Mike's commentary · Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment, Session 931

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" of this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during his lectures. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).

Introduction

This chapter records the eight-month interruption and resumption between Session 928 and Session 931. Even as her physical condition continued to deteriorate, Jane persisted in writing, proofreading, and publishing The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events and a poetry collection, with her symptoms worsening as the publication progressed. During this period, Seth concentrated on delivering material about the "sinful self," analyzing its formation, beliefs, and influence on bodily symptoms, and through Jane's reincarnational dreams introduced the concept of time overlays, discussing the relationship among reincarnation, value fulfillment, and creativity.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The "guilty self" was formed during Jane's early Catholic upbringing and her mother's psychological abuse, believing that suffering is good for the soul and that creativity and spontaneity are sinful.
• The symptoms of Jane's body were regarded by the "guilty self" as necessary and beneficial, so without changing that belief, it was difficult for the body to improve.
• Jane's fear of misleading others and her excessive sense of responsibility caused her to repeatedly interrupt her work for long periods whenever she touched on material that conflicted with traditional views.
• Time overlays mean that different versions of a major event can be brought into the present through association, with past, present, and future influencing one another.
• To change a core belief, one must replace the old belief with a completely opposite belief, and understand the "guilty self" rather than condemn it.

Main Text

Hello everyone, I am Mike. Today I will continue sharing with you Session 931 of Volume 2 of the Seth book Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment.

This session began at 8:37 p.m. on Wednesday, July 15, 1981. This session is rather long, so I suggest you listen to it in several parts. This part is very important, and it also has a certain degree of difficulty, but most importantly, it is a very crucial session that sorts out very thoroughly the entire Seth material, as well as Jane's own health problems, her inner entanglements, and the relationships among the body, ideas, and thought.

Opening Remarks: An Eight-Month Gap

Right at the start, Rob said that even as he was writing the material preceding this session, he found it hard to believe that eight months had passed since Jane gave the last session for this book on November 12, 1980 -- Session 928. From that last session to this one was a full eight months -- this is July 15, and the previous session was November 12, of the year before. Time passed so quickly, and was so filled with all sorts of work-related and worldly matters, that its movement was almost imperceptible.

During this period, Jane gave him two regular non-book sessions -- sessions not for the book, two regular sessions, namely Sessions 929 and 930 -- plus 48 private sessions, for a total of 50 sessions. So he was very busy. That is to say, although there were no sessions related to the book, they had been holding sessions all along, 50 sessions in all. And within the content of those private sessions, Seth gave 25 sessions, in whole or in part, to Jane's "sinful self." This is a very interesting stretch: a full 50 sessions, of which 48 were private sessions, and among those, a full 25 sessions were given entirely to Jane's "sinful self."

The so-called "sinful self" refers to a part of Jane's personality -- there is a portion of the personality that is the "sinful self." Seth was mainly speaking with that "sinful self" personality. In the session of March 11 this year, Jane relayed the preface to that subject -- in March, this is July, on March 11, she also wrote a preface for this "sinful self." Then Rob said, I will quote this preface in the notes.

The following are the 24 sessions on the "sinful self," one of which is the preface, and the remaining 24 are devoted specifically to the "sinful self." From April 14 to July 13 -- this session is July 15 -- that is, for a full three months, they were all discussing Jane's "sinful self," and then a large concentrated body of material came through. Rob also planned to excerpt several sessions for the notes, and to excerpt several entries from Jane's personal journals of 1980 and 1981, all to be placed in the notes at the end of this session. In other words, the opening remarks for this session, Session 931, will be quite long. He has already told you that the opening remarks for this session will be very long.

Now it begins. Since there is nothing difficult here, I will go through it quickly; where there is difficulty, I will stop.

Jane's Body and Creative Work

Since Session 928, even though Seth clearly intended to help, and even though Jane also wanted and accepted that help with obvious willingness, Jane still remained confined to the house. Seth wanted to help, and Jane was willing to accept the help -- previously he had been unwilling to accept it, but now he was willing to accept help -- yet his body still did not improve, and he remained confined at home. The reason for this will be explained later.

Even though Jane could not walk, he continued to move from his work chair to the living room couch, where he now held most of his sessions. When December arrived, because he had difficulty moving around in the bathroom, he could no longer bathe himself in the bathroom, and he no longer walked into the shower stall either -- he could not even walk in anymore -- so Rob began to help him with sponge baths. His physical condition was clearly closely connected to his creative condition, and even the simple act of writing was becoming increasingly difficult for him.

On December 4, Rob mailed the revised manuscript of Jane's God back to the publisher. Later that month, Jane for the first time allowed Rob to push his chair out in front of guests. Late December was generally the holiday season, around Christmas time, and he had visitors -- a group of friends who came on Friday nights, much like the free and lively gatherings they used to have every weekend back when they lived in the city, in that apartment.

All of their friends had known about Jane's physical condition for quite some time. But Jane, with his innocence and determination, as well as his mystical view of worldly reality -- note 2 will tell you why he held such a mystical view -- most of the time refused to put himself, as he put it, on display. He was unwilling to appear before the world, and he did not even want to see his friends. It had also been a long time since he had seen his friends. Why? Because he felt that Jane should offer himself and others -- offer others something better. Even though he had already provided all those highly creative works for himself and others over the past 17 years, Jane still wanted to show others the best side of himself.

When Jane was unable to leave the house by himself, let alone go out to buy Christmas gifts, he asked a good friend of his to buy the Christmas gift he wanted to give Rob. However, my wife wrapped the gift herself, and she warned me to stay away from the studio until she had finished wrapping it. Then Rob said, I looked away, and put my own gift in the closet and hid it there, keeping it hidden until Christmas Eve.

Then in late December, the final page proofs of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events arrived. This book had been a particularly difficult one for Jane to produce. While he was holding sessions for that book, he often experienced many long delays. Why was it difficult? It was difficult for Jane because the book dealt with many social phenomena and many very core issues, and the interpretation of these social issues was completely different from what we ordinarily believe -- it was contrary to and in conflict with the mainstream understanding of our society. For example, the idea discussed in it that impulses are angels -- this viewpoint conflicts with all mainstream viewpoints.

While proofreading, Jane opened up new insights into himself and the reflection of his work. As he proofread The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, he gained new understanding. He summarized those conflicts in the notes he wrote on their 26th wedding anniversary -- he wrote down all the entanglements, contradictions, and conflicts he experienced in the process of delivering this book in note 3. Rob saw the same kind of delays occur when he was holding sessions for this book, and for him, that meant the same psychic and psychological forces were still at work. So Jane was always delaying.

During the period when they very quietly celebrated the year-end holidays, they completed the proofreading of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. And in early January, Rob mailed the book back to the publisher. When the final proofs of God arrived in mid-January, Jane felt much better, and his body was somewhat better than before at this point.

The Drama of National Consciousness

On January 20, our new president took the oath of office. American presidents are sworn in every four years on January 20, and at the same time, the 52 American hostages were released after 444 days in captivity — on the very day the new president was inaugurated, the hostages in Iran were set free, which may also have been arranged by both sides as a gesture of goodwill toward the United States.

During this period, they were proofreading that book, because The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events mentioned the Iran incident. At that time, the Iran hostage crisis had just occurred, and the content, along with Seth's views on the matter at the time, had been written into that book. And when he was proofreading the final draft of the book, it happened to coincide with the release of the hostages, and it also happened to coincide with the swearing-in of the new American president.

In many ways, they discovered the workings of their nation's consciousness — he felt the workings of their nation as a collective consciousness — because he happened to be proofreading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, so his feeling was especially pronounced. It was both creative and deeply frustrating. As an American born and raised in the United States, he felt that America's national will was both creative and often deeply frustrating. The two were tangled together: it displayed a vibrant, creative side, yet also had many social problems and social contradictions that seemed impossible to resolve.

He said he found the simple oath-taking of the president and vice president deeply moving. He was moved beyond words. Why? Because 52 American hostages — not just one or two, but diplomatic personnel who had been detained — after 444 days, about a year and a half, had been released. By all rights, on the day of the presidential inauguration, this should have been an occasion to make a grand proclamation, to speak at length about what the nation had achieved and what efforts had been made to bring these 52 Americans home. But no. That was what moved him: the entire swearing-in ceremony was extremely brief, extremely simple, even though such a momentous event had taken place.

Sitting beside Jane, watching the ceremony on television — the American presidential inauguration — while eating lunch, at the same time the hostages in Iran were nearly free, their plane was taxiing onto the runway at Tehran's airport, preparing for takeoff. When the national anthem played, his eyes grew moist, and he sat as if hypnotized, motionless, praying for our country, for our defeated president — the president who had lost the election to Reagan — for his successor, and for the hostages.

The hostages' plane rose into the sky. Because this event had such a strong impact on Rob, he wrote this scene into the preface of Session 931 of this book. Through his description of the scene, you can imagine it: Rob, with tears in his eyes, his eyes moist, watching the American presidential inauguration ceremony, while on the live television broadcast, the American hostages boarded a plane and took off from Tehran's airport at the same time. This kind of television dramatization, combined with the mood and atmosphere of the moment, made Rob deeply emotional.

Jane said: My God, I hope everything goes smoothly. Then Rob said, I am searching for the right words — I do not know how to describe it. What I saw was the best this country could offer in the present moment. It is always like this, you know, the collective expression of our national consciousness, cooperating in whatever manner with Iran and with every other country on earth.

This was Rob's feeling. In the end, he summed it up in two points. First, he said that America's national will is a collective will, a collective belief, and this country always offers the best it can offer. His attitude was also very good: although he had his dissatisfactions with the country, although he had many, many dissatisfactions with the current state of the nation, he recognized that, so far, in terms of the present social phenomena or political situation, this was the best the country could offer. Of course he wanted it to be better, but he could not do whatever he pleased, nor could he accomplish everything.

The second insight was that America, as a national will, in whatever manner — whether through sanctions, punishment, war, cooperation, alliances, and so on — he said in whatever manner, was cooperating with Iran and with every other country in the world. He even called these hostile methods cooperation. This was his insight into America's collective will.

Although more than 40 years have passed — from 1981 to now, a full 41 years — this insight and experience, Rob's realization during the proofreading of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which happened to coincide with the American presidential transition and the release of the Iranian hostages, was a heartfelt sentiment from deep within him.

It was as if, for these great events, tiny and extreme personal counterparts were being created. He said these were all great events, but there were also individuals living within this environment, just like Jane and Rob. He said Jane and he had finished proofreading The Nature of the Psyche — which was an extremely tiny matter for the nation — and he continued working, writing essays for If We Live Again, writing some new poems, painting, replying to many letters, and helping Jane continue their private sessions. And he felt that their actions, compared with the ongoing national drama — this celebration of the hostages' return and the presidential inauguration — although so small, were in fact their contribution to those great dramas. They were also part of American society as a whole, part of the entire drama, albeit an insignificant part.

Here he again drew on many of the ideas from The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Even the fact that by January 26, his wife had gone ten weeks without using her typing table to move about — that is, the matter of pushing the typing table as she walked, she had not moved for ten weeks — even that played a role. Rob said, I can feel the connection, but I cannot express it well. Rob could feel that Jane, as such an insignificant little person in the nation, still proofreading his poems and writing his articles, recording their trivial lives, writing poems and painting — he said even her inability to walk — her inability to walk — these small things were all a very insignificant role within the nation's great historical events. There was a connection between them, but he said, I know it, yet I cannot put it into words.

Jane's Dream and the Guilty Self

On that same day, January 26, they mailed the final proof of God back to the publisher, all corrections completed. Then he said, Jane again often dreamed of walking, running, dancing, and normal activities. Jane often had such dreams. Rob said that, for him, those dreams were simply an encouraging message from Jane's own psyche, and also from another version of himself -- discussed in Note 2, in another reality, in that probable space-time, and in some other realities, where he truly possessed all his physical abilities, with no problems in his body, able to sing, dance, and run. In this reality, his body felt very uncomfortable most of the time.

In early February, Jane wrote a short essay about Seth, treating Seth as a primary event; see Note 4. That article was inspired by material from one of his old notebooks. Jane expanded on it, striving to weave the events of our lives into the consciousness of our nation. Rob told Jane that if Seth truly was a primary event, then the value implied by his creative works was extraordinary, and what he could offer was indeed valuable, and could be of important help to people.

The so-called "primary event" means the thing behind an event that occurs in another space-time -- that is the primary event. Jane's transmission of the Seth material for writing is a concrete event in our world, and behind this concrete event there is a primary event. Then Jane realized that Seth might be that primary event. Rob then said to Jane, although the books you have written are not a concrete description of the entire primary event, and may only be one part of that primary event in the three-dimensional world, he said that the value contained within your concrete works, including the values they imply, is of important help to people.

Then in his notes of February 21, Jane wrote that he planned to soon begin typing the final proof of his poetry collection. The poems themselves did not need final revision, only the essays did. Then, amid his continual questioning of who Seth is or what Seth is -- even if he is a primary event -- and amid his concern about the fear of leading others astray, Jane added in his notes four days later:

The worst interpretation of Seth I can imagine is that he is a part of myself that I could not otherwise express.

That is a psychological explanation. Since his material is so brilliant, how could there be any harm in it? Is it because I would be pretending that I am better than I am trying to be, better than others, better than everyone, or causing others to believe in life after death, because the material is so convincing?

This passage was written by Jane herself. Let us briefly discuss it and try to understand Jane's state of mind at that time. This was a persistent inner conflict of his: he constantly worried that the Seth material he transmitted would mislead everyone, would lead everyone astray -- this was his greatest worry. Because he was not certain whether the Seth material was truly beneficial to human development, or whether it would lead everyone down a wrong path. Although in his heart he knew the Seth material was good and helpful to the development of humanity as a whole, he always had this kind of worry.

He said the worst case would be that there is no such person as Seth at all, and that this material is only a part of my own personality that must be expressed in this way -- a possibility that could not be expressed normally through other means. If we put it in psychological terms, it would mean I have a split personality, I have developed schizophrenia, and another part of my personality has appeared in the form of Seth. Like the superman in Augustine, and like the schizophrenic patient he discussed a few sessions earlier in Session 920, who believed he was Jesus, Jesus living in the world. He said, am I not also like this? This was an uncertainty directed at himself, and he always had this kind of anxiety.

Then Rob asked Jane whether he would consider temporarily giving up the sessions and taking a rest. He said, since you are so anxious, you might as well stop having sessions, and let us take a break. At this point you have even begun to doubt, doubting whether this thing is even real, or whether it is a phantom personality of your own that has emerged. He said, then do not have sessions anymore. Let his creative self give him the answer to this kind of question, let him arrive at a definite answer on his own; otherwise, in this state, the sessions will not be effective either.

Jane said no, truly stubborn. Although he had this kind of anxiety, he insisted on continuing the sessions. Why did he not stop? See Note 5. Because he had already begun a series of private sessions and did not want to stop.

Seth Reveals the Truth

Two days later, on February 27, Seth said some things that revealed the inner workings. Seth said:

Generally speaking, Ruburt enjoys our sessions and regards them with a natural enthusiasm.

It is crucial to remember this sentence. Why does Ruburt want to have these sessions? Why, under these circumstances, when his body can barely move, and he carries enormous self-doubt, and he withstands social pressure -- you must not forget that the social pressure is also enormous. You can imagine this overall social pressure: you are a channeler, someone who is pretending to communicate with spirits, someone who may be mentally unhealthy, someone who has a mental illness, and you publish book after book. How do we know whether these books are just your own nonsense, or whether there really is such a high spirit named Seth speaking through you? Even in such an open cultural context, he was still under this kind of pressure.

So Seth revealed the truth in one sentence: Ruburt likes having these sessions, always wants to have them, and does not stop, because he likes them. And it is a natural enthusiasm, spontaneous, something he liked from the start, an instinctive liking.

Then Seth continued:

Once again, generally speaking, this applies whether or not book dictation is involved. Whether we are dealing with books or private sessions, Jane enjoys having sessions. However, in book dictation, when he becomes too rigorous and worries about the responsibility of helping to solve the problems of the world, about his or my abilities in that regard, and when he considers the various protests that any given subject might arouse in any given group of people, then trouble arises. So if the scope of the discussion becomes too sensitive, we let the dictation pause for a while. Sometimes I will first embed that particular material into your private sessions, so that he can become more accustomed to it. See Note 16.

This passage is very important. It explains Seth, explains Jane, and why, during the sessions, she would suddenly stop for eight months, stop for nine months, sometimes even stop for a year. Of course he had all kinds of reasons -- he was giving private sessions, talking about this or that -- but it was very abnormal. Because when the sessions are going well, one after another, such long interruptions can really make it difficult for the content to connect. Although Seth is very capable and usually not affected by this, able to pick the sessions back up, when you pause for such a long time, it becomes very hard to pick them back up. There are many reasons why it is hard to pick them back up, not only because of Seth, but also because of Jane.

What is the guiding reason here? It is right here. He said that when it came to private sessions, these were all fine -- solving the problems of the two of them, or solving the problems of some of their relatives, friends, or readers -- that was all fine. But once they started formal book sessions -- for example, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, or this book, Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment -- because what he was discussing were core knowledge and ideas, and these things directly conflict with the society we live in. Once it reached that point, Jane felt pressure. She felt that these books should be able to help many people in this society, in this world. When she wanted to help people, when she felt that these books could help others, the pressure came. She was thinking: Can I help others? Can these books solve these problems?

In Note 6 there is also a discussion of this. What was his conclusion? His conclusion was that the Seth material is not meant to help specific individuals, not meant for you to solve life's problems. He said that if you place the Seth material in the category of solving life's problems, then you are greatly underestimating the Seth material.

He gave a vivid example: if Seth is a main event, then it is like the Mona Lisa as an artistic creation. Behind it there is a greater artistic achievement, and it is only in our three-dimensional world that the Mona Lisa manifests as the existence of a work of art. So speaking in terms of our three-dimensional world, the Mona Lisa, as a world-class work of art, has a far-reaching influence that far exceeds solving some person's depression, solving some person's marriage problems, or solving some person's family financial difficulties.

She said that the Mona Lisa, as a work of art, is not about solving these problems. But the Mona Lisa, as a work of art -- her smile, her value within the realm of art -- cannot be measured by what specific problems she has solved. If you insist on putting the Mona Lisa together with solving specific problems -- for example, how many patients she has cured, how many families she has set back on the right track -- she said that if you want to discuss the value of the Mona Lisa in this way, then you are demeaning the value of the Mona Lisa. Because they are simply not the same kind of thing: one is something concrete, practical, and functional that solves problems, and the other is a work of art.

And here, he treats the Seth material as the latter kind of thing. He said that the Seth material is helpful to the whole of human society and the whole world; it is not aimed at solving the problems of specific people or a few specific people. But this does not mean that it cannot solve these problems. He said it can solve them, but this is not its focus, nor is it where it concentrates its attention.

So when it comes to this issue, you can understand why the Seth material, in many cases, avoids getting itself entangled in specific matters. Yet some disseminators or practitioners of the Seth material insist on treating the Seth material as a method for solving specific problems. We are not saying that this approach is wrong, or that this kind of thing should not be done; we are only saying that this is merely the most superficial layer of application of the Seth material, its shallowest function. If you cling only to this point, then you are greatly demeaning the value of the Seth material to human society.

This is like those things in Buddhism. For example, the Diamond Sutra¹ -- would you say it solves specific problems? Does it solve Zhang San's problems or Li Si's problems? It does not. Would you say that after reading the Diamond Sutra¹, I can solve my emotional problems, my financial problems, my problems of outlook on life? No. But would you say that it does not solve problems either? Not that either. Many people read these things and suddenly become enlightened; many people are influenced by just one sentence. For example, Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, just because of this one sentence, "Let the mind arise without dwelling anywhere," when he was still a teenager, upon hearing this one sentence, he set out on the path of studying Buddhism and became a great master². Would you say that for his life, and for the people after him, including the later six branches of Zen and so on, there was no influence? There was influence, influencing millions upon millions of people.

How many people today delight in telling Zen stories? How many people, just because they read a book of Zen stories when they were young, or one of Cai Zhizhong's comics³ containing stories about Zen masters such as Dazhu and Baizhang⁴, have been influenced for the rest of their lives? But would you say that specifically, the Buddha, or the Diamond Sutra¹, or Huineng the Sixth Patriarch, solved certain people's problems? Did they intend to solve certain people's problems? There is a dialectical relationship here.

So Seth pointed out why Jane had so many long pauses, why Jane had this kind of inner conflict. And it was only when she wrote Note 6 that Jane finally thought this matter through. Before Note 6, Jane had not thought it through, and it had always been a source of distress for her. On the one hand, she wanted the Seth material to help specific people; on the other hand, she worried that the Seth material would conflict too greatly with everyone's ideas and would not be accepted by others; and on yet another hand, she doubted whether these ideas, which differ so greatly from, and even completely oppose, mainstream social concepts, could help others, or whether they might lead others into an even worse situation, not making things better but making them worse. This was her worry. But later, when she wrote Note 6, as I just said, after her views shifted, after she thought through the idea that the Mona Lisa cannot solve specific problems, yet somehow seems to solve all problems, she understood, and she was no longer so conflicted.

Jane's Paintings

So for Jane, painting was truly pure pleasure. It was not that he never failed -- he certainly failed at painting sometimes -- but since they met in 1954, his work had improved tremendously. They fell in love and married in '54, on December 26th or December 27th. After they married, Rob kept teaching Jane how to paint. Rob himself was a painter, and Jane was willing to learn, and she made tremendous progress in ways Rob had never anticipated.

Rob said, indeed, I now think my wife, in her way, is a better painter than I am -- Rob said of himself -- in my own way. This does not mean he in any way belittled his own abilities. Jane was relatively free; she painted with color, acrylic panels, and watercolors. Rob at this point held Jane in very high regard: Jane paints in her own way, far better than I paint in my own way. He said, I am not saying my own painting is bad; I am only saying, by comparison, Jane is freer. She is not like me, painting oils only with oil paints, watercolors only with watercolors. When Jane paints, she uses everything, even throwing acrylic panels into the mix. What ordinary painter would use acrylic panels to make a painting? Not her -- whatever came to mind, she used it. She was extremely free.

When she painted, she realized that in other ways she had gained a release from the concerns of time and from responsibility. She no longer had to worry about time -- time was something she always wanted for creating -- do I need to have time? Right? I should write more of the Seth material, right? Transmit more, teach more sessions. Responsibility was the responsibility just mentioned -- she felt the Seth material ought to be able to solve social problems, world problems. And that joy indeed reinforced the quality of life Seth had always emphasized, which is value fulfillment. This kind of joyful release. Her paintings were her unhindered creativity, translating the Seth material into color rather than words. He said these paintings were also a kind of creativity that occurred while transmitting the Seth material -- not in words, but expressing the Seth material through painting.

Because of her visual problems -- Jane had poor eyesight, severe myopia -- Jane's perspective differed from Rob's and was rather abnormal. Yet through her instinctive design and color choices, she achieved her own kind of depth. Who says a painter needs good eyesight? Jane's eyesight was very poor; she could not even render perspective correctly, yet she expressed her own kind of depth in her own way -- not the depth of ordinary space, but the depth of her consciousness. Her paintings contained a charming innocence and mysterious freedom that made Rob envious. Rob said, I think that to evaluate her writing and psychic abilities, one must make a deep study of her paintings. To study Jane's psychology and writing ability, you have to study her paintings; the paintings, in fact, can reveal certain things about her psyche from a deeper angle.

For her, Jane's physical mobility was gradually decreasing, which produced a strongly compensatory growth in her painting mobility. Rob said, Jane's physical movement was restricted, and this led her to make a strong compensation in painting -- in her paintings she expressed her inner longing for movement. She could no longer move well, but in painting she made tremendous progress. Rob also believed that her paintings reflected the free movement of her body in dreams. None of this was accidental. He had seen Jane turn almost automatically to the solace that only painting could give her -- when Jane's body was very uncomfortable, when even typing was difficult, she still kept painting. So these painting works were a very good comfort to Jane; she could escape the things that concerned her, even escape the points of her anxiety.

Reincarnational Dreams

This is him describing what happened last December, January, and February. Now the time has come to those days in early March, and for Jane, it was a time of busy thoughts. In the early morning of March 6, he had a reincarnational dream involving himself that was very vivid and happy, and he also had a dream of returning to the past of this life, that is, a dream of the early part of this lifetime. He wrote the next day that he very rarely had reincarnational dreams, but he woke up at two o'clock, remembering this one and another dream.

The first dream gave him some material about a life he lived in the 16th century as a nun, in the place in France now called Normandy. In that life, Jane founded a small convent. Then he also fell in love with a priest at the time. Although they had no substantial physical contact, they were in love the whole time, through letters, through meetings, and that love was very intense. Jane could remember that relationship even into this life.

But at that time in the 16th century, many of the Church's ideas were actually superficially in line with the Church's requirements, but in reality, many things in his small convent implicitly contained rebellion against the Church. So gradually people found out, and in the end the whole convent returned to orthodoxy, and then he was exiled, expelled from the entire social circle — what we now call social death. For him at the time, it was social death, meaning he was excluded from mainstream society and banished. And later he took with him a few nuns who steadfastly followed him, and in the end they starved to death. Because in that era, being excommunicated by the Church would bring danger to one's life; one could not survive in society. Unlike now, whether you believe in religion or not doesn't matter much; believing might even get you some help or benefits from the Church, but not believing doesn't matter either. In the 16th century, that was not possible. He will talk later about the process at that time.

The second dream was about his intense reaction to the death of his maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo. In this lifetime, in this life, his grandfather died when he was 19 years old. Seth talked about Jane's grandfather in many sessions. Jane's grandfather was also a very spiritual person, but he did not believe in this society, did not believe in this era, and he did not believe in all adults; he felt they had all lost their spirituality. But he was very touched by children instead; he knew that children were very spiritual. So when Jane was very young, his maternal grandfather was very fond of him — the grandfather did not like his mother, but liked him, because he was a child. And his relationship with his grandfather was also very good, but in the year he turned 19, his grandfather passed away.

Jane's many years of association with religion and his challenges to it were very evident in his dream as a nun, in the period of dream construction two nights later in a nightmare experience, and in the subject matter of the private session on March 11. Then in that session, Seth used his nightmare as a basis to discuss his life as a nun, mentioned his grandfather, and began the material on the "sinful self" that Rob mentioned in his notes at the beginning of Session 931. Through one of Jane's nightmares, through his experience of the past reincarnation as a nun, Seth then unfolded this material on Jane's "sinful self."

This began to unfold in March. The material on the "sinful self" opened up a very important development in Jane's and Rob's own search for understanding of his symptoms, and Rob summarized the inner progress in Note 8. Before long, Rob realized that he could use the notes to write out part of several other sessions dealing with the "sinful self." The "sinful self" was too long — a full 25 sessions, with one session as a preface — and could not be included in this book. So, in order to let us understand something about Jane's "sinful self," he excerpted a portion of it.

Columbia and Inner Exploration

On April 12, the space shuttle Columbia was launched into orbit around the Earth⁵ -- this was April 12, 1981, and it was the United States' first space shuttle. In that era, in 1981, what was a space shuttle? It was something that could be launched into outer space like a rocket, carry out its space mission, and then fly back like an airplane and be reused. This was later retired. I remember that in its last mission some years ago -- roughly a dozen or so years ago -- the space shuttle stopped carrying out missions, and after that the United States also did not build another space shuttle to carry out related missions.

The space shuttle was more like a vehicle -- it could carry people into space and shuttle back and forth. It was not like the earlier spacecraft: going up, it was a rocket; coming back down, what landed was a reentry capsule, a very small reentry capsule. But this was different: when it went out it was also an airplane, and when it came back it was still an airplane -- only when it went out it had a very large launch rocket underneath it to launch it. So the space shuttle was a vehicle that traveled back and forth between heaven and earth.

Then at this point he brought this up, using the space shuttle as a hint. He said:

I think Jane used the only vehicle she possessed -- her own mind -- to explore inner space.

She did not explore outer space; Jane used her mind to explore her inner space, complementing that obvious exploration of outer space.

During this period, they often reread Seth's material on the "guilty self." Because this material ran from April 14 all the way to July 12, and this session was July 15, Session 931, so in the three months that had just passed they had been discussing this "guilty self" continuously, for 24 sessions. So they had been reading this material all along, and it moved them deeply.

Also interesting -- put simply, Seth pulled out Jane's "guilty self" personality and made it concrete. This thing had previously been hidden deep in Jane's personality or deep in her psyche. You see, back when we were writing The Nature of Personal Reality, Seth had mentioned that we need to dig out and change those underlying things in our personal beliefs. But you see, even now -- so long after The Nature of Personal Reality -- by the time this book was being written, in 1981, because Jane died in 1984, three years before her death, Seth, in order to treat Jane, in order to help Jane, at this point had no choice but to use such concrete, forceful means -- the tangle, the conflict, the dilemma in Jane's personality, that self-unforgiveness, that self-guilt -- the belief that there was a "guilty self" -- he forcefully pulled it out and held it up before Rob and Jane, so that the two of them could see with their own eyes how Jane's inner self regarded herself.

So what happened as a result? On April 14, the day Columbia landed⁶ -- Columbia's first flight lasted only two days; it was successful on the 12th and came back on the 14th -- Seth began another long series of sessions, specifically about Jane's own guilty self and the general characteristics of this "guilty self." The next evening, Jane let Seth deliver some extremely important material; see Note 9. When Seth was delivering that material about the "guilty self," several of his points went deep into Jane's "guilty self," pulled it out, and then deeply dissected this part of Jane's "guilty self."

The Anatomy of the Guilty Self

Below is a simple summary.

In her early years of close involvement with the Catholic Church, that "guilty self" was born and grew. How did the "guilty self" come about? Because Jane attended Catholic school in her early years. Think about it: Catholic Church schools believe that people are born sinful, so that "guilty self" personality was already nourished, born, and grew during that time.

The development of her very stubborn core beliefs. She had a very real, very obstinate, conflicted state of mind after she left the church in her early teens. Although she was very rebellious, by the time she was around fifth or sixth grade, she had already left the church. She left the church in her teens, and no matter what, she refused to go, absolutely refused to attend school anymore, and insisted on transferring, transferring to a non-church school. But even so, even though she did transfer, as a child who had attended church school from a young age, she still had conflicts. That is, the church's influence on her was still very great — they scared her, saying you cannot go to heaven, after death you will go to hell, and so on and so forth. Do you think that for a child in her early teens, that still had a great deterrent effect? Although on the surface she rebelled against the church and left the church school, her inner conflicted psychology still existed.

After she got married, she began to experience conflict. On the one hand, she had the "guilty self," and the religion she believed she had renounced; on the other hand, in painting, science, writing, and the nontraditional direction she discovered through her natural mystical abilities and through the Seth material — these were all places where she was torn. On the one hand, she was very traditional and had given up religion; on the other hand, she felt that whether it was transmitting the Seth material or her usual writing and painting, she could fully release that inner self of hers. These two were again in conflict.

Her fear of leading people astray — this was all her experience of the guilty self. And every individual's very real need to achieve value fulfillment — this was another conflict. On the one hand, she wanted to fulfill her value fulfillment by transmitting the Seth material, yet she worried that the more books she published, the more she would mislead people. Seth also discussed how, over the years, Jane had been subjected to constant psychological abuse from her mother Marie, and that young girl's deep fear of being abandoned. Jane had never gotten rid of that fear — the fear of being abandoned — and often needed constant reassurance that she was a worthwhile person.

Because from her childhood, from a very young age, her mother had subjected her to this kind of psychological abuse. This kind of sustained, years-long psychological abuse of a minor will produce serious consequences. For Jane, the consequence was that she always had a sense of worthlessness, and she always needed others to emphasize that she was worthwhile; otherwise, when she felt she was worthless, she might be abandoned by others. This was what Jane feared most, because from childhood her mother had always wanted to abandon her.

From the age of three, when she lived with a divorced, bedridden mother, she rarely received that kind of reassurance. In Jane's early years, she naturally loved her mother deeply and tried in every way a child could to please her. Some people develop a people-pleasing personality, but in her early years, Jane would certainly have done this — when a child is very young, she will certainly try to please her parents. Yet she felt ashamed because of the way Marie treated her. The way her own mother treated her made her feel ashamed, subjecting her to every possible insult and abuse. And throughout her growing-up period, she always kept this matter a secret — Jane felt this matter was too shameful, so her relationship with her mother was always kept a secret, and she did not want anyone to know.

A few years after they were married — you see, it was only a few years after she married Rob that Rob began to understand the depth of the feelings she had in that regard — the depth of the hurt and the insecurity, the fear of abandonment, the need for others to constantly affirm that she was a worthwhile person — only then did Rob learn what Jane's early life had been like.

Seth tells us that Jane's "guilty self" even felt guilty because of Marie's abuse of her. This "guilty self," because of her mother's abuse of her, felt that she was guilty. Add to that the influence of the church on her in her early years, and she would think: if even my mother abused me like this, then I must be guilty. If I were not guilty, why would my own mother abuse me like this? That "guilty self" assumed that she must be very bad, otherwise her own mother would not have treated her this way, and that she deserved those many years of psychological attack. This is all a summary and summation of the "guilty self."

Seth pointed this out to her directly, in all its rawness.

Beliefs Behind the Bodily Symptoms

The very next night, that is, on the second day, April 23, Seth told them that Jane's "guilty self" believed his bodily symptoms were for this person's own good. Seth told them that Jane's "guilty self" believed that this symptom of his body, its being unable to move, was for this person's own good, was necessary, was a must. Therefore, as long as this "guilty self" within Jane remained for even one day, her illness could not possibly get better. Why? Because her "guilty self" believed this was necessary, this was essential, and this was for her own good.

You see how terrifying this is. A single belief like this can cause such a great change in a person's body.

That "guilty self" had no concept that its policies had become self-destructive. He had made his body into this state, and might eventually get himself killed, which would also be destruction to himself. But he said he had no concept of this. The "guilty self" had made his own body into this state, and then might ultimately destroy himself, and he did not care, and he had no concept of it.

Following Catholic doctrine, that "guilty self" believed that suffering was good for the soul. In Christianity this has always been the belief, which is why there is the crucifixion of Jesus. He believed that suffering could purify the soul, that it was good for the soul. And the concept of the physical self receiving grace was, to that "guilty self," a blasphemy. Letting one's body feel very comfortable, feel very graced, feel very happy, feel very pleasurable — all of this was a kind of blasphemy. People were born to suffer; that was what was normal. If you were happy, then you were committing blasphemy — blaspheming yourself, blaspheming the divine.

Ancient China had similar sayings as well. Ancient China would instill this kind of concept in people. They would say things like "bitterness" — the very shape of a person is a bitterness: look at the two eyes up top, the two eyebrows, right, and there is the nose with two nostrils, and then below, a mouth. He said, look at the character "苦" (bitter) — it is a true depiction of the human face, therefore people are meant to suffer. Whether in the West or the East, this kind of view exists.

So such a view would lead to these things in his body — the body would suffer.

They both found this hard to believe. Neither Jane nor Rob believed that Jane's "guilty self" could actually think this way. Seth really had no other options left; he had no choice but to point it out. All the previous hints, all the explicit statements, all the indirect prodding, all the guidance and persuasion — none of it had achieved any fundamental effect. Jane was on the verge of being unable to go on — she could not move at all. Think about it: barely past fifty, and the person could no longer move. Every joint in her arms and legs could no longer move; she could not even type, much less walk, and she could not even bathe herself.

So Rob and Jane did not believe such a thing could be true — that Jane's inner mind could actually hold such a thought. So Seth said, then I will drag it out and let you see it. There was truly no other way; Seth had no choice but to resort to this last measure. Think about it: twenty-four consecutive sessions, a full three months, one session after another without rest. He held two sessions a week, so twenty-four sessions meant a full twelve weeks. Four weeks make a month, so it went on for a full three months, from April 14 all the way to July 13. In those three months nothing else was done; he focused exclusively on explaining how Jane's "guilty self" thought, how it formed, how it was born, how it approached problems, how it perceived things, what its beliefs were — a full three months devoted entirely to this.

Yet Seth told us that no matter what, once Jane's "guilty self" was touched, it could begin to change. Seth said, in any case, when I drag out this part of Jane's "guilty self" and let you see it, once you have touched it, once you have made contact with it, once you have dragged it out, it can begin to change. The only thing to fear is never having seen it at all. So we should not be afraid of having these parts of ourselves discovered; once discovered, they will begin to change. When you see the problem, the problem is already partly solved. That is what he meant.

And then, they had already touched it to a certain degree — and this was no ordinary touching, because for three straight months this had been the topic — and more than once at that. But the emotional disturbance involved made Jane worse during this period. Well, of course — drag out anyone's "guilty self" and talk about it, and no one's emotions would be comfortable.

According to Seth, Jane's "guilty self" no longer identified with the church. This "guilty self" was not Jane's primary personality; that part of Jane also no longer identified with the church. That self itself had become frightened; he was very afraid, he had been startled. Why? Because he had originally been born from the church, but he no longer identified with the church — Jane's primary personality had long since stopped identifying with the church, but what Seth was now saying was that Jane's hidden personality, the "guilty self," had also begun to stop identifying with the church. In himself he felt conflict because of his early training and Jane's great creativity — "in himself" refers to this "guilty self"; in his early years he had studied with the church, and the church's influence and shaping on him had been very deep, because he was still a child at that time — and then, because of Jane's later great creativity, Jane writing books and poetry, channeling Seth — all of this had a great impact on him as well.

And then he considered creativity to be wrong. Jane's "guilty self" believed that creativity was wrong, that the creative self was guilty. He believed he had two selves: one was the guilty self, and one was the creative self. He believed that this creative self of Jane's, the primary personality, was guilty. Therefore Jane would have panic attacks in sleep, would have episodes of terror. So when Jane was dreaming, after her primary personality had rested, this "guilty self" would often stir up panic in her dreams, because he was afraid, he was startled, and he felt that this was sinful.

From April to May, as Rob became more familiar with the mechanisms by which the "guilty self" operated — after a month of these discussions — he found it hard to control his anger and his feelings of sorrow toward it. After Seth had continued for a month of sessions on the "guilty self," Rob felt toward Jane's "guilty self" — not toward Jane, but truly toward that part, the "guilty self" — both great anger and great sorrow. The anger was because it had brought about this kind of physical condition in Jane; the sorrow was because he was facing this "guilty self" that had formed since childhood, that could not be changed, that had become the situation of today — even at night, in dreams, there was unease, there was terror. He was both angry and sorrowful.

Of course, it was obvious that Rob's feelings reflected the workings of his own "guilty self." Rob also had this part of the feelings; Rob also had a "guilty self." In fact, extending this further, every one of us has a "guilty self" operating within — the question is whether you can drag it out, whether you can transform it, whether you can even turn it around.

So Rob said, when I saw Jane's "guilty self," he felt his own "guilty self" at work, or reflecting some similar psychological traits. For how could I have been so deeply involved in my wife's challenges for nearly twenty-six years without some deep part of my own personality complementing it?

Where did Rob's sense of guilt come from? Rob said, I have been married to Jane for twenty-six years. Why has Jane's "guilty self" caused such harm to Jane and brought about today's situation, while the deep-level parts of my own personality did not counterbalance it, or compensate for it, or form some kind of complement, to make up for the negative influence of that part of Jane's "guilty self"? In other words, what Rob meant was: why, in twenty-six years of marriage, regarding this part of his wife's "guilty self," had he done nothing at all? Why had he done nothing to change it? Why had he been able to tolerate it, or watch helplessly, as it developed step by step over twenty-six years to today, bringing Jane's body to this state? This was Rob's self-reproach — that is, the guilty part of himself had jumped out again, feeling that he was guilty. Look at this couple.

Seth told him that Rob's way of being angry was precisely not to react. And even amid Rob's churning emotions, he had to agree with what Seth said. So Seth's words here are very interesting: Rob, you are very angry, but what is the expression of your anger? It is not reacting. That is, as mentioned earlier, Rob also had this part of the guilty self. Although Rob felt very self-reproachful, very angry, very sorrowful, what did Rob do? Nothing at all. That was the most distinctive feature.

Seth's words were also very direct, hitting the nail on the head. He said, Rob, although you have this awareness, although you have learned this — I am guilty, I did not take good care of Jane, I did not form a complement to her in personality, I did not help her walk out of this predicament — but he said, your anger consists of doing nothing at all. This was another blow to Rob's head. Rob said, although amid my churning emotions, these emotions were all tangled together — you see, he hated that "guilty self" of Jane's, and then he reproached himself, and then Seth dealt him another blow to the head, saying, what use is your self-reproach? You have done nothing at all. Rob said that what Seth said was the truth — although Rob was very angry, his emotions very stirred up, he had to admit that what Seth said was indeed the truth: he truly had done nothing at all.

Do Not Blame the "Guilty Self"

Seth said on April 28:

My meaning is not to blame the guilty self. Indeed, get to know him, his needs, his requirements and motives, and tell him that in childhood he was influenced by some bad ideas, that he was frightened stiff, that he was badly hurt. Ruburt's entire syndrome does not follow any established pattern; they are the result of applied pressure, finally reinforced by hopelessness and some relative isolation.

Seth saw that the two of them were both so angry at Jane's "guilty self," with that feeling of wanting to kill it and be done with it, wanting to get it out and be done with it. Seth said, you two don't get so worked up, don't get worked up, getting worked up is useless. Why? Because my meaning in singling out Jane's "guilty self" is not for you to hold a struggle session against it, not for you to blame it.

Remember, this is also how we handle things: when we discover the "guilty self," it is not for you to blame it, to scold it, to reproach it. He said, I want you to be able to see it clearly, to understand it, to know its needs and motives, so that you understand many of the inner motives and needs at your foundation, so that you know why you do such things, why you suffer, why you have such entanglements, why you find yourself in such a dilemma, and where the cause lies. That is what it is for.

Then he said, this "guilty self" was influenced by some bad ideas in childhood, was frightened stiff, was wounded. And Ruburt's entire syndrome does not follow any established pattern—it is not that if you were like this in youth, it will necessarily lead to something—it is not like that—they are the result of the pressure he later put on himself, finally reinforced by hopelessness and by some relative isolation.

What he says here is all directed at Jane and does not apply to other people. Everyone should remember, this is Jane's.

And I—Rob said—was so shaken by what he said about Jane's hopelessness. Hopelessness means having no hope, being full of no hope for the future. So much so that Rob went back once again to look at the private session of April 15, in which he excerpted Seth's material on Jane's pursuit of value fulfillment. Without Seth's psychological breakthrough, Ruburt would have felt unable to continue that particular way of existence.

This sentence frightened Rob. Note nine later will mention it, so let's not go into too much here. To put it simply, Seth said that if Ruburt had not transmitted the Seth material, had not made such a major breakthrough—that is, if he had not achieved this major breakthrough—then Jane's life very likely would have ended on its own early on. Why? Because he would not have been able to achieve his value fulfillment. This will be discussed later in note nine.

The Magical Self and the Sinful Self

Rob said that by now readers must be able to see very clearly that Seth's material on the "sinful self" can well be regarded as the other side of his material on the magical approach to reality. Because he inserted a section on the magical approach in the middle, you remember, right in the middle of this book, the magical approach was delivered over 14 sessions, roughly 14 sessions, on the magical approach. Then Seth's section on the "sinful self" can actually be seen as a supplement to the magical approach, the other side of it. You have your magical side, you have the divine side of your humanity, but you also have the side of you that is controlled by the "sinful self" in your actual life.

This is also a predicament that many of us cannot escape: I have studied this material, I have studied this spiritual knowledge, yet in actual life I have not lived out the state of the magical approach as you all describe it, I have not lived out that state of Framework 2, I have not lived out that feeling of breaking through the dark clouds in the so-called "you deserve a better life." The reason is that you still have the psychological influence of the "sinful self."

Rob said, I am all too aware of an uncomfortable dichotomy. He said I suppose indeed, no matter how infuriating it is, at least for Jane and me, the magical self seems so far away from everyday reality, while the sinful self is so very near.

He said the infuriating point, the dichotomy, lies in this: we have both our divine side and our human side. The divine is so far from us, while the human is so near to us, and yet the "sinful self" has such a great influence on us. And the inner divinity that Seth repeatedly emphasizes—which is also what the Buddha called the Tathagata nature that every person possesses—why can we never touch it, why can we never manifest it, why is it so far from us? This is what made Rob so angry.

He said trying to construct the magical self could be regarded as some theoretical, attainable goal, but the sinful self is right there, operating in the most intimate areas of personal life. He said everyone wants to construct the magical self, yet in actual life we cannot do it. Why? Because the "sinful self" is right there, in the deepest part of your psyche, influencing you, operating in the most intimate areas of your life—that is, in the eating, drinking, and daily routines of your everyday life, in interpersonal relationships, in the practicalities of daily living, in the mundane details—it is operating there. And in your moments of stillness, when you meditate, when you sit in meditation, when you take a few days away from your actual life to go on retreat, to practice, the moment you return to normal life, you are again influenced by that "sinful self" operating in those most intimate areas.

Rob here is very furious, very angry. He is not angry at anyone in particular; he is simply saying why is it so hard, why does the "sinful self" always give us such a great hindrance when we want to explore our magical self. Even someone as creative as Jane, even someone with such aversion to religion and such resolute separation from it, still cannot escape the influence religion had on her in childhood, still has a "sinful self" operating continuously at the bottom layer of her personality, even causing Jane's body to reach the situation it is in today. This is what made Rob grind his teeth in frustration.

Rob then thought, how many people actually have this condition? Rob said it is not just Jane alone; how many people in this world are like this—wholeheartedly pursuing the magical self, yet in reality being firmly controlled by the "sinful self."

I know Seth would only say that the magical self is just as real and just as near as any other self. And for the individual, the personal challenge is to know and believe this, and to clear away the weeds surrounding the magical self so that it may blossom unhindered.

What does Rob mean by this? Did he not ask—how many people are like Jane, wanting to pursue the magical self, yet being tied down and hindered by the "sinful self," unable to break free? Then he said I guess Seth would say, your magical self and your other selves—including that "sinful self"—are equally real and equally near. However near you are to the "sinful self," that is how near you are to the magical self.

Rob said, this is easy to say, and Seth would say it too. But he said for the individual, each person's challenge is to know and believe this. Everyone knows it is so, but one must remove the weeds surrounding the magical self.

To allow the magical self to blossom unhindered is not an easy thing. Everyone knows they should let the magical self blossom, should clear away the weeds surrounding it; yet in practice, the sinful self often comes out to interfere.

Every Time a Book Was Published, Jane's Illness Worsened

In late May, they received The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events from the publisher. Jane had finished proofreading at the end of January, but it was not until late May that they got the finished book. In that era, the publishing cycle for a book was very long; by today's Internet-age standards, that pace is far too slow. If you published at that rhythm, you could never keep up with how fast information changes. Let me give you an example: if you wanted to publish a book about "lying flat" right now, by the time you finished negotiating with the publisher, writing it, and getting it published, two years might already have passed, and "lying flat" would no longer be a hot social topic. The same goes for the post-pandemic era: by the time you finish writing and publishing, the post-pandemic era may already be over as well.

Rob said they felt both happy and puzzled that the book was finally published. Happy that the book had finally come out; puzzled because thinking back to how Jane had been three years earlier when she was giving the sessions for this book, it felt as though several lifetimes had already passed. Although only three years had gone by, at that time Jane already had physical problems, but they did not affect her mobility; three years later, Jane was nearly paralyzed at home, unable to do anything at all. Seeing this book published, and then thinking about the contrast between three years ago and three years later, the feeling was very unpleasant.

After that, Jane's symptoms worsened again. Rob felt there was a connection between Jane's condition and the arrival of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. He sensed that as their books were published one after another, each publication made Jane's illness a little worse. Previously it had only been a vague feeling and suspicion; it was not until this book was published and her symptoms clearly deteriorated that Rob fully understood: the publication of the books really did have an aggravating effect on Jane's illness.

Why was this so? Because at the bottom layer of Jane's personality, there had always been a guilty self at work. That guilty self believed her creativity was sinful, believed that she had betrayed the church, that channeling and writing this material was sinful, and that she might even be misleading the public. Under such beliefs, the more books were published and the more widely they spread, the deeper Jane's self-reproach became, and the greater the influence of that guilty self on her body. From an objective standpoint, Jane truly was writing with her life: every time a book was published, every time a book was distributed, as soon as bookstores began selling it, her illness worsened a little.

By June 20, Jane had not walked for six and a half months. Not being able to walk was bad enough in itself, but what was worse was the pain; the rheumatoid arthritis was both uncomfortable and agonizing. And during those six and a half months, she did not lie around like a sick person; she kept on writing every single day.

The First Time in the Bathroom She Could Not Get Herself Back into the Chair

Just around that time in June, a crisis occurred in the bathroom. For all these years, although Jane had limited mobility, she had always insisted on bathing herself and would not let Rob help. Both of them had a very strong sense of independence: one did not need help, and the other said it was just as well not to help. This kind of self-reliance is very common in America. Many elderly Americans push little carts with four small wheels around the supermarket, totter out to the parking lot, fold up the cart, and then actually get into the car and drive away by themselves. Can you imagine an old person like that still driving on their own? Yes, this situation is very common in America.

Let me give another example. The entire Greater Los Angeles area is made up of five counties, and Los Angeles County governs 88 cities, with a population of over seven million; the entire Greater Los Angeles area is equivalent in size to six Beijings⁷. For such a large administrative body, apart from police cars and other official vehicles, the government actually provides only about five passenger vehicles for administrative chiefs and legislators. Everyone drives their own car to and from work. Many overseas companies, by contrast, will provide expatriate staff with new cars and rent good housing for them, but the government is extremely strict about this. Even so, people's self-reliance is generally very strong.

So Jane, who had been unable to walk for six and a half months, still insisted on bathing herself. Until one day in June, after she had finished washing, for the first time she could not move herself back from the sink into that wheeled office chair. That was not even a proper wheelchair, just the kind of swivel chair with wheels on the bottom commonly used in offices. Rob had no choice but to carry her back. Such a simple action was a heavy blow to both of them. They realized that the body really was failing, that she could no longer take care of herself in daily life. For two people with such strong self-esteem, once the label of "disabled" was attached, it meant no longer being a complete person, and that was the most unbearable thing of all.

Rob said he was at a loss at the time, and so was Jane. The next day, while Rob was typing up that night's session, he inserted a declaration of love for his wife. He only learned later that that simple addition had greatly affected Jane, just as it had deeply affected him when he wrote it. It was like a kind of compensation: the guilty self inside Rob stepped forward and said, for twenty-six years you have not taken good care of your wife, and that is why she has become what she is today.

A few days later, their builder friend Floyd Waterman⁸ helped Rob saw down an old-fashioned straight-backed wooden chair and fit it with small wheels. This chair was much narrower than the original office chair with clawed casters, and it was suitable for moving around in the bathroom and the rooms of the hill house. Jane could move herself onto it from the office chair, the sofa, or the bed, and then move around the house, or be pushed by Rob. The only problem was that she could not sit for more than a few minutes on a wooden chair without a cushion. So the next day, Rob added a cushion himself. After that, Jane found the chair very useful.

In the days that followed, Jane tried several times to stand up, wanting to lean on the typing table and push herself along as she walked, but each time she could not do it. She could no longer even stand up. Her feet began to swell. She began writing poems related to the great stone circles of southern England⁹, typed very little because her arms were very sore, but she did paint some pictures.

The Guilty Self Finally Jumped Out

On the evening of June 15, they held a session. In his opening remarks, Rob asked Seth: Since they began this series of sessions, what might Jane's guilty self have learned from the Seth material? Rob said it was very important to tell the guilty self that his behavior was destructive to Jane, so he must loosen his control over Jane. Rob also wanted to know what attitude the guilty self held toward the fact that he was already powerless to keep Jane's body alive. Without Rob's help, Jane could no longer take care of herself; if the situation continued to worsen to the point of death, the guilty self would also die. He wanted to know what the guilty self thought of such a contradictory situation.

Rob noted in his records that in that session Seth had only just begun to answer his questions and did not go further into them. To his regret, Seth did not continue on the topic of "what the guilty self has learned from the Seth material over these seventeen years." Instead, Seth spoke in considerable detail about how Jane could write a "mental declaration of intent," so that the guilty self would know exactly what she wanted from life. That is to say, Seth shifted the angle and told Jane: The guilty self is not unaware that if this continues she will die; what the guilty self wants is not the continuation of life or a longer life. He knows what he wants.

The next day, Jane began writing this mental declaration of intent. That same day, they received the publication of Jane's first poetry collection. Rob congratulated her and said this poetry collection was Jane's best book, and he hoped it would sell well. Yet Rob sadly noticed that the publication of this book led to another worsening of Jane's symptoms.

On June 17, the trigger was pulled. Jane suddenly began writing material directly from the guilty self, as if that self had finally been forced out to defend himself. For five days, she wrote in bursts of excited tension, producing thirty-six pages of manuscript. Jane also began writing several poems to accompany these prose passages, and had several related dreams.

The guilty self truly exists. Seth had long been fully aware of this, but at first did not want to force it out into the open. Only when there was no other way did he gradually force the guilty self out, bit by bit. When Rob and Jane first heard Seth describe this guilty self's version of beliefs, they were greatly shocked: How could there be a self like this hidden deep within the personality? When the guilty self actually jumped out to speak for himself, they were even more astonished. He wrote page after page with great fluency, and said with full justification: "You say I am guilty, but where am I guilty?"

Rob had to be careful with his unease and anger. He was very angry; at last there was an object at which he could direct his temper. But he could not let it out, because the guilty self was also a part of Jane. Those emotions mixed together with his love for his wife, and in the end even developed into a kind of slightly perverse black humor.

During those five days when the guilty self was making his confession, apart from one regular Seth session, Seth simply could not come through. In that one Seth session, the original Jane came back and could transmit the material normally; after the session ended, the guilty self's personality returned. Seth was very pleased with this breakthrough. This was exactly what he had been waiting for: Previously he had said there was a guilty self operating underneath Jane, and everyone half-believed and half-doubted it; now the guilty self had jumped out to defend himself, so surely you can all see it now. Old Seth had a plan, and his purpose was one thing only: he really wanted to cure Jane.

This was in fact a watershed for Jane's health. If at this point, after Seth had dragged the guilty self out in all its rawness, Jane had made a thorough change, her illness might have improved. But regrettably, even though it was touched and forced out, she still did not make a thorough change. Seen this way, those underlying beliefs really cannot be changed casually.

Changing Core Beliefs Requires the Courage to Cut Off One's Own Hand

When I was reading The Nature of Personal Reality, I said repeatedly from the very beginning that changing beliefs is not a simple matter. Seth gave many methods to help you find core beliefs, such as bridging beliefs. After you find them, the key is how to change them. Seth gave the simplest and most direct method: use a completely opposite belief to replace the old belief. And this process is precisely where many people fail, and it is also where Jane failed.

People always want to change gradually, and they can never bring themselves to strike hard. Jane outwardly said she had broken with the church, and her attitude seemed very resolute, but in her heart she never truly broke away. She still believed there was a heaven and a hell, that there was good and evil, that there was sin and punishment; she still believed that her mother's curse could still take effect at night. Her mother said to her countless times: "The way you treat me today, one day I will let my illness come upon you." When Jane's symptoms first appeared, this curse actually strengthened Jane's belief: she felt that her mother's words had come true. She never admitted it aloud, but inwardly she hesitated and became ambiguous.

Many people fall into a misconception here, always feeling that changing bit by bit is normal. Let me tell you, once a core belief has been dug out, you can only cut through the tangled mess with one swift stroke, giving it not a single second to catch its breath, and replace it with a completely opposite belief. Whether or not you believe the new belief, you must believe it one hundred percent, like a fool. Do not look for evidence, do not feel that the old belief still has some merit. As long as there is even a trace of doubt, the old belief can never be changed. You need a moment like that, when you tell yourself to make a clean break with the past, just as the Buddha said: put down the butcher's knife and become a Buddha on the spot¹⁰.

Let me give a simple example. Many people's pain and fear come from one core belief: they think there is no love in this world, that people are all competing with each other for self-interest, that cooperation does not exist at all, and neither does grace. You tell them that the whole world is gracious toward you, and that people cooperate with and love one another. They think that is just feel-good talk, something that only occasionally appears in a few lofty individuals. Some people will say: "Mike, you have unconditional love, I can feel it; but others do not necessarily have it, at least I do not yet." When you tell them that they already have unconditional love, they do not believe it.

If you want to change this core belief, you must first believe: every person has unconditional love for every other person, even though the way it is expressed may not be right; and the essence of relationships between people is cooperation, not competition. You may not believe it, and may only admit that some people are like this and some are not. If you still have that reservation, then it cannot be changed. You can only believe like a fool: everyone in this world has love, everyone is good, just as human nature is originally good¹¹. These six words are an unshakable truth.

You may ask, does that mean there will be no more setbacks? No, setbacks will still come. Does that mean there will be no more pain and illness? No, pain and illness will still come. But the biggest change is in your state of mind: you no longer have even a trace of fear or dread. If illness comes, let it come; if death comes, let it come; whatever happens, let it happen. In your heart there is no fear or worry, and you accept everything calmly, not by persuading yourself, but by accepting it naturally. Once this shift in mindset happens, everything that follows changes completely.

Yet many people cannot do this at that point. They say: "You say people are good, but I need to see evidence. I can see it in some people, but in other things I see the complete opposite." At that point they cannot change. Why? Because the belief you want to change grew out of the old belief. The old belief knows you better than anyone else. When it sees that you have resolve, it begins to soothe you: "Fine, go ahead and change, everyone should make progress." So you think you are changing, when in fact the new little sprout is still planted in the soil of the old belief.

The old belief is extremely cunning, using both soft and hard tactics, threats and temptations. When you finally manage to grow a tiny sprout of "people are good to one another," it shows you the social news: look, the eight-child woman in Xuzhou, the woman in chains¹², look at the evil in these people, tell me where the good is? The moment you see it, you burn with anger and feel you cannot help but believe the old way. And with that one blow, the little sprout is poisoned to death.

I give this example precisely to say that changing core beliefs is truly a bloody process, requiring the courage of a warrior who cuts off his own hand. You must dare, in the absence of conclusive evidence, to replace the old belief, just like blind faith or superstition. Seth spent so many years explaining principles, dozens of books, and in the end, on the level of action, it comes down to one simple and blunt instruction: do not ask anymore, just believe. If you still think this is superstition or blind faith, that is fine too; that is the diversity of consciousness. If you want to experience fear, worry, and powerlessness, that is also possible. There is no good or bad, right or wrong. If you have had enough and want to experience the psychological state Seth described, then you need to change.

The Defense of the Guilty Self

Having forced the guilty self out into the open, Rob and Jane felt quite pleased. After all these years of hard work, Jane had kept those beliefs and motives hidden beneath her symptoms buried very deep, and now at last they had been laid out in the open. This was the real reason. Now they could pull up Jane's physical troubles by the roots. Rob believed that the confession of Jane's guilty self was a supplement to the Seth material, and also another side of the material on the magical approach.

When that flow of material finally came to an end, Jane was exhausted, her eyes red, her expression bewildered. She said, "Wow, I never knew, I never dreamed, that there was so much stuff inside me." In five full days, she had written thirty-six pages. Rob said to her, how fortunate we are that we were able to dig these things out; and how tragic it is that those who need the same kind of help may not be able to do the same thing.

Rob said that the material from Jane's guilty self was too long and too complex to include all of it here. He emphasized that one of the guilty self's chief concerns was a genuine and ironic perplexity: why has humanity for so long, perhaps even before there were written records, kept creating and depending upon an existence such as a guilty self? Rob said in his notes that he told Jane this concern was undoubtedly creative. The guilty self was really questioning: why did Jane keep him confined within such a narrow range?

We might consider that Western Christianity says people are born sinful, and the East has its own set of formulations as well; Buddhism and many other traditions also say this. Why does humanity insist on making the "guilty self" the mainstream, and pursue it so tirelessly? Among the seven deadly sins, gluttony, lust, and pleasure are all defined as sinful, and many basic human qualities are classified as sins.

The following two pages are what Jane wrote in this manner as the guilty self's defense:

I resent the unfair reputation that has been imposed upon me, for if I ever believed in the phenomenon of sin and wanted to escape it, my intention and interest have in fact never been to escape sin.

The guilty self said that he does not accept this unfair reputation. On what grounds do you give me the name "guilty self"? It makes it sound as if I want to escape the guilt of sin. Actually, I am not escaping sin, but pursuing eternal truth.

Those goals pursue truth, union with the universe, ignited your creativity, and have driven and still drive you to explore all possible varieties of existence, seeking to express the sacred mysteries within and behind every existence—yours as well as mine.

You see, he speaks with great conviction. Taken by itself, there is nothing wrong with this passage at all. He says he is allied with cosmic goals, pursuing higher aims, seeking spiritual union with himself, with the whole self, and with the universe. How can you call me a guilty self?

What our explorations involve is not secondhand evidence handed down by others, but direct personal contact between our consciousness and existence within vast unknown factors.

Then he went on to say:

First of all, I believed that the soul survives after death, even though in my heart I believed in sin and the existence of the devil.

You see, the problem lies right here. Everything before was correct—pursuing truth, seeking union—but he believed in the existence of sin and the devil.

I also inspired that creative self to go out as freely as possible. In my heart I felt the heavy and cruel mark of Cain.

Cain was Adam's eldest son, who in Genesis¹³ murdered his younger brother Abel. The guilty self said he could truly feel that cruel stain of sin left by Cain's murder of his brother Abel¹⁴, and feel the almost indelible burden of sin and evil that humanity carries. This shows how deeply the early influence of the Christian church was embedded in his psyche. Not on the level of ideas, but on the psychological level: he could really feel that sense of sin, guilt, and self-reproach after killing one's brother. Not to mention Cain—Li Shimin killing his brothers¹⁵ would be the same.

He said:

I reasoned that if I was flawed, I must automatically distort even those seemingly clearest experiences of the soul.

Since I carry this deep sense of sin that comes with being born human, then whenever I think about any issue, my thought patterns all carry the premise "I am sinful." Given that, he would inevitably distort those experiences of the soul.

Since I shared that sinful tendency of mine, then when I trusted myself, I must inevitably fall into error without knowing it.

Jane was thinking, if I feel that I am sinful, then when I transmit the Seth material or think about any issue, I am bound to fall into error. The self I trust most is itself a guilty self, so how could my view of things be objective? So he worried: the material I transmit must be contaminated. And if I then write it into books and publish them, and influence others, wouldn't that make me even more guilty? So the more books were published, the worse she felt.

Yet the guilty self also said:

Nevertheless, even with those feelings, we still pressed forward steadily.

Even while doubting and worrying, he continued working, continued transmitting the Seth material. You see how conflicted he was. It was such a self that came forward to defend itself, written with such reasonableness, not at all a repulsive villain. He had his own reasons, and one might even want to comfort him. But understanding is one thing; when you want to change, you still must replace him with a completely opposite belief. You cannot keep him by your side just because you understand him and pity him.

Rob Read Seth's Words in Session 915

Rob said that, just as they had their own collective beliefs, Jane's symptoms continued to worsen after the publication of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events and the poetry collection. Her feet became increasingly swollen, and even walking a few steps between the chair and the sofa was very difficult. Several times she refused Rob's and others' suggestions that she seek medical attention. There are no further records about doctors and the medical establishment in these notes, because there was simply nothing to write: Jane just would not see a doctor. With that extreme stubbornness, she simply would not cooperate on the matter of seeking medical care. Although Rob loved Jane, he also acquiesced to this situation. In hindsight, Rob felt that he too bore responsibility.

July 4 was Independence Day in the United States¹⁶, and they still worked. A session was held that evening. Seth came through with some very interesting material, answering Rob's earlier questions. From Session 919 on June 9, 1980, to the first session of this chapter of the book, to July 8, they had accumulated 61 complete private sessions, and had also held 10 regular sessions and 1 book session.

On July 8, Jane began studying a large amount of private material, then suddenly set it aside and spontaneously wrote a complete outline for Seth's The Magical Approach. Eleven months earlier she had given the first session on that subject. At that time Rob had kept hoping she would continue. Four days earlier, Seth had also said he wholeheartedly approved of the project.

The last session Jane gave for this chapter was Session 928, delivered eight months earlier. Afterward Rob prepared these notes for Session 931, wanting to sort out the personal, professional, and worldly circumstances. But when he looked back, he was not sure whether he had taken everything into account. He might have chosen other sessions, written other notes, asked other questions, and reached other conclusions.

For example, in Session 915 he read this passage from Seth:

Ruburt is undergoing some profound therapeutic changes. Probabilities intersect with your time at every point, and those probabilities are psychologically directed. So in your terms, he is at an excellent point of intersection, and his chances of recovery are very great. Tell him I said so, and that you both share the responsibility, because your lives come together in their own way. (Session 915)

At Session 915, Seth said it was an excellent point of intersection. Probabilities intersected with present time and space, and if the development continued it would produce new changes, possibly leading to another kind of life, and the illness might also heal. If this point of intersection was not seized, it would continue to worsen. Seth specifically said that Jane's chances of recovery were very great, and that both of them bore responsibility.

Rob reflected: Why did he not write this introduction around Session 915, instead of beginning from the perspective of his own guilt? Why had Jane's body regressed so much since then? Why had they failed to stop the decline of her physical condition? In retrospect, the possibilities for help seemed infinite, and some of them were clearly better than the ones they had chosen. He also felt that Jane did not agree with his view; she often let Rob put the books together in the way he thought best, naively accepting his labor. Rob said that trust reflected Seth's larger view of reality. In this probable reality, they received things from that great whole in their own way, and strove to ask better questions.

Back to Session 931

After Rob finished organizing the eight months of notes, he said, "Now that we have caught up with the time, let us begin Session 931."

On Wednesday, July 15, 1981, at 8:37 p.m., they waited for the session as usual. Before the session began, Jane reminded Rob that she wanted Seth to comment on her reincarnational dream from that morning. In four months, this was the second time she had had such an experience, which was quite unusual for her, and it even made her reflect on the sinful self in a new way. After breakfast, she wrote a rough report of the parts of the dream she could remember. She thought the dream had been triggered by a movie from the previous night, a story about a person traveling from the present life to a past lifetime. Rob had only seen the end of the film, but Jane told him the general plot.

Jane's reincarnational dream may have served two purposes: not only did it give her some insight into the sinful self, but the information Seth later transmitted said that the commentary on the dream might become a dictation for this book. She asked Rob whether he minded working on this book today. Rob of course did not mind, saying that she and Seth had absolute freedom to talk about anything. Jane replied that if Seth really did discuss her experience, it might be related to time cover. She was not nervous about returning to the book, and the book's dictation did not mean giving up personal material, or giving up the book she expected to discuss on The Magical Approach.

Then, only after the long introduction ended did the main body of Session 931 begin. I suggest everyone take a break before continuing to listen to the rest of this session. This session is not simple, because it deals with the issue of time.

Let us continue with the main body of Session 931. Seth began by saying that time cover is a different version of a primary event -- several different versions. By primary event, we know he means those events in Framework 2, or events in higher dimensions. One event has many versions, and these different versions can be called time cover. Because these different versions occur in such a way that one aspect of an overall event may appear at one time, while another aspect appears at another time, and so on for the rest. One event has many versions; one appears in this space-time, another appears in that space-time. He calls this time cover.

Time cover is a different version of a primary event.

These time covers exist forever.

They are always there. You may only experience one, but the others also exist. However, they may be activated by some associations you are making now, because through your present associations, you connect them together. If you do not associate with them, they are still there, but you may not be able to perceive them; yet once you associate, they come out. Thus some bits and pieces from the past or the future, or from both past and future, are brought into your present time, because your associations bring them in.

So what is called the present time is thickened by the deep psychological awareness of the psyche. What does that mean? It means that your present time, because of the existence of time covers, the things happening at this present point in time actually have many versions -- different versions of one primary event. So it becomes thickened, because once you make these associations, it thickens. Although only one thing is happening in the present -- for example, you are eating an ice cream right now, just that one simple thing -- because you associate it with a delicious ice cream you ate before, or with a scene of eating ice cream with a certain person, this causes the present time to be thickened. It is no longer just the single matter of you eating ice cream right now.

What is that awareness? All events are interrelated and can all be connected.

And any given individual's reincarnational experience provides a rich source of experience.

For a specific individual, each person's reincarnational experience -- that is, the experience of your previous life or other lives -- provides you with a rich source, and it has a certain influence on this life of yours. Each person at least unconsciously draws from this experience.

This usually unconscious knowledge is of great benefit to humanity itself.

This usually unconscious knowledge -- we have not studied it, nor have we consciously thought about it -- but it is beneficial to you as humanity itself. It allows you to learn many things. Just as beavers build dams and mice dig holes. So at least on certain levels, human knowledge is not confined within any given generation -- your knowledge is not imprisoned within your own era. You draw knowledge from your past and future eras, so your knowledge is very rich, and it circulates within the larger reincarnational picture. The larger reincarnation includes not only the past, but also the future.

Of course, probabilities are quite involved here, and for a particular event, it is easier to fall into one time sequence than into another.

This certainly involves probabilities, because we discussed many probabilities in The "Unknown" Reality. So for a specific event, in which time does it occur? Why did this probability not occur in your reality? Here it says: for a particular event, it is easier for it to occur in a certain time sequence, so it occurs in this space-time, because it is easier there.

However, I do not want you to feel that you are destined to experience certain events. He says, let me put it this way, do not get the misunderstanding that your life is all predetermined, that some events you are destined to experience -- because the influence of your past-life or future-life reincarnations has already prepared a storehouse of experience for this life, and you can only draw from those experiences. That is not what it means. The facts are not like that.

Yet in your other reincarnational existences, there will be branches of your own life events that may appear as time covers. At certain points, however, such events are closer to you than at other points.

What should it be like? It should be that in different reincarnations, there will be branches of your life events -- that is, branches of the time of this life of yours -- and they may appear as time covers. For example, you married Zhang San, not Li Si. The matter of marrying Li Si did not happen in your space-time; but in another reincarnation within probable realities, you may have married Li Si, and at that time Li Si may have appeared in another form. So at certain points, such events are closer to you than at other points -- that is, suppose the matter of you marrying a person named Li Si did not happen in your era, and in your era there was not even a person named Li Si; but in another reincarnation, the matter of you marrying Li Si, at that time in that space-time, had a greater probability of occurring than you marrying Zhang San. Understand it that way.

In this, the psychic connections at any given time may connect you with other events of a similar nature in a future or past life.

That is, there are psychic connections, connections that transcend space and time, and there are these similar events that allow you, through association, to connect with them, to think of other things.

It is more truthful to say that those similar events are temporal versions of a larger event.

You could say that in your different cycles of reincarnation there are different similar events, and you could say they are different versions of a larger event of yours. Saying it this way is more truthful.

Generally speaking, you experience only one temporal version of any given action.

Generally speaking, you only experience one version; you do not go through all the versions. Undoubtedly, it is easier for us to understand how a birthday, a wedding anniversary, or particular symbols, particular objects, can be used as associative connectors. They can serve as connectors for your associations -- for example, on particular dates, at particular points in time, you will associate certain things, certain mementos. And within your inner mechanisms, at other times, memories of certain themes or actions that occurred under similar circumstances are connected together through your associations.

Actually, as far as humanity is concerned, this psychological behavior represents the backbone of social organization.

So for humans, this psychological behavior -- that is, this associative behavior -- is the backbone of your human social organization. In other words, human society is connected together through these correlations and associations.

And it is precisely those usually hidden, definite memories of past or future reincarnational relationships that consolidate social organization. This applies from small tribes to large governments.

It is precisely these reincarnational memories that we cannot sense, that are hidden -- whether from the past or the future; let us not assume that reincarnation only refers to the past, the future is included too -- that consolidate social organization. What does consolidating social organization mean? It is like a web connecting everything together. That is, as a human society, the roles we play in this society, how we should conduct ourselves, how we should do things within this social organization, how the social organization should operate -- it is not merely, as you might think, a process of a civilization progressing from nothing to something. It is connected with the future from the very beginning. So why do we say that many ancient civilizations were very advanced? For many reasons, one of which is that they were actually connected with the future, and they knew they should do things this way. Look at many ancient cities, including some from the Ming and Tang dynasties. In those cities, people knew how to build cities. In large cities like Chang'an, they knew how to build sewers, they knew how to build drainage, sewage treatment, drainage pipes, and the corresponding measures. In the excavation of ancient city sites, there is much of the wisdom of modern cities in them, which is quite amazing.

So to put it simply, at your present point in time, you are connected with both the past and the future. In other words, you are influenced by such a large social network woven by the past and the future. So this is why our current human social organization appears the way it does. From small tribes to large governments, it is all like this. Why is it like this? Because it needs association, it needs communication with people. Humans are social animals; humans cannot live in isolation; humans need connections between people. Once people connect like this, there will be associations, there will be events, there will be exchanges, there will be communication. From individuals to multiple people to combinations to network structures, this is how our human society came to be.

Of course, to some degree, you have been or will be related to each other.

What does this mean? It means that we all have inner connections with one another. The colleagues, friends, classmates around you, including the people you work with, the people you know -- none of them appear without reason. They all have some connection with you, whether in this life or a future life, or in certain matters of the past. There is such relatedness, such inner relatedness.

In those terms, all times within time are related to each other.

According to this, if we are connected with the past and the future, then are we connected with all people? Are all events interrelated? Yes, they are all interrelated. An event you experience in this life may be a branch of the probabilities of some other event; and some events in your future may be a branch of a probable event of this life, or the reverse is also true. So these events are all related to one another.

At every moment of your life, you brush shoulders with a future or past event.

This means that every event you experience in your life implies a past event and a future event. Or a future event is a different version of this event. The meaning of brushing shoulders with it is that you did not choose that probability; you chose the present probability, but those probabilities have that feeling of brushing shoulders with you. Perhaps you adopted that probability in this life of yours, while you did not adopt the probability of your present event, and that probability brushed shoulders with you. That is what it means.

In the culture that you know, this information has always been unknown to you.

In the past knowledge of humanity, this is something you did not know. You have always been enveloped by this belief.

Your main belief system causes you to feel that your present life is singular.

You think there is only this one life, from birth to death, with no connections.

Unsupported by any knowledge of previous experience of existence, and destined to be cut off or to die without any future.

You are neither supported by past knowledge, nor do you have a future. This is the current cognition of humanity. He says, on the contrary, it is exactly the opposite.

You always carry within you the inner knowledge of countless available futures.

What he emphasizes is that, contrary to your cognition, you always carry within you countless inner knowledges of futures that are available to you. This is an insight he gives us -- about the future.

You certainly know that your emotional life is enriched on certain levels by those unconscious awarenesses.

What is meant by unconscious? It means those probable events from the past or the future that enrich your present event. So when you are in love right now, why are your emotions so abundant and so rich? It is not just this one present event. Your feelings for your boyfriend or girlfriend, or for your beloved, contain within them the feelings you have had for people you have loved across many lifetimes, or across several future lifetimes. They are all contained within it, all connected, more or less. So this is why your feelings are so abundant and so deep. There is a reason for it. Many people do not understand, saying, why do I love this one person alone? I cannot even say what is so good about them, what I love about them, why this feeling is so intense and so deep -- the reason behind it is here.

Those who have loved you in the past or future are connected to you by special ties.

So the person you love is not just the person before your eyes, not merely this person before you. What you love is a condensation, or a projection, or a counterpart, or an object, in this life of yours, of the person you have loved across many lifetimes and future lifetimes. So the Chinese use of "gao duixiang" -- "doing object" -- the word "duixiang," object, is used very well. Object is a very professional term, whether in computing, in software development, in logic, or in many other fields, in mathematics -- object is a very professional term. And look, we Chinese actually use it between boyfriends and girlfriends -- "gao duixiang." So now do you understand what meaning this "object" contains? Because the object may not be a specific person; it is the object of the person you love, it is your object -- it is your projection, the projection of all your love, it is the concretized one.

That adds to your emotional heritage and support.

It adds to you, and at the same time, does it not also add to the other time covers, or the other versions of the event? Or does it add to the feelings of love experienced by other yous in other lifetimes? They add to you, and you add to them. It is such a process.

As many people have supposed, especially in fiction, love relationships do indeed transcend death.

Many people have supposed that love certainly transcends life and death. In ancient China we have The Peony Pavilion¹⁷; if you have read it, you know -- before life, after death, dying and living and dying, this kind of love's transcendence, transcending life and death. The classic film Ghost¹⁸, and many stories that pass through three lives and three worlds, and so on. We humans, or our writers, have depicted many such things. We guessed that love can transcend life and death, and in fact it does transcend life and death. These novels did not guess blindly; these stories were not made up. It really is like this.

And places you in a special kind of communication.

That is, in this kind of communication based on love that transcends space and time.

Even if you become aware of the existence of reincarnation, your present psychological behavior will not be threatened.

He says even if you know about reincarnation, your present psychological behavior will not be threatened. It is not that because of reincarnation, your spirit will collapse or your psyche will collapse.

It can still maintain its prominence, because only at certain intersections of space and time does actual behavior occur.

He says even if you believe in reincarnation, this will not affect your judgment of present matters. You know what the prominent focus of your present is, you know who you love in the present, and you will not, because of reincarnation, wonder whether he is the person from your reincarnation, whether he is the person you agreed to meet in a previous life. This will not affect you, because you know what is important in this life, what is the important thing in this life of yours, what that prominence is. Although you have an awareness that there is a reincarnational effect within it.

However, a somewhat general acceptance of the theory of reincarnation would automatically alter your social systems.

He says when the whole society, when most people have a general acceptance of reincarnation -- not just a few individuals, but the whole society has a general acceptance of reincarnation -- it will change our social systems. If everyone believes in this viewpoint, it will add to the richness of experience, and our experience will become very rich. When you look at the people around you again, your perspective will be different. You will think, perhaps this person is an incarnation of someone I loved in a past life, or perhaps someone I will love in the future -- a collection of all of them.

Particularly embedded with a fresh feeling for the future.

That is, for this matter of yours, for our human time, there are some things you have not experienced, yet through emotional connections, you can connect to the future version of you, at least in the relationship of love. And at this time, it will bring a fresh feeling, because the future, for this present you, has not yet happened, and many things of that era are very fresh to you.

Therefore, you will not feel that your life is a dead end.

Because the future is open. When you can imagine that part of your present emotional experience is connected with your future, you will see life and death more clearly, you will be more detached, you will be less attached to this matter. Why? Because you know you cannot die, because you know your future is connected with you right now, and you also know that there is certainly a future you that exists. So you will know that your life will not enter a dead end; there are many yous.

I have mentioned several times before that we must reach a point where you can see clearly seemingly contradictory information, and this is one of those occasions.

We have now arrived at this point where we need to see clearly that seemingly contradictory information is actually not contradictory. Why is this issue raised? Because if you think about it from a three-dimensional perspective, it will definitely be contradictory, and you will definitely be unable to make it self-consistent. Because later Rob also raised a question: to put it simply, is your life experience determined by your past lives or future lives? Because the things of this life are all drawn from those resource experience storehouses -- whether from the past or future experience storehouses -- does that mean that the things you will experience in this life, at least in major matters, are already determined? For example, if you once had a grand and passionate love affair, then in this life you will certainly experience another version of this event. Does that mean that in this life you will also have a grand and passionate love affair? Then you say yes -- but then where is your free will? Where is the place for your free play in this life? If this one matter is not a small thing, and it can be determined like this, then does that mean other matters are also determined?

But the facts are not like that. You could say it is, and you could also say it is not. So it has both your free will and these time covers -- that is, the existence of different versions of primary events. And they can also be connected through your associations, and they can also be strung together like ribbons through your emotions, your psyche, your feelings. And in this process of stringing together, it often escapes your awareness, escapes your conscious awareness. But that feeling, that sensation, you can feel it.

What does it mean to be able to feel it? I think everyone has had this feeling. For example, a girl meets a boy, and she inexplicably feels a sense of familiarity, and she wants to talk with this person, and she does not know how she got attracted to him. You might say conditions, material things, having a house and a car -- when she goes on blind dates, when she is choosing, she has a set of standards and requirements; this one will not do, that one will not do. But when she meets the right person, she knows immediately. As many girls say: if you ask me to state my standards for a boyfriend, I cannot say them, but once I meet him, I will know immediately that he is the right one. This kind of thing is very hard to explain clearly. You could say it is because he is humorous, because of his speech and manner, because he is knowledgeable -- you could say it is these things, but many times it is not clear, it is not necessarily these things. So here I give you such an example to help you understand.

So at this point, do not ask: is there free will, or is our life all predestined? This question has already been discussed very thoroughly in Liao Fan's Four Lessons¹⁹: if you believe it is predestined, then it is predestined, and your life has an arrangement; if you believe that your life can be decided and changed by you, then your life can be handed over to you to change. Regarding this point, I previously gave a very typical example -- everyone still remembers, right -- it is like you are driving a car, and you are using GPS navigation, but the steering wheel is in your hands. You can listen to it, or you can not listen to it. Use such a rough example to help you understand whether your life is predestined or self-determined, and where free will is actually reflected.

Time cover is a picture presented to you.

Time cover is a different version of a primary event. You can see it as many versions of one event being presented in different space-times. It is a picture in which you have free will; it is not that this version can only be performed in one way.

Yet each time you choose will have its own time version.

What does this mean? Why is it so convoluted? It means that every event you experience is a time cover -- in other words, it is a different aspect of a primary event, it is one of many possible versions, and you experienced it. But within this event, you also have free will. It is one of many possibilities, but it is not that it has been written in stone for you, that you must perform it this way. You have complete free will, and the version of this time cover that you perform according to your free will will have its own time version. What does that mean? It means that this matter also has its own possibilities, and its possibilities in turn become different time covers in other space-times. Do you understand what I mean? And this point seems contradictory; logically speaking it is contradictory, it is self-contradictory, so do not try to explain it clearly with logic. It is inherently contradictory.

These time versions may be completely different from one another. And while you undoubtedly initiate your own time version, there is, in usual terms, no real time and space in which that version can be said to actually begin.

Although you undoubtedly initiate your own time version -- the events you experience in your life are all time versions related to you, and there is also another set of time versions related to another probable you -- yet in your usual understanding, there is no real time and space in which that version can be said to have actually begun.

When you read this, you may feel a bit dizzy. This part is contradictory with what he said earlier; the contradiction is right here. Within this, there is the existence of probabilities, yet there is also an existence that has not actually occurred. But how can it be activated? How can it occur? That depends on when you activate it. The "you" here is not just the present you; to explain this would be very convoluted.

Simply put, let us simplify it as much as possible: in this life you have experienced many events, and each of these events has its corresponding probable versions, and you have, so to speak, activated all the things that happened on this timeline of yours, and to you they seem to have really happened. And those events that did not happen, that did not happen in your time and space, as a kind of probable event, should have happened in other times and spaces. So did they actually happen in those other times and spaces or not? Here he does not say that they did not actually happen. What he says is that there is no real time and space in which that event substantively happened. He emphasizes that there is no such time and space, but he does not emphasize that the thing did not happen. So here it depends on your understanding of "happening." If you insist on looking at it from the angle of time and space, then it did not happen; but if you set aside the limitations of time and space, then did this event happen or not? From the moment this event happened, all of its probable versions had already happened. Where did they happen? Where did they happen? That is the question we ordinary people keep pressing. And if you insist on pressing that question, then in fact your concept of time and space has not yet been broken through, and you are still going around in circles within the limitations of our three-dimensional time and space, which is why you keep asking: then tell me where it happened. You say you still do not understand, you say you get confused here, you do not know what Seth is trying to say. Remember, this is a difficult point.

He said earlier that you have to reach a point where all the places that seem contradictory are no longer contradictory. Now we have reached that point, and I am going to explain to you why contradictory things are not contradictory.

All right, let me try to explain it from another angle. Everything I say is an attempt to help you understand. For example, you experienced something, and at the same time as you experienced that thing, you experienced all the probable versions of that thing, but you did not know it, and you thought you only experienced one version of that thing. For instance, the one event of breaking up with so-and-so, just this one version. Actually there were many possibilities between you and that person: not breaking up, half breaking up and half staying together, still tied to each other, dragging things back and forth, and so on. All these possibilities exist, but for you in the present, you only experienced this one. All right, at the same time as you experienced this one event of breaking up with him, this single event, you actually also experienced many different versions of this event. Among the probable events, let me give a simple example, when you were breaking up with him, you actually also felt what it was like to still be tied to him, you also imagined making up with him, and you also imagined that he changed again, that he came back and begged you, and then you got back together. All these possibilities, I am not saying every one, but at least those scenes that could have happened, you actually experienced them all in the emotional experience of your breakup. Remember, I am talking about the psyche, on the level of your psyche, you experienced all of them. Although you only experienced this one timeline, this one result, this result in the three-dimensional world, of the two of you finally breaking up or getting back together, all those probable things had already been experienced, in your thoughts. Some of them you were aware of, some you were not aware of, but they had an influence on you. Those things that were not realized, that were not experienced, all had an influence on this world of your breakup; they influenced your emotions, influenced your feelings, and gave you many thoughts.

Then the question arises: you ask whether these things that did not happen, that did not happen in your time and space, happened in other times and spaces. That is the question you want to ask. Did they happen? The premise of your asking this question is that you admit, or you firmly believe, that only things that happen in real time and space are real. You overlook one point: what you have experienced, even things experienced in thought, in the psyche, is also a kind of reality, it is also a kind of actuality, it is also a kind of happening. So then Seth says: all right, then we can use the versions that your reincarnational selves, past or future, might have experienced, and explain them to you through a concept called time overlay, or through the idea of different versions of a primary event. It is as if one version also happened in a past life, and one also happened in a future life.

But think about it, can the probable versions of this event happen in your past life and future life? If you insist on clinging to the three-dimensional world, they cannot. Why? Because the you of the past life is no longer the you of now, and the person in the past life who broke up with you is no longer this person now. A you that is not you, and a you that is not your boyfriend, whether the two of them broke up or not, what necessary connection does that have with what you experienced in this life, your breaking up with your current boyfriend? Do you understand what I mean? All right, that is to say, the you of your past life, you were an ancient young lady from a noble family, and then whatever, and those things simply did not exist. Because at that time your parents directly chose a suitable husband for you, without even asking your consent, and they did not even let you meet him. Maybe they just casually asked what you thought of some family's young master, and you did not know either, and then the parents said he was quite good, and you had no choice, and the parents said it was settled, and you got married, so it was impossible for you to have that kind of thing. Right? Even if there was that young lady from the past, a young lady from the Ming dynasty, is she the same person as the you of now? There are many, many problems here.

But do the things that happened at that time have an inner connection with this matter? Yes. That is the magical part. You are able, through those things in your past life or future life, through similar things and the associations and connections between them and this matter, to link them together, and it gives you a feeling. You say, how could I put them together? What is the core here? Association. In other words, if you think there is a connection between them, then there is a connection, because you associated them; if you feel there is no connection, then there is no connection. This is something that seems contradictory and paradoxical and very hard to explain clearly.

This is also why Rob and Jane kept wanting Seth to talk about reincarnation, and Seth actually kept not wanting to talk about this topic, kept not wanting to touch it. You remember very early on, around Session 920 or so, the two of them said it was time to talk about reincarnation, time to talk about reincarnation, but Seth kept delaying and delaying, and never talked about it. Here he finally began to talk about it. Why did he keep delaying? It is because of this concept. If you understand it according to the ordinary person's way of understanding, the moment it is spoken of, the moment you understand it, it will go astray, and it will definitely fall into causality, reincarnation, karma, and all that. You cannot say there are no such influences in the middle, that would be wrong; but if you say there are influences, it will mislead you onto the path of believing there are influences. That is why Seth here again emphasizes: the probable versions of the events you experience in this life did not actually happen in a real time and space; they only happened in your psychic world within this time and space of yours, in the probable psychic activity of your brain. They did not happen in any real time and space.

The reason, I tell you, is this: because in other times and spaces it is no longer you, and the other person is no longer the other person, so it cannot happen in other times and spaces. Unless in other times and spaces there is an exactly identical you, and an exactly identical him. You say, right, that is the probable time and space, that is the parallel time and space, that is the probable self, usually there are countless me's, countless other people, countless whatevers. Yes, yes, what you say exists. But what is he talking about here? Reincarnation. Remember, what he emphasizes here is reincarnation. This and the probable events, the probable events we talked about in The "Unknown" Reality, are not the same thing. Do not confuse them. He is talking about reincarnation, different versions of future and past reincarnational events. How was this point brought up? It was brought up from Jane's dreams, in which she dreamed about some experiences of her 16th-century self, and about the death of her grandfather in this life. It was from there that the concept of time overlay was brought out. Later, in the notes after this session, we will see some records of Jane's dreams, and then the connections between them and her present life, and you will be able to see them, and you will also be able to see their influences.

Let me give a simple example. For instance, do you remember Seth said that Rob once had a life, at some point in the Common Era, in which he was a person who copied the words of sages, copied other people's sayings. In that life he was extremely conservative, and only believed what the sages said. He copied down the famous sayings of the sages one by one, never stepping one inch beyond them, firmly believing that these were all truths, all the transmission of truth, and that he must pass them on. That was the kind of life Rob lived in that life. Then think about what Rob is doing in this life. In this life, apart from painting and such, is not his main work recording what Jane says when she speaks for Seth? Is it not also recording them one by one? The same. Is it not also organizing and publishing them one by one? The same. Does he not also feel that what Seth says is all truth? The same. Now when you think about it, do you not get a bit of a creepy feeling? Do you not feel that thousands of years ago, he said it was in the first century CE, about two thousand years ago, Rob was already copying and copying, willing to copy; and two thousand years later this Rob is still copying and copying, writing and writing, recording other people's words rather than his own. Can such an astonishing resemblance be seen as different versions of a primary event? With an example like this, it is probably a little easier for you to understand.

All right, spend more time contemplating this part. This thing can only be intuited, it cannot be fully conveyed in words. Contemplate it a few more times, and find a hazy feeling, that is enough. If you cannot find it, then give more examples, think of more cases, and then reason it through yourself, just simple reasoning, and then imagine that feeling, put yourself into it, and find that feeling, and that is right. Do not try to truly understand it theoretically; you can only find that feeling, you cannot truly understand it or explain it fully in theory.

Of course, such a time version implies an event occurring in time. Yet that event may leave only a ghostly trace.

Like a ghostly trace, like the things Rob copied. You could say that, because it had almost no concrete manifestation.

While in another life, that time version may be quite prominent.

That is, this version did not manifest in your time version, but in another version it was very prominent. In another time version, although in your own experience it only represented a rather trivial event on an ordinary afternoon, in your case maybe you just went out for afternoon tea, or went shopping, just a very trivial thing, yet those two very trivial things, having afternoon tea and going shopping, might be an important event in another time experience. For example, in another life, because you went shopping you met a person, and this person changed your whole life, becoming your boyfriend or girlfriend; or in the simple act of having afternoon tea, you might have experienced a robbery, a car accident, or very ordinarily none of that, but you might have met another person in a cafe, in a Starbucks. So for you these things did not happen, you just had a cup of tea, just went shopping; but in another probable time and space, that was a key point in time that changed that whole life of yours, a time when a major event happened.

The inner core of the event, however, is maintained by those activities.

Those trivial things seem unimportant, but the inner core of the event, its core, is indeed maintained by those trivial activities. In other words, if you had not gone for afternoon tea, those things would not have happened, right? You would not have met your boyfriend, or would not have met your girlfriend. All of this seems like coincidence, seems like chance, but in the middle there are necessary connections.

A classic example here is a Korean MV from many years ago, I think it was sung by the group KISS²⁰. That MV had a storyline. The storyline was that the male lead went to get his hair washed, and met a girl who washed hair, and the two of them immediately took a liking to each other. Then the boy asked the girl to come out for a photo shoot, and that was how they got to know each other. The boy was a photographer, and the girl was just a girl working in a hair-washing place. After taking the photos, she went to develop them, and the boy was a photographer, and then the two of them fell in love. During one of the times developing photos, the girl's clothes seemed to get dirtied by something, and then she went to change clothes, and while changing clothes she accidentally knocked over a bottle of developing fluid on top of a cabinet, and blinded her eyes, and she lost her sight. After she lost her sight, the male photographer donated his own corneas so that the girl could see again. But then the boy became blind, and in order not to affect the girl, he disappeared, and left on his own. After the girl regained her sight, she could never find the man again. Then many years later, on a bench on a street, she saw a man wearing sunglasses, with a dog. And although he was wearing sunglasses, and although many years had passed, she recognized at a glance that this man was her boyfriend. But the man could not see her, because his eyes had already been transplanted to her. How many coincidences there are in this tragic and beautiful love story: the first time going to the hair-washing place and meeting, the first time he asked the girl out to take photos, getting her clothes dirty and going to change, accidentally blinding her eyes, and so on. All of this, you could say, are very small things, but strung together they are all important turning points in life. The eyes went blind and then were regained, and the man originally had good eyes but then donated them to her. I give this example so that you can understand: the inner core of these events, their core, this primary event, is maintained by these trivial little things. Do not think these little things are unimportant; these seemingly trivial little things are actually just different facets of the primary event.

In all ways, you are provided with an endless source of probable action from the past and the future.

You are now, in all respects, from the probable objects of action of the past and the future, this part he already discussed in The "Unknown" Reality, and from these you compose the actions of your lives and societies. You draw that material from the past and the future, and then obtain the actions of the present.

Again, let me remind you that all time exists simultaneously.

Then Seth says:

Last night, in an experimental dream experience, Ruburt received new evidence by actually seeing portions of two other lives, one in a 16th-century monastery, and one involving his grandfather in this life. Only fragments of environments, yet he was so deeply filled with precious personal possessions, a green bottle, and the beloved person, the priest he loved in the 16th century, and his grandfather, such immediate and vivid feelings.

Although that experience was separated by many reincarnations, it was still a very vivid experience, with very great emotion, so much so that he realized with great shock:

Entire dimensions of existence can so perfectly continue with such detail and depth, and exist simultaneously with his present life.

This is what Jane felt, that those lives are also being experienced, also continuing, and also existing simultaneously, which is why the feeling was so intense. The feeling was so intense, it was as if he could walk from any one of these existences into another. Just like when we dream, in the dream we walk back from the dream into reality. Some dreams are so lifelike, so real that they are almost vivid to an extreme degree, as if you had just come over from another room.

Just as you can walk from one room to another.

The two rooms are two different reincarnational lives of yours, and you can walk from one room to another.

And at other levels of the psyche, he understood that point.

Why did he understand these things? Because those doors of his were open. At our level of the psyche, that door is not open, but at other levels of the psyche, between those reincarnations it is like the doors between rooms, and they are open. But for us they are not open; we do not remember the events of past lives, and we know even less about the events of future lives. But for those other levels of our psyche, these doors of reincarnation are all open.

Then with many pauses, all very enthusiastic.

This is his description of the state in which Seth was transmitting.

Ruburt, however, has particular difficulties with the theory of reincarnation.

Ruburt has particular difficulties with this point, because as it is usually portrayed, people seem to blame reincarnation as the source of present misfortunes, or as an excuse for personal behavior they otherwise cannot understand, and reincarnation has been so maligned. He says that regarding the topic of reincarnation, he has his problems, his difficulties, because reincarnation has been portrayed as: if your life is not going well, you will certainly blame the previous life, which is what we often say, who knows what bad things you did in your previous life, which is why you have such a calamity in this life. When some things in this life cannot be explained, then we say maybe it was something done in a past life. In this way, you have maligned the matter of reincarnation.

Through the time framework that you understand, however, the reality of reincarnation is used to initiate activity, to unify humanity, to reinforce frameworks of knowledge, to transmit information. And perhaps most of all, to reinforce relationships involving love, brotherhood, and cooperation between men and women through the generations. Otherwise, those people would be quite estranged from one another.

Reincarnation has many functions. As I said earlier, the maintenance of your human society is all maintained through reincarnation. What use does reincarnation have for your humanity? It can initiate activities, that is, you will inexplicably want to do certain things, or inexplicably like a certain person, or inexplicably do certain things, and this happens from individuals to societies to nations. These things are all initiated by certain functions of reincarnation. You say, is that not just the theory of causality? Is that not just karma? So here it plays an initiating role. Then it unifies humanity. What does unifying humanity mean? It means that this life of yours is connected to the previous life, and connected to the future. In this way, the next life is connected to the previous life and to the future, linked ring by ring, and the whole history of humanity and the whole civilization of humanity are connected together, like a net. It is not the single-threaded process of development from nothing to something that you imagine; it is not, it is a multi-threaded, net-like, three-dimensional structure. This is the basic current state of human civilization and human society.

So why do I say it is not causality? Because the future also has an influence on it. How can you call that causality? Causality can only be the influence of earlier things on later things, but here future things have an influence on past things or on present things, so you cannot speak of causality. But there is influence, there is influence: it can initiate him, it can reinforce the structure of your knowledge, that is, it can enrich your knowledge, fill in your knowledge, and complete the parts you do not understand; it can transmit information, that is, transmit things you do not know from other reincarnational selves to you. And perhaps most importantly, it establishes connections between people, it establishes connections between people, for example love between men and women, brotherhood, family affection, and also commercial or cooperative relationships, and so on. He says that if it were not for these reincarnational links, then these people, the brothers and sisters, family members and relatives, colleagues and friends, business partners and brothers who were once familiar with one another, would all be quite estranged. The reason they are not estranged is because of this inner reincarnational link within them.

Through such relationships, for example, the caveman communicates with the 20th-century person.

That is, the ancient Peking Man, the people who lived in caves, have a connection with the people of our present era. Although in the strict account of time, humanity seems to have no connection at all with its earlier and later counterparts, according to human time there is no connection, how could that caveman have any connection with us? They died thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. But in actuality, do they have a connection with us? They do. How are they connected? Through this kind of relationship. That is why they know tools, through this kind of behavior.

Maintaining the focus of humanity's overall purpose and intent of value fulfillment.

That is, through these activities initiated by the inner connections of reincarnation, the overall value fulfillment of humanity is maintained, the focus of the purpose and intent of humanity's overall value fulfillment is maintained. So there is such a purpose in the middle of it. That is, the development of the whole of human civilization is like a net-like structure, like a field, like a field domain, and it has its own value fulfillment and purpose and focus of intent, rather than the single-threaded development and evolution for survival alone that we imagine. The direction of the future is also uncertain, what will happen in the future is also uncertain, everything is uncertain, but it is not like that; it is a net-like field structure, if you take the whole of humanity as a whole.

The necessary conditions are then planted in whatever time and space is required.

What are the necessary conditions? For humanity to realize its own overall value fulfillment, to realize such a purpose, it needs certain conditions, right? To realize value fulfillment, these conditions are placed into whatever time and space we have, it does not matter. Remember, planted into whatever time and space is required. Whatever it needs, it places it wherever it is needed. This value fulfillment requires humanity to do such and such things, so it does different things in different periods, and finally realizes the whole value fulfillment. In other words, if today we want to produce this kind of computer chip, with transistors so complex, hundreds of millions of transistors per square millimeter²¹, then such technology had to start from the early Neolithic Age, the Paleolithic Age, from those most primitive tools. Without the creation of tools at that time, there would be no creation of today's transistors; it came step by step. But it is not the kind of step-by-step groping and exploration we imagine, as if aimless, like a headless fly; it is not. To put it bluntly, the whole of humanity clearly knows the direction of its civilization and technology; it is just that in this process of completing its own value fulfillment, in different eras and spaces, it arranges different events into place, he calls it embedding them, planting them, and then these events, according to the development of such a time and space, form an overall value fulfillment.

Take the chip as an example, the span in the middle may be relatively large, or it can be small, it is the same. You say, why could chips not be made directly in ancient times? Why could they not be made right then? Why did they have to be made only at this time? There is a requirement of time and space. The conditions of ancient times could only first produce stone axes, stone hammers, stone knives. You say, then what value fulfillment can those realize? The chip is the value fulfillment, right? But you have misunderstood again; value fulfillment is not the final result, value fulfillment is the whole process, it is the quality of the whole of life. Suppose making chips is our final result and purpose, then from the very beginning of making stones, stone knives and stone axes, that is also one of the necessary processes of making chips. Without those early stone knives and stone axes, without the early period of human civilization, there would be none of the later series of civilizational developments. In other words, without stone knives and stone axes, there would be no chips today. So for those who made stone knives and stone axes, in relation to the value fulfillment of this final completion of the chip, they also know that they played a key role in the middle of it, but it is not the kind of knowing in consciousness that we imagine; it is a knowing at the bottom layer, it is guidance at the bottom layer. The person who made the stone axe would not think of the existence of chips. This is such an overall framework, for the whole of humanity.

Again, in all such adventures, free will still operates.

He calls it an adventure, because he also does not know exactly what the final outcome will be. This is still what he said in the previous session: in his thought he has already thought it through very clearly, but in practice he still has to try it, and constantly correct errors, but it is not that his thought was not clear; he had already thought it through.

Although it now seems that your world has been including more and more information.

Our present world is an information explosion.

Your particular kind of science, however, is quite narrow.

Your information is exploding, but science is becoming narrower and narrower, because it only accepts certain special, speculative areas as valid -- only guessing at those areas that can be verified, that are truly valid, and nothing else is. It is very narrow, and the areas outside its boundaries have become taboo. Science considers all non-scientific fields unworthy of exploration.

So much so that the unknown realm is no longer the mystery of the physical universe and outer space, but the mystery of the inner universe and the mind.

He says those unknown realms -- it is not that we do not understand what is outside, it is that we do not understand what is inside. Because we have always been exploring what is outside, and on the contrary, the true mystery is the mystery of our inner universe and the mind.

Because these are experienced or suspected as existing outside those official areas.

So it has become something truly mysterious, because the official stance does not let you study these things -- there is no explicit prohibition, but its attitude is: this is all pseudoscience.

Science's fear of the unknown is far greater than its fear of religion.

This sentence is very interesting. Science's fear of the unknown -- the unknown refers to our inner self, our psyche, our inner universe -- science's fear of this is far greater than its fear of religion. So today we can advocate for religious freedom, but we still strike down and root out so-called pseudoscience everywhere. Because it is not afraid of religious things, but it is even more afraid of these spiritual things, these deeper explorations of the inner psyche, these studies of consciousness -- it is afraid of all of them. Because for it, it completely does not understand them.

Religion is encumbered by its own concepts of the power of good and evil.

Why is it not afraid of religion? Because religion's own dualistic opposition has encumbered itself, so it cannot go too deep or too far.

But it does not deny the existence of other versions of consciousness.

Religion acknowledges different psychological activities and lives -- religion recognizes all of them.

Of course, reincarnation implies the extension of individual existence beyond a single time period, independent of a physical form, and the transfer or transmission of intelligence through non-physical frameworks. And it implies purposeful action of psychological behavior, memory, and desire without any physical bodily mechanism. That is something science at its current stage of development simply cannot accept. And it also cannot find evidence, because the methods of science automatically exclude the kind of experience that such evidence requires.

These are all simple plain words. Simply put, if reincarnation were acknowledged by science, it would imply one thing: that the physical world is not the only reality, and that we can allow the transmission of consciousness to surpass physical transmission -- that after death consciousness is still transmitted, and the soul still exists -- this is something scientists absolutely cannot accept. They also cannot find evidence, because according to their understanding, according to the standards of evidence they set, none of these can be called evidence. Why? Because they do not consider these to be evidence. Even if you place it right in front of them, it is still not evidence.

Let me give an example. Take reincarnation, for instance. Many people have had reincarnation experiences -- all kinds of children, all kinds of experiences. You can search on YouTube or on websites for reincarnation cases, and there are endless cases, many of them very real and detailed. Scientists have also gone to investigate and verify them, but they just will not acknowledge them. No matter how much evidence you have, they will not acknowledge it, and there is nothing you can do about it. If they will not acknowledge it, what can you do? They call the shots themselves. They represent science, these scientists wear the cloak of science, and if they say they do not acknowledge it, you cannot do anything to them. Why will they not acknowledge it? Because if they acknowledged it, it would mean these scientists would lose their jobs, and everything these scientists insist on would collapse. So they can only grit their teeth and refuse to acknowledge it. Because once they acknowledge it, all the foundational theories they insist on would completely collapse, and what they believe in would even affect their livelihood -- their food, their work, and so on. There are many interests and practical issues involved here. So none of them can acknowledge this matter.

Then, people become very afraid of any personal experience that hints at reincarnational life.

So when anyone talks about reincarnation, the mainstream of society is very afraid, because they are facing the taboo of science -- this is the taboo of science -- or being frightened by distortions from certain religions or fanatical sects.

Therefore you protect yourselves, blocking out the many natural emergences of your own reincarnational existence that would otherwise let you experience it.

You humans, in order to protect yourselves, block out these reincarnational experiences, these experiences, because you are afraid of being abandoned by mainstream society, so you completely screen them out, and therefore you cannot feel many of these reincarnational experiences.

And when under pressure, you often deny the psychological comfort that could otherwise be received.

When you are under pressure, you could actually receive psychological consolation and comfort through these reincarnational experiences. Because in your reincarnations you must have experienced similar things, but because you have excluded the existence of these reincarnational experiences, you deny them entirely, so you also cannot receive that comfort or consolation from the past you or the future you -- they have also encountered similar things -- so you cannot obtain it either.

I do not necessarily mean that the full picture of other existences will necessarily come into your mind.

He says he is not saying that all these reincarnational experiences come flooding into your mind all at once -- no.

But when those who love you in other worlds sense, to some degree, your need for response, you will always receive, to some extent, a support or an emotional change.

He says it is not that those reincarnational images will clearly appear before you, but rather that in your other life, your reincarnational life, if someone loves you and has such a need or call toward you, then in this life, you may have an emotional change, some感应 or some average change, perhaps extremely subtle. Some people are sensitive and can feel it. For example, some people feel inexplicably sad, some people inexplicably have a sense of emotional loss, and many times they cannot say clearly why.

Then, the overall nature of events exists in a different way than you assume.

The overall events are the things we experience one by one. What kind of way does the whole of events exist in? It exists in a way completely different from what we assume -- they are all connected to the past and the future.

Yet only a small portion cuts into the reality you recognize.

Only a small portion enters into our time and space.

Yet underneath, all of it is connected by a vast psychological activity.

Underneath means beneath our consciousness, all of it is connected to a vast psychological activity.

You may compare this event to a physical psychological environment, a psychological resonance beneath the less ordinary scenery.

How do you understand it? You can treat this event as what? As a physical psychological environment, a psychological resonance beneath that less ordinary scenery. What does that mean? It means the reason you experience this event, why do you have to experience this event? Because this event is beneath that level of consciousness, beneath conscious awareness, that vast psychological activity -- it has its scenery, it has its underlying color -- a resonance in that situation. In your reality, it manifests as one event after another. So that vast psychological activity is very crucial. That psychological activity you cannot perceive, the resonance it produces, its associations, the connections between those events -- their resonance in your world manifests as a certain event.

At 9:57, after giving Jane a few lines of personal material, Seth said good night at 10:01. Below are his notes -- he wrote a full 11 notes, and each one is very long. The reason these notes are placed here is also very important, as a supplement to the preceding director and a threading through of the events of these eight months. And why is this threading so important? Because this point in time happens to be when Jane began an important period of transition.

First Note: The Body's Vitality Supports Mental Work

On December 2, 1980²², Jane typed out the following material. She said she had finished revising Jane's God this afternoon and felt it was very important. When she finished, she realized something: how much physical vitality and energy is needed even for work that appears to be sitting still.

A seemingly simple task like sitting there typing or proofreading also requires the body's vitality and energy to support it. Because she had been very uncomfortable -- shifting her weight while sitting, body aches, blurred vision, and so on. But in some new way, she seemed to understand how much seemingly mental work actually depends on the body's vitality and flexibility.

Then the rather intense activity of the writer -- writing a book seems to be just sitting there writing, but it requires the author's physical vitality. That is, sitting down, cutting out impulses, distractions, in order to make sure I will do my work, pursuing my goal without looking aside. That new book contract immediately directed me into that kind of behavior. And I truly understand that when this behavior reaches its extreme, the result will suffocate my writing, defeating the very purpose it seems to want to protect. But I was truly afraid that action and physical activity would divide the work. Now I understand that even for typing, impulse is of great benefit. Imagine typing effortlessly, and seeing things -- just thinking what I am thinking, rather than trying to put my fingers on the correct typewriter keys. I feel as if I have realized something here, and I feel slightly relaxed. Of course, if this is indeed the case, this whole process can quickly be turned toward activity. Tonight I am not writing about the reasons behind this behavior; there are many thoughts, but I did write down something.

Jane said a lot, and she did not fully clarify it either. What she actually wanted to say is: our mental activity is supported by the vitality of the entire body. Without the vitality of the entire body, then the things you think can be done just by using your brain become very difficult to accomplish. This bodily vitality does not mean you must exercise, run, or jump. It refers to an inner vitality.

Second Note: Jane's Mystical Nature

After Jane began to show physical symptoms, Rob said:

Sometimes my awareness of the fact that basically she is a mystic gets buried under many other more practical matters.

What is a mystic? Someone who is psychic, connected to higher sources, and so on -- all of that is called being a mystic. But this aspect of Jane was buried under concrete matters and practical life. Jane was originally a very mystical person, someone who could connect with mysterious information, but her ordinary daily work, including these physical problems, made her seem like just an ordinary person.

Perhaps in this book, I should have placed more emphasis on her nature. During those times, I never took those basic characteristics of hers for granted. Quite the opposite -- I accepted her so easily.

Rob said, although I did not take her qualities for granted, I nevertheless accepted so easily that Jane could have this ability, as if Jane was simply meant to do this. But in fact, what Jane did would be miraculous for any person. Rob did not consciously emphasize that Jane had such a mystical nature.

Yet Rob believed:

Jane's mystical nature, although so alien to most people, actually provided the only true framework for understanding her physical condition, the one she had chosen.

This is the key to understanding Jane -- you must understand Jane's mystical nature. To more traditional people, Jane's ways might sometimes seem incomprehensible. Rob believed that this only showed our lack of understanding of her viewpoint. Ordinary people thought Jane's viewpoint was unreasonable and impossible to understand. Jane felt that this was not a lack of understanding on her part, but rather your lack of understanding of her viewpoint, which is why you found this person impossible to understand.

As a mystic, she may have had motivations to explore certain avenues of the human condition that most of us do not have. We do not have the motivation to be psychic or to investigate the truth of humanity, but Jane did. Her view of basic reality was her own, and Rob said that sometimes he too had to grope in the dark to understand the role she had chosen -- because she was constantly switching roles: writer, mystic, connected with Seth, all kinds of roles.

To actually carry out her approach in practice, as she did, was something I could not do. She sacrificed physical activity in order to have greater creative activity.

Rob said, if I were asked to do this, I could not do it. I could not trade my physical activity for an understanding of the truth. Jane once told Rob:

I told myself that if I let myself do that, then I will do this to compensate.

Jane told Rob, if I am allowed to have psychic abilities, if I am allowed to glimpse the truth of things, then I would rather let my body gradually become restricted, or unable to move. Rob said, one could say that kind of trade is hardly a mystical viewpoint, yet he knew that in her case it was so. Rob did not originally believe that such a trade in life was necessary -- you could be perfectly healthy and still obtain those things, so why would you need to make yourself unhealthy? There was no such requirement. But for Jane, what was real could be quite different from what was real for Rob and for most people. Jane did have her reasons -- when she wanted to obtain these abilities, she had to lose her physical mobility, and she felt this was real.

Jane's nature even led Rob to speculate more than once:

She may actually be visiting our probable reality from a reality that is far more native to her, in terms of a very substantial entity or whole self.

Rob felt that Jane was more like a version of her own greater self or entity, a version closer to her greater self, who had come into our twentieth-century probable reality. Jane was a person who had miraculously shifted realities -- not in the sense of being physically connected to another version of herself, but rather her inner being must have been connected to another version of herself. When Rob mentioned this viewpoint to Jane, she nodded without speaking, nodded in silence.

Jane's task -- to use the word "task" for the moment, though she generally would not use that word -- was to transmit the Seth material. She would give us deeper insight into what humanity has done within the scope of our history, for better or worse, and point out what we can do, opening up unexpected vistas before our eyes, encouraging us to explore realms far more active than we have always assumed. And all of the above is only part of the story, because according to Seth, other versions of Jane exist in many probable realities, and the same is true for each of us.

Third Note: Responsibility and Fear

Rob and Jane were married on December 27, 1954²³. They had no idea that exactly twenty-six years later—that is, in 1980²⁴—Jane would write this piece. Below are excerpts from her 1980 notes, and the words in square brackets were added by Rob.

After twenty-six years of marriage, yesterday Jane was proofreading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events when she felt that the book really disturbed her, that it had a kind of focusing effect. The trouble with her eyes had begun in the same spring that Seth began dictating that book—that is, in 1977, when he began dictating The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. She was writing her book on William James²⁵ at the time, and those people were picketing outside the Prentice Hall²⁶ office in New York City—that is, her publisher's office—because of the Seth material. This series of events had an impact on Jane.

Previously Jane had not noticed this fact: The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events represented a direct attack by Seth and herself on official opinion. By official opinion, she meant the opinion of mainstream society. Actually, he did not attack either, but his viewpoints were a tremendous shock to mainstream society. And before that, one could say they had only done so by inference—they had previously only felt that there might be a certain impact on mainstream society, but they had not expected that when the real impact came, there would still be so many people protesting.

I accept everything in that book, but I feel that if I am to speak truthfully—and I have resolved to do so—then I also need to be more on guard against the world, and begin to cut back on activities.

Jane said, to tell the truth, after that book, I resolved to cut back on my activities, and I began to be on guard against the world. Why be on guard against the world? Because people had begun attacking her—protesting, writing letters, in all sorts of ways. This was something she had never felt before, and now she felt it, so she had to be on guard against the world. So when Seth kept emphasizing earlier that they were protected, this is what he meant—you don't need to worry, you are protected. They even worried whether some protesters might rush into their home and affect their lives, though of course none of that happened.

Jane's thought was this: the muscular pressure in her eyes had deteriorated after reaching a certain point; the pressure was too great. Her thought of being on guard against the world had also returned after reading a book about William James²⁵ that a friend had given her at Christmas. James's attitude was very similar to theirs²⁷—James was determined to bravely explore consciousness, to press forward regardless of everything, yet at the same time he was drawn to safety; he did not want to cause security problems, did not like arguments, and wanted peace. Jane said, I think I am the same way.

Whenever she was particularly worried about the wisdom that the material—the Seth material—presented to the world, Seth's dictation of the book would stop for quite a long period. Whenever Jane worried that Seth's wisdom might have a bad influence on society and the world, she would terminate the transmission of the Seth material. In fact, Seth gave them the Framework 1 and Framework 2 material in the book to help Jane. With Jane's book on God, Rob said she did indeed grasp several times the material there on the psychic sense and on following impulses. Seth was helping her from all sides—Framework 1 being real life, Framework 2 being the spiritual realm—and she also gained many new things, with some very good improvement in symptoms. This was what Rob emphasized in parentheses.

But from the beginning, I have been far more nervous and anxious than Rob about stating many of the concepts directly—that is, many of the concepts of the Seth material, which at the same time I fervently, even passionately, believe in.

Jane said, when I transmit the Seth material, although I believe that the material is good, useful, and true, I am still more nervous and anxious than Rob, because I worry that this material might have a bad influence on society and on the development of humanity as a whole. Because this material comes out of her mouth, while Rob is only a recorder, so her nervousness and anxiety indeed made her more nervous than Rob.

I am afraid that if you go too far, the establishment will kick away your platform.

Jane worried that if she spoke too far, disregarding everyone's feelings, and blurted out the truth all at once, then the whole establishment would give her no space to speak, kick away her platform, and it was even possible that they would eliminate her as a person. Or people would stop buying the books—not buying the books would be one thing, but kicking away the platform so she could not speak was even more frightening.

It is a bit like biting the hand that feeds you—Jane used a vivid metaphor. For example, when we feed a dog, you feed the dog out of good intentions, but if the dog is not careful it will bite your hand off. The Seth material is very good; it is helping humanity, but humanity, like a dog biting the hand that feeds it, might bite the Seth material. You can only say so much; if you say more, it won't work.

Yet I have always known that these concepts conflict with the official ones.

Jane said, in my heart I understand that what I am saying is bound to conflict with the official mainstream. It was just that previously their attacks were less direct—the earlier Seth material did not discuss social issues, did not discuss matters of mass events, and was relatively gentle, only discussing personal growth and personal matters, not so direct. But now that it discusses social issues and social phenomena, the impact on society is much greater, and the attacks are much stronger.

Lately I have been working on thoughts of safety, telling myself and believing that I am safe, and am protected, and am held in care. And I really rely on my natural spontaneity in operation.

Jane said she had recently been thinking about the issue of safety. And she really relied on her spontaneity in operation. Now, as she was writing this piece, some old and clumsy things, emotional things, came into her mind—for example, her mother saying "I destroy those I love," and other such nonsense. When she was writing this piece, the things her mother had said to her surfaced again. Her mother had said that she would surely destroy those who loved her. Then she extended this statement—those readers, or the humanity she loved, she worried that she would destroy them; she even worried that because of her, she might bring bad security-related effects to Rob, and Rob was also someone she loved, and she did not wish that either.

But it seems that all along I have felt that if left undisturbed, my spontaneous self would take away the blankets that give people comfort. And I feel sad about that, even though at the same time I also know that those blankets are full of bugs and must be removed. And I also clearly understand that I am offering something far better.

The "blankets" are a vivid metaphor for those outdated, ill-suited old ideas or old philosophical views and worldviews. Jane said, if I followed my own nature, I would without any regard strip away all those blankets that people rely on to comfort their minds, sweep them all away at once—although I know that my things are better, and that those blankets are already ruined and full of bugs. This is her own inner monologue.

After Rob read her notes, he told her: My dear, but you are doing wonderfully. He was comforting her, telling her not to feel this isolation, that she was doing wonderfully. Rob was happy to encourage her, because Rob believed what he himself said—she really was doing very well. He also said that if she had confusion, that was perfectly understandable—it is very normal for you to have such troubles. Jane was not only offering the world a new way of understanding reality, but in her uncertainty about what she was doing, she felt she had to prove her ideas to the world entirely on her own—something very few people have had to do in such a comprehensive way.

Jane not only had that pressure; she had another pressure: she wanted to prove that the Seth material was good for humanity, but this was something that could not be proven, only a personal feeling and intuition of hers, so she could not prove it to the world. That could only come through readers' feedback—readers gave her a lot of positive feedback, but also a small amount of negative. At the same time, she had to protect herself as a person existing in the three-dimensional world. Because Rob and Jane had both fallen into that disturbing thought—they were both somewhat worried about their safety. Whenever Jane came too close to any kind of basic truth, she automatically threatened the deeply rooted, rigid belief systems that many people had established in our reality, and this was bound to provoke a very strong backlash. Jane could feel this, and Rob could know it too.

Jane felt that her contemporaries often rejected her, and sometimes Rob thought so too. What did that mean? He felt that perhaps only the future could prove the value and significance of the Seth material, and that people of his own era might not yet be able to truly understand its value and significance, so they rejected them. Rob said, with considerable irony, "Consciousness once again explores itself"—this sentence is a bit of humor, meaning consciousness exploring these different possibilities. In this era, insisting on saying something that this era cannot verify—although it might be good for humanity, because you cannot produce proof or make others believe it—this is consciousness exploring one of its own possibilities.

During the sessions in which Jane was transmitting The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, there was once an interruption of nine and a half months²⁸. And in Chapter 9 of this book, from 928 to 931, there was a gap of more than eight months²⁹. So this evidence proves that when Jane touched upon certain core concepts of reality, because she worried about touching off the resistance and opposition within traditional values, she would automatically interrupt for a period of time, to ease up. Then Seth, being very clever, would follow up with some private sessions—because private sessions would not involve group or social belief material, but only discuss their private matters. During the private sessions, Seth would smuggle in some of his own goods, adding in what he wanted to discuss, which was like giving Jane a preventive inoculation—so that she would be less resistant to the concepts he wanted to discuss later.

Fourth Note: Art and Creativity

Jane wrote the material quoted in Note 3 six weeks earlier. And in the spontaneous essay she wrote for the new note, she tried to go beyond that idea once more -- not only by tracing back through her own past, but also by incorporating some of Seth's recent concepts. Note 4 is an upgraded version of Note 3. Note 3 was Jane's own reflective thinking about herself, about the Seth material, and about herself, while Note 4 took it up another level.

On Friday, February 6, Jane received an inspiring book. After reading part of her 1973 notes, she wrote the following passage:

Seth as a primary event -- if Seth is a primary event -- is just as the Mona Lisa is more real than a normal object or thing, than the materials that compose it. In the same way, all good or great art is larger than its own specific manifestation.

Seth is more real. The Mona Lisa is far greater than the frame, the canvas, the paper -- that is what he means.

To think of art as a natural phenomenon of the psyche's construction, a hybrid of perception and consciousness.

If we were to define art: art changes, expands, and stretches the experience of life, and then places it under a different point of view. We often say that art comes from life and rises above life -- that is exactly what this means. It changes and expands the experience of life -- it comes from life -- and yet it places it under a different point of view. If you write art from the viewpoint of conventional life, that is documentary literature, and that is not called art; if you express it in a different way, viewing this life experience from a different point of view, then it becomes art.

Art enters into, embeds itself in new original material, providing new opportunities for creative action and new answers to problems. To confine this creativity of art mainly to solving life's problems, or mainly to channel it in the direction of solving life's problems, is to limit and restrain it -- because you have placed it under an incorrect focus. If you insist on directing creativity toward solving specific problems, then you are being too narrow, because that is not what it is for. We must transcend this narrowness, transcend this restraint, and turn back to emphasizing the sublime aspect of creativity -- rather than its practicality. Otherwise, the Seth material becomes a framework for solving problems. In English it is called troubleshooting -- fixing troubles, repairing life -- no, that is not what the Seth material is for.

I have rejected the projection of all that messy stuff onto Seth's books by others or by myself, assuming that Seth must prove himself to be a problem-solver, or that pragmatism is more important than art.

Jane said, what I dislike most is people projecting all kinds of messy stuff onto Seth's books. What is this messy stuff? It is whether Seth can prove something, whether Seth can prove he has this or that ability, that he has superpowers, that he can solve certain people's problems. For example, a depressed person -- one look from him and the person is cured; a schizophrenic -- one conversation with him and the person is instantly well. Do not always try to make Seth prove himself, or turn him into a problem-solver: you have a problem, so you come ask Seth -- my marriage is unhappy, give me an answer on how to solve it; my career is not going well -- she said this is not what the Seth material or the Seth books are meant to do. If you do this, it is as if you are saying pragmatism is more important than art.

Jane's understanding of the Seth material went up another level:

The larger point of view is that art itself is larger than life. To take it further, art transcends life. Although it springs out of life, the matter of art, the height it involves, has already far exceeded the life of ordinary people.

That is the saying we often use -- art comes from life, but rises above life.

And Seth and my books, simply by being themselves, transcend that.

The Seth material is simply the Seth material being itself; it does not need to do anything extra -- it does not need to solve people's problems, does not need to prove anything -- and it already transcends that life, transcends the difficulties of that life. The Seth material automatically places people in a different, broader psychological space and another frame of reference. In other words, when the realm, breadth, and height of your consciousness have all been raised, the problems troubling you automatically disappear; they are no longer problems, or the problems simply do not apply in that psychological space.

To put it bluntly, your Framework 1 problems are not problems in Framework 2. But you insist, first solve the problems in Framework 1, then I will be convinced; I insist that you enter Framework 2, but first let me see whether you can solve the Framework 1 problems. Seth says, once you enter Framework 2, the Framework 1 problems are solved. You say, no, I do not believe it; first you have to show me how the Framework 1 problems get solved. Seth says, solving them is easy, just enter Framework 2 directly. You say, no, I want to solve them within Framework 1; you solve them for me, I am not entering Framework 2. That is the idea. Jane spent all that time trying to say exactly this.

To achieve that, I must give up the old feeling of responsibility as the primary focus.

Jane said, I must give up the idea of always carrying responsibility on my back, always wanting to solve problems, always wanting to help others. Because these things would put pressure on the structure of the Seth books. If she kept carrying this problem-solving, responsibility-bearing mindset, feeling responsible toward society and toward individuals, then she would be under pressure, and the Seth material would also be under pressure -- because the Seth material is not for solving these problems; it is for letting you enter a higher space of consciousness, for raising the dimension of your consciousness. It is not for letting you solve problems within this dimension of consciousness. Of course it can solve them -- as long as your consciousness rises in dimension, they are all solved; but if you do not rise in dimension, then you cannot solve them either. Therefore, if Jane still carried such a strong sense of responsibility, she would put pressure on the structure of the Seth material.

Why This Session Is Important

In this session, from Seth's perspective, from Rob's perspective, and from Jane's perspective -- although it begins with Jane's physical health, although it starts from this place of protectiveness -- through these different people's perspectives and the expressions from their different levels, he gives you a deeper insight and understanding of the entire Seth material and the entire process by which the Seth material was transmitted. You can understand how they thought: how Seth thought, how Jane thought, how Rob thought. Why the Seth material is the way it is today rather than some other way. All of this, in this session, is given many thorough explanations that he had never given before. So that is why I spend so much time on this session -- actually, these notes and introductions could be skipped entirely, and we could just cover the main text. But understanding this part is very important for our understanding of the Seth material.

Jane said, when she was asked to answer the many reader letters in this book, asking this and asking that -- this was not something the Seth material or she herself should be doing.

Once again, as with the main events, we are dealing with an entirely different framework of action.

The main events are things that do not happen in our time and space. When we deal with those events, we are not dealing with the matters of our own events. In other words, we are dealing with matters in Framework 2, not discussing problems within Framework 1.

There, the Mona Lisa is more real than the physical properties that compose it.

In Framework 2, in that higher realm of artistic creation, the thing behind the Mona Lisa is more important, more important than the painting itself. It is not meant to deny the validity of its materials -- it is not saying the painting is unimportant, nor that the canvas and pigments are unimportant, only that the thing behind it is more important.

But to discuss Seth and his concepts mainly from the framework of right and wrong is the same thing as considering the Mona Lisa only from the validity of the physical properties of the pigments and the canvas.

Using right and wrong, good and bad, to measure the Seth material is like saying the Mona Lisa's canvas is very good, the pigments it used are very good, the framing technique is very good -- you are not discussing art, you are discussing how to mount a painting, how to make and frame a painting. The Seth material is the same. If you insist on using logic, using reason, using right and wrong to discuss the Seth material, that is the same principle as discussing the quality of the Mona Lisa's frame -- extremely, extremely limiting.

I do not need to conform to any standards. I do not need to make the material useful, or prove it useful through my behavior.

Jane said, I do not need to do these things. I do not need to prove it useful, I cannot prove it useful, and I do not need to prove it useful through my behavior -- for example, saying that I transmitted the Seth material and I lived to a hundred, to prove the Seth material is useful. He said there is no need.

For he proves himself by the way creativity transcends the reference plane of right and wrong.

He proved himself through creativity. He does not need to be measured by these worldly standards. Otherwise, truly, if I did not do this, I would be working against myself. So he threw himself into it wholeheartedly, unaffected by worldly opinion, because his understanding of the Seth material had risen to a new level.

Fifth Note: Rob's Love and Trust

This is Rob speaking. Rob often told Jane that if he decided to completely and permanently give up the sessions, he would have no problem with it. At such times, he always thought of whatever would help her -- if you are so torn up about this, it is fine if we do not do the sessions, and it is fine if we do not work on the Seth material.

I have asked him more than once whether he continued the sessions only for my sake. As far as I am concerned, what matters most is not the sessions or any other thing he might be able to do.

Rob said, even if there are no sessions, that is fine, as long as you just live well. If the sessions make you suffer so much, if publishing the books makes your health steadily worse, then let us just stop.

It is his existence that I want to spend the rest of my life with.

Once again, Rob recalled Seth's statement in Chapter Five of Volume One of this book, from Session 899 on February 6, 1980:

But the purpose of your life, and of each life, is in its existence. That existence may include certain actions, but the actions themselves are important only because they spring from the essence of your life. Your life, simply by its existence, will necessarily fulfill its purpose.

To put it simply, you do not need to do anything, you do not need to prove anything; your mere existence has already fulfilled the purpose of your life. Rob placed this passage here precisely to tell Jane: even if you do nothing at all, you still have value, you still have meaning, and you have still accomplished your value fulfillment. You do not have to do this thing.

Sixth Note: Jane's Own Choice

But Jane actually did not think this way. Seth continued in the session of February 27, 1980, saying:

The only other times there have been any such difficulties also involved responsibility -- that is, when he concentrated upon his responsibility for these sessions, that is, when he focused upon the need for function and usefulness, and separated that from the other subjects involved. Then such feelings could for a while override his natural inclination, his natural joy and excitement, with which he would otherwise regard our sessions.

What does this mean? Normally, Jane would treat the sessions with joy and excitement, using that kind of mood to explore life, to explore the truth. But once responsibility was attached to it -- the need to transmit the material, to leave this material behind as useful information to help the development of human society or to help other individuals -- she became anxious, and she suppressed the joy and excitement she should naturally have had. Her mood changed. When she truly focused on need, function, and usefulness, she suppressed her own nature -- and her nature should have been joyful and excited.

Seth said that Jane would not have held the sessions for this long for your sake, or mainly for your sake -- and not just these seventeen years. Seth said, do not flatter yourself; Jane did not hold these sessions for you. These sessions were bound to gradually diminish -- Seth of course knew that later her body was already failing, and by the time of The Way Toward Health, in the later period a session would be very, very short, often just two or three paragraphs.

You do have a large role to play, however, and I will speak more clearly about that, about your role, and about some of your own attitudes that you can at times misinterpret. Nothing, however, would have kept him at the sessions for so long unless he wanted to hold them.

Rob, do not talk about Jane yet -- you still have a large role to play. You have a different role, but not this one. You have misunderstood your role. Jane did not transmit the Seth material because she loved you. Jane transmitted the Seth material because she enjoyed it -- it is that simple. Because in the process of transmitting, she was excited, she was delighted, she was happy. Of course she had her points of entanglement, her sense of responsibility -- as already mentioned earlier -- but as long as she set aside that sense of responsibility, she would automatically return to her excitement and joy. Seth's comments of February 17 also reflected Jane's own thinking, as she had written eleven days earlier, see Note 4.

Seventh Note: Nightmares and Insight

When Jane had these very revelatory experiences, she often woke Rob, and each time Rob tried to comfort her. Rob said, note how she expressed it from the power of her early religious training -- she attended church school in her early years -- and from another angle of religion's fear of unknown forces. Religion has always feared unknown things, and this affected Jane. Even now, in her pursuit of knowledge, she still has to deal with those factors -- the fear of unknown events, which is a continuation of the religious influence from her childhood.

Jane wrote in her notes, March 8, 1981³⁰, which was Women's Day, a Sunday morning, written by Jane herself:

A part of me simply did not want to face this material -- the Seth material. But last night I had one of the strangest and quite frightening experiences, made all the stranger because there were so few real events to evaluate.

Very soon after we went to bed, I found myself in a nightmare-type experience -- one that was very vivid emotionally, but with no real storyline. Many people have had this kind of experience: they know they had a nightmare, and the emotions in the nightmare were very clear, very distinct, but the dream itself they cannot remember. They do not know what happened, but the fear, the terrible emotions brought by the dream, still linger. With no plot, she found it even stranger.

Jane said, I only know it involved the following things: a childhood fairy tale -- she could not remember the specifics -- and a toy like one from my childhood, named Susie, a lovable stuffed cat doll, and one of my favorite cat dolls. In any case, it was mainly the story, and I could not remember the story, I could not figure out the connection to the story. I only know I woke up crying. In the dream it was so terrifying that she woke up crying, her body aching. She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down the following connections from her feelings at that moment -- this passage was all written down right after she had just woken from the nightmare, just after crying herself awake, an intuition that arose from the dream, very important.

The whole world and its organizations are organized by means of certain stories -- like the Roman Catholic Church -- organized in the manner of stories.

This was a unique insight of hers, a very meaningful insight. The insight was this: the whole world and the various organizations of this world are all organized and held together through the manner of stories.

To try to see through those stories, or to examine the truth within them, is a terribly dangerous thing to do.

She said, if you want to see through this story, through this surface appearance, to explore the truth within, that is far too dangerous a thing. Why? Because you cannot obtain the truth, because it is a story, it is not real.

And there are all kinds of silences and taboos to keep us from doing so, because on the other side there is an incomprehensible, terrifying, chaotic, malevolent etymology.

Behind the story, there is an incomprehensible, terrifying, malevolent, chaotic etymology -- this is what mainstream society tells us: do not explore the truth behind it.

To question those stories threatens not only personal survival, but also the structure of reality as we know it.

They made up a story for you, and you had better just believe the story and play along with them. If you insist on questioning the story, if you insist on exposing the truth behind the story, then sorry, even your personal survival may be in jeopardy, because you are going against the entire system.

So excommunication is a punishment -- meaning not only banishment, but the complete isolation of that person from those belief systems, leaving them with no barrier, no shield between themselves and those terrifying realities.

In that era, being excommunicated was very dangerous, because you were isolated. The mainstream view at that time was: what the Church taught was orthodox, and anything outside the Church was darkness, was the devil. You insist on exploring those things -- the Church told you a fairy tale, you refuse to listen, you insist on asking what lies behind the fairy tale, what the real world is, and then the Church tells you those are all dangerous, terrifying unknown forces.

No one can organize a framework of meaning within it.

You cannot organize anything meaningful, because the whole thing is unknown, chaotic, uncertain, terrifying forces. You cannot live a meaningful life within that, because you can only live meaningfully within the framework of the Church. This is what the curse really means -- the main meaning of excommunication is that you can no longer organize a meaningful life. Even if you yourself think it is meaningful, or you have your own beliefs, the whole society considers you cast out of mainstream society, and no matter how you live your life, it no longer has any meaning, because you have been separated from mainstream society.

So seeking truth is the most dangerous well-intentioned act.

Is seeking truth in itself good? Yes, but it is very dangerous, it is the most dangerous well-intentioned act.

The retribution must be swift and precise.

This was Jane's insight after waking from the nightmare. Her insight was: the whole of society and its organizations are completed and maintained by stories, like fairy tales. They clearly know the truth but pretend not to, clearly know what the truth is, yet they insist on telling you stories, and you still have to believe the stories. If you say you do not believe the story, if you say this is a story and there is truth behind it, and you insist on exploring the truth, then they excommunicate you, expel you from society, make your life meaningless, and leave you to fend for yourself. So the retribution must be swift and precise.

Jane also said:

I do not remember the events connected with the nightmare that caused these feelings, but I was at the same time under attack by a psychological force.

She could not remember the events, but she had an impression of this attack, that it was an attack by a psychological force.

It wanted me to understand the danger of such a course.

What course? It was what Jane is doing now -- just like the feeling in her nightmare, you are always speaking these truths through Seth, and it is actually very dangerous, extremely dangerous, you will be cast out by mainstream society.

When she went back to sleep, the whole thing happened again -- she dreamed again. At one point she thought there was the name of a fairy tale appearing in the air in huge letters. The difference this time from the last was that she could roughly make out something, as if she could see the name of the fairy tale, but still could not see it. And the meaning of this dream was also that beyond the known order provided by these stories, there are violent forces opposed to human existence -- it reminded her of the old idea of Pandora's box.

Jane connected all of this to three things. First, the night before last she had seen a movie on television, in which the hero finally saw through the gods of his people -- tore off his mask and saw his true nature. Second, Rob had found a rag doll in the backyard one day and brought it in, perhaps brought in by a dog, its right arm missing, but the doll reminded her of her old Susie. Third, yesterday she had read part of a review of a book about death.

The book was based on the idea of nature being opposed to humanity, and religion being humanity's attempt to operate within that unsafe realm.

The theme of that book was based on nature and humanity being opposed to each other -- nature is everywhere opposed to humanity. And religion is an attempt by humanity to operate within that unsafe realm. When humanity is in opposition to nature, it is certainly unsafe, nature is everywhere opposed to humanity, and religion can play a protective role in this.

Jane's feeling went even deeper:

I felt that religion, science, or whatever, is not trying to discover truth, but precisely does not want to do so, and instead substitutes satisfying stories for truth.

She said, whether it is religion or science or anything else, it does not want to explore truth, it wants to cover up truth, it wants to replace truth with a more satisfying story. For example, science uses the Big Bang theory to give people an explanation for the origin of the universe, religion uses creationism to say God created the world, so people stop asking further. But are these the truth? If you ask a child -- a child who has not been harmed by traditional culture, a relatively young child who has not yet been influenced by these things -- if you ask them how the universe came to be, how humans came to be, these core questions, you cannot answer them. In other words, the stories you made up can only fool those who no longer have the ability to think independently. With this statement, Jane again offended how many people.

And Jane's assumption was:

If a person persists long enough -- persists in seeking truth -- they will find the holes in the story, and destroy the entire story structure.

What is the meaning of the story? It is to keep you from contacting the truth. So they make up a story, and you just believe the story, do not keep asking about the truth. Why do you ask about the truth? They tell you the truth is too terrifying. The characters in the story, in their own way, do this for people -- who are the characters in the story? For example, God, Jesus. You ask about the truth of the world and the universe, he knows, he did it for you, so you do not need to ask. Science is the same, Newton, Einstein, they understand it, that is enough, you do not need to understand, he figured it out for you, with your IQ, with your intelligence, you cannot figure it out. Religion says your level of cultivation is not enough, your realm is not enough, you cannot figure it out. Why is it that you cannot figure it out? Why is it that they can? They tell you your IQ is not enough, your cultivation is not enough either, so it is perfectly normal that you cannot figure it out, and you just believe it -- my cultivation is not enough, my wisdom is not enough, my IQ is not enough, so whether from science or religion, I am not qualified to contact the truth. You accept it by default, and this default acceptance is the most terrifying thing -- you accept by default that you cannot contact the truth.

Like the Buddha, he penetrated the truth, so you do not need to penetrate it, and you cannot penetrate it either. He will tell you -- although this goes against the Buddha's original intent, because what the Buddha penetrated was that everyone can become a Buddha, Buddha-nature is inherent in every person -- but then he in turn emphasizes that the Buddha only appeared after countless eons of cultivation, and the implication is that you cannot do it, he can, which is completely opposite to the Buddha's original intent. But he is also embarrassed to directly deny the Buddha's meaning, so he uses all kinds of stories about the Buddha, all kinds of rumors, all kinds of hearsay that cannot be verified at all, to tell you that the Buddha is a figure who only appears once in millions of years, you cannot do it but he can. But he does not dare say it directly, because what the Buddha realized was that everyone can become a Buddha, Buddha-nature is inherent, every person already has it, no cultivation needed, no meditation needed, no sitting in meditation needed, no forty-nine days needed, no opening this chakra or that chakra, no great or small heavenly circulation, no alchemical methods. You already have it inherently, what do you need these things for? But religion is not like that, religion tells you no, you cannot, your realm is nowhere near enough.

So Jane inadvertently realized this point, through the feeling and experience of this dream.

And if you continue to explore truth, you threaten the delicate organizational structure that makes life bearable.

If you continue to explore, you threaten the entire structure. What is the delicate organizational structure? It is this story system, or our social mainstream, the main body of our current social civilization. Life can be accepted here -- accepted without seeking truth, accepted without seeking the truth -- but living happily within this delicate structure is enough. And if you explore truth, you threaten this structure, this organizational structure, you make people very uncomfortable, you make life seem to be in a kind of danger. So everyone within the entire organizational structure rises up against you, because you are breaking this organizational structure, you are taking away people's comfort zone -- their intellectual comfort zone, their spiritual comfort zone. You force people to have to explore the truth, because before they could just listen to stories, identify with the story, accept the story, and everything was fine, no responsibility of their own, no pressure, living very happily, because the work of exploration was handed over to others -- to scientists, to religious leaders, to eminent monks and great masters. I do not need to do these things, I can just live my own little life. But when you poke through this structure, then it becomes that everyone must explore their own inner world inward, everyone must seek such a truth. And those people are not willing to do that!

The Eighth Note: Seth on the History of Religion

On the evening of March 11, 1981, Seth said in one of his private sessions:

I do not want to go into the history of a culture in detail here, but historically your organizations have largely been built upon your religious concepts, and those ideas were indeed extremely rigid.

Seth said that your culture is built upon religion, and those religious ideas are extremely rigid. For example, in the Middle Ages, the oppressive nature of Christian thought is widely known -- everyone knows this -- it was very repressive. Religious artistic expression itself was considered extremely suspect, and art was suppressed at that time. Why did the Renaissance come later? The Renaissance was a revival of the content of ancient Rome, where a hundred flowers bloomed, with no religious restrictions whatsoever. And in the thousand years in between, Western civilization had a medieval dark age, and during that thousand years nothing creative was allowed, including art -- it was all suppressed.

Why did the medieval religion of that period consider art suspect?

Because if it spilled beyond the accepted truths -- and of course, especially if it led others to take action against those truths -- to some degree, the same kind of policy is still reflected in your present society. Although science and the state itself may have replaced the church as the voice of authority.

The authority of the medieval church suppressed art, because art would lead people to challenge the so-called truths of religion -- these truths were not allowed to be challenged, not allowed to be questioned, not allowed to be asked why. But artistic creation would bring about this possibility, because art itself is creative, it is not about following the rules. Artistic creation itself is about breaking all kinds of limits. All right, you break all kinds of limits, and you let people's thinking have this kind of creative idea, so if I can create in art, then I can also challenge other questions, I can explore what human beings are really about, right? Then you are no longer restricted by the church's rules and regulations, and your thinking becomes active. He did not want your thinking to be active, he did not want you to have ideas.

And now society no longer has the church, no longer has the darkness of the Middle Ages, but the present state and the present scientific establishment play a role similar to that of the medieval church -- dressing themselves up as authority, restricting everyone who disagrees with them, just like the medieval church. Think about it: saying this is tantamount to criticizing all states and all mainstream society and all of the scientific establishment. Who would tolerate you? But there is no way around it -- this is the fact. So Seth said it, and Jane transmitted it. So why did Jane have such concerns, why did she have such pressure, why did she consider her own safety, why did she think about protection -- because these views really are at odds with mainstream society, and they even carry a strong aggressiveness. As Jane said, although it has no aggressiveness, when others hear it, it is the most powerful aggressiveness.

Behind this kind of thinking, what is the essential point of Christian doctrine -- or at least one of its essential points? It is that the human being on earth is a sinful creature.

Human beings are born loving to commit sins and make mistakes, and they must be kept under control. In that respect, his natural expression must be closely watched. Human beings cannot express themselves naturally at will, because human beings are sinful; as long as a person is not controlled, he will do bad things and make mistakes. Human desires must also be restrained, just like livestock that must be fitted with a halter. The church, science, and the state are all like the halter and reins put on livestock, so that you cannot speak or act freely at will, because he assumes by default that as long as you speak and act spontaneously and develop according to your own nature, you will certainly do bad things. This is an inner idea of religion -- he is mainly referring to Christianity, not Buddhism, and he is referring to Western society. Here again it is mentioned that he is discussing this within Western society.

It had to be channeled into official forms.

You must stay consistent with the official line; if you are not consistent, then it is very dangerous.

And beyond that boundary lay, especially in the past, the very uncomfortable realm of heresy.

In the past, anything beyond the church was heresy and heretics. The punishment for heretics was extremely terrible -- either they were not accepted by mainstream society, or even exiled, and in serious cases they could be executed and sentenced; there were religious tribunals at that time. Even now in many Islamic countries there are still religious tribunals; they are not the kind of courts we ordinarily understand, they are religious tribunals that directly declare you guilty and directly put you to death.

In the Middle Ages, excommunication was no small matter -- in medieval times, it was quite a severing affair. It touched upon both aspects of soul and body, with all the political, religious, and economic conditions held together by the two.

In that period, being excommunicated was almost the same as being killed. Politics, religion, and economics all strangled you. Many people depended on the church for their livelihood. And in terms of reincarnation, the millions upon millions of people alive today were familiar with this situation at that time -- most people of that era made their living through the church. And people of this present era, according to the earlier discussion of reincarnation, you remember? You would have similar experiences and feelings. The experiences of those who lived in the Middle Ages and reincarnated would also have an influence on people living today. Our history and our culture are connected; they are a whole. That is why the religions we have today still control people's thinking.

Convents and monasteries were long-standing social and religious institutions. And others were only nominally religious in orientation.

These two are the most typical religious places. But there is a long history of conflict between creative thinking, heresy, and excommunication -- or worse, death.

All of these factors are contained to some degree in the structure of Ruburt's nightmare material.

The process of religion in history -- including creative thinking, heresy, heretics, excommunication, and being put to death, and the conflicts among them -- has a very long historical period. During such a long historical period, those who reincarnated within it would all be affected to some degree. And Jane's dream was one of the results of that influence. Seth is talking about her dream here -- why she had such a terrifying dream, although she did not remember the plot of the story, she still had a deep memory of the fear from that dream. And regarding the insight after the dream -- the passage Jane wrote after waking from that nightmare, with all that anger and criticism toward religion -- Seth told her that this was the reason.

For Ruburt as a child, the church was quite real. Through the priests who often came to Ruburt's home, through direct contact with the church elementary school, and through the support the church provided to single-parent families without a father or mother. Ruburt's very early poem -- he angered a priest named Father Poe, who was both a priest and his teacher. This Father Poe burned the books about the fall of Rome.

After Jane read this book, she wrote a poem, which was actually a rebellion against religion. Then after the priest read this poem, he became very angry, and he went to Jane's home and burned all these books in the backyard in front of her.

So Ruburt had more than just a hypothetical feeling about such issues.

Jane's experience of religious intimidation, psychological attack, or this kind of ideological imprisonment or persecution was not just theoretical knowledge; she was deeply harmed by it, when she was very young, in her childhood. So Jane's feeling about this was real, although she forgot it after she grew up -- just as if you were asked now to recall what you experienced at age seven, you cannot remember it; you can only remember some general outlines, but you cannot remember specifically who scolded you or who disciplined you at age seven, yet in the bottom layer of your thinking, it leaves an imprint. Much of what was in Jane's nightmare was formed in this way, so she could not remember the specific events, but she remembered the feeling.

Of course, many of his fears existed long before the sessions began -- long before Seth came to tell him this material -- and long before he realized that there were viable paths between traditional religious belief and complete distrust of divinity.

What does complete distrust of divinity mean? It means science, it means atheism. Long before Jane neither believed in religion nor believed in atheistic science -- she believed that between these two, between religion and atheistic science, there were other possibilities -- long before Jane realized this, she already had this fear, and it had already taken root in her heart.

Ruburt became afraid that if he went too far, he would find that he had flung himself into a realm where both questions and answers were meaningless.

Jane was very afraid of going too far herself, afraid of putting herself into a realm where questions and answers were both meaningless. Doing that was one thing, but she felt that bringing others along with her would be unforgivable. She felt it did not matter if she did it herself, but she should not bring others into it, especially not Rob.

And within that framework of fear, as his work became more widely known, he became even more cautious.

Within this theoretical system of his, the more widely known his work became, the more afraid and cautious he became.

Of course, the entire structure of fear was built upon the belief in a sinful self, and in the sinful nature of one's own expression.

Which two beliefs? First, that the self is sinful; second, that what one is now expressing is also sinful. She generated fear based on these two beliefs.

Outside of that category, those fears had no complete rationale at all.

Beyond the two views Jane accepted -- that the self is sinful and that one's own expression is sinful -- these things, these fears, simply cannot hold up.

Broadly speaking, over the generations, the church ruled through the use of fear far more than through the use of love; this is a fact. Do not assume that the church is all about love. Much of the time, in most periods, the church spread its religion through intimidation and fear. Of course, now it does not dare to use coercive methods, but it still frightens you -- if you do not believe in me, you will go to hell; all who believe in me will have eternal life. This statement itself carries a strong sense of threat, curse, and intimidation.

It was precisely in the realm of artistic expression that inspiration could most quickly leap over the dogmatic frameworks of religion that were being employed at the time.

Because artistic expression could pass through the strong and strict framework of religion -- because the church also needed art, needed all kinds of murals and paintings in the churches; it needed art itself. But because art itself has creativity, it was not bound by these constraints, so it was equivalent to opening a window.

The church understood quite well the political nature of spiritual material of any kind.

This sentence is very important; be sure to pay attention to it.

The Struggle Between Church and Art

They understand everything, but he insists on making up stories for you, same principle. What he is saying is: the Church understood very well the political nature of all kinds of inspirational material. Inspirational material, not spiritual material, includes the artistic, the creative, the artist's — as long as it is inspirational, creative stuff, the Church was very sensitive to the political intent of art.

You might say, what political intent could art have? How could art be like that? Then you have misunderstood, you really have misunderstood. Art itself can bring about the expansion and activation of our thinking, which is why in the early days we held the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, remember? Our country ideologically, the United States ideologically, other countries ideologically, all have their own tendencies and guidance. So here the Church, it was more sensitive than anyone, it knew better than anyone that this kind of inspirational, artistic creation could actually bring about political change. So it understood this political nature very clearly.

The Church understood quite well the political nature of inspirational material of any kind. (Session 931)

Even as a child, as a teenager like Ruburt, writing a poem like that, just an artistic creation, the Church could not allow it, it had to be strangled directly, punished quickly and precisely.

Ruburt understood very well that such religious structures had served their purpose, and his poetry provided a channel through which, as he matured, he could express his own views. After he grew up, after his teenage years, he wrote out his views on religion through poetry. Actually he was very clear about it. But religion did not allow him — the Church at that time could not accept a teenage child expressing his own creativity, even in the form of poetry.

A Small Convent in the Sixteenth Century

Seth shifted gears and mentioned that particular reincarnation of his. In sixteenth-century France³¹, he did indeed found a small convent -- what he said was actually another dream, that is, he dreamed of that lifetime of his in the sixteenth century. Seth said:

In sixteenth-century France, he did indeed found a small convent. (Session 931)

And for many years, he had always loved that man -- the man he met in the dream. Five days earlier he had dreamed of a man, a priest. At that time he was a nun, and he fell in love with a priest. That love was never fulfilled; they did not truly have a romance, but they had mutual admiration and affection for each other, and feelings arose between them. Yet the love on both sides was very passionate and enduring -- although in that lifetime the love never came to fruition, the love itself was extremely lasting and fervent.

Even at that time, Ruburt had considerable objections to the doctrines of the Church. In the sixteenth century, that Ruburt already had objections to the Church's doctrines. And the rules actually practiced by that convent were later considered to contain the seeds of a heresy -- the rules of the convent he founded already contained the seeds of heretical doctrine, which was a provocation and a challenge to the Church of that time.

When Ruburt became an old woman, she was forced to leave the convent she had founded. She was also exiled, and she left with a few nuns who had likewise been exiled, and in the end she starved to death.

That was an era when unconventional modes of thought and unconventional expression could be fatal. In that era, if you voiced non-mainstream views, it was not like now, where people just criticize you or re-educate you -- back then it was directly fatal.

Even so, you can see that Ruburt in that era also dared to challenge that authority. So you might wonder, why does he still engage in spreading the Seth material in this era? Is there not a great deal of similarity in between? That is, what was discussed earlier about reincarnation -- this Session 931, is its main text about reincarnation? Think again: is this kind of overlapping of time not utterly wondrous? The different versions behind one major event -- Ruburt in the sixteenth century and Ruburt in the twentieth century, the things they did seem utterly unrelated, but is the core of the inner event not very much alike?

A Reminder Through Two Dreams

The names Normandy and Abelard³² came into Ruburt's mind. This dream was meant to remind Ruburt of those connections, but also to remind him that even his life in that time was enriched by an enduring love relationship. The dream told him: even under the harsh, dreary, religious repression of that medieval sixteenth century, he still had his rich love, and his emotional life enriched his whole existence. Although their love bore no fruit, it still enriched his life.

These two people often corresponded, that is, he and the priest, and they also met frequently, and in their own way, they conspired to change some of the terrible practices of church policy that were nevertheless maintained as proper. The two of them consulted together and conspired to change some of the church's practices. So they founded a small convent, flying the banner of the church while actually opposing the church, but in the end they were discovered and expelled from the church and from the convent. But this was a shared interest of the two of them.

Through this matter you can see, the things Rob has done in this life, this role, and the things between Ruburt and the priest in the sixteenth century, are there not many inner connections between them? Are they not very similar? So in this life Rob also stood firmly by Ruburt's side.

That dream represented his maternal grandfather, symbolically permitting him to return to the past of this life, to a time when he was very severely frightened. Ruburt had two dreams, one of his sixteenth-century self, and one of his self in this life, but from the early part of his life, when his grandfather died, which happened when Ruburt was nineteen years old.

At that time he began to replace religious faith with scientific belief. At that time he no longer believed in religion; he believed in science. Then he wondered whether his grandfather's consciousness would accordingly fall back into a state of nothingness. Because he no longer believed in religion, he believed in science, and science says that when a person dies, they simply vanish into nothing. He was wondering whether his grandfather, having died like that, would fall into chaos, as science seemed to imply.

In the dream, his grandfather survived, and his grandfather was wearing a suit that was too large, which meant that his grandfather still had room to grow. He was interpreting Jane's dream for her.

Ruburt also had a small experience of hearing speech in his mind. Yesterday when he was dreaming, or at some ordinary moment, someone was speaking in his mind, a comforting voice, and that was all he could remember; he did not know what it specifically said. Quite legitimate help received from the souls of others connected with the French past life, in sixteenth-century France, a kind of comfort given to him by people of that era, and it came because of the French dream. You see, the dream from that era, that scene, was brought over to this side through the dream.

Then he said, Ruburt still needs Rob's affirmation. He said to Rob: he still needs your affirmation, and when he feels frustrated, let you know.

The Priest Who Burned Books in the Backyard

The following is from Rob:

From Jane's personal past, I could add a great deal of material to supplement the excerpts from the sessions above, and perhaps the two of us can explore those intriguing connections in a later book. But for now I will only point out one thing: that priest burned his books in his own backyard, in Jane's backyard, and in the most explicit way handed that growing girl the message: he had to protect his natural abilities and his inquiring mind from the interference of the institution with which he most strongly identified (the Roman Catholic Church).

That priest burned her books in Jane's backyard, and in the mind of a girl who was not yet of age, it formed this kind of belief: I must protect the things that are naturally mine, such as the poems I write and my creativity. I must protect them well. I cannot let the church, let that institution, interfere with them or influence them. So later he resolutely withdrew from the church school and cut all ties with religion — by that time he had already made up his mind.

The Ins and Outs of the Guilty Self

Then comes Seth's private session on the evening of Wednesday, April 15, 1981:

As a young man, Ruburt found great comfort in the church. For if the church created an image of a guilty self among its members, it certainly also provided a stable system for dealing with it -- a series of rituals that gave the individual some sense of hope. As in most Christian frameworks, there was the feeling that the guilty self could be redeemed by adhering to certain portions of Christian doctrine.

He is saying that when Ruburt was young, when he joined the church as a child, first he accepted the church's viewpoint: that people are sinful. But the church also provided a series of rituals, such as baptism, hymn singing, Mass, and other religious ceremonies, telling you that as long as you participate in these rituals, your sins can be washed clean, and after you die you can go to heaven and be redeemed. That is how it was.

But when Ruburt later left the church, his concept of the guilty self remained. His belief in his own guilty self was still there, but the system he had previously used to release the pressure was no longer effective.

Because once he left the church, that sense of ritual was gone. Without the sense of ritual, he still believed he was sinful. So the church's ritualistic sense that had been used to alleviate his guilt, the rituals that could bring him redemption, were gone, and his concepts were then transferred to the scientific version of the defective self. Because he believed in science, but science had no rituals.

Therefore, the only way he dealt with this sense of guilt involved standard psychoanalytic counseling³³. "Counseling" is a term used in Taiwan, meaning a psychological counselor. He went to see a psychological counselor, and the psychological counselor himself deepened this kind of predicament. Why? Because the psychological counselor himself was built on the concept that the inner self is a storehouse of savage impulses. In that era, psychological counselors, influenced by Freud, believed that the inner nature of human beings is savage and impulsive, that you cannot trust your own inner self -- that the inner self is very dangerous, and the subconscious is very frightening.

You see, this was even more frightening. Jane already felt she was sinful, and when she was young, the church's sense of ritual could alleviate this guilt. After she reached adolescence and young adulthood, she left the church and believed in science, and science would say, well, if you have problems, go ask a psychological counselor, go see a psychologist. And psychological counseling was built on the idea that your inner self is unreliable -- so this made Jane even more frightened, even more afraid.

Ruburt's creative nature had long since begun to sense that human existence at least involved other deeper realities. Some of these were difficult to separate out: leaving the church, for example, meant still carrying some of the old beliefs, but without the protective support that had previously been provided.

A bandage, like a cast put on a broken bone, or something that protects the neck, or something like a Band-Aid -- you no longer had the thing that protected you. The church could still provide some ritualistic protection, at least psychologically.

Actually, from childhood onward, he had sought in a very natural way for a larger framework that could offer an explanation of reality and that was at least somewhat similar to the natural viewpoint of his best poetry. From a very young age, Jane knew that he wanted to find the kind of artistic conception depicted in his poetry, and he believed that this thing was a larger framework of reality. He wanted to find the meeting point between the two -- to find the meeting point between this larger reality and the poetry. That is why he always insisted that he was a poet.

I have said before that many creative, gifted people die young to some extent because their great creative gifts cannot find a clear space in which to grow. They become stifled by the cultural beliefs of their time.

Seth says that the reason many gifted people die young is that their creativity has no space to survive, that they are not tolerated by their era, and are stifled by the cultural beliefs of their time.

We can see many examples of this, right? For instance, the most famous one we know is the poetry of Haizi, right? "Facing the sea, with spring flowers blossoming³⁴," these lines we know by heart; "Riding the dream as a horse," these are all Haizi's poems. He could write poetry like this in his twenties, yet he took his own life at an early age. Of course there were many reasons, but one of them is what Seth points out: he was not tolerated by his era.

The Creativity of Breakthrough

Ruburt's creativity has always struggled for his own growth and value fulfillment. The recognition and enlightenment of his psyche represented a remarkable breakthrough, meant to give him extra psychic space. He kept struggling, kept seeking to expand his psychic space, kept breaking through, so as to give his own psychic growth greater room, not to be confined, protecting the continued development of his natural abilities.

The idea of the sinful self is, for each person who holds it, a personal idea. But of course, they also project it outward onto the entire human race.

Although everyone feels that the sin of their own sinful self is ever-changing and different—for example, Zhang San feels that his gluttony is sinful, Li Si feels that being ugly is sinful, Wang Wu feels that his lustfulness is sinful, Zhao Liu feels that his craving for pleasure is sinful—everyone will have a different perception of their own sinful self. But he says, each person's sinful self is projected outward, becoming a collective belief that all of humanity feels itself sinful, until the whole world seems to be colored by it as well. The entire human society will believe that humanity is sinful.

Ruburt's creativity broke through; Ruburt was not suppressed. Look at how creative he is—painting, writing poetry, writing novels, and also transmitting this material through Seth—how many things has he done?

In providing our sessions, this breakthrough is the greatest, and it released those psychic abilities that had previously been almost suppressed—yet not completely suppressed.

In the early period they were suppressed, but they were not successfully suppressed.

His poetry was in some ways stimulating, perhaps with some exaggeration, from a certain angle perhaps with some exaggeration, but it was stimulating. Yet you might say that the breakthrough was a life-saving thing.

That breakthrough was a life-saving thing. Because without some such expansion, Ruburt might have felt unable to continue that particular kind of existence of his. This sentence is very weighty; this was life-saving. If he had not broken through—if his creativity had not broken through, if he had not transmitted the Seth material, if he had not found a larger space in which to exercise his psychological creativity—he might have ended his life. The word he used is very veiled: Ruburt would have felt unable to continue that particular kind of existence of his—that is, he would have died.

The Uniqueness of Value Fulfillment

It is impossible to say in words what one person or another seeks in life, or which materials can best enhance his growth and development.

It cannot be said in words. If you asked Jane herself, what is the purpose of your life, what is the meaning of your life, she could not say it either. But she knows it inwardly.

Even two plants of the same species sometimes require entirely different care.

Seth says two pots of flowers of the same variety, you would think they should be the same — they are not. The water they are given, the fertilizer, the light, all differ, even if they are the same variety. Seth's point is that even two plants are not the same, so how can you say there is anything common in the development and value fulfillment of two people? There is nothing common at all; it is all particularity, individuality.

These sessions, then, opened the doors to a natural, specific kind of value fulfillment for Ruburt's being.

Seth says through these sessions, Ruburt was enabled to achieve his own value fulfillment; the door was opened for him.

To some extent, that poor unhappy guilty self — a psychological structure formed of beliefs and feelings — also sought its own salvation. For even it exceeded the framework that so defined it.

His guilty self, because Jane's creative self kept struggling, kept breaking through, kept creating, was also lifted along with it, and transcended the framework that had limited it. So his guilty self was also elevated.

Value Fulfillment Denied

I have said this before, and this is still Seth speaking: In almost every case of serious dissatisfaction and illness, the reason behind it will not necessarily be found or expressed in buried hatred or aggression (if these may exist), but in the expression of value fulfillment that has been denied for some reason.

This sentence is very important; mark it first. What he means is this: if we see in a specific person this kind of phenomenon—this person is seriously dissatisfied with his present situation, including being dissatisfied with himself, with his present situation, with the surrounding environment, or this person has a serious illness—the reason behind these two phenomena will not necessarily be found in their hidden or buried hatred, or in aggression. Some people have deep hatred or aggression toward their father or mother in their family of origin, which leads to a great deal of dissatisfaction with their present situation in adulthood, including feeling worthless, insecure, and so on.

Then our ordinary psychology will look for an explanation and say: this is your family of origin, and so on. Why is this passage important? Seth, in one sentence, points out the real reason behind it: it is not the hatred toward his parents when he was a child, not their aggression. Because many of these people have very strong aggression; if you observe them you will find—I am referring specifically to this type of person, but not only to this type—their aggression is very strong. Some women have very strong aggression toward men, and conversely some men have very strong aggression toward women. You go study their aggression, study their hatred. Of course, this aggression and hatred may also have been hidden by them; in some cases it is not expressed.

He says the cause does not lie here; you cannot find their cause in this. So what is their cause? Their cause is mostly that their value fulfillment has been denied—for some reason, their value fulfillment has been negated. This reason is not fixed; each person is different, with a thousand faces.

You all should pay attention to this point. So if value fulfillment is not expressed, it is very frightening. In mild cases, it will produce changes in mood, or the dissatisfaction and illness we see—these are outer manifestations; in severe cases, if value fulfillment cannot be carried out, the person will commit suicide. Therefore every person should remove the restrictions that limit the expression of value fulfillment, so that he can truly begin to express himself and actualize himself.

The Dilemma

Ruburt broke through both psychically and creatively. These sessions almost immediately provided him with innovative creative inspiration and expression.

So this course was innovative enough, because it was entirely the expansion that the human mind, and psychologically, needed, and it could help him fulfill his future as a writer and as a mature person.

Ruburt's psychological needs and his demands for creativity were completely satisfied by these sessions.

But he still had beliefs in a guilty self, and he carried many deep fears within him. He felt that self-expression itself, as well as spontaneity, was extremely dangerous.

This had not yet been completely removed. As far as that goes, Ruburt had what could be called a creative dilemma: on the one hand, in terms of creative content, he could create without any restraint, but on the other hand, the guilty self worried that being too creative was dangerous.

To say that the dilemma was unfortunate is one thing, but to say that the dilemma existed because at that time it gave Ruburt what could be called a breakthrough into a new life is also true.

This dilemma, you could say it was a dilemma, and that would not be wrong, but from another angle, it was also a driving force for Ruburt to gain a new life. Because within this dilemma, Ruburt was bound to be very uncomfortable and very distressed, and he had to find a solution within this dilemma. Once he broke through this dilemma, it represented a new birth for Ruburt.

Rob's Spine Tingled

Since 17 years ago, the following is Rob speaking, since these Seth material sessions began in December 1963, this was the first time I felt a chill down my spine when Seth relayed a sentence, because at the time he said:

Without the expansion of these sessions, Ruburt would have felt unable to continue that particular kind of existence of his.

He said it was a kind of lifesaving -- creativity was lifesaving for Ruburt. He said I think he must have meant that Ruburt or Jane might have chosen to die. After the session I did not bring this question up with Jane. The next day, when he read the session content I had already typed up, he did not seem to have that kind of reaction either.

We talked about several geniuses who died young, who died prematurely. Indeed, we often wondered, if such people had chosen to continue living, what further contributions would they have made? The common saying easily says that those premature deaths were a waste, that they should have been able to contribute more to humanity. But now it is said that this is not from the viewpoint of the individuals I am involved with --

Great variations of motive, intent, and purpose must be operating, but each person has accomplished what he could within this probable reality, and then left.

What they mean is that those brilliant people who died very young -- ordinary people consider it a loss, a pity, that they could not be tolerated by their era. But now the two of them believe it is because this person accomplished what he could do in this era, and even if he wanted to do more, he could not do it, so he chose to leave. This is a realization the two of them had. Then they said the Seth material is especially good -- that goes without saying.

Rob's Own Associations

This session also triggered my own process of association several times. Rob began thinking to himself: I almost immediately recalled something Seth had said the previous evening, on August 14 -- I think it should be July 14, I believe this is a typo -- he discussed my usual attitude toward religion, and in particular talked about my own guilty self.

Then Seth said the following to Rob:

He said it is no coincidence that you are relatively unaffected by that concept in its traditional religious sense. In your life as Nebene, you largely resolved that problem, and you yourself prepared for the life you have now taken on.

He said you are not bound by this limitation. What concept in traditional religious terms? The guilty self. He said you are not affected by this guilty self -- this concept has a great influence on Jane, but not on you. This is no coincidence. Why are you not affected? Because in your life as Nebene you largely resolved that problem, and you prepared for this present life.

You see, these two things led to Rob not being greatly influenced by the guilty self -- you cannot say not at all, only that he was not greatly influenced, not as enormously as Jane was. So we can say that in one particular lifetime we resolve many of life's sticking points and problems, and this actually helps us across many reincarnational lives, because we will no longer face the same difficulties. Jane had never gotten past this hurdle of the guilty self, from that sixteenth-century reincarnation onward, as we have seen. But Rob did not have this problem, because he resolved it in that lifetime.

Seven and a half years ago, this is Rob's own writing, Seth mentioned a version of myself living in first-century Rome. So Joseph was Nebene, a scholar:

He did not dare take risks, did not like taking risks, he was obsessed with copying ancient truths, and was afraid of creative errors, and was authoritative and harsh.

He feared sexual contact, did not touch women, and he educated the children of wealthy Romans. That was his life as Nebene. In Volume 2 of The "Unknown" Reality, in the session of November 25, 1974:

You could say I am still obsessed with truth. For example, when I record the Seth material, only now I call it timeless rather than ancient or new material.

Because the Seth material is timeless. Then Seth pointed out directly: what you are doing is very much like what you did in the first century A.D. Back then you treated that as truth, and you copied it line by line; today you treat what I, Seth, say as truth, and you also copy it line by line.

However, obviously because of my concern for Jane, this is Rob speaking for himself, I recalled a session he gave for Chapter 7 of this book. After checking, I found it was Session 911 of April 28, 1980:

It was incredible that Seth had given that session almost fifteen months earlier. He was mainly discussing a person's choice of genetic defects before birth. But to me, part of his material easily brought Jane's situation to mind.

Seth was discussing a general topic: how a person chooses his genes before birth, and why some people would choose to be born with defective genes. This excerpt is from Session 911:

Although I admit many will not agree with what I say, I know from my experience that most people do not choose one happy life after another, forever dwelling in sound bodies, gifted by nature or heredity with everything that most people seem to think they desire.

Seth said not all people will choose healthy and happy lives again and again.

Each person pursues value fulfillment, and that means they choose lives in such a way that all their abilities and talents are developed as much as possible, and in such a way that their world is also enriched.

Some people will deliberately choose defective bodies in order to focus more intensely on other areas -- this is something we have discussed before. They want a different kind of focus. Such a choice requires an intensification, one that will help both the individual and the parents.

To put it simply, some people are born anencephalic, which is a genetic defect and disability. But this anencephalic infant prompted his family to communicate with him in non-rational ways, through emotion and telepathy, an ability that could not have been acquired any other way.

I saw in the group that some friends mentioned evidence of this, saying they had a friend who is Japanese, and her son had this kind of congenital illness, and her son later passed away -- indeed he died from the illness. But this Japanese woman can communicate fully with other people even when they do not share a language, which is truly amazing. Because she developed an ability to see into people's hearts, whether you call it telepathy, or intuition, or inspiration, she can communicate with people directly. And this ability was brought to her by her son. You could call it a gift, or you could call it an intensification.

The Moment of Entering the Womb

Let us continue. Rob said:

And at least for me, the reincarnational dimension behind our present joint situation was reinforced by a third association. And that association came from Session 874, published on August 22, 1979. Jane had completed the first session of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events a week earlier. When I discovered the following statement by Seth, I felt a distinct jolt, because I had completely forgotten it.

That is the following passage, which Rob had completely forgotten. Seth said:

For example, Jane entered her fetus at about three months of age, and accepted that fetus as a new life, using it as a vehicle, and so forth. You waited longer. You did not enter at three months; you entered only when the fetus was quite large.

He said Jane entered the womb when the fetus was about three months old. Rob waited longer, and entered only when the fetus was quite large.

I do not remember Jane ever mentioning this piece of information. She indeed never asked Seth to elaborate on it, and I never asked Seth to speak about it either. Incidentally, that was one of the few times Seth called her Jane rather than Ruburt.

You see, Seth usually calls Jane Ruburt, but in this passage he did not. He called her Jane. Why? Because this was Jane's present life.

So when Jane entered the womb, she entered at three months of fetal age, while Rob had to wait a long time before entering.

I took those associations to mean that regardless of the focus of her evolution in this present life, my response to her situation should be as aware as her own response. And even though I had resolved religious issues in past lives, in this life I still chose to share with her a probable reality in which her physical symptoms were so inextricably bound up with religious themes. That may be, but at the same time I reminded myself that her great creativity had found expression no matter what.

Rob means: Jane chose this life. Regardless of how she would evolve later, her response to her present situation should be one of awareness. When Jane chose this fetus at three months, she also chose her mother, and chose the environment and background of her birth — in fact, she had already chosen the major events she would experience in this life. He said Jane was actually fully aware of these things.

He said that for himself, although he had gotten past the religious issue, that is, the issue of the sinful self, he had not entirely gotten past it. You see, he and Jane still chose to become husband and wife, and to go through the deterioration of her body together. She herself still had this strong belief in the sinful self, and was even so deeply entangled with religion. Although he did not have the religious problem, he was still drawn into such a turbulent reality.

He said:

What Seth said on April 15, that conflicts like Jane's often arise from the unrewarded pursuit of a gifted individual's value fulfillment, even ending in early death — that premise is at least understood on a conscious level.

Simply put, whether Jane or anyone else, their early death is known to them on a conscious level. So Jane knew, on a subconscious level, that she would pass away four years later, or three years later.

I had suspected for some time whether something like this was also operating in Jane's case. Not that she pathologically refused to recover, even with all the help Seth and I tried to give her, and even asked for. But in this particular life, the deepest part of her being had other goals, rather than moving forward together with her physical self and her bodily symptoms.

What Rob has been saying all along is this: in the deepest part of Jane's being, why did she not seek medical treatment? Why did things come to such a state? In fact, Jane knew all along. Even the deepest inner part of Jane wanted this very outcome. This was something he had suspected all along. He did not dare ask, and he did not say it out loud, but he had always suspected it.

I was beginning to feel that without such an idea, it would be difficult to understand my wife's long-term challenge.

He said if it were not for this, he could not understand why his wife Jane chose such a path, such a way of dealing with her body.

Otherwise, I think, when faced with whatever drastic negative events are occurring, the afflicted person is all too often left with that great big question mark — why?

You would certainly ask, why did this happen? And those who suffer along with the sufferer also receive, in their own lives, fatefully unsatisfactory answers.

He said those who suffer along with her also get unsatisfactory answers themselves: why did this happen? Why do we have to go through this? Right? His point is that there is only one explanation: she wanted to experience this.

To seek answers within the narrow frame of reference provided by conventional views of reality is, so to speak, to peer through an opaque window into the depths of the personality.

If you insist on looking for answers within the three-dimensional world, asking why Jane's body ended up like this, he said it is like looking through a gauze curtain at what is inside a window — you simply cannot see it; it is all hazy. What he has been trying to say all along is this: Jane's inner self had already decided what she was going to do and how she was going to do it. That is why she was so stubborn about not seeing a doctor, not seeking medical treatment, and that is why things turned out this way, this way, this way, this way. This is Rob's own feeling.

Rob's Inner Monologue

The following is what Seth said, in this private session on June 22, 1981:

He said that the rapport and love between the two of you is sufficient to withstand the natural expression of any aggression or hatred from either of you. As mentioned earlier, because of Ruburt's condition, he has often feared being abandoned. In his view, it seemed as though he did not offer what most men expect from a woman.

He does not have a lot of feminine qualities in him. You can tell from looking at photos or videos of the two of them -- this is a genuine inner reaction, and Seth pointed it out to him. He felt that in a male-female relationship, many of his own traits would be considered disadvantageous; this was his perception of himself.

After Jane heard Seth finish that passage, the following is what Rob said:

I very much wanted to type up the session, to print it out, so that I could lodge the strongest possible protest against Jane's poor evaluation of herself.

Rob said, I wanted to lodge the strongest possible protest: that is not true, you are very feminine, I love you very much. But I did not -- Rob said, I did not do that. Why did he not do it? Later Rob will explain. Quite the opposite: later, after I put my rough statement into words, he wrote a rough statement, and besides expressing my love for Jane, that statement also revealed other churning emotions.

Very interesting. He said:

I should take a little time here to explain that Seth had mentioned this situation of Jane's before, and he had also mentioned it. I have never had any such feeling. Because from the very beginning of our relationship, I have always found it very difficult to be certain -- remember, the phrase here is "very difficult to be certain" -- that Jane was the ideal mate.

This passage is very important and very subtle. From the very beginning of our relationship, Rob said, I never truly and finally confirmed that Jane was my most ideal mate -- this is the truth he is telling.

An achievement I would consider most fortunate, that is, if a person finds the ideal mate, that would be the most fortunate achievement. A thing I never dreamed I could accomplish.

That is, he did not feel he could find the ideal mate; he did not even dare to imagine it. So this is his view of Jane.

When I look back, looking back over their twenty-six years of marriage, our meeting and staying together seem like the most natural and most inevitable thing in the world, as if it were simply natural and as it should be, that the two of them should be together. How could I make all of this any better? It could not be better; this is already the best match made in heaven. I have always been extremely proud of Jane's abilities and achievements, and very glad to have taken part in them. What makes me upset and nearly heartbroken is the fact that, as the years pass, I see her in such an increasingly worsening physical condition. What is especially astonishing is that this material explains that this is not the only path, that there are other possibilities. No wonder I told him that we paid too high a price for our achievements.

Of course I would like to see her move about like other people, to be able to see Jane regain normal mobility, and also to have her own achievements. Why must such achievements be accompanied by such suffering? Why must she endure this kind of physical torment? It should not be so; this is his thought. So far things have not resolved that way; they have not turned out that way.

Inevitably, this has had a profound effect on my feelings, her feelings, and our relationship.

He does not say it explicitly, but you can imagine. You can imagine: with a Jane like this, with her body in such a state, then the physical intimacy between them, their married life, must no longer be possible, and in fact it must have become very discordant quite early on. Under these circumstances, because Jane's body was already that ill, how could it possibly be otherwise? So did this have an effect on their relationship? Of course it did. Did it have an effect on the two of them? Of course it did.

So that earlier statement of his -- that he had never been certain whether Jane was the ideal mate -- is his genuine reaction. Because the ideal mate in his mind should not be like this; the ideal mate should be someone who can dance, sing, speak, and move about like a normal person, not a Jane like this. Of course he also said earlier that regarding Jane's achievements and Jane's creativity, there is nothing to argue about; I admire her enormously, and I am honored to have taken part. But I do not think she should have to suffer such physical torment; I do not think that achieving such things should necessarily come with such a body -- this is what I am unwilling to accept.

Then he goes on to say:

He said I have always regarded our relationship as everlasting, and even now I still consider our relationship to be everlasting.

Remember, it is regarded as everlasting. But remember the distinction here: their relationship can be everlasting; this is something Rob firmly believes, without the slightest doubt. But he does not consider Jane to be his ideal mate. And this is also why he did not write those words out in the earlier notes, and then lodge a strong protest and refutation, rebutting all the ways she belittled herself -- because he also felt that part of it was true, and therefore he had no way to deceive himself and refute it with a clear conscience. He reveals this reason; this is a very genuine inner monologue.

Why is this session so important? In this session, whether it is the guilty self jumping out to rebut and dissect the guilty self, or Rob expressing himself in the process -- because we have not covered much of the material in the early sessions or the private sessions, you can only catch glimpses through these passages of the relationship between the husband and wife, and of their differing perceptions and views of the Seth material.

The Guilty Self Explained

Note 11. We held that class on the evening of June 18, which was the second day after Jane began recording the material on her guilty self.

The main issues with which the guilty self is concerned are most clearly gathered together in The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events and in Jane's God. Seth told us that, because they represent a more direct confrontation than the other books — both of these books are direct challenges to conventional ideas, attacking the very legitimacy of the entire concept of sin and evil.

Because in the Seth material, his treatment of the law of sin, including this reading of the guilt of wrongdoers, is completely opposite to conventional ideas.

Even more dramatically, it emphasizes that man's basic impulses are good.

This is dramatic, and many mainstream viewpoints do not accept it.

Ruburt's explanation of the guilty self represents a fascinating psychological document in that regard, and it also shows the self's mobility and its willingness to learn and to change.

The guilty self at that time was a psychological document expressed very clearly, because he felt that challenging the whole of society in that way was not good.

Once that intention had been stated as a position, he also wanted to learn, he also wanted to change.

Why? Because once the concept of sin and punishment was negated, the guilty self's very position or idea was also challenged. Since the whole issue of sin and evil no longer existed, the guilty self would also cease to exist. So why did Jane still hold on to such a deep belief in a guilty self? Therefore, what is said here is that Jane actually also wanted to improve, to learn, to break through, to cast off the concept of sin and punishment, but she had not completely cast it off.

It might be helpful to have Ruburt ask the guilty self, inwardly, to discuss how his beliefs about women are united with his ideas about sin, and whether those attitudes are changing.

This is Seth's suggestion. Here Seth points out with piercing accuracy: in fact, regarding the idea that women are inherently sinful, there is a very core belief involved. That guilt is not guilt in the usual sense — it is the idea that women ought to be beautiful, and if one is not beautiful, is that not a sin? Are all unattractive women in the world therefore sinful? That is what he means. Jane felt that she was not beautiful, that she had no feminine charm, that her figure was not good, her personality was not good, her appearance was not good, her voice was not good — she felt she had none of the virtues of a woman.

Therefore, Seth says, why not ask Jane about her views on women, which can help sort out the underlying beliefs of the guilty self. Including what was said earlier in Note 10, she felt she ought to please Rob, that she ought to handle their relationship with great care. Otherwise, if it was not handled well, Rob might — because she had no feminine charm to begin with, and then if her temper was also bad, and if they were to divorce — Jane was afraid of being abandoned. That is the viewpoint involved.

The Lack of a Sense of Security

Note 12. Earlier in the opening remarks of this session, I mentioned the unhealthy relationship between Jane and her mother Mary. Now I think the following is what Seth said:

I would like now to place the material on the sinful self in a larger context. Ideally, the infant is closely connected with the parents -- particularly the mother, but also the father -- because the infant is also closely connected with the general ideas of society. This suggests a sense of security, in which the child can then feel free enough and curious enough to explore the world and the nature of reality.

What he means is that, for an infant, a close connection with the parents also means a close connection with society. If the child can get a sense of security from the parents, it means the child can get a sense of security from society. And if the child can get a sense of security from society, then the child can more confidently and boldly explore this unknown world.

And this example shows that when Jane was little, she did not get a sense of security from her mother, so she also had no sense of security regarding society, and therefore she was guarded toward society. That is perfectly normal.

You are social creatures, and for that reason you fear being abandoned. Because you are meant to develop individually while also interacting with others, and that interaction has given your established civilization its particular characteristics.

What does this mean? We humans need interaction, and it is this interaction that has formed today's human civilization. Without this kind of interaction, there would be no such human civilization. In other words, we are social animals, and this social way of living has built today's human civilized society -- this is the particular characteristic of the civilized society we have already established, this is our defining trait. So once you are abandoned by society, once you are abandoned by the mainstream of society, your suffering is extreme, worse than death. Because that is simply your nature, that is your defining trait.

Now for much of the time, Ruburt's family was a single-parent family, and he did not feel secure in that relationship. And speaking of that preselected situation, there was a great deal of leeway within that intimate nature.

Ruburt chose this himself before incarnating. But within this intimate relationship (meaning the relationship between infant and parents), there is a great deal of leeway. For some people, the connection is so secure -- their relationship with their parents is very secure, very close, very safe -- that it provides an overall, fairly permanent inner and outer structure. A child from such a family will be given an overall, fairly permanent inner and outer structure. But Ruburt clearly did not have that, because his relationship with his mother did not provide him with any sense of security, and a single-parent family was even more lacking in a certain sense of security.

Ruburt's relationship with his mother was quite unsatisfactory, and that relationship failed to give him that important sense of security.

So as parents, the first thing we give our children is a sense of security. It is not "if you do this I will like you, if you do that I will not like you"; "if you do this I will think you are a good child, my good little darling, but if you do poorly in school I will not like you" -- that kind of thing makes a child feel insecure. If the child cannot get a sense of security from you, then the child will have no sense of security regarding society, and this insecurity will accompany the child for life.

And feeling that threat of abandonment, he had very strong connections with religious and cultural beliefs, to make up for that initial lack.

The material on the sinful self represented those concepts that were strong elements in his original belief structure.

That is, in his very early period, the sinful self was a very important part of him.

That troublesome material remained in a dormant state, and did not disappear. Not until his curiosity and his abilities led him to actively challenge those concepts.

Not until he had this ability, and his curiosity began to explore.

At the same time he was also in a situation in which natural fears of abandonment might be aroused. At certain points, the absorption of new information was so different in nature from the original belief structure that, in order to absorb the new information, the personality had at one point to stand between two belief systems.

What he is saying is that, in dealing with the sinful self and the creative self, Jane often stood between two personalities. The point at which this happened was, of course, internal. What he referred to earlier was this material -- this material had an effect on them.

So what effect did this material actually have? It had nothing to do with the quality of the material -- perhaps it did, but it had to do with its nature. What does that mean? It had nothing to do with whether the content transmitted by this material was truth, how much truth it contained, how good or bad it was. But it had to do with the nature of the material itself -- what kind of nature? If this material represented something creative, something that broke through limitations, or even something about truth, then whether what it said was right or wrong did not matter, whether it was good or bad did not matter. As long as it was material of this nature, it would trigger her dilemma.

Every society, or for that matter every system of knowledge, has its own built-in taboos, and these largely imply abandonment by the community.

Every society has its own cultural taboos, knowledge taboos, and belief taboos. If you touch these taboos, then you are essentially touching the bottom line of the entire community.

But no matter how angry the parents got at any time, a firm relationship with the parents implied that the child would not be abandoned.

It is fine for parents to get angry; it is fine for parents to scold or even hit the child. But you must never say "I don't want you anymore, I am abandoning you, you are not my child" -- do not say such things, because the impact on the child is enormous.

Ruburt in particular remembered his mother using such sentences as: "I hereby sever the mother-daughter relationship with you," and "You are hereby disinherited" -- though his mother had nothing much to inherit -- "I no longer acknowledge you as my daughter."

This situation increased Ruburt's sense of insecurity, yet it also strengthened Ruburt's sense of independence. Everything has two sides. Because he did not have to feel dependent on his mother -- which otherwise he might have felt; he was forced into it. Because his mother severed relations with him from an early age and often said such things, he knew from an early age: I must be independent, I cannot depend on my mother, and I could not depend on her anyway.

The old intimate relationship, however, would one day have to be faced, because it simply could not sustain the new one.

The old intimate relationship with his mother, which he had wanted to escape and did not want to face -- that would not work, because he had to face it. Why? Because if he did not face the relationship between himself and his mother, then when he established a new intimate relationship with Rob, that old intimate relationship would be unable to sustain the new one. Because that old intimate relationship was built on distrust and the constant possibility of abandonment, and now that he was going to establish a new intimate relationship with Rob, he would carry over that pattern -- if he did not deal with it properly.

This is also why many children, when their relationship with their parents is not handled well, will also have problems in their marriages, because they will not handle those well either. Why? Because the relationship with their parents is the first, or the most fundamental, intimate relationship, and they did not handle it well. Of course the responsibility was not theirs -- at that time they were still infants. But they will carry that sense of insecurity, that sense of uncertainty, that need for constant promises from others, which came from the pattern of that unhandled intimate relationship, into the new intimate relationship, and at that point problems easily arise. So it must be faced; if it is not faced, the new one cannot be sustained, and problems will come.

Untangling the Guilty Self

A greater understanding of that framework:

So the concept of the so-called guilty self represents several layers of activity.

This guilty self of his represents many layers—from the very bottom all the way to the very surface, he has been active throughout, not just moving at the core layer.

Some of the troublesome aspects of one of the belief structures shared by millions of people in your society, and by certain layers of Ruburt's personality.

His guilty self is actually a very common phenomenon. People like Ruburt or anyone else can have this kind of belief. It is a widespread belief structure.

He is now trying to digest a larger structure, to become connected with a higher context of knowledge.

Ruburt is also making progress now. He is casting off the old and connecting with a larger structure of knowledge.

Once that old belief is understood—remember, not judged, but understood—they will not consider themselves shameful, or feel ashamed or blamed.

That is, once you know and recognize "so I had this kind of belief," that is enough. It is not that this belief is wrong. There is no right or wrong about it. It is just that you need to understand what effect and influence this old belief has had on you. Once you have this recognition—this acknowledged recognition—this problem of his, the matter of the guilty self, is resolved.

His idea of wanting to do a project on the magical approach is very good, because he has established a new concentration and focus. He has given Jane a new focus, and begun to make contact with a new structure of knowledge.

Jane's Dream

Note 13. Jane's previous experience with reincarnation-type dreams, private session of March 11, 1981. The following is what he hastily typed for his journal today, followed by Jane's dream. Wednesday, July 15, 1981:

Last night, or rather this morning -- this just happened, because today is July 15 -- I had a most extraordinary dream, extremely vivid while it was happening, and I felt it was quite important, yet now I can barely remember it. It involved the wonderful television film about reincarnation that we watched last night. In the dream I thought I was considering writing a book based on that film, a sequel, but I was also watching one (or two) of my own reincarnational lives.

He watched a television drama before bed, about reincarnation, and he was thinking about writing a sequel to it. That was Jane's thought. In the dream he felt he was writing a sequel, but it seemed what he was writing was not a sequel to that television drama -- what he was feeling and experiencing in the dream, or what he thought he was writing, was one or two of his own reincarnational lives. Amazing, right?

Thinking about how the belief in reincarnation opens up feelings of the future in the present.

How can the belief in reincarnation open up feelings of the future in the present? How can that future self travel back to the present, so that you can feel that sense of the future?

I was learning how, while alive in this life and not yet dead, to visit those future lives -- which are still in progress -- or past lives, and I think those were ones I longed for. I also had a road, and scenery from other selves of the past, which I also wanted to paint. A deeply meaningful green bottle, people I loved dearly, he wanted to paint all of it, and I may well have involved Rob.

These dearly loved people may also have involved Rob. There were many people I have completely forgotten, people I loved in particular lives -- who always support you in certain ways. People you loved in your other reincarnations will always support you.

We were infected by the time Seth mentioned in his recent dictation -- layer upon layer of overlays. Rhythmic overlays of time occur when various anniversaries or deeply meaningful times in a given life overlap.

He said these rhythmic overlays of time refer to anniversaries, birthdays, and such -- different anniversaries within a life. For example, Christmas -- every year's Christmas, last year's Christmas, the year before's Christmas -- he layers these events one on top of another. Every anniversary, every birthday, every celebration of theirs, wedding anniversaries, and so on, these overlap the events, intensify them, and bring them temporarily closer together.

Like a meteor, it brings past events -- for example, a birthday from ten years ago -- to you when you celebrate your birthday today. Even though ten years have passed, he means "closer" in this sense. A meteor is a comet, which can travel across different planets, and at those times the exchange or passage between them becomes especially easy. At those times they can be connected, linking together all your birthdays.

Part of my illness comes from fear of the unknown. Once I realize that I am gifted in that direction, and certain friends I have made here represent loving relationships from reincarnational sources, that provides present support -- if I accept it.

What he means simply is that the friends I have in this life are all people I once loved in my past reincarnations. In this life they may no longer appear as lovers, but they still give me support -- if I accept them.

The belief in reincarnation and eternal life adds support to life, so that life does not seem to be a dead end. Now I can relax, acknowledge and realize that I do have a certain fear of the files of the guilty self, rather than pretending I do not.

He said I have fear, I admit it, toward this guilty self. Because they have been brought into the light and seen, I can truly deal with them. And see how they arose, how they came up, how they were born.

Material on how society operates on a reincarnational basis, whether or not society knows it. And how associations have many layers of thickness.

This is what Seth said earlier: your society is built on a reincarnational basis, and this maintains the stability of the society's organization -- whether or not the society knows this. Your associations are not just associations of events in this life; your associations also connect to events across all your lives, so associations have many layers of thickness.

So to speak, these are only the thoughts connected to the experiences I remember, while I have forgotten the events themselves, as well as those extremely colorful and emotion-filled scenes.

This is Jane's description of her dream, and her feelings about and experience of the dream.

Rob's Nitpicking

Then after the session, I told Jane that his material brought up countless questions. What kind of questions? Just on the level of our physical plane alone, leaving aside reincarnation for the moment, just talking about this one life, there are already many questions on the physical plane. Why is that?

The various communications between the living and the dead must equal the number of communications among humans on earth.

He said according to your account, then the dead, or those who were once loved, will all become your friends or your colleagues in this life, and so on -- he said this includes those loves from reincarnational lives. Rob said this topic will bring many challenges, will bring many problems.

What kind of problems and challenges? Once he gives an example, you will understand:

As I read his material, I wonder, for instance, when a newly dead person meets the loved ones of other lives -- these people have just died, and after they arrive in that in-between zone, when they meet those other reincarnational loved ones -- will that weaken or dilute his love for the beloved who remains behind in this life, who has not yet died?

This Rob is also someone who loves to split hairs; he always asks these tricky questions. A person dies, and then he encounters one of his most beloved from past lives, so does that mean his love for the one in this life who has just died, the one who has not yet died in this life, has diminished? Because he now has a new love -- or rather, an old love again.

Rob said how ironic: while the living one is grieving for the departed beloved, while heartbroken and devastated, at the same time the one who is near death is joyfully becoming aware of a connection and relationship with other loved ones.

For example, your beloved has just died, and you are heartbroken, yet that dead person is now living happily with a beloved from a previous life. He asks, what kind of feeling would that give you?

Of course, conversely, a person can also reverse the whole matter in various different ways. For instance, the one who is near death, still carrying his nonphysical emotions, may feel the same grief as the one left behind, and their mutual sorrow can form a stronger bond -- perhaps at least temporarily, stronger than the feelings either of them has created with others in any other lives.

Or the living one can turn away from the dead partner or relative or friend, so as to be free psychically and physically to seek new adventures -- whether physical or psychic, they have begun to take on new companions.

He said no matter which side dies, the various relationships between parents and children must be vast indeed.

Jane said perhaps we can get some answers from Seth. Rob was just nitpicking, and he said well, if you put it that way, then there is no need to delve into this any further -- this is Rob considering the question from his own angle.

I do not know whether those of you here can think this through clearly. Rob felt his question was very reasonable, because he was still thinking about it from a three-dimensional perspective. Actually, once Jane died, his question would no longer be that question; the question would no longer exist. Why would it no longer exist? Because all love is eternal; there is no such thing as loving one person more and another less -- I love him more, I love him less. To have loved is to have loved; love is eternal.

Second, these loves, as discussed earlier, every person you love is an aggregate of all other people. It depends on how much you can associate, how much you can feel. If your perceptive ability is very strong, then you can condense these feelings to a very intense degree; if your perceptive ability is not strong, and you only see this one person before you, then you only see the love of this one life, and that is rather shallow. If you can take the love of three lives -- but the love of life after life is not necessarily directed at this one person; do not misunderstand, it is not about being fixed on this one person life after life, or being husband and wife for several lifetimes -- it is that you condense, for yourself, the love you have had for different people across several lives. The object itself is only one object of your love; it is not a very important matter. But Rob felt this matter was very important, and he kept agonizing over it. Well, that is enough on this question; this is Rob Heng being very endearing -- the questions he asks are all very endearing.

Footnote 14, the last footnote. In this chapter, see note 2, item C of Session 920 -- very complicated, he makes it more and more complicated. He says:

I have written out Seth's comments on one example of communication involving Jane, Rob, and me, along with his shorter and more general discussion of the phenomenon.

And that is all.

This Session 931, such an extremely long session, is probably the longest session since the interpretation of the Seth material began, and now the interpretation is complete. I hope everyone can read it in sections, in stages, and study and experience it. Well, regarding this very long interpretation, it ends here. Finally, I wish everyone a magical and beautiful day.

注释与核实

1. Source: Wikipedia "Diamond Sutra" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%87%91%E5%89%9B%E7%B6%93) ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. This claim could not be verified. ↩

3. Source: The Commercial Press "Comics on Zen Thought" 2015 (https://www.cp.com.cn/book/7430f66c-c.html) ↩

4. This claim could not be verified. ↩

5. Source: NASA "40 Years Ago: Columbia Takes Flight!" (https://www.nasa.gov/history/40-years-ago-columbia-takes-flight/) ↩

6. Source: NASA "STS-1" (https://www.nasa.gov/mission/sts-1/) ↩

7. According to Mike's original words, "the entire Greater Los Angeles area is equivalent to six Beijing municipalities"; upon verification, it should be "calculated based on the Greater Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area of 87,940 square kilometers and Beijing's 16,410.54 square kilometers, the former is about 5.36 times the latter, not six times." (Source: Wikipedia "Greater Los Angeles", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles) ↩

8. Source: Jane Roberts, Robert Butts "Dreams, Evolution, and Value Fulfillment" 1986 (https://pdfcoffee.com/-7379-pdf-free.html) ↩

9. Source: Associated Press "Britain's Stonehenge is yet again a source of fascination ahead of the winter solstice" (https://apnews.com/article/948b9d83cf34d306d562b24679b29bfc) ↩

10. Source: Taiwan Ministry of Education "Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary" 2021 (https://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/dictView.jsp?ID=36676&la=0&powerMode=0) ↩

11. Source: The Commercial Press "Three Character Classic (Popular Edition)" (https://www.cp.com.cn/book/75a64d71-1.html) ↩

12. Source: Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government Investigation Team "Report on the Investigation and Handling of the 'Feng County Woman Who Gave Birth to Eight Children' Incident" (https://www.news.cn/politics/2022-02/23/c_1128407989.htm) ↩

13. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "Genesis" 1911 (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Genesis) ↩

14. Source: Bible Gateway "Genesis 4 NIV; CSB" (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+4&version=NIV%3BCSB) ↩

15. Source: CCTV.com "Special Presentation: The Violent Change at Xuanwu Gate, Episode 4: Slaughter" (https://tv.cctv.com/2014/09/26/VIDE1411718264874351.shtml) ↩

16. Source: USAGov "Independence Day" (https://www.usa.gov/es/dia-independencia-estados-unidos) ↩

17. Source: Wikipedia "The Peony Pavilion (Mudan Ting)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peony_Pavilion) ↩

18. Source: Movie Channel Program Center "Ghost" (1990) (https://www.1905.com/mdb/film/59774/) ↩

19. Source: Wikipedia "Liao-Fan's Four Lessons" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E4%BA%86%E5%87%A1%E5%9B%9B%E8%A8%93) ↩

20. Source: OSEN "'Music Queen' Ben, comeback today (4th) after 5 months.. 'Because I'm a Woman' release [Official]" 2021 (https://www.chosun.com/entertainments/entertain_photo/2021/05/04/GAOJ7OOJHZGQTVO5HX3WLOXY5I/) ↩

21. Source: Rachel Courtland "Intel Now Packs 100 Million Transistors in Each Square Millimeter" (https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-now-packs-100-million-transistors-in-each-square-millimeter) ↩

22. This claim could not be verified. ↩

23. Source: Wikipedia "Jane Roberts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Roberts) ↩

24. Source: The Music Academy, Madras "Fifty-Fourth Conference, 1980" 1980 (https://musicacademymadras.in/catalogue/files/souv/1980_54th%20conference%20souvenir.pdf) ↩

25. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "William James | Life, Books, Psychology, Contribution, & Facts" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-James) ↩ ↩²

26. This claim could not be verified. ↩

27. This claim could not be verified. ↩

28. Source: Jane Roberts "The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events" (https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Jane%20Roberts%20-%20Seth%20-%20Individual%20and%20the%20Nature%20of%20Mass%20Events.pdf) ↩

29. Source: Jane Roberts "Dreams, 'Evolution,' and Value Fulfillment, Volume Two" (https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Jane%20Roberts%20-%20Seth%20-%20Dreams%2C%20evolution%2C%20and%20value%20fulfillment.Vol2%20%5BOCR%5D.pdf) ↩

30. This claim could not be verified. ↩

31. This claim could not be verified. ↩

32. This claim could not be verified. ↩

33. Source: American Psychological Association "Psychoanalysis" 2023 (https://dictionary.apa.org/psychoanalysis) ↩

34. Source: People's Daily Online "People's Daily Online Famous Scholars Qingming Poetry Gathering: Lu Qi Recites Hai Zi's Poem 'Facing the Sea, with Spring Blossoms'" 2016 (https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0329/c87423-28235840.html) ↩