secondarily that they are creating the experienced drama.

To understand that you create your own reality requires that same kind of "awakening" from the normal awake state—at least for many people. Some of course have this knack more than others. The realization itself does indeed change "the rules of the game" AS FAR AS YOU ARE CONCERNED (louder) to a rather considerable degree. There are reasons why I am mentioning this now rather than in earlier books. Indeed, our books follow their own rhythms, and this one is IN A WAY a further elaboration upon The Nature of Personal Reality.

As long as you believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for your actions, or on the other hand that events are meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then you cannot consciously understand your own creativity, or play the role in the universe that you are capable of playing as individuals or as a species. You will instead live in a world where events happen to you, in which you must sacrifice to the gods of one kind or another, or see yourselves as victims of an uncaring nature.

While still preserving the integrity of physical events as you understand them, [each of] you must alter the focus of your attention to some extent, so that you begin to perceive the connections between your subjective reality at any given time, and those events that you perceive at any given time. You are the
intiator of those events.

This recognition does indeed involve a new performance on the part of your own consciousness, a mental and imaginative leap that gives you control and direction over achievements that you have always performed, though without your conscious awareness.

As mentioned before (in Session 828), early man had such an identification of subjective and objective realities. As a species, however, you have developed what can almost be called secondary nature—a world of technology in which you also now have your existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it. To develop that kind of structure necessitated a division between subjective and objective worlds. Now, however, it is highly important that you realize your position, and accomplish the manipulations of consciousness that will allow you to take true conscious responsibility for your actions and your experience.

You can "come awake" from your normal waking state, and that is the natural next step for your consciousness to follow--one for which your biology has already equipped you. Indeed, each person DOES attain that recognition now and then. It brings triumphs and challenges as well. In those areas of life where you are satisfied, give yourselves credit, and in those areas where you are not, remind yourselves that you are involved in a learning process; you are daring enough to accept responsibility for your actions.



© Robert and Laurel Butts

Seth on Death and Cancer

Seth, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Sess 866, Mass Events

Cancer, for example, has become the symbol for the body’s vulnerability, in current years—the proof of man’s susceptibility to the body. It is a disease that people have when they want to die—when they are ashamed to admit that they want to die, because death seems to fly against sane behavior. lf the species struggles to survive, then how can individuals want to die?

I have mentioned before that many people have had cancer and recovered without knowing it. In your belief system, however, it is almost imperative to see a doctor in such circumstances (as Jane wrote in Note 2 for Session 805), for many fears are unsubstantiated, and the fear alone, found groundless, gives the person new life symbolically and physically.

In the case of your article, a woman’s cells would already have had to prepare themselves for the guest—granted that guest was cancerous, and was a sperm. There is not an attack. There is an acceptance and a preparation for certain changes.

(Pause at 10:13.) A life crisis is formed. The “parasite,” or virus, plays its part in setting up such a psychologically-desired position. It is an emotionally-charged position, an imminent crisis. I am aware of the tormenting questions involved in such issues, and also of the gap between my explanations and the daily experiences of many people. The fact is that when death comes it is wanted; it has been chosen.

The fact is that death in its way is the culmination of a life, leading toward a new birth and new experience. The cells know this. So does the heart. People cannot admit that they want to die at certain times. If they could accept the fact of their own wishes, some could even change their minds. Many do: The psychological condition changes for the better, and the body cells are no longer amiable to the cancerous condition.

Seth Classic: New Job as an Event to be Activated

Seth, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 822, Page 106

The inner ego is a portion of the self, for example — is the portion of your self — that is aware of your reincarnational activities. It is the part of you that exists outside of time, yet simultaneously lives in time.

You form your own reality.

The ego that you are aware of obviously could not form your body for you, however, or grow your bones. It knows how to assess the conditions of the world. It makes deductions. Your reasoning is highly important, yet alone it cannot pump your blood or tell your eyes how to see.

The inner ego does the actual work that brings about the events you have decided upon.

In very simple terms, if you want to pick up a book, and then do so, you experience that event consciously, though you are quite unaware of all the inner events that occurred to bring the motion about. The inner ego directs those activities.

If you want to change your job, and hold that desire, a new job will come into your experience in precisely the same fashion, in that the inner events will be arranged by the inner ego. A body event involves the working of numerous muscles and joints and so forth.

An event involving a job change concerns motion on the part of all of the inner egos involved. Obviously, then, a mass physical event implies an inner system of communications of proportions that would put your technological communications to shame.

© Robert and Laurel Butts