Seth Classic: There Are No Accidents

Seth Class, June, 1973 excerpted from Conversations with Seth.

(Slightly modified to fit blog dialogue format.)

Seth: Any accident – and this applies to each of you - is no accident. Your good health or poor health is no accident. All of this has meaning to you.

If you cut your finger, it is no accident. If you stub your toe, it is no accident. If you come down with the flu, or with a virus, it is no accident. If you have a chronic physical difficulty, it is no accident. If you are creative, it is no accident. If you get good news, it is no accident. If lovely things happen to you, it is no accident.

You form your reality. And this applies all the way down the scale from your consciousness that you think of, to the tiniest molecule in Lauren's eye!

Bob (Class Member): I was thinking about my motorcycle accident. It was basically the same thing. It's true that I solved a lot of problems, but I can't help thinking that I could have solved the same problems without doing something so radical.

Seth: Perhaps now you will work out problems at conscious levels. It is only when you are not willing to face consciously your own beliefs, and face them through and make distinctions, that seemingly unconscious accidents occur: when all of a sudden you are not as quick as you should be; or, when all of a sudden, your reactions are not as good when a car comes that should not be there.

Each of you has your own way, and an event that seems horrendous from the outside-from the inside, from your private viewpoints, may be something else entirely.

[snip]

In nature, there are no accidents. If you accept the possibility of the slightest, smallest, most insignificant accidents, then indeed you open a Pandora's Box, for logically, there cannot be simply one small accident, but a universe in which accidents are not the exception but the rule. A universe in which, therefore, following logically, your consciousness is a combination of an accidental conglomeration of atoms and molecules without reason or cause that will vanish into nonexistence forever even as, indeed, they would have come from nonexistence.

Once you accept, you see, that idea, then if you follow your thought completely enough, you must accept the idea of a random accidental universe, in which you are at the mercy of any accident, in which mind or purpose have little meaning, in which you are at the mercy of all random happenings, in which 300,000 human beings can be swept off the face of the planet without reason, without cause, simply at the whim of an accidental happening.

And if that is the universe in which you believe that you live, then it is a dire and foreboding universe, indeed.

In that universe, the individual has little hope, for he will return to the nonexistence that his random physical creation came from. Following that line of thought, then, if you follow this through, a group of atoms and molecules were accidentally sparked into consciousness and song and then will return to the chaos from which they came; and the individual has no control over his destiny, for it can be swept aside at any point by random fate, over which he has no recourse.

All of this can be related to ordinary life. Whenever you think that you have a headache, simply because you have a headache; or you bump into a door simply because you bump into a door; or you have an accident simply because you happen to be in a particular place at a particular time; whenever you feel yourself powerless, then you think that accidents happen and that you have no control over them. The only answer is to realize that you form physical events, individually and en masse. And as I have said time and time again, you form the physical reality that you know.

Abe: So You Messed Up Big Time. So what?

Abraham - San Francisco, CA, 3/16/02

Abraham: We are wanting to help you find a way of accepting once and for all the perfection of who you are, and we want so much for you to find this place where you really are so sure of who you are that anyone else’s opinion of who you are does not matter at all.

In other words, we want you to be able to... mess something up altogether or blow an exam or crash your car or do any other number of things [to which] much of the world would say, “Well, that was certainly an inappropriate thing for you to do,” and we want you to be able to stand proudly and say, “Hey, I did that and it doesn’t have any relationship to who I am.” 

In other words, “Who I am is Source energy physically embodied. Who I am is pure positive energy out here on the leading edge.... Who I am is an eternal seeker of alignment with who I am, but I’m not going to let any outside standards or judgments confuse me about who I am,” and we feel that’s what is at the basis of all of this for you. When you let somebody in really close where they might really know [you], then you start worrying about what they really think, and we want all of you to reach the place where it just doesn’t matter to you so much what anybody else thinks -- it only matters to you how you feel. And when you reach that place then you attract those people that agree with that.

Does that make some sense to you?

We do not believe that anyone could sit in a room like this... and hear someone like Abraham, who knows the perfection of who you are, telling you how good you are, how wonderful you are, how really right you are, how really expansive and ever-changing you are, and we don’t think that any of you could get it even close to the way we know it and mean it. What we hope to do is to incite within you a desire to train yourself into that dominant thought. We want you to train yourself into self-appreciation. And you just do it one little thought at a time.

Want to talk some more?

Guest: No—that’s perfect.

Abe: One little thought at a time. We want your mistakes—whatever they may be—to strike you as humorous. [When it comes to] your opinion of yourself, no matter what, we want you to look for redeeming features. We no longer want the insecure masses who have surrounded you, who have used your errors as their justification for feeling better, who have convinced you that you are unworthy and inappropriate and flawed in this way and this way and this way as you don’t measure up to who knows what standards—we want you to just stand and sort of shake yourself off and begin saying, “I really don’t give a rip what any of you are thinking because none of you have concentrated upon me fairly. None of you have really known—none of you know who I am, none of you know how I am from Source, none of you have walked in my shoes. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. I have accepted this feeling of unappreciation unfairly and I’ve practiced it, and I’m no longer gonna do it.”

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