Seth on What To Do When Told You Have a Short Time to Live

NOPR, The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 646

Seth: No man or woman consciously knows for sure which day will be the last for him or her in this particular life, that each calls the present one. Mortality with its birth and death is the framework in which the soul, for now, is expressed in flesh.

Birth and death, then, have their function, intensifying and focusing your attention. Life seems more dear in your terms, corporeal terms, because of the existence of death. It seems obvious, but the full enjoyment of life would be impossible in the FRAMEWORK, NOW, of earthly reality without the knowledge of death.

You have been given an opportunity to study life and to experience it more fully than you ever have before in this existence. Its intensity and brilliance, its contrasts and similarities, its joys and its sorrows, are here for you to perceive, whose eyes are opened by the fact of the doctor’s pronouncement.

Now I tell you: That intensification, appreciated and understood, and the experience of life and living, accepted unconditionally, can bring you in this lifetime another birth in which the doctor's pronouncements are meaningless. Spiritually the death sentence given you is another chance at life, if you are freely able to accept life with all of its conditions and to feel its full dimensions, for that alone will rejuvenate your spiritual and physical self.

NOPR, The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 646The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 646

© Laurel Butts

Seth/Jane Roberts, Deleted SESSION 853, THE PERSONAL SESSIONS

The Personal Sessions, Book 5, page 33-34 (Also known as the Deleted Sessions)

Seth: SESSION 853, 5/14/79, found in both MASS EVENTS and THE PERSONAL SESSIONS, BOOK 5

Seth: Generally speaking, creativity has feminine connotations in your society, while power has masculine connotations, and is largely thought of as destructive.

Your scientists are generally, now, intellectually oriented, believing in reason above the intuitions, taking it for granted that those qualities are opposites. They cannot imagine, life's "initial" creative source, for in their terms it would remind them of creativity's feminine basis. In the framework of this discussion, now, only, you have a male's universe. It is a universe endowed with male characteristics as these appear in the male-female orientations of your history. The universe seems to have no meaning because the male "intellect" alone cannot discern meaning, since it must take nothing for granted. Even though certain characteristics of the universe are most apparent, they must be ignored.

You must understand I know that the terms male and female here are being used as they are generally understood, and have nothing to do with the basic characteristics of either sex.

In those terms, the male-oriented intellect wants to order the universe, name its parts, and so forth. It wants to ignore the creative aspects of the universe, however, which are everywhere apparent, and it first of all believes that it must divorce itself from any evidence of feeling. You have in your history then a male god of power and vengeance, who killed your enemies for you. You have a prejudiced god, who will for example slay the Egyptians on behalf of the Jews...

The male god is a god of power. He is not a god of creativity.
Now, creativity has always been the species' closest connection with its own source, with the nature of its own being. Through creativity the species senses All That Is. Creativity goes by a different set of rules, however. It defies categories, and it insists upon the evidence of feeling. It is a source of revelation and inspiration--but revelation and inspiration do not initially deal with power, but with knowing.  

So what happens often in your society when men or women have creative bents, and good minds to boot?
You run into many contradictions. God is supposed to be male. The soul is sometimes considered female. The angels are male. Now let us look at the Garden of Eden. The story says that Eve tempted the male, having him eat of the tree of good and evil, or the tree of knowledge. This represented a state of consciousness, the point at which the species began to think and feel for itself when it approached a certain state of consciousness in which it dared exert its own creativity.

This is difficult to verbalize. It was a state when the species became aware of its own thoughts as its own thoughts, and became conscious of the self who thinks. That point released man's creativity. In your terms it was the product of the feminine intuitions (though, as you know, such intuitions belong to both sexes). When the passages were written, the species had  come to various states of order, achieving certain powers and organizations; it wanted to maintain the status quo. No more intuitive visions, no more  changes, were wanted. Creativity was to follow certain definite roads, so the woman became the villain.

Seth, Deleted SESSION 853, 5/14/79, in both MASS EVENTS and THE PERSONAL SESSIONS, BOOK 5


© Laurel Butts 

Seth: Physical Objects Transmit Meaning Just Like Text

SETH SPEAKS

Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul

Seth: As you read the words upon this page, you realize that the information that you are receiving is not an attribute of the letters of the words themselves. The printed line does not contain information. It transmits information. Where is the information that is being transmitted then, if it is not upon the page?

The same question of course applies when you read a newspaper, and when you speak to another person. Your actual words convey information, feelings, or thoughts. Obviously the thoughts or the feelings, and the words, are not the same thing. The letters upon the page are symbols, and you have agreed upon various meanings connected with them. You take it for granted without even thinking of it that the symbols - the letters - are not the reality - the information or thoughts - which they attempt to convey.

Now in the same way, I am telling you that objects are also symbols that stand for a reality whose meaning the objects, like the letters, transmit. The true information is not in the objects any more than the thought is in the letters or in words. Words are methods of expression. So are physical objects in a different kind of medium. You are used to the idea that you express yourselves directly through words. You can hear yourself speak them. You can feel the muscles in your throat move, and if you are aware, you can perceive multitudinous reactions within your own body - actions that all accompany your speech.

Physical objects are the result of another kind of expression. You create them as surely as you create words. I do not mean that you create them with your hands alone, or through manufacture. I mean that objects are natural by-products of the evolution of your species, even as words are. Examine for a moment your knowledge of your own speech, however. Though you hear the words and recognize their appropriateness, and though they may more or less approximate an expression of your feeling, they are not your feeling, and there must be a gap between your thought and your expression of it.

The familiarity of speech begins to vanish when you realize that you, yourself, when you begin a sentence do not know precisely how you will end it, or even how you form the words. You do not consciously know how you manipulate a staggering pyramid of symbols, picking from them precisely those you need to express a given thought. For that matter, you do not know how you think.

You do not know how you translate these symbols upon this page into thoughts, and then store them, or make them your own. Since the mechanisms of normal speech are so little known to you on a conscious level, then it is not surprising that you are equally unaware of more complicated tasks that you also perform - such as the constant creation of your physical environment as a method of communication and expression.

It is only from this viewpoint that the true nature of physical matter can be understood. It is only by comprehending the nature of this constant translation of thoughts and desires - not into words now, but into physical objects - that you can realize your true independence from circumstance, time, and environment.

Now, it is easy to see that you translate feelings into words or bodily expressions and gestures, but not quite as easy to realize that you form your physical body as effortlessly and unselfconsciously as you translate feelings into symbols that become words.

You have heard the expression before, I am sure, that the environment expresses a particular individual's personality. I am telling you that this is a literal and not symbolic truth. The letters upon the page have the reality only of ink and paper. The information they convey is invisible. As an object, this book itself is only paper and ink. It is a carrier of information.

© Laurel Butts.

Seth: Negative focus robs you of energy you need to help

Seth, The Nature of the Psyche, Session 800

Seth: You form your own reality. That reality contributes to the experience of others, but each of you possesses a unique, original stance in space and time that is yours alone in quite practical terms, regardless of time's relative existence.

Only when you operate from your own stance can you help others to the best of your ability. To anticipate danger, or to imaginatively take on the troubles of others robs you of the very energy with which you could help them.

I am not saying, therefore, to turn your eyes from the unfortunate conditions of the world. Practical help is needed in all areas of the human life.

Yet it is far better, and more practical ultimately, to concentrate upon the beneficial elements of civilization-far better to organize your thoughts in areas of accomplishment than to make mental lists of mans deficiencies and lacks. Such a practice leads to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, in which effective action seems impossible.

Life possesses an exuberance.

If this is cherished, nurtured, encouraged, then additional energy is generated that is not needed for the purposes of daily private life-a superabundance, that can be effectively directed in those areas of the world where help is most needed. The strength, vitality, and effectiveness of thought is seldom considered, Thought, you may say, will not stop a war-yet what do you think started such a war?

Throughout history the downtrodden have often risen into power, using force, rebelling against their oppressors; and yet, learning little from that experience, they turn and become the elite, the new power-holders. Their physical conditions may be completely changed. Now theirs, the offices of government, the wealth. Gone are the conditions that, it would seem, caused the uprising. Yet in retaliation they strike out, forming a new class of downtrodden who must in their turn rise and retaliate.

Despite all appearances, conditions of an exterior nature do not cause wars, or poverty, or disease, or any of the unfortunate circumstances apparent in the world. Your beliefs form your reality. Your thoughts generate practical experience. When these change, conditions will change.

To add your own energy, focus, and concentration to dire circumstances in other portions of the world does not help, but adds to, such situations.

© Laurel Butts

Seth Classic: Choosing a Painful Life Situation

Seth, NOPR, Session 667

Seth: The situation Is one of danger, yet is chosen by those involved, and is not inflicted upon them. In somewhat the same way, entire life contexts are selected that might appear to be incomprehensible, foolhardy, or even insane to an observer.

(9:38.) These lifetime organizations may involve very drastic physical disabilities from birth. From the outside it seems impossible that anyone would choose such a background, such a highly restricted or even painful situation in which to live. From that viewpoint birth defects, or lifetime diseases of any kind, make no sense.

No one begins a race with a handicap, you may say, but that is obviously not the case. Individuals have often chosen such situations precisely as incentives, and many great men have done so. This does not mean that such disabilities are necessary. At any point that an individual realizes his point of power in the presents he will not need a barrier to test himself against, or to focus him in what he thinks of as the proper direction.

You live many lives simultaneously. You often think of these as reincarnational existences, one before the other. If you are severely ill and believe that the reasons for your symptoms exist in a past life, that you must "put up with it," then you will not realize that your point of power is in the present, and you will not believe in the possibility of recovery.

Again, even so-called incurable diseases can be healed as long as this does not involve regenerations not possible within the context of creaturehood.

In your terms, birth defects of whatever kind are chosen before this life. This is done for many different reasons ( just as people choose to be ill In life, regardless of the duration involved). That is, a certain psychic framework is set up through which an individual decides "ahead of time" to experience an entire life situation. Some information on this has been given in my other writings.*

A person with several existences stressing intellectual achievement might purposely then decide upon a life in which mental abilities are beyond him, and the emotions allowed a full play that he had denied them "earlier."

(9:54.) Since all existences are simultaneous, this simply means his stressing certain aspects in this life--at the expense of others, you would say--and setting up a frame of reference that may seem to be limiting. On the other hand the personality involved may see this as a most rewarding and expansive experience, in which the emotions are allowed freedoms ordinarily denied. Characteristically, some personalities prefer lifetime experiences in which accomplishment and development follows an even course. Others demand great contrast. One of the latter may be miserably poor in one life, luxuriously rich in another, an intellectual giant in still another, a great athlete, and then a complete invalid. Individual differences operate then in the kinds of life situations chosen.

In many cases it is the family, rather than the incapacitated member, who questions and does not understand as in cases of severely mentally retarded children, for example. Yet in all instances not only do children choose their parents ahead of time, but parents choose their children, of course.

In such a situation, there are fulfillments to be gained from the parents' standpoints. There are always opportunities of growth and unusual creativity possible under those conditions for all involved. That is why the framework was chosen. The same applies to seeming tragedies such as accidents, or severe illnesses that come at any time.

(Very emphatically at 10:03:) On an individual basis a grave illness, for instance, will represent the adoption of a particular highly intense focus in which a given aspect of usual experience is deliberately cut out or denied; the context of life itself must then be magnified along other lines. In somewhat the same manner, this also applies to those born in extreme poverty or in the most seemingly unfortunate of family situations. The life challenge is inherent within the problem itself and springs from it. Usually, though not always, a peculiar personal achievement results precisely because of the given difficulty (intently).

Now this accomplishment need not involve some great artwork or invention, or political leadership, for example, though it may. Often the successful activity represents a challenge on the part of the personality who set it in terms of psychological creativity, and the overall enrichment of experience. Those involved, such as family, will have acquiesced to the situation "earlier." Often, particularly in the case of mental or physical birth defects, the incapacitated person will be accepting that role not only because of personal reasons; he or she will also be choosing that part for the family as a whole.

Highly intelligent parents, therefore, may find themselves with a retarded child. If they place a great value upon intellect at the expense of the emotions, then the child may be acting out for them the emotional spontaneity of which they are so afraid themselves.

(10:15. Peculiarly, in spite of her deep trance and the mass of material she'd delivered, Jane remembered one line--Seth's remark about her using the radio as a point of reference while she worked with states of consciousness. See the session at 9:32. This was an obvious thing that neither of us had realized before.

(Jane plays the radio often while writing, too. She joked now that she must use it as "a lifeline between realities. "Resume in the same intent manner at 10:47.)

A birth defect is obvious, and sets up certain conditions that cannot be ignored.

Many ordinary illnesses also involve the family group to some degree. The predominating beliefs of the sick person will always be paramount, however. The group situation will encompass an acquiescence on the part of other family members.

Now understand that the same thing applies in the case of unusual achievements. In those instances the achiever's beliefs predominate, and yet apart from this he may also be acting out the unrealized aspirations of his family members, or of the group in which he is intimately involved. There will always be reasons for such interrelationships.

(Pause.) Many great contrasts of a social nature have the same kind of inner meaning; here whole groups of individuals chose particular life situations in which, for example, poverty and illness predominate, while other areas of the world (or of any given nation) enjoy the highest technological advances, wealth and prosperity. Separately each personality has a private reason for such an affiliation. But on other levels, through the contrasting focuses of poverty and wealth, scientific accomplishments or the lack of them, opposites are brilliantly apparent. Technological progress, followed as a main focus, automatically portrays its benefits and its disadvantages. 

A nation which pursues this course is like one individual who primarily follows a strictly "objective, male," externally oriented path in terms of your Western understanding. Certain values have been stressed in your country, particularly in the recent present. These attributes were pursued at the expense of others for individual reasons and those en masse. The rest of the world agreed to such actions, however, and various portions of it took entirely different courses, so that in your experience global society would show a kaleidoscope of varying focuses and their results.

(Pause at 11:05.) On a much smaller scale and to different degrees, any tribe, town, family or group will show the same tendencies, and from the shared experience each individual will learn and grow.

A person may choose a great talent instead, through which he or she will perceive reality and concentrate all experience. This will serve as a formidable focus, yet by its nature it may often preclude other experiences that many individuals find quite normal. Some artists with great ability may shut out intellectual maturity, utilizing native emotional qualities to such an extent and with such intensity that the mental reasoning faculties are largely shunted aside. (Pause.) Without rational illumination, the emotional elements may be so unwieldy that the artist, for all of his spontaneous expression, cannot relate in any kind of permanent situation of an intimate nature. For reason and emotion are natural counterparts.

Someone else may choose to focus upon intellectual achievement to such a degree that he shuts out all true closeness, and though he can accept a permanent relationship, he will not experience the emotional richness that others may derive from a much briefer encounter. Therefore each of you choose ahead of time, in your terms the kind of framework through which you will contend with this life situation. This applies personally and collectively.

Those who believe in reincarnation will ask, 'What about past-life beliefs? And even if I forget the idea of guilt, am I bound to follow the rules of karma?" (See the 614th session in Chapter Two.) 

Since all is simultaneous, your present beliefs can alter your past ones, whether from this life or a "previous" one. Existences are open-ended. Now with your ideas of progressive time and the resulting beliefs in cause and effect, I realize this is difficult for you to understand. Yet within the abilities of your creaturehood, your current beliefs can change your experience; you can restructure your "reincarnational past" in the same way that you can restructure the past in this present life (as explained in sessions 657-58 in Chapter Fifteen.

(With gestures:) In the center of the page:

The Point of Power Is in the Present.

This experienced present also represents your psychic touchstone to all of your other existences. You are consciously aware of certain events, and unconsciously aware of much more that in one way or another you are learning to bring into conscious focus.

The same applies to all of your other "reincarnational selves." They are unconsciously aware of your conscious experience, as you are unconsciously aware of theirs.

The interaction is constant, however, and in all of your presents, creative. You draw on their knowledge as they draw on yours, and this of course applies to personalities that you would consider future. You have a gigantic pool of information and experience to draw upon, but this will be utilized according to your present conscious beliefs. If you understand that the point of power is in the present, then you have an inexhaustible realm of ability and energy at your command.

© Laurel Butts

Seth: Your Mind, like the Government, Is Not a Thing, But a Process

The Magical Approach, Session 8

Think of your own government in ideal terms for a moment. Its citizens are all individuals, with their own lives and interests. The government, if it has their loyalty, utilizes their energies in such a fashion that the majority are benefited, as is the government itself. Yet you cannot really put your finger on "the government," though you might mention the White House as the seat of its power. The government is composed of many people, of course and really extends all the way down the line, even to its least citizen, but the government can direct the use of energies, of goods, commerce, power, and so forth.

The people count upon the government to realistically define the conditions of the world, to have proper intelligence so that the activities in foreign lands are known, to keep up proper communications with other governments, and so forth. Now in some important respects the reasoning mind is like the government in this analogy. If the people in power are paranoid, then they overestimate the dangers of any given world situation. They overreact or over mobilize, using a disproportionate amount of energy and time for defense, and taking energies away from other projects. The reasoning mind acts in the same fashion when paranoid beliefs are in power. It therefore tells all of the citizens - or cells of the body - to mobilize for action, to be on the alert, to pare down all but necessary activities, and so forth.

When a government is paranoid, it even begins to cut down on the freedom of its own peoples, or to frown upon behavior that in freer times would be quite acceptable The same applies to the conscious mind in that situation. Now the people might finally revolt, or they will take certain steps to see that their freedom is restored, and so the body's cells will do the same.

So what we want, obviously, is to ensure that the conscious mind, with its reasoning processes, can make proper adjustments about the nature of the world and the individual citizens within it. I will return later to the purposes of man's conscious mind in nature, and part of that discussion will fall in our book.

Man's mind is really more of a process. It is not a completed thing, like an arm or leg, but a relationship and a process. That process has its source in what I can only call "natural reasoning."

© L. Butts

Seth on Why Diets Don't Usually Work

Seth, The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 660

Seth: Diets do serve momentarily as outer signs that you are in control, and can seize the initiative; and as such they can be important. Usually, however; a pattern of unsuccessful diets occurs, operating then as a series of negative suggestions. The resistance is the result of conflicts in beliefs. You think you are overweight and accept this as reality. Steps to lose weight do not make sense in the face of that belief. They are 'unrealistic' or even impossible.

The same applies to underweight conditions. In each case frequent attention to the scales serves as another negative stimulus, reinforcing the condition. The effort to eat more will be as resisted by the chronically underweight, as the effort to refrain from eating will be by the obese.

Not only will these reactions occur, but opposing tendencies will be brought to bear. The concentration upon not eating, and the resulting tension, may instead cause increased consumption. And the underweight person may actually eat less the harder he or she tries to eat more —the latter being interpreted as an impossibility by the overriding belief in the underweight condition.

The best thing to do is to stop all such efforts, but instantly begin altering your beliefs as instructed in this chapter.

The reason why some lose-weight groups succeed in their therapy, at least momentarily, is that belief in the worth of the self is stressed. Unfortunately, weight is attacked as 'bad' or 'evil', symbolic moral judgments enter the act. The therapy seldom has long-reaching effects because from then on any gained weight is even more negatively charged.

© Laurel Butts

Seth on Assassination and Murder

Seth: The Personal Sessions,  aka The Deleted Sessions  9/20/78

Rob: Do you want to say something about my dream, in which I get shot? 

Seth: It was, as I believe Ruburt has mentioned, a result of deep contemplation on your part about the bookstore murder, but in a larger context, involving probabilities, murderers, victims, and the beliefs involved.

The men were all united--that is, they agreed to the circumstances. No one was trying to run away, and in a way the murderer was performing a service. Any violence or hatred serves a purpose beyond itself so that man in a way often performs services of which he is not consciously aware.

I am not saying that man is being manipulated, but that in a larger framework, even his seemingly evil acts have constructive meaning. A man who kills with hatred will have his hatred to contend with, but he is not able to kill anyone who has not decided to die--and to die in a particular manner; that is, someone who wants his death blamed on another, who would not commit suicide, who would not choose a long illness--someone who is ready to die but does not want to deal with the circumstances, and wants indeed to be surprised by death.

Now: in those terms, and in the terms of this discussion, specifically, all assassins are paid assassins hired by the victims. Again, in the terms of this discussion, many murderers are overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, and the murderous act pinpoints the reason for the guilt--so the victim pays the murderer by giving a clear-cut, unassailable reason for a monstrous guilt that was before formless, and even more frightening, since it seemed to have no particular base, but an overwhelming vitality.

Now all of those issues, in one way or another appeared in your dream, where ...you became the victim. You then discovered that you were still 'alive'..."

© Laurel Butts

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: The Results of a Belief in Inferiority or Unworthiness

Blogger's Note: Sue Watkins was a member of the Seth Classes and close to Jane Roberts and Rob Butts. I changed the formatting slightly to match the blog's typical format.

Sue Watkins, Conversations with Seth, Volume I, p. 112


Sue: As the weeks passed and the belief assignments continued, it appeared that more of us were indeed starting to listen to what we were constantly telling ourselves. In fact, some of us started to construct a whole new vale of tears out of what we thought we were hearing. Diana, for example, read a belief essay filled with self-recrimination for what she saw as endless areas of "lousy beliefs." It seemed to her that all of her beliefs contradicted themselves! "I can't seem to get it together no matter what I do," she read. "I'm just doing a rotten job of projecting my beliefs, I guess. I've got a pretty inferior reality!"

To this, Seth responded with great good humor: For all of you, on your papers, or the papers in your head, write down what I hope will be your prime belief -- and it is hardly original, you have heard me say this often: I am a worthy, deserving person. I have a right to my life in this universe. I have a right to be because I AM!

Now, as you examine your own beliefs, any beliefs that contradict that one, scratch them out. If you do that, you will have no difficulties. And do not compare yourselves with the idea of perfection! You are perfect as you are. You are happening!

When you believe that you are unworthy, and when you interpret this particular belief, for example, to mean that you are fat, or that you are lonely, or that you are poor, you are following through with your beliefs perfectly! It is a beautiful example of your beliefs in action, in your terms!

If you believe that you are inferior, Diana, and you find before you the result of your belief, then you have done an excellent job of projecting the belief outward! Pat yourself on the back! But if you do not like the results, then change your beliefs. There is nothing wrong with you. You did a good job of projecting your beliefs.

There is nothing wrong with any of you, with your being, and with what you are. And do not ever let anyone tell you that there is! You are simply using your abilities and learning how to do it. And you continue to learn. But there is nothing wrong with the self that is learning, and that is what I want you to know.

There is nothing wrong with the selves that you are. Do not identify beliefs that you do not like with the self that you are. 


© Robert and Laurel Butts

Seth: The Man in the Mirror

Seth, Book 8 of The Early Sessions, Session 334

Seth: Now. If you paint a picture, its overall quality comes from the inner atmosphere of your being. In the same manner, you create your physical image and your world. If anything in that physical image or world needs changing, the change must first be made in the atmosphere of the inner self. For this projection of inner into outer is automatic. Understanding the processes involved is of great benefit. The physical self seems to react to physical stimuli.

Actually, of course, it is reacting to its own reality, projected outward. The objects in the physical universe are but symbols to express other realities existing within private realms. The inner will always be projected outward within your system.

If, for example, a letter comes to you bearing good news, and you react to the letter with high spirits, then you should understand that the high spirits existed first, and created the materialization of the letter within the physical systems, through the multilayered and complicated reactions that bind together the physical system. If an annoying letter arrives and you react to it negatively, the negative quality preceded the letter and caused it to materialize in your system.

Now you do not force someone to write such a letter, you see. You broadcast the negative feelings, which were then picked up by whomever was ready to receive them, for their own purposes. I cannot emphasize too strongly that this is automatic. I do not want to put it in such a way that it is oversimplified.

Neither do I want it to get too involved in too many complications. The intensity of the inner feeling is the dominating factor here. A sudden but intense feeling of hatred or resentment or fear may cause tragic physical circumstances, for example.

A sudden and intense exaltation, however, will have the same immediate and literally astounding but opposite physical effect. That is, pure joy, even of brief duration, can literally change the direction of a life. Between these extremes lie all the other colors and hues of inner feeling.

A variety of poor or negative feelings, however, of fairly low intensity, can add up to a general negative emotional climate, which projects itself outward into physical reality.

These negative feelings will be translated in physical terms. It does you little good to know that physical symptoms or inadequate physical surroundings are symbolic unless you realize that the inner situation can be changed.

Now it appears to you that a difference is worked when you exchange a poor physical symbol for a constructive one. The change of course comes before this in the inner self.

The physical being simply uses the physical system as a checking board. It must be realized that the physical conditions are not (underlined) permanent, but ever-changing.

To imagine otherwise is to become hypnotized by the physical symbols. Each day should be considered a new day. Ruburt should not think for example: "I have had these symptoms for such and such a time." This reinforces the idea of permanency.

The day should be considered as a psychic rebirth.

You may take a break…


© Rob and 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: Illness Is A Form Of Avoidance

Seth, The Early Sessions, Book 4, Session 159

A cure of any kind will never depend upon any given treatment. It will in all cases depend upon the belief on the part of the sufferer that he can be cured. It will depend upon his desire to be cured. It will depend upon the strength of the purpose than an illness serves. It will depend upon, in the last analysis, the individual's own ability to mobilize his energies, for only these will effect a cure.

An illness is a failure to solve a mental or psychological problem in the correct manner. The energy that would be used to solve the problem instead is spent maintaining the illness. It is therefore necessary that an attempt be made as soon as possible to solve the problem, which of course must first be discovered by the ego, which has avoided it.

© Laurel and Robert Butts

To Better See the Solution, Minimize the Problem

Seth: The Personal Sessions, Book 4, Session 08/14/78, pgs 332-334.

(Hat tip to Ric of Seth Practicing Idealists.)

Seth: Your whole civilization is immersed with the idea that the way to solve a problem --any problem, private or worldwide-- is to exaggerate it, see its worst projection; and this, then, is supposed to make you take proper action.

The approach unfortunately solves no problems, and only compounds them, whether the nation is trying to solve problems of energy, or social problems, or whether an individual is try to overcome a dilemma.

You are so immersed in that method of problem solving, however, that it comes back to haunt you. At least you can be aware of it and alert.

I will give you the answers to your questions, but they are not the way to solve your problem--and against all conventional knowledge, reviewing the mistakes of the past does not lead to wisdom.

When you become so worried, of course, you concentrate even further on the problem--how bad it is, and what will happen if it becomes worse in the future.

The problem is, therefore, compounded to whatever degree--and when I give you both such reasons, then sometimes you use them, the two of you, to ADD TO your private and joint self-disapproval.

(snip)

The belief is that if you frighten yourself badly enough through imagined projections and imagination, you will be frightened enough to change--but the nation or the individual following that method does not change for the better, but compounds the original condition, concentrates upon it until it looms larger than before.

Such methods cause panic, national or individual.

(snip)

To solve a problem you begin to minimize its characteristics, diminish its importance, rob it of your attention, refuse it your energy.

The method is the opposite, of course, of what you are taught.

That is why it seems to be so impractical. I have said this so many times--and I do realize it is difficult for you--but you cannot concentrate upon two things at once. So to the extent that you concentrate upon your pleasures, your accomplishments, and to the extent that you relate to the PSYCHIC AND BIOLOGICAL MOMENT, you are refreshing yourselves.

You are not projecting negatively, and you are allowing the problem to un-wrinkle, un-knot.

You are denying it the energy of your attention that keeps it going.

You do not spend time thinking that you have not used your abilities properly. You take it for granted that you ARE using them properly, and that allows them to fully develop.

© Laurel Butts

Seth: Leave them Alone!

Seth Class Session - 09/08/73

Class Member: How can you help a person who believes that you are making them miserable?

Seth: Leave them alone!

CM: Wait, let me finish, - and they believe that you are making them miserable. How can you help them change that belief, to see that they themselves are doing it without...how can you help someone to see that they create their own reality, or to accept that in this tenet?

Seth: First of all, if they believe that you're causing them misery, then you should leave them alone. It is the best help that you can give them at that time. It is false sympathy to do otherwise. You are not helping. The help now can come, but while that belief is held it cannot come from you.

CM: Even with my own thoughts, or whatever my beliefs are, without coming near this person, how can my attitude, my thoughts, or whatever I direct toward this person, help them change that belief?

Seth: Then, in your own mind, imagine them realizing that they form their own reality, and, in your mind, see this realization on their part, and, otherwise, do nothing. You cannot force a belief on another person. You cannot know, as Ruburt would call it, the inward order of their events. You should not try to force your ideas upon them, or your beliefs.

CM: Then you say, 'I'm not making you miserable, that way?'

Seth: Let them go their way, in their own way. You are your responsibility. Each person is his own responsibility. You are trying to prove a point. You want to help, but you are still trying to prove a point. You are settting up resistances and the more you insist that your way is right, the greater the barrier. Ideas are fluid, like water. Left alone, they will change. You set up a dam when you insist, "You must see it my way". Beliefs form reality.

CM: What if I have never said that? But it may be that I take that attitude, in a certain way, but I don't think that it is that vocal and outspoken, but i understand that I am not the cause of this person's misery, or wish or not wish to live.

Seth: Then let that be sufficient. The individual is using you also, and you are allowing it. As long as someone can point to you and say, "You are the cause of my misery", then they do not have to face themselves. And, as long as you play the game, you take part in it and you do not help. You do not have enough faith in the individual involved. They will find it their own way, in their own way, and joyfully take that for granted.

(c) Robert Butts via Ric on yahoo.

Seth: Love is Always a Protection

Seth, The Early Sessions, Book 4, Session 176

(Blogger's Background Note: Jane/Ruburt's mother was bedridden throughout most of her childhood and could be very emotionally abusive.)

Seth: He [Ruburt] would do his mother no harm, and for this reason she can do him no harm. The desire and the intent to do violence almost inevitably brings forth violence. We are involved here in somewhat of a basic problem, hardly Ruburt's alone, that will someday take up many sessions. For like does indeed attract like. If you hate, you will be hated. You will attract hate.

There are definite reasons for this. The reasons have been known and forgotten, but the very practical fact remains. If Ruburt would indeed do his mother harm if the opportunity presented itself, then he would indeed be in danger of harm...

...Ruburt's love for you, his ABILITY to love in general, is his protection. So he has nothing to fear. Love is ALWAYS a protection, in a quite literal manner; in a biological and electromagnetic and chemical and psychic manner.

(c) Robert Butts